Young women lost the virtue which is not only the point of honour with their sex, but the chief support of all other virtues.

Not only women of the working classes, but in some cases even substantial farmers' daughters, and sometimes those who were themselves the actual owners of property, had their illegitimate children as charges on the parish, regularly deducting the cost of their maintenance from their poor-rate, neither they nor their relatives feeling that to do so was any disgrace.

The system must have been fearfully vicious that produced such depravation of moral feeling, and such a shocking want of self-respect.
Dr.Burn has given a graphic sketch of the duties of an overseer under the old poor-law system in England.

'His office is to keep an extraordinary watch to prevent people from coming to inhabit without certificates; to fly to the justices to remove them.

Not to let anyone have a farm of 10 l.