Britain 729
their drift in the direction of “Jacobinism.” In England it was not possible even to
modify the game laws. By these laws, only landowners possessing estates worth
£100 a year were legally allowed to shoot as much as a partridge. A bill was intro-
duced in 1796, and the Foxite Whigs made their usual speeches, arguing that both
modest farmers and “opulent merchants” were injured by the game laws; but a
majority in the Commons held that even the game laws were part of the fabric of
the constitution, devised by the wisdom of ancestors, and not to be tampered with
without danger to existing ranks and orders.^38
The one notable exception was the “Speenhamland system” in the administra-
tion of poor relief. It arose, characteristically enough, outside the circles of Parlia-
ment and the government, when the justices of the peace in Berkshire, in 1795,
taking note of the rise of prices, ruled that wages of the laboring poor should be
supplemented by grants from the poor funds. The practice soon spread to other
counties throughout much of England. It was criticized for holding down wages,
and for pauperizing much of the laboring class; but it did something to relieve the
worst cases of destitution, and it did so at the expense of the landowners who paid
the poor rates. The annual cost of poor relief for all England in the 1790’s rose
from about £2,000,000 to about £4,000,000. Whether the upper classes took up
this burden for political reasons, out of social fear, is very uncertain; it was not “the
poor,” but the next higher classes that were most vocal in their disaffection. Fred-
erick Eden, the nephew of Lord Auckland, also prompted by the rise of prices
after 1794, made detailed studies of how families contrived to live on £20 a year,
and in 1797 published a famous book, The State of the Poor, which Karl Marx later
praised for its exact and factual content. Nowhere in the book did Eden show any
actual fear of the people whom he was studying. He remarked, however, that it was
not the agricultural laborers so much as the rural “manufacturers” that were most
often on relief. So far as the increase of relief payments, under the Speenhamland
system, went to weavers and other rural household workers, it may have reduced
their interest in radical clubs and propaganda.
The propertied classes, in short, to a degree that one would not find in many
parts of the Continent, were willing to lay taxes upon themselves in return for
their domination in government and society. In 1799 Pitt was even able to intro-
duce a new income tax. Exempting persons with less than £60 a year, and con-
taining a progressive feature from £60 to £200, it imposed a flat ten percent on
incomes above £200, so that the rich paid at the same rate as the broad middle
class. It is not clear whether the landowners paid any more under the new income
tax than under the old land tax which it supplanted. The public revenues contin-
ued to come largely from indirect taxes, of which the stamp tax on newspapers,
already mentioned, was but a small example. But in principle the English govern-
38 Parl. Hist., X X XII, 838–54. Sir Richard Sutton remarked (p. 848) that “in these times of
democratical doctrines, he did not hesitate to utter the aristocratical opinion that the game laws of this
country were founded on good principles, and secured to the landed proprietors that superiority of
privilege and enjoyment which they could best exercise without injuring themselves, or interfering
with other pursuits.” So little was the interest in the matter, or likelihood of passage, that only 82
members were present, or at least took the trouble to vote: 65 Noes to 17 Ayes.