expect that the increase of reformatories should enable us to close our prisons. To mark the exact line of avoidable and unavoidable poverty will ever remain an impossibility; the utmost we can hope to do is to approach towards it, and by a vigilant supervision of those who are relieved, discourage as much as possible the idle and undeserving. Such an attempt seems hardly to have been made under the old system, and it is not surprising that the introduction of changes and the suppression of many abuses should have been hailed with unmixed satisfaction, and for a time all defects in the new system were overlooked. Some of the administrators of the old régime of course looked coldly upon innovations of any kind, but the change was generally welcomed as the means of ridding the country of a great and ever-increasing burden.
We will now proceed to make some remarks upon the different classes of misfortune, for the relief of which the poor law is intended, and which are supposed to have a right to claim its assistance. We hope to be able to shew that there is a class of deserving poor who are entitled to a better treatment than they at present receive in the administration of our public charity; and also, that a more efficient and discriminating management would not tend to increase, but rather to diminish, pauperism.
With regard to the persons for whom the provision of a home in the workhouse is afforded, we may quote the words of Mrs. Jameson, in her book on the Communion of Labour. She says, "The purpose of a workhouse is to be a refuge to the homeless, houseless, helpless poor; to night-wanderers; to orphan children; to the lame and blind; to the aged, who here lie down on their last bed to die. The number of inmates varies in different parishes at different seasons, from 400 to 1,000. In the great London unions it is generally from 1,500 to 2,000."[1] Assuming then that all these are not impostors or otherwise undeserving of compassion and help, we will briefly consider what is their present general condition, and what measures are taken for their welfare.
In the first place, whatever the management of workhouses may be, it is stated to be a fact, that they are less comfortable than prisons, and that the latter are preferred as places of abode by the lower classes. Magistrates and chaplains and visitors to prisons acknowledge this to be the case. The preference is
- ↑ The following list gives the number of inmates in some of the metropolitan unions on Christmas Day, 1856:—Marylebone, 1,966; St. Pancras, 1,639; Lambeth, 1,056; St. George-in-the-East, 1,205; St. Matthew, Bethnal Green, 1,110; Whitechapel, 1,044; Stepney, 1,006. Others contain numbers varying between 200 and 1,000.
"Of the 11,310 who thus closed their career not in their own homes, 6,552 died in workhouses."—Registrar General's Report, 1856.
