LITMIR.BIZ

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it generally resemble those of the two classes last mentioned —i. e. they are industrious or idle, intemperate or sober. Generally, this class requires relief more urgently than the several classes of widows; because by their past conduct they are shut out from any participation in many of the charities. It is needless to say that strict investigation into their circumstances and proceedings is necessary.

      The eighth and ninth classes consist of single women. The eighth is composed of women who have had two children, and are prostitutes; the ninth of those who have only committed the first offence. The inquiries of the officer, in the ordinary routine, would develop the facts. The utility of this distinction is, that it would afford boards of guardians an opportunity of dealing fairly with the latter class: the fact of the distinction being noted in all the books would attract their attention to the point. To confound these cases together, and to act with, equal severity to all, is obviously unjust. In those unions where the prohibitory order has been issued, all the individuals of both these classes are relieved only in the house. In the case of their admission, the cognisance of this distinction, not casually, not specially, because a guardian may have had his attention drawn to a particular case, but as a matter of routine, would necessarily lead to a good result. No board of guardians, when their attention has been regularly and officially directed to the facts of the case, could compel both classes to herd together in one common room.

      The medical relief list is composed of poor persons who are suffering from acute disease, and are, in consequence of their illness and extreme poverty, receiving relief in money or food. Those who are in the receipt of other relief by order of the board, and who belonged to one of the other classes, would be excluded from this list. There are two modes of regulating the medical out-door relief in kind. One mode is to require the medical officers to attend the meetings of the boards of guardians. It is their duty to report upon the state of health of each out-door sick person at specified times, and to state the kind of nutriment adapted to each case. The board is thus furnished with a sanatory report from one officer, and a report upon circumstances from the other. This is a satisfactory system. The other mode is, for the medical officer to report to the relieving officer in a prescribed form, that A B is ill with consumption, and requires – food per diem. The relieving officer has a veto. If, upon visiting the case, he is satisfied that the head of the family can supply the articles recommended, the relief is withheld. The case is reported to the next board, who issue the necessary instructions thereon. The first plan is undoubtedly the preferable one, in all those parishes or unions where the population is large and the area small. But in all large rural unions, where the medical officers are many and their labours great, from bad roads and extent of district, the plan would be inapplicable. As regards the second method, it would be found to prevail as a rule, that, in the majority of cases, the recommendation of the medical officer is regarded by the relieving officer as tantamount to an order. The exception would be in those unions where the board is infested by persons who know of no means of estimating the value of an officer excepting by his supposed power of reducing expenditure; and in those parishes where the inhabitants are poor and embarrassed. And it is to be feared that this evil, against which the press exclaim so loudly, will continue to predominate so long as the existing unequal charge upon parishes continues. The magnates of St. George, Hanover Square, can afford to be magnanimous and humane. In St. Luke, Middlesex, or St. Leonard, Shoreditch, where the rate-payers are poor, it is a different matter altogether. And yet it is in these poor neighbourhoods that the poor live; and where they live, there they must be relieved.

      The administration of the relief given in consequence of poverty and illness requires great care. The list contains the most meritorious of the poor: and as the relief given is of the greatest value, it is the relief most sought after by “cadgers” and impostors. The great abuses which creep into the administration of out-door relief do not arise from the relief of the able-bodied, but from affording relief to persons who allege that they are suffering from bodily ailments without proper investigation. In ordinarily well managed parishes, impostors, cadgers, and mendicants have no chance of obtaining relief in money. Therefore the whole of their practised cunning is brought to bear upon this more valuable form of relief. Now, from the peculiar habits of this class of persons, there is often strong ground for the claim. They will starve three days, and complete the week in revel and debauchery. Those periods, which they consider days of prosperity, are too often occasions for emaciating their bodies by drinking gin and eating unnutritious food. A chilly, foggy, November night is the time when the supposed widow can parade her children on the highway with the best chance of exciting the compassion of the passersby; and it is the time, too, when, if there is any predisposition to disease, the circumstances are most favourable for its development. It is to this class that the workhouse may be offered – as an infirmary. It is a fact, however, that those of this class who suffer from external diseases, and especially those which may be exposed with impunity, do not desire to enter a workhouse, and will not remain there until they are completely cured. And then, with reference to children who are exposed at night in the streets, notwithstanding the parents may be warned that they are sowing the seeds of incurable disease in the bodies of these infants, and are offered relief sufficient to constitute the greater part of their support; yet, however they may promise, they will continue to sleep in the day-time, and prowl about as homeless outcasts in distant neighborhoods at night. It is useless to offer them the workhouse; they will refuse it, and make, the offer a ground of appeal to the benevolent. As regards the children, the medical officer declares that his medicines are useless, and even dangerous. They are taken in the morning, the child is exposed in the evening, and in a few months it dies —a natural death? Here is lower depth of crime and misery which baffles the benevolent and wise.5

      The aged, the infirm, the sufferers from chronic disease, the permanently disabled, the several classes of widows, the single women who have one or more children, and those who are chargeable mainly from temporary illness, have been collected and separated from the dense mass of pauperism. Who are those that remain? There is much error abroad upon this question. They are legion, whether they be regarded in connexion with the causes which have led to their impoverishment, or with reference to their various modes of obtaining a livelihood. Reference has already been made to that portion of the population of England who are in a transition state —i. e. those whose ordinary employment has been superseded by more rapid and cheaper methods, and who have thereby lost their ordinary means of livelihood, and been drifted down from stage to stage until they have reached the lowest depth, and have at last been compelled to ask for a morsel of bread at the workhouse door. Then it will appear upon inquiry that each separate locality will present its peculiar species of casual poor, who fall into a state of destitution from the action of peculiar causes. It frequently happens that the individuals were never trained to any ordinary species of labour. At an early period of their lives, they were put in the way to learn a trade, but from early habits of idleness, from the criminal neglect of masters or parents, from natural incapacity for the particular trade, or from an unconquerable dislike to it, they have never been able to earn “salt to their porridge,” as the saying is. They never received a regular or an average amount of wage. If they are tailors, they compete with old women in making “slopwork” for the lower class of salesmen. Or they convert old coat tails into decent cloth caps, and may be industrious enough to supply a tribe of women with a Saturday night’s stock. As cobblers, they ply the craft of “translation” – a trade, even in this lower acceptation of the term, peculiarly liable to abuse. To the unlearned, it may be necessary to state that translation is the act of converting old boots into new ones, and is done with thin strips of varnished leather, and plenty of wax and large nails. There are carpenters, whose ingenuity is confined to the manufacture of money-boxes, cigar-cases, and children’s stools. Smiths, male and female, forge garden rakes, small pokers, and gridirons, as the season may suggest. And then their wives and children, or other men’s wives and children, hawk them for sale in populous neighbourhoods on market evenings. Tin funnels are sold “at the low price of a halfpenny.” Minute and useless candlesticks, wire forks, children’s toys, and old umbrellas, are a few specimens of this miscellaneous merchandise, the sale of which brings bread to hundreds of families. They live in fœtid alleys, are not cleanly, and are sometimes intemperate; hence they are peculiarly liable to the attacks of disease. During illness, there are many things which the sick man craves which a parochial officer cannot grant, and

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