Settlement (social work)

“ Another device to prevent others from establishing settlement in a parish was for its farmers to hire laborers for only fifty-one weeks. Also, some apprentices were bound by means other than indenture to avoid settlement. Laborers who came to work in industries were refused settlement and sent back to their original parishes whenever they seemed likely to become dependent on the rates. ”

“ Are you content that greed and the seizing upon disadvantage and the pushing of the weaker to the wall shall rule your business life, while in your family and social life you live so differently? Are you content that Christianity shall have no play in trade?" If these questions press upon all of us, then a settlement must surely face the industrial problem as a test of its sincerity, as a test of the unification of its interests with the absorbing interests of its neighbors. ”

“ The overall effect was to decrease the mobility of people. But a later statute permitted greater movement of poor people by allowing those who were poor for want of work to go to another parish where labor was wanted. They had to bring a certificate of their present parish membership to the new parish, where they could settle if they rented a tenement worth ten pounds a year or served in a parish office. Later, settlement had to be given to inhabitants paying its parish's rates, and unmarried inhabitants hired for one year, and apprentices bound by indenture. ”

“ They need the help of those they came to succor quite as much as they need them. I have no desire to find fault with any one who wants to help his neighbor. God forbid! I am not even a settlement worker. But when I read, as I did yesterday, a summing up of the meaning of settlements by three or four residents in such houses, and see education, reform politics, local improvements, legislation, characterized as the aim and objects of settlement work, I am afraid somebody is on the wrong track. ”

“ Such a condition made it practically impossible for any poor man to gain a settlement by forty days’ residence, unless his tenement were of the value of £10 a year, but the Act allowed an immigrant to obtain a settlement in any one of four ways; (1) by paying the parish taxes; (2) by executing a public annual office in the parish; (3) by serving an apprenticeship in the parish; (4) by being hired for a year’s service in the parish. ”

“ A new class of persons arises in the documents after 1834, namely those who are not residing in the parish or union to which they apply for relief. There had grown up a custom under the old Poor Law by which, in order to save the expense and hardships of removal, parishes agreed to grant outdoor relief to persons belonging to them by settlement, who were residing elsewhere. ”

“ Statutes then provided that a parish must give settlement to apprentices bound for forty days there, not only by indenture, but by deed, writings, or contracts not indented. In 1722, parishes were authorized to purchase houses in which to lodge or employ the poor and to contract with any person for the lodging, keeping, maintaining, and employing of the poor. These persons could take the benefit of the work, labor, and service of these poor, which was then used for the relief of other poor. The poor refusing such lodging could not then get relief. Many of the poor starved to death. ”

“ Any one who does not, is sent to the poor-and-workhouse (the work is compulsive) of the province, where he is taught to earn a livelihood. If the distress be temporary, the proprietor of the estate (called the dominium) , or the community in which the indigent person has acquired a settlement, is bound to afford the requisite relief; yet having the right to claim restitution, upon the assisted person becoming able to make it. When this is not the case, and the relief has been afforded by a community, the members of it must bear the expense, if in a town, out of its general funds ”

“ I maintain, further, that the change in the law of settlement, joined to the increasing facilities and cheapness of locomotion, together with an imperfect administration of the Poor Law throughout this country, has had the effect of throwing upon the large towns great masses of pauperism which, though created elsewhere, yet fall upon their local rates. ”

“ The Colonial Treasurer began to prepare another brilliant Public Works Policy, the Premier hinted that sweeping reforms would be placed before the House, the Minister for Lands busied himself with a scheme of land settlement that would give homes to large numbers of people, and would lead to a great revival of settlement and of the agricultural industry. ”

“ The settlers will find themselves related to two distinct classes of “the poor,” and it will be well if they keep in mind the fact that they must serve both those who, like the artisans, need the necessaries for life, and also those who, like casual labourers, need the necessaries for livelihood. They will not of course come believing that their Settlement will make the wicked good, the dull glad, and the poor rich, but they may be assured that results will follow the sympathy born of close neighbourhood. ”

“ He further says that the parish officers will assist a poor man in taking a farm in a neighbouring parish, and give him £10 for the rent. Mr. Hay, M.P., protested in his remarks on the Poor Laws against the hardships inflicted on the poor by the Laws of Settlement. ‘It leaves it in the breast of the parish officers whether they will grant a poor person a certificate or no.’ [160] Eden, on the other hand, thought Adam Smith’s picture overdrawn, and he contended that though there were no doubt cases of vexatious removal, the Laws of Settlement were not administered in this way everywhere. ”

“ This statute is often regarded as the first English poor law, because it recognises that the impotent poor had a right to relief, and because it carefully distinguishes between them and the able-bodied beggars. The provisions also imply the responsibility of every neighbourhood for the support of its own poor. Moreover, this enactment may be regarded as a law of settlement. Not only were the impotent poor confined to their own district, but all unlicensed labourers were likewise forbidden to migrate. ”

“ It is the facility for talk, and the ready suggestion that a money gift is the best relief, which makes some dread lest, after this awakening of interest, there may follow a deeper sleep. He who has, even for a month, shared the life of the poor can never again rest in his old thoughts. If with these obvious advantages, a Settlement seems to want that something which association with religious forms gives to the mission, I can only say that such association does not make work religious, if the workers have not its spirit. ”

“ A settlement has not only taken a pledge towards those thus injured, but it is placed where the motive-power for the fulfilment of such a pledge is constantly renewed. Propinquity is an unceasing factor in its existence. ”

“ Before granting a settlement, they required the labourer to find sureties to save the parish harmless from his becoming chargeable to it. Obviously a labourer could not himself find sureties, but the farmer who wished to employ him was in a position to do so, and thus the responsibility for the wage-earner’s family would be laid upon the person who profited 84by his services. ”

“ By this Act and the various amending Acts the law of settlement, so long a burden on the labourer, is now settled thus: a settlement may be acquired by birth, parentage, marriage, renting a tenement, by being bound apprentice and inhabiting, by estate, payment of taxes, and by residence.—Stephen, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1903) , iii. ”

“ The pressure of the changed conditions of the nation on this system of maintenance out of the rates is seen, not only in the behaviour of the labourers, but also in the growing anxiety of the upper classes to control the system, and in the tenacity with which the parishes contested settlement claims. This is the great period of Poor Law litigation. Parish authorities kept a stricter watch than ever on immigrants. ”

“ Some of the parishes are quite small, and if in the parish where a poor person belongs, and has got his settlement, there is no work he can’t go into the next parish and get work, though there may be plenty of work there.”
“Why can’t he go?”
“He can go, sir, but he will get no work, for nobody will hire him for fear he will get out of work or fall sick, and stay long enough to gain a settlement; they will say: ‘Get you back to where you came from,’ and hustle him right out. Sometimes the farmers will hire a man for a few days short of a year, lest he should gain a settlement. ”

“ Provision will be made by law, at the earliest opportunity for rendering those capitalists, who may be engaged in taking out labouring persons to this settlement, liable for the future maintenance of those persons, should they, from infirmity, of any other cause, become unable to maintain themselves there.
5. The license of occupation of land will be granted to the settler, on satisfactory proof being exhibited to the Lieutenant Governor (or other officer administering the Local Government,) of the amount of property brought into the colony. ”

“ No part of society can afford to get along without the others.
The settlement, then, urges first, the organization of working people in order that as much leisure and orderly life as possible may be secured to them in which to carry out the higher aims of living; in the second place, it should make a constant effort to bring to bear upon the labor movement a consciousness of its historic development ”

“ No independent workman, it is evident, whether labourer or artificer, is likely to gain any new settlement, either by apprenticeship or by service. When such a person, therefore, carried his industry to a new parish, he was liable to be removed, how healthy and industrious soever, at the caprice of any church-warden or overseer, unless he either rented a tenement of ten pounds a-year, a thing impossible for one who has nothing but his labour to live by, or could give such security for the discharge of the parish as two justices of the peace should judge sufficient. ”

“ As the burden of maintaining the poor is thrown .on the parish of settlement, when the necessity for immediate relief arises in another parish, the important question arises whether the pauper can be removed; for, although the parish where the pauper happens to be must afford immediate relief without waiting for removal, the parish of settlement cannot in general be charged with the cost unless the pauper is capable of being removed. The question of removability is distinct from settlement. A pauper often acquires a status or irremovability without gaining a settlement. ”

“ An over-all program to abolish tenancy, as well as to assist farm laborers and wage earners, the free settlers of public land and farmers owning private land of less than family size, will bring about an overdue readjustment of our social struc­ture; it will correct the present imbalance in our society, where there are enormous concentrations of land, wealth and political power in the hands of a few. ”

“ This Plan offers many advantages.—An individual may form his own opinion by an absence of 12 or 14 months, and a six months' observation on the spot, of the prospect of success.—Should he be disappointed, his expenditure will probably not exceed that of his residence at home; and, if he is a man with a family and approves of the Settlement, he can fix his locality and return for his family at a certain expence, or he can make arrangements for his family to join him when his situation may be determined and in some forwardness. ”

“ The settlement of that province had lately been begun, but, instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen, accustomed to labor,—the only people fit for such an enterprise,—it was with families of broken shopkeepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the jails, who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. ”

“ No economy of the Government has been more fruitful in substantial blessing upon the industrious poor than throwing open these lands for entrance and ownership of homes by the payment of a nominal fee for recording and proof of actual settlement thereon. ”

“ This memorable meeting of the erstwhile warring hosts agreed absolutely as to the main conditions on which the Land Settlement of 1903 ought to be preserved—viz. that the abolition of landlordism should be completed in the briefest possible time, that the rate of tenant purchasers' annuity should remain undisturbed, and that the State bonus to the landlords should not be altered. ”

“ A still more convincing proof of the universal destitution of wage-earners is shown in the efforts made by churchwardens and overseers in every county throughout England to prevent the settlement within the borders of their parish of families which depended solely on wages. ”

“ Whenever I hear of any new settlement, I pay it a visit once or twice a year, on purpose to observe the different steps each settler takes, the gradual improvements, the different tempers of each family, on which their prosperity in a great nature depends; their different modifications of industry, their ingenuity, and contrivance; for being all poor, their life requires sagacity and prudence. ”

“ The coöperative plans that often 105fail in serving the family of father, mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes, and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant. ”

“ This statute, therefore, rendered it almost impracticable for a poor man to gain a new settlement in the old way, by forty days inhabitancy. But that it might not appear to preclude altogether the common people of one parish from ever establishing themselves with security in another, it appointed four other ways by which a settlement might be gained without any notice delivered or published. ”