who are decent and respectable to be mixed up with these rougher elements. Miss Twining quotes a case in which a blind man in a London workhouse was forced to go to bed at six, in order to get away from the foul language used in the day-room. Altogether, everything points to the necessity of some differentiation of treatment, as suggested by the Local Government Board, between those aged inmates of our workhouses who are decent and respectable and those who are not. The notion that to be over sixty confers of itself a halo of respectability is a dangerous fallacy. If metropolitan workhouses are not to be swamped with those who have been and are still leading dissipated and disreputable lives, greater stringency will have to be adopted in respect to them, both as a matter of public policy and in fairness to the more decent inmates. A fair percentage at least of those who frequent our workhouses need not be there at all if they behaved themselves even moderately well outside. We must all of us know cases, for instance, in which children would have kept their parents away from the workhouse altogether but for their intolerable and continued misbehaviour.
The difficulties of classification are, as already pointed out, considerable. But we can, at all events, refrain from encouraging impenitent old age by gifts of tobacco, snuff, and sweets, by unlimited liberty to come and go, and by dressing it up in clothes which are sometimes better than those of the respectable tradesman outside. It is not at all necessary to go into people's past lives. The line of demarcation between those who behave themselves decently and respectably and those who do not, is quite sufficiently defined, and no good workhouse master, if he has the support of his Board, will find much difficulty in doing justice, broadly speaking.
