judging harshly of these classes, we should do well to remember the want of all the advantages which are usually considered essential to the well-being of children. Such reflections would go far to lessen the wonder so often expressed at the results apparent in the after lives of those who have been trained in circumstances so dissimilar, and at the fact that so many act as if they were outcasts from that world and that society which has shewn so little love to them. It is a fearful and significant fact that many of the most hopeless and hardened inmates of workhouses are girls who have been brought up in the pauper schools.[1]
Mrs. Jameson mentions the case of a large parish union where it was reckoned that about fifty per cent, of the girls were returned to them ruined and depraved; and she gives the following testimony of a workhouse chaplain, Mr. Brewer:—
"The disorderly girls and boys in our streets are mainly the produce of the workhouse and the workhouse schools. Over them society has no hold, because they have been taught to feel that they have nothing in common with their fellow-men. Their experience is not of a home or of parents, but of a workhouse and a governor—of a prison and a gaoler as hard and rigid as either."—Communion of Labour, p. 113.
This was probably said of girls trained under the workhouse roof, but the result of district schools is at present less satisfactory than we should expect.
We would venture here to make the suggestion that ladies should be appointed to visit and inspect the schools, as well as the gentlemen appointed by the guardians and the Poor Law Board, and this would be an important part of the work of ladies' committees connected with workhouses. They would endeavour to gain a hold on the affections of the children by means of a personal knowledge and interest, which would not cease when they left the school, but would follow them out into their respective situations; and as these establishments must be homes as well as schools, an infusion of some kindly and cheerful elements would be most desirable. Who can tell what might be the value of a friend to many of these poor friendless ones, of whom boards of guardians are but too often the sole protectors? and how
- ↑ Extract from the Report of an inspector of pauper schools for 1855:—" I have been assured that the number of Kirkdale children (the district school for Liverpool) who after their discharge from the school have become inmates of the Liverpool workhouse, amounts to some hundreds, and that many of these were females under the most disgraceful circumstances. There were at one time, in the Liverpool penitentiary for fallen females, eleven Kirkdale girls, out of whom it was found necessary to dismiss four for bad conduct … More, assuredly, is practicable than has hitherto been accomplished; but it remains to he proved whether any person can exercise a sufficient moral influence over so large a number of girls allowed to associate together in the same building. As far as I know at present, no girls' school appears to be morally more unsuccessful in this district than the largest."
