Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land, Ladies as Well as Gentlemen, on the Character, Conduct, Situation, and Prospects of Those Whose Sole Dependence for Subsistence Is on the Labour of Their Hands (1833)

Authors

Mathew Carey
Paul Royster (transcriber & depositor), University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Paul Royster

Document Type

Archival Material

Date of this Version

1833

Comments

Originally published in Philadelphia in August 1833. Electronic text transcribed from the "Third Edition, Improved."

Abstract

Mathew Carey’s 1833 pamphlet pleads the case of the paupers, the unemployed, and the working poor in Philadelphia and other Eastern-seaboard cities. He finds it a national disgrace that hard-working seamstresses, spoolers, hod-carriers, canal-diggers, and other manual trades cannot earn enough to support their families and that they live on the edge of economic ruin threatened by temporary unemployment, accident, or illness. He discusses the “welfare system” in both America and England (with a long discussion of the history and abuses of the English poor laws), the price of labor, the cost of living, and the numbers and condition of the indigent in contemporary Philadelphia. His overall aim is to refute the idea, promulgated by nineteenth-century political economists, that provision for the poor robbed them of their industry and incentive to work. His discussion of how the previous 40 years of administration of the English poor laws had reversed 200 years of good effect, by making them an instrument for the depression of wages and transferring the costs of labor from the manufacturers to the tax-payers.