And in order to give the most perfect
security to the parish where such certificated
man should come to reside, it was further
enacted by the same statute, that he should
gain no settlement there by any means whatever,
except either by renting a tenement of
ten pounds a-year, or by serving upon his
account in an annual parish office for one
whole year; and consequently neither by notice
nor by service, nor by apprenticeship, nor
by paying parish rates. By the 12th of Queen
Anne, too, stat. 1, c. 18, it was further enacted,
that neither the servants nor apprentices
of such certificated man should gain any settlement
in the parish where he resided under
such certificate.
How far this invention has restored that free
circulation of labour, which the preceding statutes
had almost entirely taken away, we may
learn from the following very judicious observation
of Doctor Burn. "It is obvious,"
says he, "that there are divers good reasons
for requiring certificates with persons coming
to settle in any place; namely, that persons
residing under them can gain no settlement,
neither by apprenticeship, nor by service, nor
by giving notice, nor by paying parish rates;
that they can settle neither apprentices nor
servants; that if they become chargeable, it is
certainly known whither to remove them, and
the parish shall be paid for the removal, and
for their maintenance in the mean time; and
that, if they fall sick, and cannot be removed,
the parish which gave the certificate must
maintain them, none of all which can be without
a certificate. Which reasons will hold
proportionably for parishes not granting certificates
in ordinary cases; for it is far more
than an equal chance, but that they will have
the certificated persons again, and in a worse
condition." The moral of this observation
seems to be, that certificates ought always to
be required by the parish where any poor man
comes to reside, and that they ought very seldom
to be granted by that which he purposes
to leave. "There is somewhat of hardship
in this matter of certificates," says the same
very intelligent author, in his History of the
Poor Laws, "by putting it in the power of a
parish officer to imprison a man as it were for
life, however inconvenient it may be for him
to continue at that place where he has had the
misfortune to acquire what is called a settlement,
or whatever advantage he may propose
to himself by living elsewhere."
Though a certificate carries along with it no
testimonial of good behaviour, and certifies
nothing but that the person belongs to the parish
to which he really does belong, it is altogether
discretionary in the parish officers either
to grant or to refuse it. A mandamus was
once moved for, says Doctor Burn, to compel
the church-wardens and overseers to sign a
certificate; but the Court of King's Bench
rejected the motion as a very strange attempt.
The very unequal price of labour which we
frequently find in England, in places at no
great distance from one another, is probably
owing to the obstruction which the law of
settlements gives to a poor man who would
carry his industry from one parish to another
without a certificate. A single man, indeed,
who is healthy and industrious, may sometimes
reside by sufferance without one, but a
man with a wife and family who should attempt
to do so, would, in most parishes, be
sure of being removed; and, if the single man
should afterwards marry, he would generally
be removed likewise. The scarcity of hands
in one parish, therefore, cannot always be relieved
by their superabundance in another, as
it is constantly in Scotland, and, I believe, in
all other countries where there is no difficulty
of settlement. In such countries, though
wages may sometimes rise a little in the neighbourhood
of a great town, or wherever else
there is an extraordinary demand for labour, and
sink gradually as the distance from such places
increases, till they fall back to the common
rate of the country; yet we never meet with
those sudden and unaccountable differences in
the wages of neighbouring places which we
sometimes find in England, where it is often
more difficult for a poor man to pass the artificial
boundary of a parish, than an arm of the
sea, or a ridge of high mountains, natural
boundaries which sometimes separate very distinctly
different rates of wages in other countries.
To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour,
from the parish where he chooses
to reside, is an evident violation of natural
liberty and justice. The common people of
England, however, so jealous of their liberty,
but like the common people of most other
countries, never rightly understanding wherein
it consists, have now, for more than a century
together, suffered themselves to be exposed
to this oppression without a remedy.
Though men of reflection, too, have sometimes
complained of the law of settlements as
a public grievance; yet it has never been the
object of any general popular clamour, such
as that against general warrants, an abusive
practice undoubtedly, but such a one as was
not likely to occasion any general oppression.
There is scarce a poor man in England, of
forty years of age, I will venture to say, who
has not, in some part of his life, felt himself
most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived
law of settlements.
I shall conclude this long chapter with observing,
that though anciently it was usual to
rate wages, first by general laws extending
over the whole kingdom, and afterwards by
particular orders of the justices of peace in
every particular county, both these practices
have now gone entirely into disuse "By the
experience of above four hundred years," says
Doctor Burn, "it seems time to lay aside all