The Labourers' Rising of 1830 served, like the cholera, to ring attention ...

The Labourers' Rising of 1830 served, like the cholera, to ring attention to a problem which without it might have been neglected till it was too late. The land was breaking under the burden of the poor rate, and the administration of the Poor Law was degrading the labourer who it was designed to support.

But the rural problem was simplicity itself compared with the problem of the towns. Let the able-bodied man be given the choice of earning his own living or going into the workhouse, and then, if he still cannot find work on the land, send him / her to the factory or the colonies.

So long as the Poor Law Commissioners were at work in the south, pauperism disappeared as by magic. But, as they moved northwards, unexpected difficulties appeared.

'We grasped the nettle all right,' one of them ruefully acknowledged, 'but it was the wrong nettle.' Machinery had so reduced the value of labour that at any moment the workman might find himself starving in the midst of a plenty which his own hands had helped to create.