Not only did the
Labour-rate Act exclude productive labour from its own operations, but
its direct tendency was to discourage and put a stop to improvement on
the part of others. This is manifest enough. The baronies--that is, the
lands of the baronies--were to be taxed to pay for all the works
undertaken to give employment to the starving people. No one could
foresee where or when that taxation was to end. There could be no more
effectual bar to useful improvements. What landowner could afford the
double outlay of paying unlimited taxation, and at the same time of
making improvements on his property? Then, he had to look forward to
other probable years of famine, and he naturally trembled with dismay at
the prospect, as well he might. So far from making improvements, the
commonest prudence warned him to get together and hold fast whatever
money he could, in order to maintain himself and his family when his
property would be eaten up--confiscated--by taxation expended upon
barren works. Private charity, too, was paralysed; private exertion of
every kind was paralyzed; everything that could sustain or improve the
country was paralysed, by this blind, or wicked, or stupid, or
headstrong legislation of Lord John Russell's Government, by which the
energies and the capital of the country were squandered upon labour that
could not, and was not intended to, make any remunerative return
whatever.
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