“Because there’s no work to be had. Why, sir, there are five men to do one man’s work. People are so plenty a man can only get a day’s work once in a while, and get so little for it that it will barely keep him alive, and when there’s no work he must fall back upon the parish or starve. The farmers don’t generally like to hire the parish poor, and then the settlement hurts poor people.”
“If a man gets a settlement in a parish, and can’t maintain himself, that parish must help maintain him.”
“If a man was born in any parish, his settlement is there. If he is bound for an apprentice forty days in a parish, his settlement is there. If he has been hired for a year and a day, he gains a settlement. If he has rented a house that is valued at ten pounds a year he gains a settlement.”
“I understand; it’s something like what we call gaining a residence.”
“Well, sir, the settlement act works very badly for a poor laboring man. 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.”
“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. They will take a boy out of the workhouse, keep him all summer till after harvest, and then quarrel with him and drive him off.”
“Can’t they be obliged to take an apprentice?”
“Yes, sir, or pay a fine; but the fine is so light they had sometimes rather pay the fine.”
Bertie found that by thus drawing a “bow at a venture,” he had struck upon a fruitful theme, and the evening passed so rapidly that it was nine o’clock before they thought it was eight, and when at last they came to separate, Mr. Conly made James promise that he would come again with Peter and Bertie. So much had his feelings and temper become modified by the discipline to which these high-minded boys, guided solely by their own instincts, had subjected him, that as Bertie told his mother when they got home, “James didn’t hang back at all when Mr. Conly asked him to come again with us, but said he would like to.”