The latter work had the object of showing that the prevalent dislike of the measure was due to a misapprehension of its provisions conceived and acted on by the agents of the poor-law commissioners.
He illustrated this view by detailed statements, taken mainly from the reports of the Mendicity Society, to show the inadequacy of the incomes of numbers of the wage-earning classes for the maintenance of themselves and their families.
Following Thomas Chalmers, Bosanquet argued that individual charity, and not the state or a public legal provision, should supply whatever was deficient in the pecuniary circumstances of the poor.
The work assailed modern liberalism and its results, intellectual and social, as interpreted by Bosanquet; who identified his age with those last times of national degeneracy and apostasy which were to precede the second advent.
His Letter to Lord John Russell on the Safety of the Nation, 1848, showed the same spirit of hostility to modern liberalism, and a desire to substitute a paternal despotism for parliamentary government.