accustomed to control the natural impulses of childish covetousness? Worse than all, the human affections of the girl are all checked, and with them almost inevitably those religious ones which naturally rise through the earthly parent's love to the Father in heaven. The poor workhouse girl is "the child of an institution"—not of a human mother! Nobody calls her by her Christian name or treats her in any way as if she individually were of any interest to them. She bears her surname, if she luckily possess one, and the name of some neighbouring lane or field if she be a foundling. She is driven about with the rest of the dreary flock from dormitory to school-room, and from school-room to workhouse-yard- not harshly or unkindly, perhaps, but always as one of a herd whether well or ill cared for. She is nobody's "Mary" or "Kate" to be individually thought of, talked to, praised, or even perhaps impatiently scolded and punished. What matter? There would have been love at the bottom of the mother's harshness. For the workhouse girl, for "Harding" or "Oakfield," there is no question of love; and youth itself is shorn of every ray of warmth and softness as the poor creature grows up with her cropped hair and hideous dress, and too often with her face seamed and scarred by fell disease. As to knowing anything really useful, her mind is as blank as the white-washed walls of the dreary yard which her hapless infancy has had for its playground and its whole portion in God's world. The apparent stupidity of these girls when they go out to service, as we have said, is something deplorable-though easily understood when we remember how impossible it is for them to learn by intuition such simple "arts of life" as the lighting of fires, roasting meat, hushing babies, and touching utensils more liable to breakage than tin mugs and workhouse platters. The excellent ladies who have founded St. Joseph's Institute, near Dublin, for the purpose of employing these poor girls in a safe and happy home, have revealed to us the most grotesquely bouring establishment. There is a peculiarly ferocious scream, really worthy of wild beasts, practised among these wretched girls whenever a mutiny takes place. It is commonly known in Ireland as the Workhouse Howl! Few things can be conceived more shocking than the state of affairs revealed by a letter from the Poor Law Commissioners to the Guardians of the South Dublin Union, January 9th, 1861, wherein permission is granted, in consideration of the outrageous conduct of the young females in the workhouse, to expel them from the house-i.e., to turn them on the streets! Must not these guardians shudder to reflect that many of these girls have been under their charge from early infancy? If they are so hideously and hopelessly depraved that there is nothing left for them but the streets, in God's name we ask on whom lies the blame? In England the workhouse girls are rather depressed and stupified than rendered thus defiant, but the result is the same in the end. When they go out to service they disgust their employers. The wretched girl is incapable, idle, insolent, and is treated perhaps harshly, perhaps with that worst cruelty which disregards her moral safety and sends her out at wrong times and places. The experience of agents appointed to help some of these children in one large city has revealed also that they are subjected to the most abominable injustice in the withholding of their pittance of wages. The girl soon learns on her errands through the streets that there is another way of earning her bread than in this drudgery of service-a far easier way they tell her.-A few years later the hapless friendless creature, now a woman ruined and broken down, goes back to the dreary workhouse where her joyless childhood was wasted. This time she is sent, not to the school, but to the "Black Ward!"1 "In one metropolitan union, inquiries being made concerning eighty girls who had left the workhouse, and gone to service, it was found that every one was on the streets."The Workhouse Orphan. A better day, however, we trust, is dawning for these pauper children. For some time back the London unions have been alive to the necessity of having schools for their children out of town and separate from the workhouses. There are five of these district schools around London, containing in all 7,000 children; and Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds have followed the example. The house, certified as an industrial school, opened by the Honourable Mrs. Way, at Brockham, near Reigate, where workhouse girls from twelve years old are trained as servants, and Miss Louisa Twining's Home, in New Ormond Street, for girls from fifteen to twenty-five from London workhouses, promise much higher advantages again than the district schools. Here indeed the "entail of pauperism" may, we trust, be fairly cut off, and all the degrading circumstances of the pauper life removed. The girls are brought into smaller communities, where the indispensable element of individual care and feeling is brought to bear on their young hearts; and the nature of the house itself permits the practice of those housewifely duties which cannot be learned in the bare wards and among the machinery of huge troughs and boilers of a workhouse laundry and kitchen. For moral reasons also the smaller aggregations of girls are altogether preferable. As the late J. C. Symons, Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, confessed, "Whenever the legislature establishes "district schools it will be well to con"sider whether the girls' schools ought "not to be very limited in size. There "is reason to fear that any large groups "of girls are liable to become demo"ralised." In speaking of the present state of things in the large district schools Miss Twining most justly remarks:: "It is an unnatural system, and one entirely opposed to the order of God's providence as displayed in the arrangements of family life. Not only is it very difficult, if not impossible, to organise an establishment containing 500 or 1,000 persons so as in any way to resemble a family household, even as regards its material arrangements; but it is absolutely impossible to introduce into it the elements of family life, which we maintain are essential to the development and well-being of the woman's nature. The necessary scale on which all the operations are conducted (combined with the total absence of all private property), leads to habits of waste and reckless consumption, which are totally incompatible with the future career of the girl, who is destined first for service in a small household, and afterwards will most probably become the poor wife of a labouring man. Establishments of these dimensions must also be served by an army of officials, in whom it is almost in vain to look for the element that will supply the place of home and family affections and sympathies to the poor outcast girl. We are far from saying that there are no remedies to be found for many of the evils which we have alluded to, as at present impeding the full benefit of district pauper schools, and still farther from implying that with all their defects they are not immeasurably superior to the pauperising 'workhouse school; but we would earnestly ask those who have the power in their hands to pause before they consent to multiply, at enormous cost, schools containing under one roof and one management 1,000 or 1,600 children, especially when at the head of this internal management is placed a man and woman who have previously only filled the post of workhouse master and matron. "The Womanly element is sorely needed in these institutions; and it is most earnestly to be desired, not only that there should be a council of ladies to confer with the matron on all such matters as come within the province of women, but also that there should be women inspectors appointed and sanctioned to take cognisance of the education and progress of the girls, both morally and industrially. "It is one of the most hopeful signs of the present time that so strongly are these convictions beginning to make themselves felt, that 'homes' for poor girls of the workhouse class are beginning to appear here and there through the country. We feel convinced that these are based upon a true and sound principle, and that their multiplication is earnestly to be desired. A motherly care and love, combined with thorough training in humble and household duties, and supplemented by a continued watchful supervision on leaving the house, surely provides, as far as human wisdom and thoughtful foresight can provide, for the successful start in life and future career of the poor friendless pauper girl; and we believe we are not presumptuous in looking for a large amount of success from the further development of such efforts." All that is required for the success of this noble experiment is that the guardians should be enabled to pay to wellqualified ladies, or societies, who under 1 Hanwell is built to contain 1,600 children. take to found such houses, the same amount which the girls now cost them in the workhouse. By the present order. of the Poor Law Board, the guardians can give only the usual amount of outdoor relief to girls who may be received as inmates of the house, and private charity must supply the remainder of the expense. But it is not just that the matter should remain on this footing, and we trust the necessary alterations in the Poor Law will be considered at the approaching discussion in parlia ment. A temporary expedient, which has been tried in one city with entire success, we would earnestly commend to the attention of our readers who have time to bestow on a task wherein a vast amount of preventive good may be performed with no outlay of money. It is simply this-that in every union ladies should make themselves acquainted (through the workhouse master or otherwise) with the addresses of girls immediately on their being sent out to service. They should then call on each mistress, express their interest in her little servant, and request permission for her to attend a Sunday afternoon-class for workhouse girls. Invariably it has been found that the mistresses take in good part such visits, made with proper courtesy, and are led to greater consideration for their servants and attention to guard them against moral dangers. Usually, also, they have gladly availed themselves of the Sunday-school, which, of course, affords an admirable "basis of operations" for all sorts of good, religious and secular, to these poor children. The main object is effected either way; the girls feel they have a friend whose influence is wholly a moral one, and whose hand is ready to hold them up in the terrible dangers which attend their lot. Finally, how do we accomplish the third end of the Poor Law, and afford support and comfort, void of all penal element, towards the sick and helpless who have no other asylum? Let it be understood that there are many workhouses where this end is effectually accomplished, and many more where the intention to do it is sincere, though the absence of the female element of thoughtfulness for details and tenderness for infirmity in the very place which the sternest contemners of the sex declare to be woman's proper post, namely, at the bedside of the sick and dying-the absence, we say, of this element, constantly neutralises the good intentions of the Board. Further, however, than this. The fundamental system of workhouse management is incompatible with proper care of the sick. The infirmary is an accident of the house, not its main object; and proper hospital arrangements are consequently almost impracticable. The wards are hardly ever constructed for such a purpose as those of a regular hospital would be, with proper attention to warmth, light, and ventilation. In some cases their position with regard to the other buildings entails all sorts of miseries on the patients-as, for example, the terrible sounds from the wards for the insane. In the courtyard of one metropolitan workhouse carpet-beating is done as a work for the able-bodied paupers. The windows of the sick and infirm open on this yard, and during the summer cannot be opened because of the dust. In another court a blacksmith's shed has been erected close under the windows of the infirmary, and the smoke enters when they are opened, while the noise is so violent as to be quite bewildering to a visitor. Can we conceive what it must be to many an aching head in those wretched rooms? The furniture of the workhouse infirmaries is commonly also unsuited to its destination. The same rough beds (generally made with one thin mattress laid on iron bars) which are allotted to the rude able-bodied paupers, are equally given to the poor, emaciated, bed-ridden patient, whose frame is probably sore all over, and whose aching head must remain, for want of pillows, in nearly a horizontal position for months together.1 Hardly in any work A very simple invention might be used by house is there a chair on which the sufferers in asthma or dropsy, or those fading away slowly in decline, could relieve themselves by sitting for a few hours, instead of on the edges of their beds, gasping and fainting from weariness. Arrangements for washing the sick, and for cleanliness generally, are most imperfect. We cannot venture to describe the disgusting facts of this kind known to us as existing even in metropolitan workhouses, where neither washing utensils are found, nor the rags permitted to be retained which the wretched patients used for towels. Again, in other workhouses, cleanliness is attempted to an extent causing endless exasperation of disease to the rheumatic sufferers and those with pulmonary affections, to whom the perpetual washing of the floor is simply fatal. In new country workhouses the walls of these sick-rooms are commonly of stone-not plastered, but constantly whitewashed-and the floor not seldom of stone also. Conceive a winter spent in such a prison: no shutters or curtains, of course, to the windows, or shelter to the beds, where some dozen sufferers lie writhing in rheumatism, and ten or fifteen more coughing away the last chances of life and recovery. But even the unfitness of the wards and their furniture is second to the question of medical aid and nursing. The salaries usually given to workhouse surgeons are low, the pressure for employment in the medical profession being so great as to induce gentlemen to accept wholly charitable ladies at trifling expense to relieve this last misery. A knitted bed-rest, the shape of a half-shawl, five feet six inches long, and two feet deep in the middle, affords the most wonderful comfort. It should be made of common knitting-cotton, and tied by double tapes at the end to the ends of the bed, then passed round the patient's back, to which it forms a support like a cradle. Any lady who would send one of these to Miss Louisa Twining, 13, Bedford Place, Russell Square, would be sure to have her work well applied. 2 Ought not the floors of all sick wards to be waxed, so as to obviate the necessity of washing? The damp is agony to the rheu matic patients, and death to those with con. sumption or erysipelas. inadequate remuneration. But low as they are, with very rare exceptions, they are made to include the cost of all the drugs ordered to the patients! It would seem as if the mere mention of such a system were enough to condemn it. Underpaid and overworked, it is impossible to expect that the labour and the cost of exhibiting the more expensive medicines can be ordinarily undergone. In many cases we believe it would swallow up the whole miserable salary of the surgeon, and go far beyond it, were he to give to the pauper sufferers the anodynes they so piteously require, and to the weak, halfstarved, scrofulous, and consumptive patients the tonics, cod-liver oil, &c., on which their chances of life must depend. Again, there may be the most difficult and intricate cases, requiring all possible skill. In every other hospital the most experienced physicians would attend such cases. Here a young man (necessarily at the outset of his profession, or he would not accept such a position) has to decide everything for himself. What would the Board think of being continually called on to pay consultation fees to the leading surgeons and physicians in the neighbourhood? It is the received theory that it is in the power of the medical officer of each union to order all that his patients require; and guardians perpetually boast that they never refuse to countersign such orders. The nature of the case, however, is pretty obvious. The surgeon knows what things will, and what will not be sanctioned, and rarely attempts the useless task of collision with the Board, in which it almost invariably happens that along with many benevolent guardians are others whose sole object is to "keep down the rates" at any cost of human suffering. Besides the anomalous arrangements of wards and medical attendance in workhouses, which are actually hospitals without proper hospital supervision, there remains a third source of misery to the inmates-the nurses. It is easy to understand that the difficulty of obtaining good nurses in ordinary hospitals is doubled here. Indeed it is rarely grappled with at all; for women hired by the Board are so invariably brought into collision with the master and matron, that even the kindest of such officials say (and probably say truly) that it is best to be content with the pauper nurses, over whom at least they can exercise some control. The result is that, in an immensely large proportion of houses, the sick are attended by male or female paupers who are placed in such office without having had the smallest preparatory instruction or experience, and who often have the reverse of kindly feelings towards their helpless patients. As payments they usually receive allowances of beer or gin, which aid their too common propensity to intoxication. A good deal of misapprehension, we believe, exists as to the class of persons who are inmates of the sick wards of our workhouses. They are very frequently quite of another and higher order than that of the able-bodied paupers-their disease, not any vice or idleness, having brought them to their present condition. Especially among the women do we find the most piteous cases of reduced respectability-widows of tradesmen, upper servants, and even teachers and governesses, joined in one common lot of sordid poverty, and sleeping side by side' with poor creatures whose lives have been passed in a hopeless drudgery of labour-in selling apples in the streets, or in lower avocations still. All the heaviest misery, in fact, of our country drains into the workhouse as to the lowest deep; and only by meeting it there can we hope to relieve the worst of our social tragedies. A few notes from the memoranda of a dear friend will enable the reader who has never visited a workhouse infirmary to form some judgment of its inmates. "I went first to workhouse to "visit an old woman whom I had "known for some time before she en"tered it. She had been more of a companion than maid to an invalid lady, and had the manners of a well"bred and well-informed person. Her |