charges: an expenditure, which has given relief to 345 persons, has checked mendi To Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Jackson, for To vagrants and other travellers, with 9 8 21 4 5 8 6 17 2 Carried forward 255 11 C city, encouraged industry and exertion, and increased the value of character, in that great city, and at the same time has suggested a more unexceptionable mode of relief, £. s. d. Brought forward 255 11 The remainder of the disbursements, amounting to £101. 155. 11d. has been expended in weekly allowances, donations, premiums in the buttonmaking school, &c. When it is considered that 61 poor persons belonging to distant parishes, whose difficulties of obtaining prompt parochial relief were manifestly great, and that more than 120 of the poor belonging to Bath have thus been enabled to struggle through their temporary calamities, without throwing themselves on their parishes, and are now mostly returned to their former habits of industry; and when to this is added the conviction that the money so bestowed would otherwise probably have been lavished in supporting idleness and profligacy, and thus filling the town with beggars; it is trusted that the public will feel the value of such an institution, and continue to support it with renewed contributions and persevering co-operation 101 15 11 Total disbursed 357 6 11 for the distress to which human nature is subject in this period of trial and probation, than any that has been as yet disco vered. OBSERVATIONS. Persons unaccustomed to inquire minutely into the distresses of the poor, are apt to form false judgments respecting them, tinctured with the opposite extremes of sympathy and severity; of sympathy, which considers not the effect of habit; and of severity, which presumes that no aggravated cases can occur, which are not anticipated in this country by legal and adequate relief. Whatever may be the estimate of the gains of mendicants in their wretched and forlorn situation, and however small that pittance may be, we shall probably find that the most miserable beggar costs the community much more, than the total of the relief to be supplied them on the plan of the Bath Society. It appears by the late Parliamentary Returns, that the expense of paupers in workhouses is nearly four times as much as in their own cottages; and by Mr. Rose's observations on the Poor Laws, (page 36) it appears that the extra expense of those individuals, who are shut up in workhouses, is not less than gl. a head; a national loss, (independent of other circumstances) of near a million a year. But the relief and support of the common mendicant is far more wasteful and expensive, than that of the parochial pauper; and the constant example of individuals, fed and maintained without their own personal labour or action, produces on the minds of the labouring poor, a continual check to industry and exertion. 17th February, 1806. No. CXXXII. Extract from an Account of the Apprenticing of the Children of the Poor, in Devonshire. By the Rev. Duke Yonge. THE HE magistrates of the county of Devon, have of late paid a particular attention to the execution of the 43d of Elizabeth, respecting the apprenticing of the children of the poor. By this statute the churchwardens and overseers, with the assent of two justices, are vested with a power of binding out the children of such persons as they shall think unable to maintain them, until the age of 21 years; and by subsequent acts, power is given to the magistrates to watch over and protect them when so bound. The practice recently adopted in Devonshire, is for the churchwardens and overseers to meet, and according to the value of the |