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PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, 14, CHARING CROSS,

For Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

1839.

CONTENTS.



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In compliance with the provisions of the Acts from which we derive our authority, we have the honour to submit to your Lordship the Report of our proceedings in England and Wales, and also in Ireland, since the 4th of August 1838, the date of our last Annual Report.

We shall in the course of this month present to your Lordship a Report concerning the continuance of the Poor Law Commission, and some further amendments of the Laws relating to the Relief of the Poor. In that Report we shall advert to several important topics to which we should otherwise have directed your Lordship's attention on this occasion; and accordingly we shall in the present Report confine ourselves to a brief account of our proceedings in England and Wales during the late winter, and to a few observations on the peculiar circumstances which distinguished that period, with reference to the administration of relief to the poor. We shall afterwards state the measures which we have adopted for introducing into Ireland the provisions of the Act of last session, for the more effectual Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland (1 & 2 Vict. c. 56).

PROCEEDINGS IN ENGLAND AND WALES.

The labours peculiar to the first and second years of our office were those of the formation of new regulations, and the organization of Unions and the machinery for the administration of the principles of relief. In the third year of the Commission the new machinery and principles of relief which had been established in the greater part of the country were tried by a winter season of peculiar severity, which seriously impeded the labour of the country, and by the extensive prevalence of the influenza, which afflicted great numbers of the labouring classes. The fourth year of our proceedings was distinguished by extensive reverses in trade and severe depression in the manufacturing districts, which threw out of employment for a time the greater proportion of the

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