to rear its ugly head. The Speenhamland System – a modest program that was thought to be too expensive – was touted as support for the lazy and shiftless. As a result, until 1900 when labour became a force, real social services were virtually unknown.Christianity provided a powerful weapon with which to attach the new Poor Law. Even more important, it also provided a set of beliefs and assumptions with which people could begin to grasp and comprehend the Poor laws significance.11The Victorian Era was a time of wide extremes, elegant city streets, gas lamps, and in contrast grinding poverty. It was also a time of exploration and invention with the symbolisation of The Great Exhibition.Poverty reduces a person to an inferior state of existence. Wild animals in nature are capable of fending for themselves, but a person saddled with poverty isn’t able to provide for their own needs the way even a wild animal can. It is the indulgence of human reason, and the ability to act on it, which constitutes one of the principal pleasures of human life. Where this is denied, you find frustration, depression, anxiety, and misery in human beings. Denial of reason is a denial of humanity. Placing the poor person in a poverty-stricken position violates what should be a human birthright – the right to reason and therefore be fully human.The poverty-stricken society were placed in a limbo of misery and deprivation which could not be resolved in the confines of the ruling society and that’s the criminality of it all – human society was one of our earliest innovations, which was designed to protect the individuals through the efforts of the multitude. By working together, we were better able to ensure our survival – the goal of all that lives. But the poor, had their very life drained from them. They were caught in a trap of forever having to wonder where their next meal was coming and because they were red...
