One of the most often heard contemporary criticisms of the Old Poor Law was that the granting of outdoor relief to able–bodied laborers promoted population growth. The aspect of outdoor relief that supposedly had the strongest effect on the rate of population growth was the payment of child allowances to laborers with large families. Like most parts of the traditional critique of the Old Poor Law, the hypothesis that child allowances caused population to increase has been challenged by revisionist historians. In particular, two papers by James Huzel (1969; 1980) have led Joel Mokyr (1985b: 11) to conclude that “the demographic argument against [the Poor Law] has been effectively demolished.” The judgment is premature. This chapter uses Huzel's data source to demonstrate that, when other socioeconomic determinants of fertility are accounted for, the payment of child allowances did indeed cause an increase in birth rates. Malthus was right.

The chapter will proceed as follows: Section 1 reviews the historical debate over the role of poor relief in promoting population growth. The administration of child allowance policies, and the economic value of child allowances to agricultural laborers, are discussed in Section 2. A cross-sectional model to explain variations in birth rates across southeastern parishes for 1826–30 is developed in Section 3 and estimated in Section 4. Section 5 tests whether child allowance policies were an endogenous response to changing demographic patterns. Some implications for the role played by poor relief in the fertility increase of the early nineteenth century are given in Section 6.