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A State pauper is one in a similar condition of necessity, but who has no such settlement in the State. Natives of one town lose their residence and settlement there, when they gain a new one in some other town by living in it a given number of years -- usually six years. It often happens that persons have no settlement in the State.

The law obliges each town to support its paupers; but it does not direct the mode. (In some of the States it does, and then the poor of a county are all sent to a common centre, called the county poor-house, or farm.) Every town in New England is empowered to build a poor-house. If, however, the people think they can support the paupers "cheaper" without it, they have the right to do so. (9)

This freedom leads to their disposal in various forms.

They are sometimes kept in comfortable quarters at the town farm, so called, which the town, by tax or otherwise, finds the money to buy, and there they are permitted many personal conveniences, as at a quiet, well-ordered home, and are employed about the premises in various work and occupations proper to their condition and useful to their health, invariably lessening to the town their actual expense. And beside all this, it gives the suffering ones and the aged the proper and constant care of a nurse, places them in clean and warm rooms, provides for them good food, and in giving them a home, elevates them to the position of living, thinking, true human beings. There will often be found in these happy homes of the poor from fifteen to twenty-five persons. I say 'happy homes,' using the phrase in a liberal sense, for they elevate the institution into the lists of Gospel or Christian institutions.

When they are not kept in this manner, they are sometimes supported in small companies, or gangs here and there about town, as the overseers can make con- tracts with different persons at so much per week. Then again, they divide the sexes, contracting with one or more individuals to support the females, and with another party to support the males. Not unfrequently they contract for the support of one in a family, so variously do they attend to this business, and secure the end of providing for them through a year.

But the most outrageous and reprehensible manner -- one that has become very common, although not universal -- is the selling of the paupers at the town-meeting, or soon after, by the overseers, to the lowest bidder, who takes them off the hands of the town, and supports them as he best can -- working them as he pleases, clothing and feeding, nursing and burying them as he thinks he can afford to do.

This is a common practice. The lowest bidder is one who takes them at the lowest rate possible, after having been run in his bids by rival speculators in the stock, and is, further, one not usually a strictly conscientious, Christian man -- the principles of such an one forbidding him to engage in the sale, even temporarily, of 'his own flesh.' Consequently, they are in the hands of money-makers, close calculators, worldly men, who, having bid them off at a very low price, feel justified in keeping them accordingly.

And it is estimated that a shrewd business sort of a man will manage to keep fifteen paupers a year at an aggregate cost of only one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars!

As it frequently happens that under this system they are supported year after year for three or five years by the same person, he comes to regard them as his creatures, to do with just as he feels inclined. He is sometimes a very hard master, and then their condition is one of extreme suffering, danger and death; at other times he is one of peculiar mercenariness, and then they go about almost starved. Then he is thriftless and rummy, and they fall into the same ruinous course.

As thus managed, it is purely a selfish and unchristian institution. Of course, the paupers, bid off on speculation by a man formerly interested in the matter to make money out of it, other people see little of it, and have comparatively no interest in the management. They feel no obligation to remember the town's poor; let the person who has taken, or bought them for the year, see that they are taken care of according to his contract!

Now, the contract may read well enough and be explicit enough, but the town knows that if an individual bids off the poor at a low rate, he will of course keep them on very poor and coarse diet, and provide for them the most meagre accommodations. The only reason why this system has maintained its hold among the people here at the North is, that a majority of the voters, often a small, sometimes a large one, have regarded it as the cheapest system. Simply to save a few dollars in the taxes, they have overlooked every other consideration, especially the inhumanity of it. They have not consulted at all the feelings of the poor themselves, who have been sometimes persons of sensibility and virtue. They have gone in opposition to Christian principles -- often Christian vows.