[ *365 ] Of certificates. able to the parish into which they have intruded: unless they are in a way of getting a legal settlement, as by having hired a house of 101. per annum, or living in an *annual service; for then they are not removable (e) (63). And in all other cases, if the parish to which they belong will grant them a certificate, acknowledging them to be their parishioners, they cannot be removed merely because likely to become chargeable, but only when they become actually chargeable (ƒ). But such certificated person can gain no settlement by any of the means above mentioned, unless by renting a tenement of 10l. per annum, or by serving an annual office (64) in the parish, being legally placed therein: neither can an apprentice or servant to such certificated person gain a settlement by such their service (g). touching his settlement, and may even may be ordered to pay the costs incurred by the other party in disputing such frivolous and vexatious matter. The expense of a pauper's maintenance, whose settlement is in question, must be paid by the parish to which he is admitted, or finally adjudged, to belong; provided that the removing parish can only recover the costs of such maintenance from the time when notice was duly given of the intended removal. And no expenses of relief under a suspended order of removal, unless notice of such order, with a copy thereof and of the examination upon which it was made, shall have been given, within ten days after the making of such order, to the overseers of the parish to whom such order is directed. A suspended order of removal is an order which, in consequence of the sickness of the party to be removed, or for some other sufficient cause, is expressly directed not to be enforced, until the cause of suspension is removed. (63) But see ante, p. 362, n. 48. (64) See ante, p. 362, n. 48. These are the general heads of the laws relating to the poor, which, by the resolutions of the courts of justice thereon within a century past, are branched into a great variety (65). And yet, notwithstanding the pains that have been taken about them, they still remain very imperfect, and inadequate to the purposes they are designed for: a fate that has generally attended most of our statute laws, where they have not the foundation of the common law to build on. When the shires, the hundreds, and the tithings, were kept in the same admirable order in which they were disposed by the great Alfred (66), there were no persons idle, consequently none but the impotent that needed relief: and the stat. of 43 Eliz. seems entirely founded on the same principle. But when this excellent scheme was neglected and departed from, we cannot but observe with concern what miserable shifts and lame expedients have from time to time been adopted, in order to patch up the flaws occasioned by this neglect. There is not a more necessary or more certain maxim in the frame and constitution of society, than that every individual must contribute his share in order to the well-being of the community: and surely they must be very deficient in sound policy, who suffer one half of a parish to continue idle, dissolute, and unemployed; and at length are amazed to find, that the industry of the other half is not able to maintain the whole (67). (65) For a full and complete knowledge of this extensive subject, recourse must be had to Burn's Justice, by Chitty, and Mr. Const's valuable edition of Bott, and the reporters there referred to.-CH. (66) See ante, p. 114, n. 36. (67) If the administration of the poor-laws was faulty when Blackstone wrote, we have seen it much worse in our own times. The number of hands to be employed may, perhaps, have been doubled; but, the capital of the country, and its manufactures, have grown, probably, in at least the same ratio. The increase of population, therefore, although it may be one element to be taken into account, cannot have been the sole cause of swelling the poor rates to the enormous amount of more than seven millions annually. Neither does the weight of taxation, however severely it presses upon those who are a step above the labouring classes, afford a sufficient explanation; for, although most of the articles necessary for a labourer's subsistence are highly taxed, still there never was a period when the ordinary wages of agricultural labour would command so large a share of the necessaries of life, as they will at present. If the wages of farming men have been reduced one-third, the price of wheat has been reduced two-thirds. The mechanic and the manufacturer, of course, pay no more for bread than the ploughman does; and the wages of the two first-named classes, it is be lieved, have not, upon the whole, been lowered more than the wages of the agriculturist. Undoubtedly, this is not the case in all instances. Where a ruinous competition is persisted in, respecting some manufacture for the production of which other countries possess decided advantages over our own; there, the unhappy creatures employed in that trade can only expect such a pittance for their labour as will barely enable them to exist their masters cannot afford to pay them better. The capital so employed is likely to be neither productive to the owner, nor of benefit to the country. The accumulation of capital, though a grand and necessary step towards the advancement of social improvement, does not necessarily produce that result. But, notwithstanding the misapplication of capital may, in some instances, prevent its yielding that comfortable subsistence to numbers which it ought to yield, and may even increase, as no doubt it does to a certain extent, the growth of pauperism, that folly is not so widely spread as to account for more than a part of the evil. And though a part may, possibly, be ascribed to the greater improvidence of the poor themselves, much will still remain to be imputed to the mal-administration of the law. In small country parishes the abuses were most gross; and for such places some strong mea sure to supply the information and the authority, in both of which requisites they were deficient, was absolutely necessary: but, after a consolidation of such parishes into bodies, sufficiently numerous to supply a duly qualified representative vestry, they might have been safely left to their own future management, under an improved code of postive law, instead of being subjected to the arbitrary and fluctuating regulations of paid commissioners. And in parishes of sufficient extent, and where public feeling had previously been sufficiently alive to have secured the adoption of Hobhouse's vestries act, even the temporary intrusion of any government functionary was worse than useless. Such parishes, as their accounts will prove, stood in need of no assistance to teach them how to expend their own money economically. They, like the rest of the country, wanted the aid of a precise and positive law, to cure some of the evils of the old system; but an unlimited establishment of salaried government agents, with undefined and almost despotic powers of capricious interference, was not merely a needless expense as regards such places, but was calculated to excite, as it has excited, a constitutional jealousy of the yet undisclosed purposes for which that establishment may be employed. (See post, p. 458, n. 24). CHAPTER X. OF THE PEOPLE, WHETHER ALIENS, DENIZENS, OR NATIVES. HAVING, in the eight preceding chapters, treated of persons of the people. as they stand in the public relations of magistrates, I now proceed to consider such persons as fall under the denomination of the people. And herein all the inferior and subordinate magistrates treated of in the last chapter are included. subjects. The first and most obvious division of the people is into Natural-born aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England; that is, within the ligeance, or, as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it. Allegiance is the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject. The thing itself, or substantial part of it, is founded in reason and the nature of government; the name and the form are derived to us from our Gothic ancestors. Under the feodal system, every owner of lands held them in subjection to some superior, or lord, from whom or whose ancestors the tenant or vassal had received them; and there was a mutual trust or confidence subsisting between the lord and vassal, that the lord should protect the vassal in the enjoyment of the territory he had granted him, and, on the *other hand, [ *367 ] that the vassal should be faithful to the lord, and defend him against all his enemies. This obligation on the part of the vassal_was called his fidelitas, or fealty (1); and an oath of fealty was required, by the feodal law, to be taken by all tenants to their landlord, which is couched in almost the same terms as our antient oath of allegiance (a); except that in the (a) 2 Feud. 5, 6, 7. (1) See Vol. 2, pp. 45, 53, 86; and Vol. 3, p. 230, with the notes to those pages respectively. usual oath of fealty there was frequently a saving or exception of the faith due to a superior lord by name, under whom the landlord himself was perhaps only a tenant or vassal. But when the acknowledgment was made to the absolute superior himself, who was vassal to no man, it was no longer called the oath of fealty, but the oath of allegiance: and therein the tenant swore to bear faith to his sovereign lord, in opposition to all men, without any saving or exception: "contra omnes homines fidelitatem fecit (b)." Land held by this exalted species of fealty was called feudum ligium, a liege fee; the vassals homines ligii, or liege men; and the sovereign their dominus ligius, or liege lord. And when sovereign princes did homage to each other, for lands held under their respective sovereignties, a distinction was always made between simple homage, which was only an acknowledgment of tenure (c); and liege homage, which included the fealty before mentioned, and the services consequent upon it. Thus when our Edward III., in 1329, did homage to Philip VI. of France for his ducal dominions on that continent, it was warmly disputed of what species the homage was to be, whether liege or simple homage (d). But with us in England, it becoming a settled principle of tenure that all lands in the kingdom are holden of the king as their sovereign and lord paramount, no oath but that of fealty could ever be taken to inferior lords, and the oath of allegiance was necessarily confined to the person of the king alone. By an easy analogy, the term of allegiance was soon brought to signify all other engagements which are due from subjects to their prince, as well as those duties which were simply and merely territorial. And the oath of allegiance, as adminis[ *368] tered for *upwards of six hundred years (e), contained a promise" to be true and faithful to the king and his heirs, and truth and faith to bear of life and limb and terrene honour, and not to know or hear of any ill or damage intended him, without defending him therefrom." Upon which Sir Matthew Hale (f) makes this remark, that it was short and plain, not entangled with long or intricate clauses or declarations, and yet is comprehensive of the whole duty from the subject to his (b) 2 Feud. 99. (c) 7 Rep. Calvin's case, 7. (d) 2 Cart. 401; Mod. Un. Hist. xxiii. 420. (e) Mirror, c. 3, s. 35; Fleta, 3, 16; Britton, c. 29; 7 Rep. Calvin's case, 6. (f) 1 Hal. P. C. 63. |