CHAPTER VII.

WORKHOUSES AND PRISONS.

"I can easily credit the assertion of the Government Inspectors of Prisons, that it is from the mass of pauper children that the convicts who fill our gaols are in a great measure recruited."-E. CARLETON TUFNELL, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Parochial Union Schools.

"It is not possible to convey to the mind any adequate idea of the extent of corruption in moral feeling and character, and of the completeness of the education in crime, which go on in the common gaols of the country, especially before trial, when the legal presumption of innocence prevents the application of discipline."-Rev. JOSEPH KINGSMILL, M.A., Chaplain of Pentonville Prison.

It is a somewhat remarkable anomaly that our parochial and penal systems should possess exactly opposite tendencies to those for which they were designed; so that instead of mitigating they have but actually augmented those chronic social disorders they were framed to remedy. In fact, the workhouses tend to throng the gaols, and the gaols to replenish themselves. But legislators,

like other people, are not infallible; and as we have no Solomons nor Solons among us, we have to gain wisdom by the ordinary but painful routine of experience, and frame new legislative measures according as we grow wiser and better.

The pernicious and vicious effects of workhouse association and training upon juvenile paupers cannot well be overrated. Possessed generally of low organizations, flaccid and effete, with little individuality of character and no aspiring sentiments, these children need for their healthy growth and development an entirely different moral atmosphere and intellectual and physical training to those furnished by union workhouses, or pauper bastiles. If it were intended to make pauperism ineradicable and crime more rampant, no better method could be devised than that now in operation in the 624 unions in England and Wales.

Her Majesty's Inspectors of parochial union schools, and indeed all who have written on the subject of workhouses, are unanimous in denouncing the system in operation therein as highly demoralizing to the younger portion of their inmates; and although classification of some sort has in several instances been attempted, yet it has proved either impossible to effect at all, or to preserve it strictly. Mr. Carleton Tufnell, in one of his reports, inserts a letter addressed to him

by an intelligent workhouse teacher, with reference to one of the ordinary workhouses of the south of England, but whose internal arrangements no way differ from the usual character of such places. The writer remarks: "It is not indeed to be expected that the people, experiencing much the same treatment, sharing a common feeling, and living under the same roof, can be kept from association. There are various ways of communication; a note, a word, a sign, may breed no small amount of mischief. At any rate, I find that the children know exactly what takes place in every part of the house; they even know much of what goes on without the establishment. They know that if this able-bodied man discharges himself on Monday, that able-bodied woman leaves the house on Tuesday. They know which of the able-bodied women will be removed from the washhouse to the lying-in room; they also know who of the able-bodied are in prison, who are out of work, and when this or that man will most likely return, as it were, home. The opinions of the adults appear to spread through the house, and to be as catching as the fever or the small-pox. The able-bodied men have said that the workhouse is worse than a prison; that they do not wish to screen the parish, and that they do not intend to cross the seas until they are sent,—meaning until they are transported. How, then, is it possible

in workhouses to train children to hate disgrace, to grow self-reliant, and to look forward to emigration? A boy in my school was asked some time ago what a prison was. Without hesitation he replied, 'A place where you have to work’— as if the world were not a place where he would have to work. He seems to have got this notion of a prison from the able-bodied men, who, as a matter of course, grumble when set to work."*

Of a similar character is the language of Mr. Bowyer, who observes, in speaking of workhouse children-"It is impossible for those who have not turned their attention to the condition of the youthful portion of that social class to which the children brought up in workhouses belong, to realize fully the depths of degradation to which, when abandoned to the evil influences that surround them, they are capable of falling." And again, in the same report he remarks:-" In several workhouses, facts have spontaneously come to light, which reveal a lamentably low state of morals among the children, and suggest a reflection as to the amount of corruption that must exist which is never discovered. In every one of these instances, the cause of the evil was clearly traceable to the influence of the adult inmates, and,

*Minutes of Parochial Union Schools, 1852-3, pp.

I regret to be obliged to add, to that of low and

immoral teachers."*

Mr. T. B. Browne offers correlative testimony. He states that "there are many workhouses in which classification is impossible, which are, therefore, necessarily schools of vice, and which, as I conceive, the legislature would not suffer to continue open year after year, if all that occurs in them were publicly known.”+

It needs no very great stretch of imagination to conceive the evil consequences which of necessity result to juvenile paupers from the associations and influences inseparable from the workhouse system. Adult paupers, as a class, are notoriously the offscourings of society; many of them pass their lives between the gaol and the union; most of them are drunken, besotted, idle, dissolute, and degraded in body and soul. From the congregation of such foul and festering elements, how can children mentally weak, ill-developed, and strongly predisposed to like disorders, escape the moral contagion arising therefrom? The thing is absolutely impossible. Hence, they but too frequently 'manifest a disposition to follow the vicious courses of their fathers; and if positive tendencies to

* Minutes of Parochial Schools, 1852-3, pp. 52-3.

Minutes, &c., 1855-6. Northern District Par. Union Schools. General Report, p. 104.