[153a-034v2]

System of Industry Houses Collateral Uses.

I. Pecuniary

1. Poor Man's Loan

Offices -

When a Cottager applies to an Attorney

to

in a year, it would be a dearer business to him, than if, on personal security, he had paid interest for the same sum, at the rate of some hundred per Cent. For, under the existing structure of the laws, it is not one of the least misfortunes attending the condition of the Poor, that the burthen of law-charges of all sorts, as well as so many other legal burthens, having a minimum below which it can never fall, presses upon the individual, in a ratio encreasing more & more in the direct ratio of his poverty, that is in the inverse ration of his ability to bear the burthen.

See Protest against Law Taxes (by the Author) 1796. Were a man, who had occasion for ,

l0,000 upon a mortgage, obliged to pay ,

l0,000 to his Lawyer, or a tenth part of the money, the hardship would be deemed intollerable. A Cottage, in the like circumstances, is actually obliged to pay in much larger proportion to the same quarter, & nobody has stated the grievance as worth remedying.

I have in the publication already referred to, had occasion to shew, how the Poor of this country, (that is to say, by many times the greater number of the inhabitants of this as of every other country,) are kept in most respects in a state of perpetual outlawry, partly, for the supposed

benefit of the public, by the insensibility of the man of finance, partly by the insensibility or incapacity, or policy, or all together, of the man of law, & at any rate for the real benefit of the misery-making & nonsense-manufacturing profession, whose most valuable property consists in the unintelligibility & worthlessness of its own works. Happy the man of humanity, who, on any occasion, or on any pretence, can, in favour of any class of subjects, however inconsiderable, succeed in procuring this outlawry to be reversed! By the enlightened humanity of men now in office, it has already been reversed to certain proposes, in favour of the contributors to the Societies called Friendly Societies.