Posted with permission of the transcriber, Ann Selchick. Geo SICKNESS & POVERTY IN Nineteenth Century Whitehaven. # 47-A. TO MR. JOHN SPENCER Spirit Merchant and Poor Law Guardian. _______ Sir, - As you have now been a candidate for notoriety for some time past upon terms, with becoming deference to your own judgment, that do not well accord with the garb you wear, and are completely at variance with my own notions of good citizenship, or what is due from one man to another, I do not think it necessary to offer any apology for thus addressing you through the medium of a public journal. I have no relish for long preliminary remarks and will therefore at once start my game. The part you took on the appointment of the Assistant Overseer for this township under the new poor law act will yet be fresh upon your recollection, and the reason you assigned for your hostility towards him; and granting that those reasons were what you professed them to be, though I hardly need tell you that nine-tenths of the inhabitants did not believe your averments on that subject, you might ere this have allayed those doubts you entertained of his competency to discharge the duties pertaining to his office. You are so peculiarly sensitive, however, lest the town should suffer, that even up to this time you appear to think that all is not right - or at all events you seem yet anxious to hunt him down with a degree of relentless hostility, which, let me assure you, is not attributed to pure motives on your part by the public. If therefore you think you deceive the public you labour under a mistake; it is yourself alone that is deceived. Your mode of bringing Quirk's case against the Assistant Overseers before the Board of Guardians on Thursday last, was in the first place, unhandsome, and in the next it was no business of yours - you had in fact nothing to do with it, your interference in the matter was therefore pure officiousness prompted no doubt by the hope that you would thus have the opportunity of wreaking a malicious and bad feeling upon an unoffending individual - a person whom I believe never did you wrong either by word or action in the whole course of his life. The overseers are surely competent to manage their own affairs without your interference; and if you had made QUIRK's case known to them, as was your duty to have done if you had lent an ear to his representations at all, you would have been informed, without the humiliation of exposure before the Board of Guardians, that you had been the dupe of a stubborn and designing man. As you are so scrupulously watchful over another man's concerns - so anxious to discover a mote in your neighbor's eye, you would no doubt take especial care that no one should be put to the trouble of exacting a beam from your own. In my intercourse with society I cannot say that I have often found the busy meddler any better than those whom he may have sought to vilify and injure, and with all my charity I have no inclination to make you an exception, but in common fairness I ought perhaps to give reasons for the faith that is in me. This I have no objections to do, and will therefore hastily glance at your conduct as a Poor Law Guardian, for it is in that capacity alone in which I claim any right to scrutinize your actions. It would require more space than I can reasonably look for in the columns of the Pacquet even to glace at the extravagant manner in which you advocate the expenditure of the public money in the shape of out-door relief to able bodied paupers; to particularize the decisions of the Board one week reversed by you the next, and all for what? - popularity - to be accounted humane and charitable, not at your own expense, but at that of the rate-payers of the township. To be continued.