THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 SOCIAL WRECKAGE.
 
 xx i . a 
 
 EALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO., EDINBURGH 
 CHANDOS STREET, LONDON
 
 SOCIAL WRECKAGE: 
 
 H TReview of tbe Xaws of EnglauD 
 as tbes affect tbe jpoor. 
 
 BY FRANCIS PEEK. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 WM. ISBISTER, LIMITED, 
 
 56, LUDGATE HILL, 
 1883.
 
 HI/73 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS 
 
 OF THE FIRST EDITION OF 
 
 "SOCIAL WRECKAGE." 
 
 North British Daily Mail. 
 
 To those who are inclined to the opinion that there is 
 a danger of our having too much domestic legislation, we 
 could not suggest a better thing to do than to read the 
 volume under the title of "Social Wreckage," by Mr. 
 Francis Peek, of London, which has just been published 
 by Mr. William Isbister, of Ludgate Hill. Mr. Peek's 
 book purports to be a review of the laws of England as 
 they affect the poor ; and he has, unfortunately, but too 
 little difficulty in proving in a most convincing and con- 
 clusive way that a large proportion of the prevailing 
 moral and physical degradation is the result of the direct 
 or indirect influence of bad laws. 
 
 The Times. 
 
 A new work, entitled "Social Wreckage," in advo- 
 cating a more extensive adoption of the Boarding-out 
 system for orphan and deserted children, gives some in- 
 teresting recent experiences of various districts of the 
 
 country in this matter Mr. Peek regards the 
 
 accompaniment of regular and careful supervision and 
 visitation as an indispensable element for the success
 
 vi Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 of the Boarding-out system, and recommends that in 
 every instance the aid of local ladies' committees should 
 be invited by Boards of Guardians as a valuable auxiliary 
 to their efforts in this direction. 
 
 The Globe. 
 
 There can be no question whatever that this thought- 
 ful volume deals with several serious defects in our social 
 
 system That the administration of the law still 
 
 remains too costly, that witnesses are often subjected to 
 unjustifiable bullying, and that judicial and magisterial 
 decisions frequently seem to be based upon the vicious 
 principle that property is more sacred than the person 
 to whom it belongs, cannot be gainsaid. We ourselves 
 have commented, time after time, on these and other 
 sores in the body politic, and we are glad, therefore, to 
 obtain the co-operation of such a valiant and fearless 
 fighter as Mr. Francis Peek. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 No one who takes to heart the lessons of social failure 
 and disorganization to be read daily in the reports of 
 our police-courts and coroners' inquests, can be other- 
 wise than grateful to Mr. Peek for his vigorous little 
 
 work It is an admirable summing-up of the share 
 
 taken by unjust laws and faulty administrations in the 
 manufacture of our criminals and paupers. 
 
 The Metropolitan. 
 
 We regret that we cannot follow Mr. Peek fully through 
 his valuable work. It is most forcibly and convincingly 
 written, and speaks fairly and honourably of the men 
 who, as Guardians or officers, administer the present cut- 
 and-dried Poor-Laws. He goes into the causes that 
 tend to degrade the lower orders. The way in which
 
 Extracts from Reviews. vii 
 
 the very poor are herded together in one or two rooms, 
 to the entire absence of decency, the destruction of 
 health, and the deterioration of morality, is a matter 
 that all deplore, but none can satisfactorily deal with. 
 
 The Literary World. 
 
 Mr. Francis Peek, Chairman of the Committee of the 
 Howard Association, formerly a Member of the London 
 School Board, and well known for his writings dealing 
 with the social questions of the day, endeavours to call 
 attention to the causes which create and maintain, as a 
 present difficulty and growing danger in our midst, 
 
 pauperism and crime Mr. Peek leaves one almost 
 
 in despair. One thing, at any rate, is clear, that we 
 must have a Poor- Law system which shall deal much more 
 harshly with the lazy pauper, and much more tenderly 
 with the infirm and unfortunate and deserving aged and 
 weak than that which we have at present 
 
 The Academy. 
 
 This work has much to recommend it. It is not the 
 hasty publication of a writer who is only partially ac- 
 quainted with his subject .... If there is any mistake 
 it is on the side of omission, for in the book before us 
 we see signs of excessive compression; and this is to 
 be regretted, considering the magnitude of the object 
 which the writer has set before him. " The object of 
 this book," he says, " is not to plead for charity, but 
 simply for justice justice from the strong in dealing 
 with the weak, from the rich towards the poor." 
 
 Chamber? Journal. 
 
 A most interesting book comes to hand on the much- 
 debated and vexed question of the treatment of our 
 poorest classes. It is from the pen of Mr. Francis Peek,
 
 viii Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 a gentleman whose experience as a Member of the 
 London School Board, and as an earnest and sympathetic 
 investigator into the condition of the poor, renders him 
 qualified to speak on a subject which must always owe 
 more to practical inquiry than to mere abstract thinking. 
 .... We have no hesitation in saying that none who 
 have the means and the disposition to assist their less 
 fortunate fellow-creatures, and are anxious to do so 
 effectively, but will find it to their profit and wisdom to 
 read Mr. Peek's book. 
 
 The Nonconformist. 
 
 Though much has been done in the way of social 
 reform and improvement of the laws relating to crime 
 and criminals, much still remains to do. If anything 
 were calculated to subdue any feeling of vain superiority 
 regarding our methods in these particulars, it would be 
 the perusal of such a frank, thoroughgoing, and, at the 
 same time, truly practical and benevolent book as this. 
 
 The Christian. 
 A book of exceptional importance and interest. 
 
 The British Friend. 
 
 This is the title of an excellent book. Those of our 
 readers who are interested in the great questions of the 
 prevention of Pauperism, Intemperance, Overcrowding, 
 and Crime, will find in its pages many valuable sugges- 
 tions by an observant and practical man.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 \1[7HILE engaged some years since in 
 work having for its object the im- 
 provement of the condition of the poorest 
 classes, I found the fact so evident that a 
 large proportion of the prevailing moral and 
 physical degradation was the result of the 
 direct or indirect influence of bad laws that 
 I was led to call attention to the subject 
 in a little book entitled "Our Laws and 
 Our Poor," which, aided by kind notices in 
 many of the leading journals, has not, I 
 believe, been altogether useless, but has in 
 some measure helped to promote the in- 
 troduction of valuable reforms. A demand 
 for further copies of the book induces me 
 to publish, in place of a fresh edition, the 
 present volume, which, while it contains 
 all that is still valuable of the former, in- 
 cludes other matter which further study and
 
 x Preface. 
 
 experience have led me to believe worthy of 
 the earnest attention of all who take an in- 
 terest in the welfare of their country, and 
 especially in the amelioration of the condi- 
 tion of the poor. 
 
 It may appear extravagant to assert that 
 the laws of England, as far as they affect the 
 poorer classes of the community, are in many 
 respects a disgrace to a civilized, not to say a 
 Christian nation. Yet it is difficult, in face 
 of such facts as are brought forward A n tne 
 following pages facts which can be easily 
 verified to avoid this conclusion. 
 
 To state the matter more particularly : 
 
 Firstly, as regards the Poor- Laws, there 
 is an almost universal concurrence of opinion 
 among those who have studied the subject, 
 that the influence of these laws in the past, 
 and to a great extent in the present, even as 
 now administered, is to foster pauperism and 
 discourage providence. 
 
 Secondly, with respect to the Licensing 
 Laws, there is no denying that these give un- 
 due facilities for indulgence in drunkenness, 
 and throw unnecessary temptations in the 
 way of the poorer classes ; while the practical
 
 Preface. xi 
 
 immunity from punishment of publicans who 
 have justly incurred it by permitting drunken- 
 ness, and the lenient view magistrates often 
 take of offences committed by persons under 
 the influence of drink, tend to make the crime 
 of drunkenness appear venial. 
 
 Thirdly, as regards the Administration of 
 Justice, the perplexities of the law itself are 
 most mischievous; the way in which witnesses 
 are treated when giving evidence is often 
 cruel ; and our legal procedure is so dilatory 
 and expensive that it offers facilities for a 
 penniless adventurer to rob a rich man of 
 his money, or for a wealthy scoundrel to 
 ruin his poorer neighbour. 
 
 Fourthly, there is the inhuman spirit which 
 pervades the Criminal Law, and which is 
 intensified by the unequal punishments in- 
 flicted by judges and magistrates, teaching 
 that a man's person is far less sacred than 
 his property, that the smallest theft is more 
 criminal than the grossest cruelty, and this 
 tends to brutalize the lawless classes. 
 
 Fifthly, the Laws relating to Women are 
 both immoral and unjust. They place the 
 harlot in a better and safer position than
 
 xii Preface. 
 
 the married woman. They strictly guard, 
 up to twenty-one years of age, the persons of 
 girls who have property, while they afford no 
 protection, after the age of thirteen, to any 
 females without property. Poor girls, though 
 still mere children, may with impunity be 
 robbed of their virtue and ruined for life, 
 even though deception and fraud be used, 
 which, if employed for the purpose of 
 obtaining money, would be punished with 
 stern severity. 
 
 Lastly, the punishments for serious crime 
 tjre for the most part so unwisely inflicted, 
 that they seldom if ever reclaim an habitual 
 criminal ; but on the other hand they gene- 
 rally ruin irrevocably those younger offenders 
 who, under wiser regulations, might have 
 been saved. 
 
 Sad as these statements are, it will be 
 difficult for those who candidly study the 
 following pages to deny that they are just. 
 And if so, a terrible responsibility rests upon 
 our legislators, upon our churches, and upon 
 all members of the community who without 
 protest permit things to remain in their 
 present condition.
 
 Prejace. xiii 
 
 The object of this book is not to plead 
 for charity, but simply for justice justice 
 from the strong in dealing with the weak, 
 from the rich towards the poor, from the 
 well-conducted prosperous Pharisee towards 
 the children of shame, bred in an atmosphere 
 where wrong is counted right, and right is 
 scorned ; justice from society even towards 
 its criminals, many of whom might thus be 
 won back to paths of virtue justice, of 
 which the essential principle is, " Whatsoever 
 ye would that men should do to you, do ye 
 even so to them." 
 
 FRANCIS PEEK.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. THE INFLUENCE OF A NATION'S LAWS ON 
 
 ITS MORAL CHARACTER i 
 
 II. THE ORPHAN'S WRONG 41 
 
 III. THE LICENSING LAWS AND INTEMPERANCE 63 
 
 IV. MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE 108 
 
 V. CRIME AND ITS PUNISHMENT 145 
 
 VI. ON THE UNCHARITABLENESS OF INADE- 
 QUATE RELIEF 175 
 
 APPENDIX 203
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF A NATION'S LAWS 
 ON ITS MORAL CHARACTER. 
 
 " I "HERE are -few proverbial expressions 
 more generally accepted as embodying 
 incontrovertible truth than the saying that " it 
 is not possible to make men virtuous by Act 
 of Parliament." Without pausing at present 
 to examine whether this is indeed an ascer- 
 tained fact, or a plausible fallacy, we may at 
 least confidently assert that, whether it is 
 true or not that good laws may fail to influ- 
 ence men for good, it is perfectly certain that 
 unjust or even inadequate laws exert a most 
 malign influence upon those who are affected 
 by them. 
 
 Wherever bad laws prevail, or wherever 
 the law, even though good in itself, is unjustly 
 administered, the baneful effect is soon 
 evidenced in the moral condition of the com-
 
 2 The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 munity; and we need not pass beyond the 
 limits of our own country for conclusive 
 evidence of this fact. It is displayed too fully 
 in the condition of multitudes among our poor, 
 whose vicious and degraded state is a dis- 
 grace as well as a danger to the common- 
 wealth ; their condition being, in a large 
 measure, directly traceable to the influence of 
 laws which have for generations been exer- 
 cising an evil influence on the community. 
 
 It would be difficult for any thoughtful 
 person to look closely at some aspects of the 
 present social condition of England without 
 feeling that, notwithstanding our material 
 prosperity, there is much cause, not only 
 for regret, but for anxiety. For instance, the 
 never-ceasing contest between those who 
 find the labour and those who provide the 
 capital for the manufactures on which so 
 much of the prosperity of our country de- 
 pends ; the increasing separation between 
 different classes of society ; and especially the 
 painful contrast between the extreme poverty 
 and wretchedness of the very poor and the 
 extreme wealth and luxury of the rich and 
 noble which everywhere presses upon our
 
 on its Moral Character. 
 
 notice all these are sources of danger which 
 
 o 
 
 it would be worse than folly to overlook or 
 ignore. 
 
 It is startling, after studying those reports 
 which show the wealth of. the country, the 
 largeness of its revenue, the magnitude of 
 its exports and imports, to turn to those 
 reports which periodically record the extent 
 of its crime and pauperism. Among other 
 matters of interest, these latter documents 
 give, for instance, the number of deaths from 
 starvation that take place each year in London. 
 And it is not a little startling to find from 
 these that, in the richest city in the world, 
 the verdicts of coroners' juries declared 
 starvation to have caused no less than 
 101 deaths in one year?* Had the poor 
 creatures upon whose dead bodies these juries 
 held their inquests been shipwrecked mariners 
 who had perished of hunger on some deso- 
 late island, the press would have been filled 
 with harrowing details of the sad catastrophe, 
 and a thrill of horror would have passed 
 through the land. But as the poor wretches 
 were only starved to death at our own doors,. 
 
 * i88a 
 
 B 2
 
 4 The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 only perished through destitution in the midst 
 of abundance, the fact is dismissed in a few 
 brief lines, and attracts hardly any notice. 
 No description is given of the agony of 
 hunger through which these wretched men 
 and women must have passed, or how 
 their ravenous glances rested on the for- 
 bidden luxuries, visible in such plenty, as 
 they lingered before the well-filled shops, 
 and then, cold and famished, shrank back 
 into their gloomy hovels to die. 
 
 Another return, hardly less sad, is the 
 yearly report of the Local Government Board, 
 from the latest issue of which it appears that 
 on ist January, 1881, there were 809,341 
 paupers in England, out of a population 
 of about 25,000,000; or, in other words, that 
 at the present time, notwithstanding the 
 great diffusion of wealth, the immense sums 
 yearly given away in so-called charity, and the 
 general demand for labour, one in every thirty- 
 one of our fellow-countrymen is a pauper 
 this, moreover, without including any of 
 that vast number of destitute persons who 
 are maintained in charitable institutions, or 
 by private benevolence. From other reports
 
 on its Moral Character. 
 
 bearing on the condition of our fellow-country- 
 men we find that there are about 180,000 
 apprehensions each year for drunkenness, 
 that over 1 5,000 persons are yearly charged 
 with indictable crimes, and that over half 
 a million are convicted summarily before the 
 magistrates :* of these latter nearly 100,000 
 are guilty of personal assaults about 2,500 
 being aggravated assaults upon women and 
 children. 
 
 In face of such facts few will have the 
 hardihood to deny that there is urgent need, 
 not only for remedial legislation, but for such 
 an increase of voluntary effort as will reach 
 the root of the evil influences which are so 
 grievously injuring the community. 
 
 As regards the pauperism that now exists, 
 as well as much of the indirect mischief 
 arising from this cause, it must be admitted 
 that the present generation is not primarily 
 responsible. We suffer in the present the 
 Nemesis of the past, and are reaping the fruit 
 of the seed sown at that melancholy period of 
 England's history when, although victorious 
 
 * The Judicial Statistics for England and Wales for 1880 show 
 a total of 641,038 persons proceeded against during the year by 
 way of summary charges. Of this number 506,281 were convicted.
 
 6 The Influence of a Natioris Laws 
 
 in her contests abroad, her governing classes 
 were so sunk in selfishness that light, cleanli- 
 ness, and even the dry crust of the starving 
 peasant, were taxed to the utmost to meet 
 the so-called necessities of the State ; while 
 pensions and sinecures abounded, and the 
 debts of prodigal princes were readily paid 
 by an obsequious Parliament, though the 
 poor weaver's rush-light had to be taxed to 
 supply the money. At that time farmers and 
 landowners, abusing their position as Guard- 
 ians of the Poor, used freely to vote away 
 the public money in the demoralizing form 
 of a parish relief, which supplemented the 
 wages of their under-paid labourers, and thus 
 succeeded, for the time, in obtaining an un- 
 just subsidy for their own workpeople at the 
 ratepayers' expense : but by their short- 
 sighted policy they so thoroughly pauperized 
 whole country districts that the independent 
 labourer valuable because of his independ- 
 ence absolutely ceased to exist. Following 
 the same selfish ends, and with a view to 
 escape local taxation and dishonestly shift the 
 rates upon their neighbours, many landed 
 proprietors made wholesale clearances of
 
 on its Moral Character. 
 
 cottages on their estates, and drove the 
 peasants from their homes to herd together 
 in overcrowded villages, where, too often, 
 they lost both health and self-respect, and 
 became fit subjects for the workhouse and the 
 gaol. This criminal selfishness is the source 
 from which a large proportion of our existing 
 pauperism has sprung; and the present 
 generation has not only to pay the penalty of 
 that past wrong-doing, but has also to remedy 
 its evil effects, if the poison is not to go on 
 working. 
 
 But though this generation is not primarily 
 responsible, it must be remembered that 
 wealth, intelligence, freedom, and education, 
 are now boasted to be the characteristics of 
 our country, whereas formerly poverty, ignor- 
 ance, and practical serfdom prevailed. There- 
 fore we shall be without excuse if these evils, 
 bequeathed us by an unfortunate past, are not 
 removed, or at least largely mitigated, in the 
 prosperous present. 
 
 To return to the now existing causes of 
 our wide-spread pauperism, it can hardly be 
 denied that it is, to a large extent, the result 
 of reckless marriages and subsequent improvi-
 
 8 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 dence. Multitudes of young men and women 
 marry imprudently and without forethought, 
 and afterwards make little or no effort, even 
 in periods of prosperity, to provide for hard 
 times or old age. 
 
 Those who have made a special study of 
 the subject assert and their assertion is appa- 
 rently supported by incontestable evidence 
 that the law itself tends to create much of 
 this recklessness and improvidence, since it 
 teaches, with the powerful influence which, as 
 the law of the land, it exercises, that every man 
 and woman, without regard to character, is 
 absolutely entitled to be supplied with the 
 necessaries of life out of the public funds. 
 As the result of such teaching a large pro- 
 portion of the poorest class look upon self- 
 denial as folly; because, however wicked, im- 
 provident, or idle a man may have been, 
 though he may have spent liberal wages in 
 dissipation, yet so soon as he has spent all 
 and qualified himself by self-made destitu- 
 tion, he can claim as his legal right food, 
 raiment, and shelter for himself and his 
 family at the cost of his frugal and industrious 
 neighbours.
 
 on its Moral Character. 
 
 It is often very difficult to trace clearly 
 the indirect influence of a nation's laws, but 
 such influence is undoubtedly very power- 
 ful ; for, except where manifestly unjust, or 
 strongly opposed to national feeling, the law 
 of the land speedily becomes, among the 
 more uneducated classes, the law of the 
 conscience. What the law forbids is crime ; 
 what the law allows is not dishonourable : 
 and thus only can it be accounted for that 
 many a labouring man thinks it no dishonour 
 to omit making provision for the future, and 
 at the first pressure of want to throw himself 
 upon the rates. Dr. Chalmers, foreseeing 
 this as likely to be the effect, strongly op- 
 posed the introduction of the Poor- Law into 
 Scotland, believing that it would deteriorate 
 the provident character of the people, for 
 which they had been so long noted. His 
 foresight was only too correct, as the result 
 has proved. 
 
 The injurious influence of the Poor-Law 
 in producing improvidence was recently 
 remarkably illustrated in a small country 
 town. A benevolent gentleman of in- 
 fluence in the neighbourhood, being anxious
 
 io The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 to establish a provident savings' bank, 
 called a meeting of the working classes 
 in order to enlist their co-operation, and 
 urged upon them the duty of providing 
 during health for times of sickness, and of 
 making in youth a provision for old age. 
 He appeared to carry the meeting with him, 
 until a labourer asked to be informed whether, 
 in case he should give up his beer, and by 
 constant industry and thrift save sufficient 
 to provide himself and his wife with the 
 necessaries of life when no longer able to 
 work, he would be in any better position than 
 another man, who, having spent on himself 
 everything he had earned, claimed these 
 necessaries from the parish ? In face of the 
 provisions of the Poor- Law, no advantage 
 on the side of industry and saving could be 
 shown, and so the philanthropist's scheme 
 fell to the ground. This incident is but too 
 suggestive of the evil influence which the 
 Poor- Law has exerted, and to a great extent 
 still exerts, upon many of the working classes. 
 They assert their right to spend at once all 
 that they earn without concern for the future, 
 and feel when destitute neither shame in
 
 on its Moral Character. 1 1 
 
 claiming nor gratitude in receiving the sus- 
 tenance to which the law declares them en- 
 titled. 
 
 It is evident that this influence of the law 
 should be changed, and a healthier senti- 
 ment introduced amongst the poorer classes 
 by a legal recognition of the indisputable 
 truth that improvidence is a crime that it 
 is not only dishonourable to marry with- 
 out a reasonable prospect of being able to 
 maintain a family, but is still more dishonour- 
 able to squander on self-indulgence those 
 resources which should be husbanded against 
 times of stress and difficulty; or, in other 
 words, that for any person to require his 
 neighbours to support his family, when by 
 proper industry and self-denial he could 
 have done so himself, is practical dishonesty. 
 The recognition of this truth is of the first 
 importance, not only in the interest of the 
 poorer classes themselves, but for the sake 
 of the whole community ; for there is no 
 hope of much social progress until right 
 views of this subject supersede those which 
 at present prevail among so many of the 
 poor, leading them to anticipate without any
 
 12 The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 dread a future of pauperism. To effect this 
 desirable change the law must be so admini- 
 stered that the demoralizing spectacle of the 
 idle, the drunken, the vicious, and the impro- 
 vident, securing in their old age equal comfort 
 with that enjoyed by the most diligent and 
 deserving, shall cease. 
 
 It has to be admitted that this reform is 
 by no means easy of accomplishment, for to 
 effect it the most careful discrimination must 
 be used in the administration of relief, and as 
 Guardians of the Poor we must have persons 
 who possess both judgment and benevolence 
 that is to say, both sagacity and sympathy 
 and who are able and willing to give time and 
 attention to their duties, and by diligently 
 sifting the cases that come before them, to 
 make character, and not mere destitution, the 
 one qualification for obtaining out-door relief. 
 Furthermore, this kind of relief must be strictly 
 limited to cases of temporary necessity, or to 
 those where destitution is clearly the result of 
 unavoidable misfortune. It is only right that 
 the relief should then be liberal, generously 
 bestowed, and free from humiliating condi- 
 tions. In all other cases the restraint and
 
 on its Moral Character. 1 3 
 
 humiliation of the workhouse are as neces- 
 sary to prevent imposition as they are to 
 enforce lessons of prudence and frugality. 
 
 Want of proper discrimination and classi- 
 fication in the administration of Poor-Law 
 relief is one of the worst defects of the present 
 system. This evil begins in the workhouse 
 nurseries and schoolrooms, where the orphan 
 children of the deserving poor are associated 
 with the children of those who may well be 
 called the refuse of society ; it is continued in 
 the arrangements for the relief of the so-called 
 able-bodied, under which respectable and vir- 
 tuous widows are often required to pick oakum 
 amidst women of the most degraded character; 
 it extends to the very death-bed, where many 
 a poor invalid, who, to save herself from such 
 a fate, has worked until she could work no 
 longer, and then starved until she could starve 
 no longer, having been forcibly removed in 
 sickness from her wretched home, is doomed 
 to linger out the last few hours of her life in 
 close contact with depraved wretches whose 
 every word is foulness or blasphemy. A lady, 
 writing on this subject, thus describes from 
 personal observation the terrible sufferings
 
 14 The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 of the really deserving through the lack of 
 discriminating treatment : 
 
 Many of the sick have been discharged from hos- 
 pitals as incurables ; unable to work, .they have nowhere 
 to go but to the workhouse ; suffering often from acute 
 disease, they have none of the alleviations which are 
 found in the well-appointed hospitals. Aware they will 
 never be able to work again, they have to bear the 
 degradation of becoming paupers ; the life now left them 
 must be worn out in pauper's dress and under a pauper's 
 treatment; they must suffer from, and be subjected to, a 
 law framed to deter the idle and the vagrant, but never 
 intended for such as themselves. Many of the very 
 aged people have worked till their utmost strength was 
 exhausted to keep out of this hated place ; and when 
 they are here at last, the degradation they suffer in 
 finding themselves associated with depraved creatures, 
 and often placed under their care, is, to many, the 
 saddest part of all they suffer.* 
 
 Among the cases visited by this lady was 
 that of a pious, respectable woman, once the 
 happy wife of an upright, hard-working me- 
 chanic; but her husband, unhappily, had after- 
 wards fallen into intemperate habits, and be- 
 come an idle, degraded drunkard. For a 
 period of eighteen years she had borne the 
 pain and misery entailed upon her by an act 
 
 " Sick and in Prison,'' published by Bell & Baldy.
 
 on its Moral Character. 1 5 
 
 of cruelty inflicted in one of his fits of drunken- 
 ness, and, notwithstanding, had toiled early 
 and late, keeping house for him as long as 
 her strength remained. At last it broke down ; 
 and while dying of cancer, no place was found 
 in sickness and old age for this noble- 
 hearted Christian woman but a bed in the 
 workhouse infirmary. It is difficult to de- 
 scribe the horror she expressed at such a 
 fate a fate painfully dreaded by all the re- 
 spectable poor, especially because they are 
 there placed at the mercy of pauper nurses, 
 and compulsorily associated with vile charac- 
 ters, one or two of whom will suffice to render 
 the lives of the rest of the sick almost un- 
 bearable. 
 
 Upon the principle of careful discrimina- 
 tion all valuable reforms of the Poor- Law 
 must begin. If we desire to suppress 
 vagrancy and imposture, to cut off the entail 
 of pauperism, to save the honest, industrious 
 man or woman, when obliged from sickness 
 or accident to seek parish aid, from degrada- 
 tion, and at the same time duly to enforce 
 that maxim which lies at the foundation of 
 all well-organized society, that " if a man will
 
 1 6 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 not work, neither shall he eat ;" if we intend 
 to show mercy and kindness to the deserving 
 in their time of sickness and decrepitude, 
 and simultaneously to impress upon the poor 
 the important lesson that society demands 
 frugality and industry from its members ; 
 then we must begin by requiring that all 
 relief, whether parochial or voluntary, shall 
 be bestowed with strict and careful discrimi- 
 nation. 
 
 Before this can be effected as regards 
 Poor- Law relief, it will be necessary to sub- 
 divide, for the purposes of administration, 
 many of the large, overgrown parishes and 
 unions, which, from their size, are at present 
 quite unworkable, and in some of which relief 
 is granted after the most superficial examina- 
 tion. A report of the Local Government 
 Board states : 
 
 The time occupied in disposing of applications for 
 relief by the Guardians differs in different Unions : the 
 maximum of speed appears to be a rate of four minutes 
 to dispose of eleven cases nearly three cases per minute; 
 the minimum, three minutes per case. 
 
 It need hardly be said that it is simply 
 impossible that anything like proper dis-
 
 on its Moral Character. 1 7 
 
 crimination can be exercised under such cir- 
 cumstances. As a consequence, pauperism 
 and imposture flourish, while the rates are 
 unduly burdened, and the deserving poor 
 suffer miserably both in body and mind. 
 
 It may be urged that the examination of 
 these cases rests, after all, with the relieving 
 officers, who are primarily responsible ; but, 
 admitting this, the necessity still remains for 
 the Guardians to supervise their officers. 
 Moreover, the investigation which is sup- 
 posed to be made by the relieving officers 
 must generally be inadequate, from the vast 
 size of the districts, and the large numbers of 
 people with which they have to deal. It 
 would be impossible under present cir- 
 cumstances for them to examine properly 
 into the claims of all applicants, and it 
 cannot be doubted that, for the most part, 
 their reports require careful supervision. 
 As the very first step, therefore, in the 
 necessary reform, the area of the relief 
 districts must be so reduced that the 
 Guardians may be able to fulfil that duty 
 which the name implies the supervision and 
 proper care of the poor. 
 
 c
 
 1 8 The Influence of a Natioris Laws 
 
 But while, for this purpose, the area of the 
 relief districts should be reduced, the area 
 of taxation, on the other hand, needs ex- 
 tension, since the present arrangements cause 
 great injustice. Some parishes, being crowded 
 with poor, are overwhelmed by the Poor- 
 Rates, while neighbouring parishes escape 
 their just -share of the burden. This is not 
 only a grievous wrong in principle, but 
 it causes severe suffering, as is shown 
 by the statement of Dr. Stallard,* that 
 in St. Giles' parish 6,000 summonses were 
 issued in one year against 4,000 of the 
 poorer ratepayers. Under such circum- 
 stances, there is little cause for surprise if the 
 Guardians elected by these over-burdened 
 ratepayers should be ungenerous in their 
 treatment of those who are indeed little 
 worse off than many of the ratepayers 
 themselves. 
 
 It is also most important for the proper 
 administration of the Poor-Law that more men 
 and women of education and social position 
 should take a share in the management of 
 parochial matters. The withdrawal of the 
 
 * In "London Pauperism.''
 
 on its Moral Character. 19 
 
 upper classes from local government too often 
 allows it to drift into the hands of those who 
 are the least fit to exercise its powers ; and 
 nothing is more earnestly to be desired than 
 that men of property and education should 
 recognize and resolve to fulfil the duties which 
 their position, rightly considered, entails 
 upon them, not the least of which is that 
 they should become guardians of the poor 
 in the truest sense of the words. Such 
 work is, without doubt, often both uninviting 
 and irksome, but if patriotism and public 
 spirit influence the minds of the wealthier 
 classes so little that they will not endure 
 any self-denial for the sake of duty and 
 on behalf of their suffering fellow-citizens, 
 nothing but a melancholy future can be antici- 
 pated for our country. No sign more surely 
 betokens the decay of a nation than for the 
 rich, the educated, and the noble, only to 
 undertake those public duties which yield 
 them social position or pecuniary emolu- 
 ment. 
 
 It is no time to dream on in blind 
 security while there is an army of more than 
 three-quarters of a million of paupers at our 
 
 C 2
 
 2O The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 gates. It is no time to indulge in self-com- 
 placency when, notwithstanding the lavish 
 gifts we cast into the Treasury, so little 
 real charity towards our neighbours exists 
 among us, that, for want of personal service, 
 our bounty is either wasted in the expenses of 
 administration, or else is applied to feeding 
 the idle and the vicious, while Lazarus 
 perishes for want of the crumbs that fall 
 from the rich man's table. 
 
 The virtues which England urgently needs 
 at this hour are self-denying philanthropy the 
 seeking without hope of reward our neigh- 
 bour's welfare that true benevolence which 
 proves itself in earnest by promoting the cause 
 of humanity and justice, even in the dull 
 business routine of the vestry and the work- 
 house that patriotism which constrains 
 citizens to devote their talents to the public 
 good, not only in the Senate, where the 
 social position acquired may compensate 
 for any self-denial, but in those lower 
 offices, where, as Vestrymen, Guardians, and 
 members of School-boards, the labour is all 
 for love, and the only reward sought is 
 the answer of a good conscience, or that
 
 on its Moral Character. 2 1 
 
 recompense which may be laid up in the 
 unseen future. 
 
 Having shown how much of the existing 
 pauperism may be traced to the direct or 
 indirect operation of the Poor- Law itself, 
 other causes must be noted which are 
 slowly but surely dragging down the most 
 helpless among the poor into this Slough 
 of Despond, and not only so, but hindering 
 those who have once sunk into it from 
 rising again. 
 
 One of the most powerful of these causes 
 is unquestionably the inadequate accommoda- 
 tion provided in those wretched habitations 
 which alone are available for the very poor. 
 Many families in London and in the large pro- 
 vincial towns have only one single room, in 
 which parents and children of all ages and both 
 sexes work, live, and sleep. It is impossible 
 to conceive that children brought up thus can 
 fail to become unhealthy in body and de- 
 praved in mind and morals. In a far 
 larger number of cases than would be be- 
 lieved by those who have not studied the 
 subject the domestic conditions in which
 
 22 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 these families live are appalling : such as 
 would not be permitted to continue for 
 a single year, but for the selfish indolence 
 of the well-to-do classes, who carefully avert 
 their attention from the consideration of so 
 unpleasant a subject. But, however con- 
 cealed, the condition of things which does 
 exist is not less horrible than dangerous. 
 Nor can society avoid the baneful conse- 
 quences by merely refusing to look the evil 
 in the face. Often indeed has a terrible 
 retribution overtaken individuals of those 
 very classes of society that had the power 
 to help to remedy the evil, but would not 
 use it in time, as some of their dearest and 
 fairest children have been swept off by 
 diseases originating in the fever-haunted 
 dens which their own selfish indifference 
 had permitted to exist. 
 
 Passing through our large towns, a little 
 away from some of the leading thorough- 
 fares, terrible spectacles of misery may be 
 witnessed ; courts and alleys, where the air 
 is deadly foul, where overcrowding poisons 
 the blood, and where the wretched in- 
 habitants are so enervated that they have
 
 on its Moral Character. 23 
 
 neither power nor inclination to struggle 
 upward. 
 
 The following description of the fever-dens 
 of London, and of the fearful condition in 
 which many of the poor are compelled to 
 live, with all the moral and physical degra- 
 dation involved in such living, which is from 
 a report of Dr. Tripe, the medical officer of 
 health in the Hackney district, will speak for 
 itself. He adds the significant remark that 
 all these cases were found out by inspection, 
 and none from complaint being made : - . 
 
 At Sheep Lane, the father, mother, a son of seventeen, 
 a daughter of fifteen, a boy of eight years, and an infant, 
 lived and slept in a small room containing only 925 cubic 
 feet of air, and therefore not large enough for two adults 
 and one child. 
 
 In Goring Street, a man was found living with a 
 widow and her two children in an extremely small room, 
 containing only 562 cubic feet of air. 
 
 In a small room having a cubical capacity of 604 feet, 
 were discovered the father, mother, two girls of twelve 
 and eleven years, and also two young children, so that 
 there was only iqo cubic feet of air for each. 
 
 In Duncan Street there were three families, consisting 
 of eighteen persons, living and sleeping in four small 
 rooms, the largest room containing only 1,074, and the 
 smallest 757 cubic feet of air.
 
 24 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 At Duncan Square, in four rooms, the largest of which 
 had a cubical capacity of 1,020 feet, and the smallest 
 7 63 feet, there were four families ; one of which, consist- 
 ing of the mother, a son of twenty-one years, a daughter 
 of sixteen, and two younger children, lived in this last- 
 mentioned single room. 
 
 In another house in Duncan Square, the father, 
 mother, and six children under twelve, inhabited one 
 small room, containing 868 cubic feet of air. 
 
 In Sheep Lane, a mother and father slept in one room, 
 and a son of twenty, a daughter of eighteen, another of 
 sixteen, and a lad of fourteen, slept in another small 
 room. 
 
 In Farm Place, Cottage Lane, there were several in- 
 stances of families residing in rooms with but little more 
 than 100 cubic feet of air for each person. 
 
 In Shadwell Row, the father, a son of twenty-one, 
 another of nineteen, and a grown-up daughter, lived and 
 slept in a room, the cubic contents of which were only 
 904 feet. 
 
 In a room having a capacity of 766 feet, situated in 
 Taylor's Buildings, a man and his wife, two children 
 under ten, and a woman who was not related to them, 
 were found living and sleeping. 
 
 In a house in Warburton Road, the father, mother, a 
 son of nineteen, and a daughter of sixteen, lived and 
 slept in a room holding only 990 feet of air. 
 
 The following three cases, extracted from 
 Dr. StallarcVs " London Pauperism/' may com- 
 plete this hideous picture :
 
 on its Moral Character. 25 
 
 First : A tenement in the parish of St. George the 
 Martyr. In a room, seven feet by eight feet, and eight 
 feet high, a pauper widow, her sister, and six young 
 children, were all existing in a space not more than 
 sufficient for a single person. 
 
 Second : A room, ten feet square, eight feet high, 
 containing a woman aged forty-eight, a son of eighteen, 
 two daughters of seventeen and fifteen, and three children 
 under thirteen ; the bed occupied a considerable portion 
 of the room, and in the remaining space every office of 
 life had to be performed, the only door opening into a 
 public court. 
 
 Third : Within a few yards of Westminster Bridge 
 Road, in a front room twelve feet square, existed a 
 man, his wife, and three children. On a bed in a corner, 
 covered by a single rug, with blackened lips and parched 
 tongue, was found the man wandering, in the delirium of 
 fever ; by his side his daughter, in the same state, and 
 across the bottom an infant fast asleep. 
 
 It may be readily admitted that the above 
 are extreme cases, and some of them may have 
 been remedied since the reports were written ; 
 but if any one should doubt the fact that vast 
 numbers of our poor are living under condi- 
 tions little less wretched than those just 
 described, let him accompany one of the 
 relieving officers or city missionaries through 
 the poorer disticts of the metropolis, and
 
 26 The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 he will be obliged to confess that the pic- 
 ture, in its general features, is only too true. 
 
 Only very recently, public attention was 
 directed to the unsanitary condition of some 
 houses in Charles Street, Marylebone, by 
 an outbreak of fever, resulting in several 
 deaths. The shocking state of these houses 
 may be imagined from the description given 
 of them by the Medical Officer of the district, 
 who reported to the Vestry that he found 
 them " damp, dirty, and dilapidated, and in 
 such a condition as to be dangerous to the 
 health of the inhabitants, and unfit for habita- 
 tion." More details are given in the report of 
 the Chief Surveyor, from which the following 
 is an extract : 
 
 As regards Nos. 1,2, 3, and 4, there was from five 
 to six feet of wet, black sewage soil under the basement 
 floors. The footings of the walls, extending from three 
 to five feet below the floor level, did not reach a solid 
 foundation ; there was no damp course, the damp rising 
 from ten to twelve feet above the floor level of basements, 
 affecting not only the basements but the first-floor rooms. 
 The houses were generally in so dilapidated a condition 
 that no structural alteration could render them habitable, 
 and he recommended that they be demolished. As 
 regarded No. 12, front and back walls were much out of
 
 on Us Moral Character. 2 7 
 
 plumb, roof also in bad condition ; and he considered it 
 so dangerous that no structural repair would render it 
 habitable; he therefore recommended its demolition. 
 At No. 13 the back walls were much bulged, much damp 
 arose from the foundations, and the basement rooms were 
 only 6ft. 3in. high, with the floors laid on the ground. 
 
 What is the best method of meeting this ter- 
 rible evil is undoubtedly one of the gravest of 
 the social problems of the present day. It is 
 certainly no part of the duty of Government 
 to provide homes for the population, any 
 more than it is its duty to provide food. 
 To attempt to do so would be the introduc- 
 tion of practical Communism; and as it would 
 necessarily encourage improvidence, the result 
 would, in the long run, only be to aggravate 
 the evil to a terrible extent. Philanthropy 
 may provide a model lodging-house here and 
 there to show what homes should and might 
 be, and to serve as a standing protest against, 
 and a condemnation of, surrounding squalor ; 
 but it can do little more. 
 
 But while it is not the duty of any 
 Government to provide houses for its sub- 
 jects, it is the first duty of all Govern- 
 ments to suppress everything which is
 
 28 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 injurious or dangerous to the community ; 
 and so long as a single fever-den is allowed 
 to exist so long as any buildings are per- 
 mitted to remain in such a state, that, either 
 from faulty construction, from want of sani- 
 tary provisions, or from overcrowding, they 
 are a source of demoralization or disease 
 to those who dwell in them or to the neigh- 
 bourhood in which they are located so long 
 does the Government fail in its first duty, and 
 so long are the electors in this free country 
 (by whose will alone the Government holds 
 power) guilty of the consequences that flow 
 from such criminal negligence.* 
 
 It would be deemed a crying disgrace 
 should any Government allow a haunt of 
 assassins and robbers to remain unmolested 
 in the midst of one of its cities. It is little less 
 shameful for it to tolerate haunts of disease 
 and vice, from which ruin and death are 
 spread, for the mischief which might be 
 wrought by a band of robbers is as nothing 
 
 * The French Government has recognized its responsibility in 
 this respect, and, while this book is passing through the press, is 
 preparing census papers which require information to be given as to 
 the number of rooms in each house, the object being to check 
 overcrowding.
 
 On its Moral Character. 29 
 
 compared with the evil results of the present 
 condition of the dwellings of our poor. It 
 must not, however, be thought that this duty 
 has been altogether ignored, since several 
 Acts have been passed by different 
 Governments to mitigate the evil. But un- 
 happily their efforts have been half-hearted 
 and hesitating. Jealously preferring the sup- 
 posed rights of property to the health, 
 morality, and welfare of the people, they 
 have even deputed the carrying out of 
 the imperfect remedies which have been 
 devised to public bodies largely composed 
 of persons pecuniarily interested in the law re- 
 maining a dead letter a policy which seems 
 hardly more reasonable than to leave the 
 prosecution of thieves to the discretion of 
 the receivers of stolen goods. 
 
 The first measure necessary to remedy the 
 fearful evils above referred to is to forbid 
 owners to allow overcrowding, or to let unfit 
 habitations ; and this should be enforced, not 
 only by stringent regulations, but by the ap- 
 pointment of proper officers, responsible only 
 to the central Government, whose duty it shall 
 be to see that the law is actually carried
 
 3O The Influence of a Nation's Laws 
 
 out. To this proposal the objection will 
 probably be raised, that by such legislation 
 severe suffering would be caused ; and it is un- 
 happily true that in this, as in all other cases of 
 beneficial reform, some hardship might result. 
 It would, however, be neither of long continu- 
 ance, nor so severe as might be anticipated, 
 for it has been proved that wholesome 
 dwellings can be built as remunerative in- 
 vestments, even if let at the same rents as 
 many of the squalid tenements that now 
 abound. But while foul courts and alleys 
 are permitted to cover every inch of ground 
 where the poorer classes congregate, the in- 
 troduction of better houses is prevented. The 
 landlords, who are thriving on the exorbitant 
 rents obtained from these overcrowded hovels, 
 are little likely either to improve them them- 
 selves or to dispose of them toothers who have 
 both the will and the power to do so ; still 
 less are they likely to allow vestries, in which 
 their self-interest makes them powerful, to en- 
 force the present law. As the leasehold cha- 
 racter of much of the property is one great 
 cause of this evil, especially towards the end 
 of long leases, the ground landlord, as well as
 
 on its Moral Character. 3 1 
 
 the actual owner of houses, should be made 
 to take a fair share of responsibility. 
 
 There is sufficient evidence that even the 
 poorest of the working classes can pay and do 
 pay rent sufficient to obtain proper habitations, 
 and were it not so, wages would adjust them- 
 selves to absolute need. At present, however, 
 the commercial success that has been achieved 
 by several of the Artisans' Dwellings Com- 
 panies, which, while providing good homes, 
 yet pay fair dividends, shows that the better 
 class of artisans may be reckoned upon as 
 profitable tenants, and that the poorest pay 
 rents which would be fair for wholesome 
 tenements.* 
 
 Another common source of pauperism, the 
 destructive passion for drink, which so often 
 takes irresistible possession of its victims, if 
 engendered and fostered among the poor by 
 various other causes, is without doubt very 
 
 * The immense benefit of wholesome houses from a sanitary point 
 of view is evident from the fact that in 1880 the death-rate in the 
 dwellings erected by the Peabody Trustees was only 19*71 per 1,000, 
 or about 2-49 per 1,000 below the average death-rate for the whole 
 of London ; and this notwithstanding that the tenants generally be- 
 long to the poorer classes, the average earnings of each family being 
 under 24*. per week.
 
 32 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 largely attributable to the overcrowding and 
 bad accommodation in their homes, which 
 must naturally tend both to create and nourish 
 a craving for stimulants. 
 
 In many dismal alleys and fetid courts 
 of our large towns, the impure and stagnant 
 air depresses and enervates those who return 
 home already exhausted by work, and there 
 is little cause for wonder if the wretched 
 creatures who are condemned to inhabit such 
 places rush to stimulants for relief, and seek 
 to drown their misery in drink. As a con- 
 sequence there are to be seen the crowds of 
 drunken men and drunken women ; the care- 
 worn, woe-stricken wives ; the half-starved, 
 neglected children precociously clever per- 
 haps, but also precociously vicious who 
 carry in their veins the taint and heritage of 
 their parents' vice. 
 
 Let it be acknowledged, then, that the law 
 cannot make all people sober, yet it must be 
 admitted that it can do much to encourage or 
 to discourage drunkenness, and to increase or 
 to diminish the facilities for obtaining drink 
 which lead to drunkenness. Even the 
 slight reduction of the hours during which
 
 on Us Moral Character. 33 
 
 a public-house may legally be kept open 
 which has recently been made has already 
 done some little good ; but the tempting 
 dram-shops are still permitted to retain 
 their prey, and to throw their fascinating 
 glitter into the streets, till eleven o'clock at 
 night in country towns and till twelve in 
 London, long after every other shop is closed, 
 and when most people are at rest. While this 
 is permitted, there can be no great mitigation 
 of drunkenness. In fact, so long as this state of 
 things continues, so long must the community 
 be content to bear the just penalty of its 
 folly and to support many thousands of pauper 
 families whose parents have been too weak 
 to escape the snare of the Government- 
 licensed gin-palace and dram-shop. 
 
 One further cause not only of pauperism, 
 but of grievous wrong and suffering before 
 that is reached, must not be overlooked 
 namely, the want of a proper law by which 
 the duties of men in regard to their wives 
 and families may be enforced. The practical 
 teaching of the law as it now stands is that 
 men are only bound to provide just so much 
 
 D
 
 34 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 support for their families as will prevent them 
 from becoming a present burden on the parish ; 
 and this provided, although a husband may 
 be earning large wages, he is legally justified 
 in keeping his wife and family in a state of 
 pinching poverty, misery and rags, and in 
 compelling them to herd together in one of 
 the wretched rooms before described, while he 
 wastes in dissipation and drunkenness money 
 which might keep them in comfort. 
 
 There is probably scarcely a greater or 
 more cruel injustice legalized by English law 
 than this one, and it tcils especially against 
 women, for while the children owe their exist- 
 ence to the father and the mother equally, 
 the very care they demand from her deprives 
 the mother of the power of doing much other- 
 wise for their support. Yet the law practi- 
 cally permits a father to evade the duty of 
 providing proper sustenance for his children, 
 who are thus physically injured by being 
 deprived of proper nourishment, and, owing to 
 this, afterwards become a burden and injury 
 to society. Moreover, the influence of this 
 teaching has fearfully deteriorated the moral 
 tone of the community as regards the duty of
 
 on its Moral Character. 35 
 
 men towards their wives and children, for let 
 it be noted as an aggravation of the wrong, 
 that even the barest necessaries can only be 
 extracted from a reluctant husband through 
 the family first entering the workhouse. Wife 
 and children may starve, even though the 
 husband be a wealthy man, unless the wife 
 makes herself a pauper, and thus brings the 
 Poor-Law to bear upon him. 
 
 In order to present this cruel wrong in a 
 sufficiently forcible manner, it will be well to 
 compare the positions occupied on the one 
 hand by the virtuous wife, and on the other by 
 the immoral woman, who, despising marriage, 
 brings into the world a family of illegitimate 
 children. The wife may be in reality a slave 
 to a hard and unfeeling husband, depending as 
 she does upon his whim for everything except 
 the barest necessaries of life, and exposed per- 
 petually to suffer in herself and through her 
 children from every freak of his bad temper or 
 his drunkenness. But the law places the con- 
 cubine in a very different position by giving 
 the woman who is living a life of shame a 
 legal right to a contribution from the father 
 of from 2S. 6d. up to $s. per week for every 
 
 D 2
 
 36 The Influence of a Nations Laws 
 
 illegitimate child. Thus, supposing her to 
 have a family of four or five illegitimate 
 children, she may live uncontrolled, in com- 
 parative luxury, while her virtuous sisters 
 are toiling early and late to meet the wants 
 of their legitimate families, being only able 
 to claim from their dissolute husbands and 
 that through the parish the barest suste- 
 nance. 
 
 A striking and, were it not so sad, an 
 almost ludicrous example of the immoral ten- 
 dency of the law of England as meted out 
 to the legally virtuous and legally immoral 
 woman, is afforded by the practical working 
 of the statute which makes the marriage of a 
 man with his deceased wife's sister unlawfal. 
 The woman living in illegal union with her 
 late sister's husband can obtain through the 
 magistrate an allowance of 55-. a week for 
 each child she bears him, whilst her sister's 
 legitimate children can claim nothing but the 
 barest sustenance. If the marriage were 
 made legal this advantage would cease, and 
 the illegitimate children would be in the bad 
 position of those born in wedlock ! 
 
 It is folly to deny the influence and teach-
 
 on its Moral Character. 37 
 
 ing power of the law of the land. If we can- 
 not make men good and virtuous by Act of 
 Parliament, we can make them drunkards 
 and paupers ; we can, and, alas ! notwith- 
 standing our boasted enlightenment, we do 
 teach them that vice is more profitable than 
 virtue, and that the law cares for the protec- 
 tion of the vicious more than for the pro- 
 tection of the virtuous. 
 
 It is impossible for any true-hearted 
 Englishman to contemplate without some 
 feeling of pride the position which his country 
 has attained. He cannot consider the extent 
 of its commerce, the wealth gathered by its 
 manufacturers and merchants from every 
 land, the mighty influence it exercises in 
 every quarter of the globe, the pre-eminence 
 it holds in science, and, not least, the purity 
 of its judges, without feeling that it is a 
 proud thing to belong to such a nation. 
 But over this fair picture there hangs a 
 heavy shadow. It is true that England 
 is pre-eminently the land of wealth and 
 freedom ; but, alas ! it is also the land of 
 withering poverty and debasing pauperism. 
 
 'r*V 
 
 395987
 
 38 The Influence of a Nation s Laws 
 
 It is pre-eminently the land of philanthropy 
 and religion ; it is also the land of pride and 
 selfishness. We disperse our missionaries 
 far and wide to reclaim the heathen ; but 
 under the shadows of our churches, within 
 the sound of cathedral chimes, we allow large 
 numbers of our fellow-countrymen to grow 
 up in a state compared with which a savage 
 existence is blessed. The Indian of the 
 West rejoices in his freedom and in his 
 comfortable wigwam, in the fresh air he 
 breathes and the boundless prairies that he 
 believes the Good Spirit has given him for 
 his use ; while he looks forward with hope to 
 the joys of the happy hunting fields hereafter. 
 The Indian of the East bears with calm com- 
 placency the ills of life ; reposing peacefully 
 in the thought that, this life ended, he will be 
 absorbed in the essence of his Deity. We 
 send missionaries to these, and to do so is 
 our duty, but a more pressing duty lies close 
 around us. On every side here at home 
 there are heathen far more depraved than 
 the American or Bengal Indians. Those 
 have some little light, and, for the most 
 part, look forward to a happier life here-
 
 on its Moral Character. 39 
 
 after. But if we regard carefully the con- 
 dition of the hundreds of thousands who 
 occupy the courts, lanes, and alleys of our 
 large towns, we find it far less happy and 
 much more degraded than theirs. Drunken 
 men and women, wretched wives and children, 
 brutalizing filth, pinching poverty and want, 
 thousands upon thousands living the life of 
 beasts on earth, without even the dim hope 
 which the savage possesses of a happier future, 
 are what we see in this our native land. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no sight more attractive 
 and beautiful than that of the throng of 
 brilliant equipages and their occupants with 
 which the parks and principal thoroughfares 
 of the metropolis are filled. There can, on 
 the other hand, be no spectacle of greater 
 misery, no scene more repulsive and distress- 
 ing, than that which is presented to the 
 observer in passing from these noble spaces 
 and streets, displaying such wealth, beauty, 
 and splendour, into the mean squalid alleys 
 and the filth-choked courts that lie around 
 them. How startling the contrast between the 
 magnificence there, and the sordid destitution 
 here ; between those fair, richly clad, attractive
 
 4O The Influence of a Nation's Laws. 
 
 women, and these hideous human beings of the 
 same sex, who sit shivering in scanty rags, and 
 grimed with dirt ! Is it asked, Who is re- 
 sponsible for such a contrast ? Surely every 
 indolent and selfish man or woman, who, living 
 in ease and plenty, leaves things to take their 
 chance, under the excuse of business, or want 
 of power, but really with the unexpressed plea 
 of Cain, " Am I my brother's keeper ?" 
 
 Retribution is the law of the universe. If 
 we allow our brothers and sisters to drag out 
 their existence in degradation, pauperism, and 
 crime, a time will come, even in this world, 
 when selfishness, pride, and indolence will 
 bring their bitter reward. If the Christian 
 teaching of brotherhood be ignored, the words 
 " Liberty, Fraternity, Equality," may once 
 more become a battle-cry of revenge from 
 those to whom the acknowledgment of their 
 fraternity has been denied. Every English 
 man, every English woman, can do some- 
 thing ; and they who decline to work in the 
 cause of the poor fail not less in their duty to 
 their country than to their God.
 
 II. 
 
 THE ORPHAN'S WRONG.' 
 
 T T is hardly possible to conceive a more 
 woeful picture than that of an orphan 
 family gathered round a grave to take the last 
 long look at the coffin which contains all that 
 remains of the last of their parents. No man 
 of ordinary feeling could hear unmoved the 
 sobs of the elder children, but too conscious of 
 their irreparable loss ; or see the half-anxious, 
 half-terrified expression on the faces of the 
 little ones, as yet too young to realize fully 
 the fact that neither father nor mother will 
 ever come back to them again that never 
 more will they see the smile of a father's 
 face, or know a mother's care. Is it possible 
 to find any further ingredient of woe to fill 
 to overflowing such a cup of misery? Yes ; 
 these bereaved and helpless orphans may be
 
 42 The Orphan s Wrong. 
 
 also destitute ; and as they turn from the 
 grave where, with their parents, love, joy, and 
 home itself have been buried, they may find 
 no relatives or kind friends to meet them, 
 ready with tender sympathy to wipe away 
 their tears, and speak words of consolation and 
 hope ; but may be confronted instead only by 
 a parish officer charged with the duty of 
 conveying them to the union workhouse, 
 where henceforth they will breathe the atmo- 
 sphere of pauperism, and be forced to endure 
 companionship which must needs contaminate 
 them both in body and mind. 
 
 Would that this were only an imaginary 
 picture of woe and misery. But, alas ! it is not ; 
 for it is unhappily realized by thousands of 
 English orphan children, many of whom are 
 now dragging out a dreary existence within 
 workhouse walls. That this should be so 
 is undoubtedly strange, for it cannot be de- 
 nied that, as a rule, English men and women 
 do feel pity for orphans. Probably no prayer 
 in the beautiful Litany of the Church of 
 England meets with a warmer response than 
 that in which the worshippers entreat their 
 heavenly Father to " defend and provide for
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 43 
 
 the fatherless children, and all that are deso- 
 late and oppressed;" but "evil is wrought 
 by want of thought as well as want of heart," 
 and perhaps still more by that selfish indo- 
 lence which leads so many, like the man 
 described in the fable, to cry to heaven for 
 help when they should be putting their own 
 shoulders to the wheel. 
 
 It is also surprising that the rulers of a 
 country so overburdened by pauperism as 
 England, after it has been conclusively shown 
 that the pauper spirit has a strong tendency 
 to become hereditary, should make so little 
 systematic effort to cut off the entail of this 
 disease from those who already inherit it, and 
 should permit so sure a method of increas- 
 ing the pauper class as that of sanctioning 
 the rearing of destitute children, irrespective 
 of the character of their parents, in a pauper 
 atmosphere, with pauper companions and 
 surroundings, and with no home but the 
 poor-house ; thus providing for them so 
 thorough an education and apprenticeship in 
 the vice of pauperism that a terrible success 
 can hardly fail to ensue. Moreover, it is 
 not only the disastrous result as regards
 
 44 The Orphan s Wrong. 
 
 the future of the children and the detriment 
 to the community caused by such treatment 
 which have to be considered. It is in itself 
 most cruel. Very sad must be the little 
 orphans' life in the dull, dreary work- 
 house nursery, where there are no pictures 
 to enliven the grim bareness of the white- 
 washed walls, no toys to amuse, no kind- 
 hearted women to join in all their childish 
 play, no look of sympathetic affection to 
 reciprocate the infant glances which plead 
 for love ! 
 
 A lady who had adopted one of these 
 children, of some eighteen months old, said 
 that what struck her as the most melancholy 
 feature in connection with the poor little 
 orphan was that it actually did not know 
 how to kiss ! 
 
 From a sad and depressing life in a work- 
 house nursery, the orphan is next removed 
 to the workhouse school. Here, again, it is 
 compelled to mingle with the depraved chil- 
 dren of depraved parents, and, worst of all, to 
 share when ill the sick wards of the adult 
 paupers, of whom a large proportion are the 
 very refuse of the population and the worst
 
 The Orphan s Wrong. 45 
 
 of characters. As the ailments of the children 
 are often comparatively slight, they have 
 nothing to do during the weary days but to 
 listen to the conversation of the adults, much 
 of which is of such a character as no child 
 ought ever to be permitted to hear. It is 
 asserted that this association exerts a sort of 
 fascination upon the children, with a result 
 which it is not difficult to imagine. One 
 experienced workhouse visitor says in her 
 report that the teachers often complain that 
 they cannot prevent the children from 
 endeavouring to catch cutaneous diseases 
 from each other, in order to be sent to 
 the sick wards, the attraction of which in this 
 way is so great. 
 
 Not only is the atmosphere of these work- 
 house schools pauperising, but the schools 
 are actively educative in a bad way, for very 
 many of the orphans' schoolfellows are the 
 children of thieves, tramps, and women of bad 
 character, who enter the workhouse for brief 
 periods, coming from haunts of vice and 
 crime to which, with their children, they 
 quickly return. Meanwhile, those who have 
 been associated with them can hardly fail to
 
 46 The Orphan's Wrong. 
 
 have been infected not only with ophthalmia 
 and other loathsome bodily diseases, but also 
 with loathsome ideas and evil thoughts.* 
 
 Our desolate, destitute orphans, having 
 been thus legally trained to live without 
 affection, to accept pauperism as their natural 
 condition, and the poor-house as their home, 
 having been furnished with precociously 
 wicked companions, well instructed in vice, 
 are, at the most critical time of their life, 
 when about thirteen or fourteen years of age 
 the time when the law withdraws all pro- 
 tection to the virtue of female children sent 
 out unprotected to fight their way in the 
 world. The result of such unwisdom, so far at 
 least as regards the girls, is but too often as 
 wretched as might be expected. Untrained 
 in domestic work, they quickly exhaust the 
 patience of their mistresses ; unrestrained by 
 the feeling that they are cared for by any one, it 
 is litttle wonder if they soon become perfectly 
 reckless ; too well acquainted with the story 
 of vice from the companionship of their early 
 
 * The large district schools, which are in all other respects a 
 great improvement on the workhouse schools, are open to a similar 
 serious objection.
 
 The Orphan's Wrong. 47 
 
 years, it is not surprising if they themselves 
 speedily become vicious. 
 
 The following reports, extracted from the 
 writings of persons who have practically 
 studied the subject, which, for the most part, 
 there has been no attempt to refute, show 
 the fearful harvest which is matured by such 
 a mischievous cultivation : 
 
 One workhouse matron stated that, "of 
 300 orphan children she had known, she did 
 not believe one was doing well. " -Journal 
 of the Workhouse Visiting Society. 
 
 "In a workhouse with which we are 
 acquainted, the poor abandoned women, 
 stripped to the waist, would dance madly, 
 shouting the obscenest songs. An outburst 
 of the noisiest insubordination was accounted 
 for by the master thus : ' You see, sir, they 
 are the girls who have been brought up in 
 the workhouse.'" Children of the Slate, 
 pp. 20 and 22. 
 
 " Out of 165 girls apprenticed from one 
 workhouse, 18 only were reported as doing
 
 48 The Orphans Wrong. 
 
 well, and within three years 73 had returned 
 to the workhouse." Ibid.,^- 2 3- 
 
 In another case, " out of 160 provided with 
 clothes to enable them to get employment, 
 within two months and a half 58 found their 
 way back to the workhouse." Social Science 
 Association Report. 
 
 " Out of 1 80 who left Cork workhouse, 60 
 returned within a brief period." -Journal of 
 the Workhouse Visiting Society. 
 
 " The history of 80 prostitutes having been 
 investigated, they were found to be for the 
 most part workhouse girls." The Philosophy 
 of the Poor- Laws. 
 
 " Some institutions for the rescue of fallen 
 women object to receive those brought up in 
 a workhouse, 'their cases are so hopeless.'" 
 Rescue Society Report. 
 
 Thus the workhouse, which is in its con- 
 ception half penal, half charitable, is in its 
 result wholly demoralizing. Life within its 
 walls is detrimental to all ; but no place, ex- 
 cept the prison, can be worse for the infant
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 49 
 
 and the half-grown child. There are no men 
 or women of ordinary humanity who would 
 not shrink with horror from the thought of 
 their own children being brought up in a work- 
 house. What answer then will society be able 
 to give when the human wrecks produced by 
 this horrible system plead against the selfish 
 indifference which has left so many little chil- 
 dren to be ruined by it? In ancient days 
 children were passed through the fire to 
 Moloch. We, hardly less cruel, having first 
 prayed the great Father (t to defend and pro- 
 vide for the fatherless children," consign them 
 to miserable workhouses, over whose gates 
 might well be written: " Orphans who enter 
 here, leave hope behind." 
 
 Having thus described the general condition 
 of children brought up in workhouses, the 
 dreary hopelessness of their childhood, the 
 corruption of character which can hardly fail 
 to be developed by pauperizing surroundings 
 and vicious associates, and lastly, the painful 
 and terrible results of this training as ex- 
 emplified in the subsequent history of so many 
 of those whose career can be traced ; it must 
 in justice be noticed that in many cases 
 
 E
 
 50 The Orphan's Wrong. 
 
 attempts are made to ameliorate the lot of 
 these children by exceptional kindness on 
 the part of the matrons, and by the visits of 
 tender hearted ladies, who seek them out in 
 their gloomy abodes. 
 
 But so utterly bad and unsuitable is the 
 workhouse system, that it is open to ques- 
 tion whether even this amelioration is not in 
 its results a cruelty, as may be illustrated 
 by the following narrative.* Some ten 
 or twelve years ago (says the writer) 
 there was a very good little orphan girl in 
 our workhouse. I knew the child person- 
 ally. She was about thirteen years of age, 
 and had been in the workhouse some few 
 years when she was sent out for a month 
 upon trial as servant in a respectable house 
 in a small town. At the end of three weeks 
 she ran away from her place and returned 
 to the workhouse. The matron, who was 
 deservedly beloved for her kindness of heart, 
 went to her and said kindly that she had not 
 expected such conduct from her, as she had 
 always been such a good, obedient child. 
 
 * These particulars were verified by a correspondence with the 
 lady hersell.
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 51 
 
 " I could not stay, ma'am ; oh, I could not 
 stay ! " sobbed the little girl. " They scorned 
 me so." " Who scorned you so ?" said the 
 matron. " Oh, the children of the town," was 
 the answer of the poor child. From that 
 time she began to droop, and a few weeks after- 
 wards she died, " of a broken heart," as the 
 matron said, "because they scorned her so" 
 
 In ten thousand bright English homes 
 there were mothers rejoicing over their happy 
 children, rejoicing, it may be, with trembling 
 if the thought passed through their minds 
 how sad it would be for these if death should 
 deprive them in infancy of a mother's care 
 and affection ; from ten thousand devout 
 churchgoers the prayer was each Sunday 
 ascending to God that He would have mercy 
 on all fatherless children ; yet a destitute, 
 desolate orphan amidst all this was breaking 
 her young heart, " scorned to death." 
 
 It may perhaps be asked on whom rested 
 the responsibility for this cruel death ? The 
 village children were comparatively innocent, 
 for they only expressed without discrimina- 
 tion the just sentiments of their parents 
 towards paupers as a class. Nor can the 
 
 E 2
 
 52 The Orphan s Wrong. 
 
 crime be laid upon the parents of these 
 children. They had but endeavoured to 
 imbue the minds of their children with the 
 righteous indignation of the honest indus- 
 trious workman against those who willingly 
 eat the bread of idleness and dependence, 
 and with his estimate of the base characters 
 of the majority of those who make the 
 workhouse their home. Rather it is the 
 whole English nation that is responsible 
 generally, and every individual personally 
 who permits without protest the innocent 
 orphans of the poor to be degraded by a 
 pauper's life in a workhouse home. 
 
 If no happier fate than is above described 
 can be secured for them, it is a question if it 
 would not be better to revoke their legal 
 claim to support, and leave Christian charity 
 to provide for them ; yea, or that failing, one 
 is almost tempted to say, mercifully leave 
 them to a speedy death, rather than doom 
 them, as now, to the life of the union work- 
 house, the degradation of its education, the 
 ruin of its demoralizing influence. But there 
 are other alternatives ready to our hand. 
 
 In the first place, there are the district
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 53 
 
 schools, mostly well managed, and though 
 open to several objections, an immense 
 improvement on the workhouse. The ob- 
 jections to them are : Firstly, That the 
 aggregation of such large masses of children, 
 mostly of one class, and that the pauper 
 class, is acknowledged to be most injurious 
 to the development of their moral and 
 mental character, it having a tendency to 
 prevent the growth of any desire to rise to a 
 higher condition. Secondly, The association 
 together of the permanent and the casual 
 children, the effects of which have been 
 already described as regards workhouse 
 schools. Thirdly, The fact that the routine 
 discipline and strict organization absolutely 
 necessary when large numbers o children 
 are gathered together, are prejudicial to 
 the formation and development of individual 
 character. The children's whole time is spent 
 under a yoke of rigid rule and routine, without 
 any escape into the freedom of home during 
 holidays, and this tends to make them dull 
 and spiritless, and unfit for the battle of life. 
 
 Nor is the list of objections quite ended 
 here. The cost of these schools is excessive,
 
 54 The Orphans Wrong. 
 
 and involves wrong to many a struggling 
 ratepayer, who pays twice as much for the 
 education of the children in them as he can 
 afford to pay for his own. The following is 
 the cost of maintenance in the Metropolitan 
 district schools :* Cost per child> 
 
 Kensington and Chelsea . . . . 30 17 o 
 
 Westminster 30 16 6 
 
 Metropolitan Training Ship Exmouth . 30 13 i 
 
 South Metropolitan Herne Bay School . 29 13 7 
 
 St. Marylebone 25 14 2 
 
 St. George's in the East 24 n 2 
 
 North Surrey District 23 13 7 
 
 Forest Gate 23 9 TO 
 
 Central London District School ... 22 9 9 
 
 West London District School .... 21 6 2 
 
 Islington 1980 
 
 St. Pancras 19 6 4 
 
 Holborn 18 15 2 
 
 Strand 18 14 5 
 
 Lambeth 18 13 10 
 
 South Metropolitan District Sc\\. (Sutton) 18 8 2 
 
 Bethnal Green 18 i n 
 
 Brentwood District School ....1819 
 
 Mile End Old Town 15 9 6 
 
 Average . . . 22 10 8f 
 
 The above figures are after deducting " Loans, Interest, 
 and Extra Receipts." 
 
 * From H. M. Local Government Blue Book for 1881, p. 395.
 
 The Orphan's Wrong. 55 
 
 Separate smaller schools for orphans, 
 in connection with which a thorough in- 
 dustrial training could be carried out, would 
 be a great improvement. A few years ago 
 the Local Government Board ordered an 
 inquiry respecting some such schools, con- 
 ducted upon the cottage principle, and sup- 
 ported by voluntary effort. The Inspectors 
 to whom the subject was referred reported in 
 most favourable terms as to the advantages of 
 the plan, under which each group of children 
 dwells separately under the supervision of a 
 house-father or house-mother. The Local 
 Government Board has also sanctioned the 
 erection of schools upon this system by 
 several Boards of Guardians in different parts 
 of the country. 
 
 An even better method of dealing with 
 these helpless orphans is suggested by the 
 story of a French labourer, who was morbidly 
 anxious about the fate of his little family it 
 perchance an early death should take him 
 away from them. One day he found in 
 a bush two birds' nests built close to each 
 other, and while he stood watching them 
 a hawk swooped down and destroyed the 
 parent birds belonging to one of the nests. The
 
 56 The Orphans Wrong. 
 
 sight greatly distressed him, for with a super- 
 stitious feeling he imagined that the hapless 
 lot of the little birds, left to starve, betokened 
 the fate of his own children in the event of his 
 fears of early death being fulfilled. For some 
 time he avoided the place, but at last he 
 was drawn by an irresistible attraction to look 
 into the nest, expecting to find the fledglings 
 dead from hunger ; but, to his great surprise, 
 he discovered them alive and healthy. As he 
 stood by the bush in astonishment he saw 
 the parent birds of the other brood returning 
 with their beaks full of food, which they 
 distributed equally between their own young 
 and the orphan birds. The sight filled 
 him with comfort, for he took it as an 
 omen that if the worst should happen, God 
 would provide in some similar way for his 
 bereaved children. 
 
 Does not the tale indicate the natural 
 method of providing for our destitute orphans ? 
 Their own parents being gone, let foster- 
 parents be found for them among people of 
 their own class. This system is now no 
 novelty. It has been carried out for many 
 years in Scotland, and has more recently
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 57 
 
 been extended . to other parts of the country. 
 There is the amplest testimony to its value 
 and success ; many officials who have watched 
 its working from the beginning one of whom, 
 at least, was at first opposed to it reporting 
 strongly in its favour. For instance, out of 
 923 children thus boarded-out by the Glasgow 
 Union, only forty were lost sight of, and less 
 than five per cent, turned out badly. Mr. 
 Greig, Clerk to the Edinburgh Parochial 
 Board, says " it is a rare thing for a child 
 who has been brought up in this way to 
 become chargeable to the parish in after life." 
 The Guardians of the Poor in Dublin, after 
 twenty years' experience, petitioned in favour 
 of an extension of the time during which the 
 children are allowed to remain with their 
 foster-parents. The Windermere Committee 
 state that the anxiety with which they under- 
 took to supervise the children was at first con- 
 siderable, but it quickly diminished as they 
 found how soon the little ones became loved, 
 and grew to be regarded as members of the 
 families in which they were placed.* 
 
 * For the most recent reports on the Boarding-out system, see 
 Appendix, page 222.
 
 58 The Orphan 's Wrong. 
 
 The Boarding-out system is indeed, not- 
 withstanding much prejudice and obstruction, 
 steadily making progress, and almost every 
 child thus provided for finds a real home. In 
 numerous cases the foster-parents have, as 
 above noted, altogether adopted their charges ; 
 and when children are placed out young, they 
 almost always induce such affection that after 
 they have left for service, there is a real home 
 to which they can return in case of need. As 
 regards expense, no system is so economical ; 
 the comparative cost being from 2s. 6d. to 
 45. 6d. per week, as against js. qd. in work- 
 houses, taking young and old together,* and 
 6s. to I2s. in district schools. 
 
 The objections raised to the Boarding-out 
 system seem to arise primarily from ignorance 
 of its practical working. It has been objected, 
 for instance, that proper homes cannot be 
 found for the children ; but the fact is that 
 there are more homes available than, owing 
 to the resistance offered by Boards of Guard- 
 ians to the adoption of the system, are re- 
 quired. 
 
 It has, again, been objected that the chil- 
 
 * No distinction in respect of age is made in the last Blue-Book.
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 59 
 
 dren would be neglected or ill-treated under 
 this plan, as they were under the old farming- 
 out system. But the supervision required by 
 the Local Government Board precludes this 
 danger, while the appointment of ladies' com- 
 mittees, who undertake to watch over the 
 orphans, brings rich and poor together in the 
 happiest intercourse. 
 
 The Government regulations regarding the 
 Boarding-out of orphan and deserted children 
 require that, when the children are placed 
 beyond the boundaries of their own parish, 
 a committee of two or more ladies approved 
 by the Local Government Board must under- 
 take their superintendence. The Poor- Law 
 officer of the Union in which they are placed 
 must see that the homes are suitable, and 
 that the children are well cared for, and the 
 children must attend regularly the elemen- 
 tary school of the parish. Under these 
 conditions it is hardly possible that they 
 should not be well looked after, and, as a 
 fact, complaints are very rare, while, for the 
 most part, the children obtain kind foster- 
 parents in place of their own, besides having 
 most useful friends in the ladies who under-
 
 60 The Orphans Wrong. 
 
 take their superintendence, and whose assist- 
 ance, when they are going out into the world, 
 is invaluable. 
 
 With such a system available one which 
 is kind to the poor children in their desolate 
 condition, successful in training them for 
 a future life of usefulness, economical in its 
 present working, and beneficial in its general 
 effect by cutting off the entail of pauperism 
 it is surely the height of folly to continue 
 the present system of workhouse rearing. It 
 may well be asked what right the nation has 
 thus to deal so cruelly with the orphan 
 children of the poor. Have they no moral 
 claim to a home ? or is it the heart alone 
 that needs no cultivating ? Even on the very 
 lowest ground of self-interest, the system 
 stands condemned. The country needs 
 honest, able-bodied, intelligent men, as it 
 also does useful and faithful female domestic 
 servants ; yet, during the past twenty years, 
 not less than 100,000 orphans or deserted 
 children, who might, if properly trained, 
 have largely supplied this want, have been 
 brought up in an apprenticeship of pauperism, 
 and now either fill our workhouses and
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 61 
 
 prisons, or are the disgrace of the streets of 
 our large towns. It is a great truth, that 
 " with what measure we mete it shall be 
 measured to us again." We have planted 
 the orphans of the poor in a corrupt soil, and 
 we reap a just retribution in a harvest of vice 
 and crime. 
 
 There is no word sweeter to an English 
 ear than "home." It is a word so full of 
 pleasant and happy memories that on its 
 being heard the tear has often rolled down 
 the rugged cheek of England's exiles toiling 
 in long banishment at the extremities of the 
 earth. It is the word which (where the thing 
 itself has been enjoyed) sooner than any 
 other, except " mother," softens the heart of 
 the outcast woman. Home is the great 
 barrier which by its sacred influence restrains 
 the flood of selfishness and vice which would 
 otherwise overwhelm society. Is it not, then, 
 as cruel as impolitic to deprive our destitute 
 orphans of the comfort, happiness, and moral 
 benefits which this most English of words 
 implies ? 
 
 May we not well question the kindness, 
 the wisdom, and the religion of those who,
 
 62 
 
 The Orphans Wrong. 
 
 looking at the gaol-like workhouse, and 
 knowing that poor orphans are dragging 
 out a dreary childhood within its walls, pass 
 by on the other side without an effort to 
 rescue them ?
 
 III. 
 
 THE LICENSING LAWS AND 
 INTEMPERANCE. 
 
 all the evils with which the English 
 nation has to contend, there is none so 
 great or so malignant, both in its direct and 
 indirect effects, as the vice of intemperance. 
 Fearful illustrations of its effects are daily 
 recorded, and it is hardly possible to enter 
 many of the streets of our large towns after 
 dark without becoming too conscious of its 
 presence. It is indeed "a pestilence that 
 walketh in darkness, and a destruction that 
 wasteth at noonday." All who labour in any 
 way among the poorer classes are at times 
 ready to despair on account of the intensity 
 with which it rages, and the havoc it works. 
 
 It is interesting and important to note that 
 the evils which are connected with the sale of 
 intoxicating drink suggested at a very early
 
 64 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 period of English history the passing of laws 
 intended to regulate it. The earliest licensing 
 law in this country was made in the reign of 
 Edgar, who decreed that there should not be 
 more than one ale-house in a parish. The first 
 Parliamentary enactment was passed in 1504, 
 in the reign of Henry VII., and empowered 
 Justices of the Peace to close any " house for 
 the common selling of ale in towns," and to 
 take sureties of ale-house keepers for their 
 good behaviour. Up to the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century the popular beverage 
 amongst the poor was beer or ale ; probably it 
 was of low alcoholic strength, for we gather 
 from the debates in Parliament that a man 
 had to take a large quantity of any of the 
 strong drinks then known, and to go on doing 
 so for a long time, before he deprived himself 
 of his reason. 
 
 In 1430, arrack was introduced into Eng- 
 land ; but up to 1688 the quantity of British 
 spirits distilled was only 527,500 gallons per 
 annum, to a population of 5,700,000 ; while 
 the beer brewed seems to have reached the 
 enormous quantity of over 6,000,000 barrels. 
 In 1689, an Act was passed prohibiting the
 
 Intemperance. 65 
 
 importation of spirits from all foreign coun- 
 tries, and opening the trade of distilling to all 
 English subjects on payment of a trifling 
 duty. " These measures," says Mr. Lecky, 
 in his " History of England in the Eighteenth 
 Century," "laid the foundation for that passion 
 for gin-drinking which about the year 1724 
 infected the mass of the population with the 
 violence of an epidemic." The extent of this 
 mania for spirits, under the name of gin, ap- 
 pears to have been at that time appalling. 
 The liquor was sold at the corners of every 
 street, and it is said that retailers of gin were 
 accustomed to hang out painted boards an- 
 nouncing that their customers could be made 
 " drunk for a penny, and dead drunk for two- 
 pence," and could have " straw for nothing" ! 
 On February 20, 1736, the Justices of the 
 Peace of Middlesex petitioned the House of 
 Commons, alleging that the drinking of spirits 
 had absolutely destroyed thousands, and had 
 rendered great numbers incapable of labour, 
 and affirming that the greater part of the 
 poverty, and also of the murders and the 
 robberies in London might be traced to 
 this single cause. The preamble of the famous 
 
 F
 
 66 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 Gin Act, which followed, set forth that the 
 constant use of spirituous liquors not only 
 " rendered men and women unfit for useful 
 labour and business, and incited them to per- 
 petrate all manner of vice," but that the evil 
 consequences " would extend to future ages 
 and tend to the ruin of the kingdom." 
 
 Unhappily, the taste for strong drink had by 
 this time become so general and intense that 
 the attempt to enforce the Gin Act caused 
 riots, and an illicit sale of spirits went on 
 throughout the country. In 1737, a further 
 Bill was passed, designed to mitigate the evil, 
 but it had little effect in checking unlicensed 
 gin-shops, of which there were estimated to 
 be in 1749 more than 17,000 within the Bills 
 of Mortality. Bishop Benson, writing at this 
 time, says : " There is no safety of living in 
 town or in country, robbery and murder are 
 so frequent. Our people are now become 
 what they never were before cruel and in- 
 human. These accursed spirituous liquors 
 have changed their very nature." In 1751 
 some new and stringent measures were 
 passed, which by 1781 reduced the consump- 
 tion of spirits to 2,000,000 gallons.
 
 Intemperance. 67 
 
 Down to 1872, licenses were granted, either 
 on the principle of magisterial discretion or 
 of free trade, the wishes of the inhabitants 
 being in no case taken into account : it 
 is owing to this that the number of public- 
 houses is at the present time in so many cases 
 altogether disproportionate to the needs of 
 the people. 
 
 In 1831, Lord Brougham passed his Beer- 
 house Act, probably anticipating that the 
 beer sold in houses licensed under that 
 law would be comparatively unintoxicating, 
 and that its use would create a new taste, 
 and so counteract the evils prevalent in 
 consequence of the drinking of spirits. Un- 
 happily, no precautions were taken to secure 
 the drink being of this kind, and consequently 
 the result has been most disastrous. In the 
 first place, a large number of the beer-houses 
 afterwards obtained licenses for the sale of 
 spirits ; and in the second place, the beer sold 
 has, for the most part, been of great alcoholic 
 strength. The regulations of the Excise 
 itself tend to aggravate this mischief, for it is 
 estimated that the amount of duty charged 
 is only is. 6d. to is. 8d. per gallon on the 
 
 F 2
 
 68 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 alcohol contained in beer, as against 
 per gallon on that contained in spirits. 
 Professor Leone Levi estimates that 75 
 per cent, of the alcohol consumed in the 
 United Kingdom is consumed in the form 
 of beer. 
 
 Demonstration from figures of the awful 
 prevalence of intemperance would be super- 
 fluous. We are all aware of it. There 
 is no large employer of labour who does 
 not recognize how much his own interests, 
 together with those of the country at 
 large, are injuriously affected by it, and every 
 clergyman or visitor among the poor 
 bewails the wide-spread degradation and 
 misery it causes ; while even a casual in- 
 spection of the poorer parts of our large 
 towns, revealing the numberless gin-palaces 
 and drinking-bars they contain, and the 
 wretched scenes that are to be daily wit- 
 nessed in them, is enough to shock the most 
 thoughtless, and to lead them to condemn the 
 laws under which so many licensed drinking- 
 places exist. 
 
 It has been said that among the working
 
 Intemperance. 
 
 classes none are so intemperate in expression 
 as the total abstainers, but, allowing that there 
 is truth in the charge, the accused have much 
 to plead in extenuation. These men and 
 women live habitually in the midst of scenes, 
 occasional glimpses of which are sufficient to 
 appal those who are unfamiliar with them. The 
 hideous dissonance of drunken shouts and 
 furious gin-fomented broils is all around them ; 
 the shrieks of ill-used wives and beaten chil- 
 dren, victims of drunken frenzy or drunken 
 moroseness, are always in their ears. A drunk- 
 ard's home not in coloured picture, but in 
 living reality is constantly before them, a 
 shuddering spectacle of misery and desolation ; 
 while his children, hunger-pinched and woe- 
 stricken, sit side by side with their own in the 
 school. No wonder if they " lift up their voice 
 with strength ;" no wonder if, having seen and 
 felt the blessed change effected where the 
 " Devil's Chain" of intemperance has been 
 broken the change from cruelty to kindness 
 in the parent, from misery to comfort in the 
 home they should feel strongly, and often 
 speak somewhat harshly and bitterly of those 
 who, in their judgment, are encouraging and
 
 70 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 supporting a system which produces such un- 
 speakable mischief. 
 
 According to the latest returns,* nearly 
 180,000 persons were proceeded against in 
 one year for drunkenness in England and 
 Wales. Of these, over 10,000 were classed 
 as habitual drunkards. The number pro- 
 ceeded against forms, however, but a small 
 proportion of the total number guilty of in- 
 temperance. It is only necessary to stand 
 outside the public-houses and gin-palaces at 
 the time of closing, to ascertain that though 
 a large number of those then turned into the 
 streets are more or less the worse for drink, 
 and many so affected as to be unable even to 
 walk alone, yet the police officers only act in 
 the last extremity. A man must be not merely 
 drunk, but " drunk and incapable," or " drunk 
 and disorderly," to bring him within the 
 official list of apprehensions ; and therefore, 
 to the number actually apprehended, must be 
 added all those who escape apprehension 
 through being somewhat less than "incapable" 
 or "disorderly," and who only vent the effects 
 of drink upon their families when they reach 
 
 * Government Statistics, 1880.
 
 Intemperance. 71 
 
 home. Taking these facts into consideration, 
 and after making liberal allowance for the re- 
 peated apprehensions of the same offender, 
 the enormous number of drunken men and 
 women shown to exist among us may well 
 appal the most unthinking ! To realize, more- 
 over, the full extent of the evil, it must be 
 remembered that for the most part each of 
 these drunkards represents a wretched home, 
 a suffering husband or wife, and miserable 
 children, doomed to bear through life, physi- 
 cally and morally, the curse of having been 
 begotten of a drunken parent 
 
 It is, indeed, but a figure of speech to attach 
 the name of " home" to the wretched abode of 
 the drunkard, the very thought of which may 
 well cause a shudder of pain to those who 
 know what such a place is. It is almost impos- 
 sible to exaggerate the picture of wretched- 
 ness suggested by the phrase, "a drunkard's 
 home," with its accompaniments of a suffering 
 wife, whose bosom companion is a half-mad, 
 half-idiotic, wholly repulsive being, and of 
 children brought up in poverty and hunger, 
 and amid scenes of degradation and cruelty 
 from which there is no escape.
 
 72 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 The following words of Canon Farrar well 
 describe the dreadful sufferings of children 
 in consequence of drunkenness : 
 
 Consider with me for a moment to what they are 
 exposed. 
 
 1. They are exposed to shameful neglect. Go to the 
 wynds of Glasgow, go to the filthy back streets of Liver- 
 pool, go to the foul feverish slums of all our great cities, 
 and see children children full of eternity, children for 
 whom Christ died in the low infamous rooms of the low 
 infamous streets, growing up in the haunts of crime and 
 misery, amid the reek of gin and the sounds of blas- 
 phemy, dirty, dissolute, diseased, with always at least one 
 prosperous place hard by the public-house flourishing 
 like some bloated fungus in a region of decay and death. 
 
 2. And not to neglect only : they are exposed to daily 
 and horrible accidents. But, alas, how little men realize 
 the daily and weekly facts ! A drunken driver is driving 
 his van, in a drunkard's heavy, brutal way, through the 
 streets of Southwark ; a woman is passing with a babe in 
 her arms and leading a little girl by the hand. He runs 
 over them, severely injuring the woman, killing the little 
 babe of eleven months, and breaking the leg of the little 
 girl of four. He is only drunk, so no one thinks any 
 more about it ! 
 
 3. Nor is it to accidents only they are exposed to 
 cruelty. A week ago a drunken woman in London is 
 seen holding a child of five months by the legs, head 
 downwards ; when remonstrated with she flings the child 
 on the pavement and runs away.
 
 Intemperance. 73 
 
 4. Nor is it only to hideous cruelty they are exposed 
 to death. A fortnight ago a child at Rock Ferry is found 
 burnt and scalded to death because the drunken woman 
 in charge of it falls against a fire-place. Dozens of 
 children are yearly killed by being overlaid by drunken 
 parents. More children are every year sacrificed to 
 drink in England than were ever burnt to Moloch in the 
 worst ages of Judean apostasy in the Valley of the 
 Children of Hinnom. 
 
 5. Again, they are exposed to dreadful congenital 
 sickness. In her last book the graceful authoress of 
 " John Halifax " describes her visit to the East London 
 Hospital for Children. She went first into the accident 
 ward. " You can imagine," said the nurse to her, " how 
 necessary this ward is, when from drink and ignorance 
 the children are exposed to accidents from morning to 
 night. Numbers are brought in, and last Saturday night 
 there was a terrible case ; such a dear little girl, burnt 
 all over face and arms and neck." "Did she live?" 
 " Oh no ! better not," said the nurse; " she was at rest by 
 Sunday night." They went into another ward sadder 
 than that for cases of accidents, where were children 
 suffering from every form of constitutional corruption 
 rickets, hip complaint, bone disorder, cancer. " These," 
 said the nurse, " are our worst and most painful cases. 
 Often surgery is the only hope of cure, and the children 
 are so weakly that we dare not risk an operation." In 
 going through this ward she says, " One almost felt that 
 death was better than life." 
 
 6. But it is not to congenital sickness only. Besides 
 all this, these miserable hopeless" children of drunkards
 
 74 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 are exposed to murder. In this very year the year of 
 our Lord 1881 in Christian England children not a 
 few have been murdered by drunkards. Not a few even 
 in the opening days. In Glasgow, a wretched woman, a 
 widow of forty, excited by excessive drinking, goes to her 
 home, and not knowing what she is doing flings into the 
 street her little boy of two and her little girl of five. 
 They are picked up alive ; the girl dies in half an hour, 
 the boy nine hours afterwards. 
 
 7. Can you believe that children are even exposed to 
 unconscious suicide ? Yet they are ! In the joy of men 
 at Christmas and the New Year this last Christmas, 
 this very year two children at least have thus met their 
 end. A little child of three gets out of bed at Glasgow, 
 drinks some whisky left on the table, and in the morning 
 is found dead. At Huddersfield a little boy of four dies 
 from the effects of whisky which has been bought by his 
 mother as she was expecting friends ! 
 
 8. Is there anything worse to which they are exposed ? 
 Yes, they are exposed to sin. Neglect, accident, sick- 
 ness, and cruelty, these may maim and torture the body ; 
 murder and suicide may end the life ; but sin ruins the 
 soul. And how often are the children of the drunkard 
 trained in sin ! How unspeakably touching was a case 
 which occurred in Lambeth the other day. A married 
 woman of twenty-six and her child were taken up for 
 stealing drinking-glasses from a tavern, and in court the 
 little child ran towards her father, who, bursting into tears, 
 said that he worked hard, but all in vain ; his wife drank 
 all his earnings, and brought him into debt right and 
 left.
 
 Intemperance. 75 
 
 9. And, lastly, even if they be not trained in sin, how 
 fearful is the lot of the drunkard's children from the fatal 
 taint in the blood, the awful hereditary craving for alcohol, 
 which either drives them into the same terrible destruc- 
 tion as their parents, perpetuating the crimes and miseries 
 of the world ; or else involves the necessity of a lifelong 
 helpless struggle, lest the wild beast of temptation should 
 leap out before them, and hurl them down with its fatal 
 spring a struggle noble indeed, and heroic, and requiring 
 as much virtue and resolution as would make a dozen 
 ordinary saints, but one which makes life one awful and 
 continuous martyrdom, almost from the cradle even to 
 the grave. 
 
 These are some of the direct effects of 
 intemperance. Some points ought, however, 
 to be considered more in detail, namely, the 
 influence drink has in contributing to crime, 
 pauperism, and lunacy. Not long since a 
 statement was made by Lord Aberdare, 
 late Home Secretary, to the effect that crime 
 was on the decrease in this country ; but this 
 statement seems hardly to be borne out by 
 facts, and, indeed, would appear to have been 
 made in forgetfulness of the circumstance that 
 by the Acts of 1847 and 1855, a large number 
 of criminal delinquencies were removed from 
 the list of indictable offences, and allowed
 
 76 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 to be dealt with summarily ;* the number 
 of criminals being thus apparently reduced 
 without any reduction in crime. If this 
 alteration of the law be taken into account, 
 we shall find that while the amount of crime, 
 taking the average of the five years ending 
 1854, was for that period as one in 671 of the 
 population, in the five years ending 1873, 
 notwithstanding the spread of education and 
 the existence of a general state of prosperity, 
 it had increased to one in 477. 
 
 As to there being a close connection between 
 crime and intemperance, there is an almost 
 universal concurrence of testimony. First, 
 we have the authoritative statements of the 
 judgesf who are almost unanimous in declaring 
 that by far the larger number of those who are 
 tried by them have committed their crimes 
 owing to the influence of strong drink. 
 Next, there is the witness borne by the chief 
 
 * Vide Judicial Statistics for those and the ensuing years ; also, 
 "Crime in England and Wales," by Hoyle, p. 43. 
 
 t Vide Speeches of Baron Amphle^t, at Leeds Assizes ; Justice 
 Lush, at Bristol Assizes ; Justice Keating, at Norwich Assizes ; 
 Justice Hannen and Baron Martin, at Liverpool Assizes ; also 
 Speeches of Judges Bovill, Denman, Deasy, &c. See also Ap- 
 pendix, p. 225. ., .-
 
 Intemperance. 77 
 
 officers of our county and borough gaols,* 
 who declare that at least three- fourths 
 of all those who have come under their 
 care have fallen through drink. The most 
 experienced governors of convict prisonst 
 testify that almost all the convicts have 
 been more or less intemperate. The chap- 
 lains of the gaols! most emphatically confirm 
 these representations, and unanimously assert 
 that a very large proportion of the criminals 
 to whom they minister have sunk into the 
 criminal class through drinking habits. Lastly, 
 the trustworthy evidence of a large number 
 of head constables, not only confirms these 
 statements, but suggests that a great diffi- 
 culty arises in regard to the police constables 
 themselves from the temptation of strong 
 drink to which they are exposed. 
 
 The connection between intemperance and 
 pauperism is equally proved by the reports of 
 the most experienced chaplains and masters of 
 
 * Vide "Report of Convocation of York on Intemperance," 
 p. 127. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 129. 
 
 J Ibid., p. 130; also Appendix, p. 226. 
 
 Vide "Report of Convocation of Canterbury on Intem- 
 perance," p. 44.
 
 78 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 workhouses,* in which we find them setting 
 forth their almost unanimous conviction, 
 founded on careful investigation, that the great 
 majority of paupers are in that position in 
 consequence either of their own intemperance 
 or of the intemperance of their parents ; and 
 the reports agree in saying that, were intem- 
 perance to cease, the workhouses in the next 
 generation would be nearly empty. At the 
 present moment, in fact, fully three-fourths of 
 England's pauperism is the direct or indirect 
 effect of drunkenness. 
 
 With regard to the connection between 
 intemperance and lunacy, the most eminent 
 doctors connected with lunatic asylums put 
 down at least twenty per cent, of the cases 
 treated by them to intemperance, and there 
 is good reason to believe that it is the indirect 
 cause of a much larger proportion, t 
 
 The following startling results are obtained 
 
 * Vide "Report of Convocation of York," p. 148. 
 
 t Dr. J. C. Brown, Superintendent of Wakefield Asylum, re- 
 ported that 15 per cent, of the cases of insanity there were due 
 directly to drunkenness, and many more to its indirect effects. 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury, Chairman of Her Majesty's Commis- 
 sioners in Lunacy, places his estimate of the insanity caused by 
 drink as high as 60 per cent.
 
 Intemperance. 79 
 
 from an examination of the above evidence 
 as regards the vice of intemperance. In the 
 first place, there are about 180,000 appre- 
 hensions in each year for drunkenness, and, 
 calculating that for every drunken person 
 apprehended at least two escape arrest, 
 we have the appalling total of over half-a- 
 million of drunkards in England and Wales. 
 Assuming again that no more than two- 
 thirds of these are heads of families, and 
 that each such head represents, according to 
 the usual calculation, a family of five, we have 
 nearly 2,000,000 men, women, and children 
 existing in the misery and degradation im- 
 plied in the words, "members of a drunk- 
 ard's family." Terribly suggestive, indeed, 
 as these figures are, they will not appear 
 strange to those who are enabled by their 
 own observation to realize the fearful pre- 
 valence of intemperance, especially among 
 the working classes,* and who fully under- 
 stand the significance of the fact that 
 nearly thirty million barrels of malt liquor, 
 
 * From the replies sent in by the clergy all over the country to 
 the Convocation at York, a much larger percentage of drunkards, 
 occasional or habitual, to the total population, is shown.
 
 8o The Licensing Laws and 
 
 eighteen million gallons of wine, ten million 
 gallons of cider and perry, and forty 
 million gallons of ardent spirits con- 
 taining altogether about 84,000,000 gallons 
 of pure alcohol, and estimated as worth 
 about 130,000,000 pounds sterling are con- 
 sumed in the United Kingdom each year.* 
 
 As the result, we find half-a-million drunk- 
 ards and two million innocent sufferers 
 through this vice. We have also 16,3881 
 offenders guilty of indictable crimes, in addi- 
 tion to 500,000 convicted summarily before 
 the magistrates; over 100,000 of the latter 
 number being convicted of personal assaults, 
 many of which were aggravated assaults 
 upon women and children. And of this vast 
 mass of crime a very large proportion, it is 
 agreed by everybody, is the result of intemper- 
 ance. Nor must it be forgotten that at least 
 200,000 innocent persons suffered in purse or 
 person through the acts of these criminals, 
 and that the families of the criminals them- 
 selves are not the least deserving of sympathy 
 among the innocent sufferers. Again, as re- 
 
 * Vidt " Crime in England and Wales," by Hoyle, p. 96. 
 t Vide Government Statistics, 1880.
 
 Intemperance. 8 1 
 
 gards pauperism, out of the 810,000 persons 
 classed as paupers, between 500,000 and 
 600,000 are in this condition through the 
 effects of intemperance; and out of 71,000 
 lunatics in England, Wales, and Scotland, 
 14,000 at least are insane from that cause.* 
 These figures are as startling as they are true ; 
 but the mind altogether fails to realize the mass 
 of misery, vice, and crime, which they represent. 
 
 Enough has been said to show the alarming 
 extent of the prevailing vice of intemperance. 
 The question now meets us whether the 
 Government, under whose license all this 
 alcoholic drink is sold, is or is not bound to 
 intervene ? It has been maintained by some 
 that the drinking evil is not a subject for such 
 interference ; that, to borrow the words of a 
 member of the House of Comm-ons, "every 
 one has a right to drink as much as he can 
 carry away," and that the State has no busi- 
 ness to meddle with individual indulgence. 
 Such arguments would hardly have been 
 advanced but for the strong and powerful 
 interests affected by this question ; for if 
 
 * Vide Parliamentary Census Report for 1871, and other returns. 
 
 G
 
 82 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 there be one duty which is universally 
 acknowledged as more incumbent than 
 another on the governing power in a State 
 it is the duty of providing protection for 
 the citizens, and of insisting on the carry- 
 ing out of arrangements for securing social 
 peace and safety. This is recognized in 
 all civilized communities, and, as a matter 
 of fact, all civilized governments do prohibit 
 actions on the part of individuals which are 
 liable to work harm around them. They 
 regulate, for example, the storage and 
 vending of explosive materials, forbid the 
 publication and sale of immoral books, make 
 illegal the discharge cf fire-arms in public 
 places, and even the establishment of bet- 
 ting and gambling houses. No small number 
 of things, indeed, are more or less limited, 
 or entirely disallowed, on account of the 
 danger they threaten to the physical or 
 moral well-being of the people ; and on the 
 same grounds it must be quite as desirable 
 and as right that the Government should 
 regulate the traffic in that article which daily 
 experience proves to be fraught, while it is 
 unregulated, with public danger, rendering so
 
 Intemperance. 83 
 
 many consumers incapable of controlling their 
 actions, and contributing, almost more than 
 anything besides, to swell the ranks of 
 pauperism and crime. 
 
 Assuming, then, that the State not only 
 has the right, but is bound, to interfere in 
 this matter, our next step is to examine what 
 it is which conduces most to the encourage- 
 ment of intemperance, and in what way State 
 action can be taken with the best chance of 
 success. The general testimony of observant 
 men is that the number of drunkards in 
 any locality is determined by the number of 
 drinking-places, especially of those licensed to 
 sell ardent spirits; they allege that in going 
 through a list of towns and villages, you find 
 the amount of intemperance, with few excep- 
 tions, to be in proportion to the beer-shops, 
 and especially to the public-houses. 
 
 It is true that the Select Committee of the 
 House of Lords on Intemperance stated in 
 their Report of March, 1879, that "there 
 appears to be no constant direct connection 
 between the number of public-houses and 
 drunkenness ;"* but, further on, the cause of 
 
 * Vide Report, p. 35. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 this is unconsciously explained, for after notic- 
 ing the fact that drunkenness most prevails 
 in the most densely-crowded places, they say : 
 "It is to be remarked that in large towns, 
 while the public-houses have decreased in 
 number, they have increased in size, and in 
 the amount of accommodation which they 
 
 afford It appears, moreover, that a 
 
 greater number of public houses have been 
 converted into ' vaults,' or 'gin-palaces/ which 
 are mostly spirit-drinking places, where 
 people stand to drink the drink being served 
 over the counter. These vaults are a modern 
 creation, and their mischievous character is 
 recognized by all the witnesses from the large 
 towns, where they exist in the greatest 
 number."* In other words, the reduction in 
 the number of public-houses in these places 
 has in no way reduced the facilities for drink- 
 ing. On the contrary, if the accommodation 
 contained in those houses which have been 
 suppressed be compared with the extensions 
 made in those which have changed their 
 character by becoming "vaults" or "gin- 
 palaces," it would be found that the oppor- 
 
 * Vide Report, p. 37.
 
 Intemperance. 85 
 
 tunities for drinking have in many cases 
 been increased tenfold instead of having 
 been lessened. 
 
 It has been argued that the multiplication 
 of public-houses is regulated by the previous 
 demand for strong -liquor, and is an effect 
 rather than a cause ; but this view is entirely 
 refuted by the fact that wherever drinking 
 accommodation has been diminished, a de- 
 crease of intemperance has followed.* This 
 has also been the effect in various foreign 
 countries, among which Sweden may be 
 quoted as affording a striking illustration. In 
 that country, the drink trade was formerly 
 unrestricted, and the grossest intemperance 
 prevailed, notwithstanding that the people 
 were at the same time one of the best edu- 
 cated. The annual production of spirits was 
 about 26,000,000 gallons, and the result was 
 an unparalleled degradation of the people. 
 " Notwithstanding effective and complete 
 Church Establishment, the wide diffusion 
 of education, .... the efficient national 
 establishment of schools suited to all classes, 
 the Swedish nation stood amongst the lowest 
 
 * Vide "Report of York Convocation," p. 315.
 
 86 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 in point of morality. No other three millions 
 of beings in Europe appeared to commit 
 within a given time so large a number of 
 crimes and moral transgressions."* The 
 material condition of the country was equally 
 bad. Even where the soil was rich, the 
 farms displayed " an aspect of disrepair and 
 discomfort." Everything told of " thriftless- 
 ness and reckless poverty."! Such were the 
 devastating effects of free trade in the pro- 
 duction and sale of spirits in Sweden. 
 
 In 1855, the Diet passed a License Reform 
 Act, enabling the parochial and municipal 
 authorities, subject to the confirmation of the 
 governor of the province, to fix the number 
 of retail shops and public-houses, and placing 
 a heavy duty on the quantity of alcohol sold. 
 The result was to reduce the number of dis- 
 tilleries from 44,000 in 1850, to 457 in 1869, 
 and the production of spirits to less than one- 
 fourth. After an experience of twenty-five 
 years, the following is the testimony borne to 
 the effect of this immense reduction in the 
 use of intoxicating drinks, taken from an 
 
 * Laing's " Tour in Sweden," p. 426. 
 t Ibid., p. 35.
 
 Intemperance. 87 
 
 account by the Rev. T. Major Lester of a 
 visit to Sweden : 
 
 A tone of thrift, honesty, and contentment appeared 
 to pervade the country. The very garments of the 
 poorer classes gave evidence of self-respect and cleanli- 
 ness. The utter absence of drunken persons surprised 
 us. The people as a whole appeared sober and thrifty, 
 comfortable and well-educated, even in the dock-sides 
 and by-streets of the larger towns. 
 
 Again, the town of Gothenburg, which was 
 once pre-eminent for drunkenness, and in 
 which the convictions for this crime had 
 reached the enormous proportion of one in 
 ten of the population, was so changed in 
 this respect by the reduction in the number 
 of drinking-houses brought about by vigorous 
 efforts on the part of the leading citizens, 
 that the number of police apprehensions 
 was diminished in ten years by twenty-one 
 per cent. 
 
 The town of St Johnsburg, in Vermont, 
 U.S., having a population of 5,000, is thus 
 described by a trustworthy writer : 
 
 A town which has all the aspects of a garden ; a town 
 in which many of the workmen are owners of real estate, 
 but in which the moral order is even more conspicuous
 
 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 than the material prosperity. No policeman walks the 
 streets; on ordinary days there is nothing for a policeman 
 to do. All voices, I am bound to say, reply to me that 
 these unusual but desirable conditions spring from a strict 
 enforcement of the law prohibiting the sale of any species 
 of intoxicating drink. 
 
 The town of Bessbrook, near Newry, in 
 Ireland, belongs to a wealthy Quaker, Mr. 
 John Grubb Richardson. He employs there 
 4,000 persons, and will not allow a single 
 public-house on his property. The results 
 are wonderful ; no police are needed ; crime, 
 riot, and pauperism are almost or quite 
 unknown ; places of worship are well at- 
 tended ; and rates are saved. Sir Titus Salt, 
 at Saltaire, and the late Lord Palmerston, 
 at Romsey, also suppressed drink-houses with 
 similarly happy results. 
 
 By the foregoing examples it is fairly 
 proved that undue facilities for obtaining 
 strong drink, involving those numberless in- 
 ducements which competition compels dealers 
 to offer in the shape of amusements, &c., in 
 order that they may secure customers, are 
 the greatest cause of national intemperance 
 that where there are no drinking-places there
 
 Intemperance. 
 
 89 
 
 is scarcely any intemperance at all that 
 where there are few there is very little* and 
 that where these facilities have been reduced, 
 a corresponding decrease in intemperance 
 has taken place. In addition to this, it is 
 in evidence that where a public-house has 
 been introduced into a hitherto sober com- 
 
 Population 
 of Town. 
 
 634 
 
 No. of Licensed 
 Drinking Places. 
 
 I 
 
 Average to 
 Population. 
 
 I to 600 
 
 ... 
 
 1,000 
 
 2 
 
 I 500 
 
 ...{ 
 
 2,358 
 
 4 
 
 1 587 
 
 ... SI 
 
 * The Report of the Convocation of York on Intemperance con- 
 tains, on page 344, an instructive table, showing the relative 
 amount of drunkenness in a number of localities in proportion to 
 the number of drinking licenses. For example : 
 
 Amount of 
 Intemperance. 
 ... only occasional. 
 
 per cent, of the 
 working classes, 
 small. 
 3,714 ... 7 ... I 530 ...not much. 
 
 On the other hand 
 
 980 ... 13 ... I 75 ... amongst all classes. 
 
 !33 per cent, of the 
 men ; 20 per cent 
 of the females. 
 ivery great among 
 all classes. 
 !8o per cent, 
 amongst work- 
 ing classes. 
 
 Again, on page 309, the chief constable reports : "The parish of 
 T had formerly two public-houses and two beer-houses. At 
 
 that time drunkenness and crime were rife in the parish. The 
 magistrates stopped three of the licenses, and the consequence has 
 been that we never hear of anything requiring police interference."
 
 9O The Licensing Laws and 
 
 munity, where none had before existed, 
 drunkenness has followed. It is to the dimi- 
 nution of drinking facilities, and the dis- 
 couragement of liquors of a high alcoholic 
 strength, that we must chiefly look for any 
 improvement in this matter. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain's evidence on the former 
 point before the Lords' Committee, which has 
 been embodied in their Report,"* is most con- 
 clusive. He states : 
 
 The enormous number of public-houses, which is 
 clearly out of all proportion to anything like the legiti- 
 mate wants of the people, must tend to increase the 
 temptation. In the first place, it has its effects on the 
 people ; the people cannot pass this number of houses 
 without being more tempted than they would with a fewer 
 number. I do not attach much importance to that ; 
 but I attach great importance to the number of persons 
 directly interested in increasing the trade. There are 
 1,900 people in Birmingham, with their families, and all 
 the members of their little circles, who are under the 
 necessity of making a livelihood out of this trade. If 
 there were only half the number they would do less 
 trade ; perhaps not in proportion to the reduction in the 
 number of persons, but still there would be a great dimi- 
 nution. Then, the number of houses excites competition. 
 Those men living so close together cannot afford to 
 
 * Page 35.
 
 Intemperance. 91 
 
 offend their customers in any way, and any demand that 
 is made upon them they must meet, not merely from fear 
 of losing the immediate custom, which they are unwilling 
 to lose, but from fear of losing the whole custom of the 
 man ; and there is no doubt that improper practices, such 
 as gambling, and such things, are allowed to go on, because 
 the publican, although he may not approve of it, does 
 not like to set his face directly against it. 
 
 There are, indeed, too many secondary 
 causes indirectly conducing to intemperance, 
 such as the want of public parks and of 
 innocent recreation, the wretched homes of 
 the poor (previously referred to), the bad 
 water-supply, and certain foolish customs of 
 society; but the reason why many of these 
 evils are allowed to remain is too often the 
 carelessness for anything else than sensual 
 indulgence which the vice of intemperance 
 produces. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to demonstrate 
 further the extensive prevalence of intemper- 
 ance, especially amongst the artisan and 
 poorer classes; or that it is from this source 
 that most of the misery, crime, and pauperism 
 that exist among us originate ; or that the 
 amount of intemperance generally corresponds
 
 92 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 with the size or number of places licensed for 
 the sale of strong drink. But it should be 
 borne in mind that, as the licensing laws are 
 regulated by the representative Assembly of 
 the country, the legislators in the first place, 
 and the electors in the second, are directly 
 responsible for the evils. 
 
 The next question which arises is as to 
 the nature of the remedy to be applied. It 
 has been urged that each parish should 
 be allowed either to permit or to prohibit 
 altogether the sale of intoxicating liquors 
 within its boundaries ; while others desire 
 to place the whole drink traffic under the 
 respective municipalities, on some such system 
 as that which prevails in Gothenburg. In 
 regard to the first of these proposals there 
 are many grave objections. Such laws would 
 plunge every community into periodical. and 
 bitter contests, and the result would be that 
 the wealthier parishes would prohibit public- 
 houses, while the poorer ones, where the vice 
 of drunkenness most prevails, would allow 
 an unlimited number. Both proposals, more- 
 over, are in advance of the general feeling of
 
 Intemperance. 03 
 
 the country ; whereas, in every self-governed 
 State, the first essential to all successful 
 reforms is that they shall have the support 
 of public opinion. Any legislation, or any 
 attempt at legislation, without such support, 
 must fail, and in most cases it would produce 
 a reaction of feeling, which would hinder, not 
 only legislative progress, but also the very 
 formation of that public opinion which is 
 so desirable. Reforms are often seriously 
 delayed by crude attempts to accomplish 
 something for which the public mind is not 
 sufficiently educated or matured. It is there- 
 fore to be hoped that all friends of tem- 
 perance, recognizing this truth, will be con- 
 tent to concentrate their efforts on such 
 reforms as present a reasonable prospect of 
 attainment. 
 
 In speaking thus, however, it is as regards 
 legislative action only that this caution is neces- 
 sary. There is no need for any abatement of 
 exertion, but every necessity and every induce- 
 ment for redoubled efforts to enlighten public 
 opinion on subjects connected with intem- 
 perance, since every individual won to the 
 temperance cause is of value, every " Band
 
 94 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 of Hope " formed is a gain ; and though it 
 is painful to wait while the monstrous evil is 
 yearly devouring its host of victims, the friends 
 of temperance need not despair, for their 
 cause is holy, their battle is the Lord's, and 
 every great and noble victory has been won 
 through patience and through pain. It has 
 taken centuries to win freedom to worship 
 God, centuries to obtain freedom from poli- 
 tical despotism, centuries to destroy the 
 curse of slavery ; and it would be weak and 
 foolish to complain because patient waiting 
 and long-continued labour are necessary to 
 free our community from the tyranny of intem- 
 perance. If the battle is to be won at all, it 
 must be won by degrees, by steady persistence 
 and patient endeavour, by bringing public 
 opinion to approve each step attained, and 
 so, from each success, progressing gradually 
 onward. 
 
 The first practical step towards improve- 
 ment is to prevent the creation of any further 
 interests in the trade. Universal testimony 
 shows that drinking-houses are, almost every- 
 where, far in excess of any possible need ; 
 and that to this excess, with the competition
 
 Intemperance. 95 
 
 for trade which results from it, leading in- 
 evitably to the introduction of all sorts of 
 attractions to draw customers, a vast amount 
 of the existing intemperance must be attri- 
 buted. Common sense therefore suggests, 
 and public opinion would probably support, 
 the enactment of a law to prevent further 
 licenses being granted and enlargements of 
 existing houses being made in any locality 
 until the number of public-houses there had 
 fallen to a reasonable proportion to the 
 population. When such a limit was reached, 
 the magistrates might be empowered to grant 
 another license, subject, however, to an appeal 
 to the Home Secretary on behalf of the in- 
 habitants. But no difference should be made 
 between the beer-shop and the public-house, 
 for all evidence conclusively proves that they 
 are both fraught with the same danger, and 
 will continue to be so unless by some means 
 a taste for beer of low alcoholic strength is 
 formed. A heavy tax on the alcohol con- 
 tained in beer would probably be of great 
 benefit in promoting this taste ; in fact, this 
 has been the case in Germany. As these 
 measures would affect no vested interest,
 
 g6 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 and are so evidently just, the only opposition 
 to them likely to arise would be from some 
 few of the manufacturers of intoxicating 
 drink. 
 
 This step having been secured, and the 
 creation of any further interests having been 
 prevented for which public opinion is pre- 
 bably already ripe the next effort should be 
 directed towards obtaining a distinction in 
 legislative enactments between hotels proper 
 (including those houses the chief object of 
 which is the accommodation of travellers, and 
 those which are mainly used as dining-rooms) 
 and mere drinking places (including in this 
 category all those houses where the chief or 
 sole object is the sale of intoxicating liquors 
 to be drunk on the premises). At present 
 these are confounded, so that it is difficult to 
 frame legislation that will apply fairly; but it 
 is evident that an essential difference exists, 
 and that respectable inns and hotels, especially 
 if without drinking-bars, have little in common 
 with gin-palaces and beer-shops. 
 
 This distinction made, the way would be 
 prepared for the next most important re- 
 form viz., the reduction of the hours during
 
 Intemperance. ' 97 
 
 which drinking-houses should be kept open 
 and the entire closing of them on Sundays. 
 No new licenses being granted, and there 
 being consequently less competition, existing 
 licensed houses v/ould be compensated for 
 this reduction of hours. 
 
 With regard to earlier closing, one of 
 the witnesses before the Lords' Committee,* 
 intimately acquainted with the classes most 
 affected, said : 
 
 As years go on, I am still more convinced it is a 
 mistake to allow public-houses to be open to so late an 
 hour. A few Saturday nights ago I was in Shoreditch, 
 and hundreds, I may say thousands of people, more or 
 less excited by drink, and some quite drunk, were turned 
 out at twelve at night. The whole scene, until twelve or 
 one on Sunday morning, was most distressing. Now, in 
 conversing with those very people I have asked them, 
 " Would it not be a benefit to you men if the temptation 
 were removed from you after ten at night ?" and they 
 generally say, " Yes." And if you take the opinion of 
 the women of the working classes, they say, " We never 
 get our eyes blacked before ten at night; our husbands 
 return home the worse for liquor after ten or eleven." 
 
 The Chief Constable of Glasgow stated to 
 the Committee that he believed the greater 
 
 * Mr. Weylland, of the London City Mission ; vide Report, p. 50. 
 
 H
 
 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 number of the parties engaged in the trade, 
 and also the citizens, "would be quite pre- 
 pared to shut the public-houses earlier at 
 ten instead of eleven." The Lord Provost 
 of Glasgow stated that the evidence he was 
 able to procure showed that "as the hour 
 grew later the apprehensions increased," and 
 that " if we could cut drinking short at an 
 earlier hour the number apprehended would 
 be diminished."* 
 
 The Irish Sunday Closing Act, which came 
 into operation on the i3th of October, 1878, 
 would seem to have had a very beneficial 
 effect. The Government returns showed 
 that, in the ensuing six months, the arrests for 
 drunkenness on Sunday throughout Ireland, 
 save in the five excepted towns, were 707, as 
 against 2,364 in the corresponding period of 
 the previous year ; while in the five towns 
 where the Act only restricts the former hours, 
 the numbers of the arrests were 1,268 and 
 1,976 respectively in the same periods. The 
 Government statistics for 1880 showed the 
 very large diminution, during the preceding 
 year, of 12,889 in summary offences, which it 
 
 5 Vide Report, p. 51.
 
 Intemperance. 99 
 
 was officially stated might " fairly be ascribed 
 to the passing of the Sunday Closing Act ;" 
 this diminution having occurred mostly in 
 the category of drunken cases viz., 8,702 
 and in offences caused by drunkenness, there 
 being a reduction of 3,204 cases of assaults, 
 and 350 of cruelty to animals. Again, Mr. 
 Hugh Mason, M.P., writing to The Times, 
 says : 
 
 I find by the returns that the quantities of spirits 
 retained for consumption as beverages in Ireland were, 
 for the year ended March 31, 1878, 6,115,332 gallons, 
 and for the year ended March 31, 1880, 5,075,368 
 gallons, showing a decrease since the passing of the 
 Irish Sunday Closing Bill of 1,039,964 gallons. To put 
 the case in another form, I find that the consumption per 
 head of population was 1*145 gallon in 1877, and 0-946 
 gallon in 1879, or a diminution of one-sixth. 
 
 It may be said that there are other kinds of " drink" 
 besides spirits, so I have extracted the figures showing 
 the quantities of malt and sugar charged with duty 
 within the years ended March 31, 1878 and 1880 : 
 
 Malt. 
 Bushels. 
 
 1878 ... 3,081,409 
 
 1880 ... 2,854,802 
 
 Decrease ... 226,607
 
 ioo The Licensing Laws and 
 
 There is, moreover, a strong consensus of 
 opinion on the part of Irish judges, prelates, 
 and other persons of distinction, as to the 
 advantages accruing from the operation of 
 the Act. 
 
 Several influential witnesses strongly urged 
 upon the Committee that public-houses should 
 be closed earlier on Saturdays, and altogether 
 on Sundays ; and there was a universal testi- 
 mony as to the benefits of Sunday-closing 
 in Scotland, and as to the good results of the 
 reduction already made in the hours in Eng- 
 land. The Committee further expressed a 
 strong opinion in favour of the claim of 
 persons employed in the sale of drink to 
 be relieved from Sunday labour. " There 
 are upwards of 340,000 barmen and barmaids 
 in England and in Ireland. Women and 
 young persons are now prohibited by law 
 from working in factories for more than 56 
 hours in the week, while in public-houses in 
 the country they can be kept at work for 108 
 hours, and in London for 123^ hours."* 
 
 A brief account of the Gothenburg system 
 
 * Vide Report, p. 52.
 
 Intemperance. i o i 
 
 will form a fitting illustration and supply a 
 striking proof of the truth of what has been 
 advanced as to the main cause of intemper- 
 ance, and the means necessary to be adopted 
 for its cure. Gothenburg, the second city in 
 Sweden and a seaport, containing at the pre- 
 sent time about 60,000 inhabitants, had long 
 been, before the present system was estab- 
 lished, one of the most drunken cities in the 
 world. In 1855, as earlier mentioned, the 
 apprehensions for drunkenness amounted to 
 more than one in ten of the population, and 
 in a report made on the city's condition it 
 was stated, " that probably in no community 
 was brutish coarseness and deep poverty so 
 common." But in the year 1855 a change 
 was made : the greater part of the spirit 
 licenses were purchased by representatives 
 of the municipality, who first reduced the 
 number of bars, and then placed the re- 
 mainder in the charge of persons who, it was 
 intended, should derive no benefit from the 
 sale of intoxicating drinks. At the same time 
 the houses were inspected, made comfortable, 
 and furnished, not only for the sale of intoxi- 
 cants, but also for the supply of food and
 
 iO2 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 unintoxicating drinks, on the sale of which 
 latter the person in charge derived consider- 
 able profit. 
 
 It need hardly be pointed out that no cry 
 of class legislation the strongest weapon in 
 the hands of our opponents could be raised 
 against this system, nor any accusation of 
 " paternal" legislation ; for every one who de- 
 sired it could obtain strong drink, but, at the 
 same time, all temptation to injure customers 
 by inducing them to drink too much, or by 
 adulterating the liquor, was taken away. 
 
 The profit on the sale of alcoholic liquors in 
 Gothenburg thus belongs to the town, and it 
 has had a considerable effect in reducing the 
 rates, while the apprehensions for drunken- 
 ness, under a far stricter enforcement of the 
 law than previously, have, as has been before 
 stated, undergone a very considerable reduc- 
 tion. This is undeniably a great improve- 
 ment, and it shows that much more might 
 have been accomplished had the beer-shops, 
 of which there were in 1873 no fewer than 
 400, the licenses for the sale of strong drink 
 in music saloons, and also the retail spirit 
 licenses held by grocers and private persons,
 
 Intemperance. 103 
 
 been acquired at the same time. This striking 
 change has, moreover, been accomplished not- 
 withstanding a great increase in the pros- 
 perity of the town, and a very much higher 
 scale of wages among the working classes 
 conditions which the experience of other large 
 towns has shown are generally accompanied 
 by increased intemperance. 
 
 The description given by a recent visitor to 
 this city, which only twenty years ago was a 
 sink of brutality and poverty, is as follows : 
 
 The streets are entirely free from drunken persons, 
 and the behaviour of the people is marked by the utmost 
 propriety and decorum. The houses of the working 
 people are well kept, and no external poverty is visible.* 
 
 Gothenburg has thus proved, by the com- 
 paratively great success of its system, that 
 restriction in the sale of drink can effect the 
 salvation of a town from intemperance, and 
 it has also shown, by its partial failure, that 
 such restriction must apply to all drinking 
 places alike. 
 
 Some persons urge that we should look for 
 a remedy for the evil in the effects of educa- 
 
 * Vide "License Reform: the Gothenburg System," by Alex- 
 ander Balfour, p. 17. London : Simpkin & Co.
 
 io4 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 tion. But not only is it vain to expect these 
 results from such instruction as elementary 
 schools afford the working classes (which edu- 
 cation ceases at thirteen years of age), but, as 
 a matter of fact, intemperance is quite as pre- 
 valent among skilled and educated artisans 
 as among rustic labourers ; while Sweden, as 
 has been shown, prior to the adoption of the 
 above measures was most deeply sunk in 
 this vice though her people excelled in edu- 
 cation. Religious influence will no doubt do 
 much, especially now that the Churches have 
 roused themselves to the work, and ministers 
 of all denominations have become missionaries 
 of temperance, many totally abstaining them- 
 selves that they may help the weak and give 
 countenance to those noble men and women 
 among the working classes who resist the 
 influences around them, and who, amid taunts 
 and often despite persecution, help forward 
 the temperance cause by showing that total 
 abstinence in no way necessarily deteriorates 
 the man, mentally, physically, or spiritually. 
 
 But who does not know that the great 
 hindrance to all moral as well as religious 
 influence is the existence of intemperance ?
 
 Intemperance. 105 
 
 The public-house bars the door to the House 
 of God ; and while other influences may be 
 used to reduce the attractions of the tavern 
 such as securing in each locality a full 
 supply of pure water, public parks, reading- 
 rooms, facilities for higher education, innocent 
 recreation, healthy dwellings, stricter police 
 supervision, a better administration of the 
 Poor-Laws, making improvidence (especially 
 when flowing from intemperance) a crime, 
 and eliciting a healthier tone of public feeling 
 in relation to intemperance yet all these 
 together will have comparatively little effect 
 so long as over 140,000 publicans and beer- 
 sellers many of whom would be ruined 
 themselves, but that they subsist on the ruin 
 of their customers compete, by holding out 
 every species of allurement, to attract the 
 young and unwary to their bars and counters. 
 Meantime, the disease of intemperance is, 
 it is to be feared, not decreasing. Women 
 have taken to it more than formerly,* and 
 drunken parents are not only poisoning the 
 blood of their children but by their ex- 
 
 * 10,000 women and 12,000 men were apprehended in Liver- 
 pool last year for drunkenness.
 
 io6 The Licensing Laws and 
 
 ample subsequently introducing them to the 
 vice. 
 
 It is surely time that every sober man should 
 exert himself to abate this evil. Indifference 
 in such a case can only be justified by the 
 plea of Cain, " Am I my brother's keeper ?" 
 It is, unhappily, too easy for respectable 
 people to shut their eyes to the ills about 
 them, so long as the police keep the leading 
 thoroughfares clear, and the daily list of crime 
 and misery in the columns of the press is passed 
 over unread ; but not the less will the blood 
 of our brothers and sisters cry out against us 
 from the ground, if, from apathy or selfish- 
 ness, we make no effort to fence the gulf into 
 which such multitudes are ignorantly or madly 
 rushing. Nearly every week coroners' juries 
 are engaged in investigating the suicides of 
 wretched girls ruined through drink. The 
 Divorce Court is constantly recording the de- 
 struction of homes through one or other of the 
 parties having fallen into habits of intem- 
 perance. There are few cases of murder or 
 manslaughter but are proved by the evidence 
 to be connected directly or indirectly with 
 drink ; while every species of cruelty and
 
 Intemperance. 107 
 
 misery, even to the maiming and wounding 
 of helpless infants in the drunken fury of 
 their own parents, besides numberless acci- 
 dents, are daily recorded as arising from the 
 same fearful cause. In the criminality of 
 these horrors every member of the community 
 must take his share, for the majority of them 
 may be prevented. They are the natural out- 
 come of the legal permission given to unlimited 
 beguilement of the weak ; and no sophistry, 
 no profession of ignorance, will relieve one of 
 us from sharing the heavy responsibility of 
 these crimes till his utmost influence has been 
 exerted in the cause of temperance.
 
 IV. 
 
 MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 HPHE wise administration of good laws is 
 the crowning honour of a nation, marking 
 its attainment to a high position in culture and 
 civilization. On the other hand, disgrace must 
 rightly attach to any community which allows 
 its laws to be confused not to say unin- 
 telligible or which submits to such defective 
 administration as causes frequent failure of 
 justice, either by deterring men from ap- 
 proaching the tribunals in civil disputes, 
 because of their oppressive cost or dilatori- 
 ness, or by the regulations being such as to 
 deter witnesses from giving evidence. Again, 
 if the punishments inflicted in criminal cases 
 be such as to fail of their proper effect, either 
 from the prevalence of uncertainty, or from 
 their disproportion to the gravity of the crimes
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 109 
 
 committed, disgrace, as well as loss, falls upon 
 those who tacitly acquiesce in such mis- 
 carriage of justice. 
 
 If these propositions be true, the English 
 nation has little reason to boast either of high 
 culture or of practical wisdom. Bad laws and 
 a hap-hazard execution of them are promi- 
 nent evils, both in England itself and in its 
 dependencies. English law has, indeed, been 
 described by some of the most eminent 
 lawyers as a mass of confusion, and as some- 
 times utterly unintelligible. Moreover, ever- 
 increasing numbers complain that not only 
 is its administration most defective ; but 
 that the delay in obtaining a hearing often 
 involves a practical denial of justice to a 
 large proportion of those who apply to the 
 courts. Finally, such unequal punishments 
 are awarded to criminals by both magistrates 
 and judges as frequently to cause a national 
 scandal. 
 
 That such a state of things should have 
 been permitted to continue so long reflects 
 little credit on the people of England, whose 
 fault it is that the wrong has not been 
 remedied. But, while the public at large
 
 no Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 deserve censure, the members of the legis- 
 lature and chiefly those of them who belong 
 to the legal profession deserve special re- 
 probation. As regards the people generally, 
 their apathy must be attributed to that 
 characteristic indolence under which so many 
 evils are allowed to grow till they become 
 unbearable before efforts to reform them are 
 seriously put forward, but the part taken by 
 the members of the legal profession in Par- 
 liament is one very difficult to explain, except 
 under the supposition that they are swayed 
 by interested motives.* Schemes which have 
 been from time to time brought forward have 
 been so mutilated in the course of almost 
 endless discussion, that, when finally carried, 
 they have been almost useless. 
 
 Before proceeding to consider the defective 
 administration of the law, a few words may 
 not be irrelevant on the license which is too 
 often allowed to counsel in the cross-examina- 
 tion of witnesses, the insinuation of base 
 motives in which they indulge, and their 
 
 * It would, however, be unfair to omit noticing that some of the 
 most ardent law reformers are found in the legal profession.
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 1 1 1 
 
 utterly unjustifiable innuendos as to the 
 characters of those who are witnesses on the 
 opposite side. Were it possible to expose 
 the needless pain, the undeserved mental 
 suffering, undergone by innocent persons 
 (especially when they are poor and imperfectly 
 educated) whose only object is to tell the 
 truth to the best of their power, a reform in 
 the procedure of our courts in this respect 
 would not be deemed the least important 
 among the changes needed ; although it must 
 be granted that it would be very difficult to 
 remedy this evil by direct legislation, since a 
 certain latitude must of necessity be allowed 
 to counsel in dealing with witnesses, who are 
 not always honest. Probably the reform 
 must rather be looked for from a steady effort 
 on the part of the judges sternly to repress 
 any excess, and from such an improved tone 
 in the Bar itself as will furnish an unwritten 
 law which none of its members will dare to 
 transgress. 
 
 Many of our judges already set their faces 
 against such conduct. But there is no common 
 action, and the evil is still a crying grievance, 
 though perhaps confined to comparatively few
 
 ii2 Miscarriage of Jitstice. 
 
 of the members of the Bar. Were the abuse, 
 indeed, general, the position of a witness 
 would soon become intolerable, and justice 
 could not be administered. 
 
 Looked at by other than professional eyes, 
 the bullying, browbeating barrister is justly 
 an object for scorn and condemnation. His 
 position is one of security, and with cowardly 
 confidence he abuses it, feeling safe from 
 retort on the part of witnesses by the shadowy 
 fear they have of falling under the penalties 
 of contempt of court ; still more by the 
 nervousness of the larger proportion, to 
 whom the fact of their being placed in the 
 prominent witness-box, the consciousness that 
 the eyes of judge, jury, and a solemn array 
 of gentlemen in wigs and gowns, are upon 
 them, is a cause of such trepidation that 
 the self-assured barrister finds it easy to 
 victimize those who have already lost all 
 self-possession. 
 
 It is a matter of grave astonishment 
 that any judge should allow an advocate 
 to exercise his skill in first confusing, and 
 then, by damaging insinuations, perhaps 
 taking away the character of some nervous
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 113 
 
 female, or possibly still more nervous male 
 witnesses, whose only fault is that they have 
 been dragged into that position for the pre- 
 sumed furtherance of justice. The permis- 
 sion of such conduct is a scandal to our courts 
 of law ; and those who have witnessed it from 
 the jury-box must often have found it diffi- 
 cult to refrain from punishing the client from a 
 feeling of indignation against the advocate. 
 The evil would not be so serious if it were 
 only obscure men who thus abused their 
 position, but some of those who hold a high 
 rank in the profession are by no means guilt- 
 less. Not long since a Vice-Chancellor felt 
 himself obliged to express regret that an 
 eminent Queen's Counsel, a knight, and a 
 writer on law reform, had been guilty, not 
 indeed of the smaller offence of browbeating 
 a witness, but of introducing malicious in- 
 sinuations as to the motives of parties on 
 the side opposed to him. 
 
 If a call to the Bar is to continue to be 
 thought a social distinction, and as admitting 
 to a highly honourable profession, this evil 
 must be remedied. Honour can only attach to 
 the profession by the strict honour with which 
 
 I
 
 1 1 4 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 all its duties are fulfilled. The cure of disease 
 is necessarily in itself an act worthy of honour ; 
 the high aspirations of the clerical profes- 
 sion justly bestow honour upon it; but the 
 greatest care and sensitiveness as to its honour 
 are essential in a profession as to which it is 
 open to railers to say that its members sell 
 their best powers of mind and speech to the 
 highest bidder, to win their paymaster's cause 
 independent of its intrinsic righteousness. 
 The profession has become dignified by the 
 high character of a large majority of its 
 members and of the judges who have risen 
 from its ranks. But for this very reason, and 
 that it may maintain its character, unworthy 
 conduct should be sternly discouraged. 
 
 An instance of the manner in which the 
 best-intentioned witness may be mystified by 
 a clever advocate, was once beheld in a 
 Committee- Room of the House of Commons. 
 A colonial bishop an ardent advocate of 
 the rights of the aborigines was being 
 examined as to the treatment of the natives 
 in his diocese. He was an excitable man, 
 and by the ingenious cross-examination of 
 an able barrister, who was probably actuated
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 115 
 
 more by mischief than maliciousness, he was 
 led to make admissions and statements which, 
 when put together, appeared to show, to his 
 utter consternation, that he had expressed an 
 opinion that it would be a benefit to humanity 
 if those whose cause he came to plead were 
 improved off the face of the earth. 
 
 If it be justly held a cowardly and con- 
 temptible act for the physically strong to 
 assault and injure the bodies of the weak, it is 
 surely no less so for the clever, accomplished 
 advocate to hurt the feelings and damage 
 the character of those who cannot defend 
 themselves. The bruises of the body are 
 less painful and sooner forgotten than the 
 mental suffering inflicted by tne reflections 
 often cast upon witnesses who only desire to 
 speak the truth. 
 
 To pass to the defects in the law itself, and 
 in its administration, there is : first, the cruel 
 regulation which excludes persons under trial 
 on a criminal charge from giving any evi- 
 dence in their own behalf. It has been 
 argued with some plausibility in defence of 
 this rule, that if prisoners were allowed to 
 
 I 2
 
 u6 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 give evidence, the majority of them, being 
 comparatively ignorant persons, would be 
 easily entrapped under cross-examination into 
 statements injurious to themselves, while the 
 worst criminals, by help of their past expe- 
 rience, and often by their superior talent, 
 might be able to deceive the jury. Admitting 
 the force of this objection, it is altogether 
 insufficient to overcome the strong feeling 
 which is so justly prevalent as to the palpable 
 unfairness of closing the mouth of an accused 
 person, who is often the only one capable of 
 explaining otherwise damaging facts brought 
 against him by the witnesses, and who may 
 therefore be unjustly condemned simply 
 because such explanation as might throw 
 an entirely new light upon the matter 
 cannot be given. Moreover, the diffi- 
 culty now referred to is not very hard 
 of solution, and would altogether be re- 
 moved if the. prisoner were allowed to 
 make his defence after all other evidence 
 had been given, and after the counsel had 
 made their speeches ; his statements being 
 only subjected to the examination of the 
 judge, or of the jury through the judge. To
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 117 
 
 a certain extent, and in a very defective way, 
 this practice already prevails in trials for the 
 most serious of all offences murder. In 
 these cases the prisoner is always asked, 
 before sentence is actually pronounced, 
 whether he has anything to say why it should 
 not be passed. But though the principle is 
 thus acknowledged, the practice is little short 
 of a mockery, since the question is never put 
 until the jury have already pronounced their 
 verdict, which the judge himself cannot alter. 
 It would surely be far more reasonable if the 
 prisoner were allowed to speak for himself 
 before, not after, the case had been decided 
 against him, especially as until then his inno- 
 cence is presumed by the law itself. 
 
 Another striking defect in the administra- 
 tion of justice in criminal courts is the passing 
 of short and separate sentences of imprison- 
 ment, as is so often done in the cases of in- 
 veterate misdemeanants; no provision being 
 made in the classes of what are considered 
 minor crimes for cumulation of punishment. 
 The consequence is that many punishments 
 are worse than valueless, being wholly power- 
 less to deter the offender from again falling
 
 1 1 8 Miscarriage ofjiistice. 
 
 into crime. One or two instances may be 
 given in illustration. A woman lately brought 
 before a Dublin magistrate for drunkenness 
 was proved to have been fined or imprisoned 
 more than two hundred times. Another 
 woman recently sent to York Castle for a 
 month, had already been imprisoned one 
 hundred and fifty times. A man sentenced 
 at a London Police-court to one month's im- 
 prisonment had been in prison one hundred 
 times. The chaplain of the Manchester 
 City Gaol reported that one woman there 
 was undergoing imprisonment for the one 
 hundred and forty-sixth time, one for the one 
 hundred and eighth ; that there were thirteen 
 women who had been imprisoned between 
 twenty and forty times; and that among the 
 males, one had been committed sixty-five 
 times, one sixty, and six between thirty and 
 forty times. If we take into account the ex- 
 pense of re-apprehending and re-convicting 
 these prisoners, the loss and injury to the 
 individuals on whom some of the offences 
 were committed, and the utter worthlessness 
 of the punishments to the prisoners them- 
 selves, the state of the law stands utterly con-
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 119 
 
 demned ; more especially if we have regard to 
 the moral effect upon the criminal classes, 
 who, seeing the law thus repeatedly and con- 
 temptuously broken by the same individuals, 
 become more and more regardless ol punish- 
 ment. 
 
 With respect to the most heinous of all 
 crimes, murder, a Parliamentary Committee 
 recently declared, after full inquiry, that the 
 law was "most evasive and sophistical," and 
 that under it persons are condemned by 
 means of a legal fiction. Everybody knows 
 that sentence of death is often passed in 
 cases of infanticide when it is quite certain 
 that the sentence will not be executed, and 
 ought not to be so. Not long since a Judge 
 at the Oxford assizes, in sentencing a woman 
 to death for this offence, said, " The killing of 
 your child is undoubtedly murder ; but, so far 
 as lies in my power, the sentence shall not be 
 carried out." Indeed, there is the very highest 
 testimony that the laws relating to murder 
 are so defective, and the administration of 
 them so anomalous, that they positively tend 
 to encourage this crime rather than to deter 
 from it
 
 1 20 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 An eminent barrister, in answer to a ques- 
 tion on the subject, stated that it is a 
 common observation in his profession that 
 there is nothing more difficult than to obtain 
 a verdict of guilty from a jury when the 
 charge is murder ; that it had frequently 
 occurred, within his experience, that the jury 
 had asked, " Can we find a verdict of man- 
 slaughter ?" and when told they could not, 
 they had allowed the prisoner to go free. 
 Even when a verdict of "Guilty" is obtained, 
 the penalty of death is comparatively so 
 seldom carried out, and the dangerous classes 
 feel that their chances of escape from it are 
 so numerous, that the fear of it ceases to be 
 deterrent. From 1861 to 1872, 281 persons 
 were sentenced to death : of these, 142, or 
 just one-half, were hanged. In 1875, out 
 of 84 persons convicted of murder, only 1 5 
 were hanged. Thus, the capital penalty 
 tends specially, beyond all others, to impose 
 obstacles to its own enforcement, from 
 the impression produced upon the minds of 
 the jury of its irrevocable nature and the 
 awful issues involved in it, and because in 
 the case of murder the evidence is usually
 
 Miscarriage of Justice, 121 
 
 entirely circumstantial, as the victim was the 
 sole witness to the act 
 
 Without asserting that the death penalty 
 should never be inflicted there being strong 
 evidence of its deterrent effect upon certain 
 classes it would seem extremely desirable in 
 the interest of the community that juries 
 should have the power to bring in a verdict 
 of "Murder in the second degree," or of 
 "Aggravated manslaughter," involving a life- 
 sentence of imprisonment. This would of 
 necessity materially lessen the chance of 
 escape of the criminal; and as it is the cer- 
 tainty more than the amount of punishment 
 which affects the minds of the criminal classes, 
 in all probability the crime of murder would 
 then become much less frequent 
 
 The following statistics show that this 
 has been the result as regards crimes which 
 were formerly punished with death, but are 
 so no longer : 
 
 COMPARATIVE STATISTICS. 
 
 ENGLAND AND WALES. During the past quarter of a 
 century most of the serious crimes in the country have 
 materially diminished, especially those which were formerly
 
 122 
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 capital. For example, the Judicial Statistics show as 
 follows for the quinquennial period commencing 1855, 
 as compared with the similar period ending 1879: 
 
 l8 S5-59- 1875-79. Decrease. 
 . . . 2,466 
 
 Burglary. . . . 
 Housebreaking 
 Cattle stealing 
 Horse stealing 
 Sheep stealing 
 Arson (of 3 classes) 
 Forgery .... 
 
 3.264 
 
 994 
 
 1,650 ... 
 
 816 
 
 2,263 ... 
 
 1,001 
 
 91 ... 
 
 '9 
 
 469 ... 
 
 19 
 
 272 ... 
 
 241 
 
 537 
 
 476 
 
 964 ... 
 
 3 
 
 Two crimes, once capital, show an increase in the 
 same period, though certainly not in proportion to the 
 increase of population, viz. : 
 
 Rape 
 
 Attempts to murder . 
 
 The crime of murder, 
 increases than decreases, 
 follows : 
 
 Increase. 
 . 126 
 . 14 
 
 677 ... 803 
 179 ... 193 
 
 despite executions, rather 
 The convictions were as 
 
 Murder 
 
 Decade. 
 
 1850-59. 
 
 167 . 
 
 Decade. 
 
 1870-79. 
 
 . 255 .. 
 
 Increase. 
 88 
 
 To turn now to lesser crimes, one of the 
 greatest causes of the miscarriage of justice 
 is the spirit which appears to underlie our 
 criminal law that property is more sacred than 
 the person; the influence of which seems 
 so to possess the minds of the judges and
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 123 
 
 magistrates that it terribly aggravates the 
 mischievous tendency of the law itself. 
 The contrasts in the punishments awarded 
 for offences against property and those in- 
 flicted for the most atrocious crimes against 
 persons, as recorded almost daily by the 
 press, constantly shock every sense of justice. 
 It is not, however, sufficiently realized that 
 every instance of such inequality of punishment 
 is a moral, or rather a terribly immoral, lesson 
 taught to that large portion of the community 
 which takes its notions of what is serious and 
 what venial from the decisions of the law, 
 and that thus an amount of harm is done that 
 can hardly be estimated. It is, as has been al- 
 ready said, to this unacknowledged but sinister 
 influence of the law, imbuing them with con- 
 fused ideas of morality, that we must attribute 
 the existence of much of the brutality preva- 
 lent among the lowest classes. The following 
 comparative sentences awarded by judges and 
 magistrates will, after making every allowance 
 for facts not recorded which might modify 
 their apparent unfairness, show more strikingly 
 than any mere argument the gross injustice 
 of some of the punishments inflicted, and the
 
 124 
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 effect that must be produced among the 
 
 ignorant classes : 
 
 OFFENCES AGAINST 
 THE PERSON. 
 
 A man named O'Neil, who 
 had kicked his step-daughter, 
 aged thirteen, into a state of un- 
 consciousness, inflicting a lace- 
 rated wound, an inch and a half 
 long, in the abdomen, resulting 
 in partial paralysis of one leg, 
 was sentenced to four months' 
 imprisonment. 
 
 OFFENCES AGAINST 
 PROPERTY. 
 
 James Kelly was charged with 
 stealing five-pennyworth of tripe, 
 which he was found "riving at" 
 with his mouth. He at first 
 pleaded "not guilty," but being 
 told that he would, have to 
 wait his trial at the next Assizes, 
 he pleaded "guilty," and was 
 sent to prison for three months 
 with hard labour. 
 
 Eliza Rolfe pleaded guilty at 
 the Middlesex Sessions to a 
 charge of stealing a sheet and 
 other articles. The Assistant- 
 Judge sentenced her to seven 
 years' penal servitude. 
 
 A woman named Hurley was 
 sentenced by Mr. Balguy, at 
 Woolwich, for knocking a child 
 a few months old against the 
 ground and the wall (the infant 
 being picked up stunned and 
 bleeding), to be sent to prison 
 for one month. The magistrate 
 added (severely) that the woman 
 might have killed her child. 
 
 Thomas Rickett, charged be- 
 fore the Lord Mayor with throw- 
 ing his wife down a flight of 
 fourteen steps, was sentenced to 
 a fine of twenty shillings or ten 
 days' hard labour. 
 
 A child, ten years old, was 
 committed at Clerkenwell for 
 t^venty-one days' hard labour for 
 stealing a house-leek, valued at 
 fourpence. 
 
 Samuel Greenwood was 
 charged at the Skipton Petty 
 Sessions with sleeping in a hay- 
 loft, and was imprisoned for one 
 month. 
 
 At Westminster, Ellen Winch, 
 a decent-looking woman, de- 
 scribed as a sempstress, was 
 sentenced to six months' hard 
 labour for stealing some curtains.
 
 Miscarriage ofjiistice. 
 
 125 
 
 Two men, convicted before 
 Mr. Justice Lopes of killing a 
 man from whom they had re- 
 ceived no provocation the one 
 by inflicting blows on the head 
 with his fist, and the other by 
 kicking him on the head as he 
 lay helpless upon the ground 
 were sentenced to twelve months' 
 imprisonment with hard labour. 
 
 At Wakefield, a miner, who, 
 without the slightest provoca- 
 tion, had knocked down and 
 kicked savagely a perfectly in- 
 offensive man, was sentenced to 
 a fine of '2 1 6s. 
 
 Richard Mountain was con- 
 victed, at Southwark, of turning 
 his wife out of her bed and room 
 an hour after she had been de- 
 livered of a child, thereby endan- 
 gering her life. He had knelt 
 upon the bed, struck her on the 
 face and mouth, and pulled her 
 out of the bed ; she crawled along 
 the floor and got on the landing, 
 when the prisoner closed the 
 door, exclaiming, "She shall 
 not live here." Mr. Benson told 
 him his conduct was worse than 
 that of the lowest order of 
 animals, and sentenced him to 
 four months' hard labour. 
 
 A miner,charged with savagely 
 assaulting a policeman in the 
 execution of his duty, was sen- 
 tenced, at Wakefield, to one 
 months' imprisonment. 
 
 Daniel Welsh, found guilty at 
 the Surrey Sessions of receiving 
 two shillings and sixpence, 
 knowing it to be stolen, was 
 sentenced to penal servitude for 
 fourteen years. 
 
 At Durham Assizes, a mill- 
 wright was sentenced to five 
 years' penal servitude for f raudu - 
 lently obtaining ^10 from a 
 benevolent society. 
 
 At Marlborough Street, George 
 Cresswell, pantryman at the 
 Badminton Club, Piccadilly, 
 pleaded guilty to stealing a five- 
 pound note, and was sent to 
 prison for six months. 
 
 Robert Collins was charged 
 with stealing five silver spoons, 
 and was sentenced to seven years' 
 penal servitude. 
 
 The Middlesex magistrates 
 sentenced a man to ten years 
 penal servitude for stealing a 
 watch, and a woman to seven 
 years' penal servitude for the 
 same o fie nee.
 
 126 
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 At the Middlesex Sessions a 
 man was convicted of inflicting 
 grievous bodily harm on a woman 
 with whom he had been living. 
 The villain had knocked her 
 down, kicked her on the head, 
 and destroyed one eye. On 
 another occasion he had broken 
 a rib, and on her way back from 
 the hospital, where she had been 
 to get the rib mended, this 
 wretch once more struck her 
 upon the bandaged wound. The 
 magistrates sentenced him to 
 eighteen months' hard labour. 
 
 A short time ago, for delibe- 
 rately picking up his child, 
 eleven years of age, and throw- 
 ing him upon a large fire, a 
 labourer, named Joseph Foster, 
 was committed to prison by the 
 Nottingham magistrates for one 
 month' 's hard labour. 
 
 An assistant in the Post Office 
 at Bath was sentenced to six 
 years' penal servitude for stealing 
 a letter containing seven shillings 
 and sixpence. 
 
 At the Central Criminal Court 
 a letter-carrier was sentenced to 
 five years penal servitude for 
 stealing some postage stamps. 
 
 At the Surrey Sessions, Job 
 William Tribe was convicted of 
 stealing a penny, and was sen- 
 tenced to six months' imprison- 
 ment with- hard labour. 
 
 The above cases, which have been taken at 
 random from the reports of the press, show 
 that the administration of our criminal law is 
 in reality demoralizing-, instead of elevating, 
 the people. Such facts as a poor wretch being 
 condemned to six years' penal servitude, with 
 the life-ruin which it implies, for stealing a 
 letter, and another to seven years for stealing 
 a sheet, while a villain who nearly murdered 
 his wife, turning her out of the room an
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 127 
 
 hour after child-birth, escaped with four 
 months' imprisonment; and another villain, 
 who was convicted of inflicting permanent 
 injury on a woman by kicking- her on 
 the head and destroying her eye, having, 
 on another occasion, while she was return- 
 ing from the hospital, where she had been 
 to get a rib he had broken set, hit her with 
 fiendish malignity upon the bandaged wound, 
 was only condemned to eighteen months' hard 
 labour surely all this is a violation of every 
 sense of justice, and fills the mind with in- 
 dignation. Such decisions are a disgrace to 
 the country, and especially are they so to the 
 magistrates and judges who give them.* 
 
 No improvement in the morals and man- 
 ners of the people can be looked for, but 
 crimes of violence must needs increase, while 
 the influence of the law and of its adminis- 
 tration is so degrading. 
 
 Among the remedies needed to make the 
 law just, are : first, improved arrangements, 
 preventing prisoners from being detained, as 
 now, for long periods before being brought 
 
 * For further similar cases, see Appendix, pp. 234-45.
 
 128 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 to trial ; second, the permission to accused 
 persons to give evidence and speak in their 
 own behalf, under some such limitations as 
 those before suggested ; third, a system of 
 cumulative punishments in cases of repeated 
 convictions for petty misdemeanours; fourth, 
 such an amendment of the law relating to 
 murder as shall make a distinction between 
 different degrees of guilt, and so render the 
 conviction of guilty persons less uncertain ; 
 fifth, a Court of Appeal in criminal cases, 
 guarded by the provision that no such appeal 
 shall be allowed except with the permission 
 of the judge, or some properly constituted 
 authority to whom cause should be shown, so 
 superseding the present appeal to the Home 
 Secretary in response to popular agitation. 
 
 With respect to the latter point, a valuable 
 suggestion was recently made in a leading 
 article in The Times, which said : 
 
 There ought to be provision for making it a little 
 more apparent to the public, to the criminal community, 
 and to the criminal himself, why the crime is avenged 
 on the lower or the higher scale. The judicial staff 
 cannot be increased sufficiently to supply criminal courts 
 with more than a single judge for the conduct of trials. 
 It might not be equally impossible to submit sentences
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 129 
 
 to more judges than one. A single judge might, as now, 
 hear the case with the jury, and record the conviction. 
 There is no necessity for declaring the penalty at the 
 same time. At present it is not unusual to order pri- 
 soners to be brought up for sentence the next morning, 
 or at the conclusion of the assize. What is done some- 
 times in these days might become habitual. The judge 
 who tried the case would still deliver the sentence with 
 the prisoner before him. But it would be the sentence 
 of himself and a brother judge, or, it might be, of 
 several. A few days' reflection, contact with other 
 minds, and the need not so much of defending as of 
 explaining to another, or to others, a sentence of unusual 
 leniency or severity, would lead to occasional alterations 
 of resolution without any practical risk of interference, 
 by strangers to the facts, with the deliberate view of one 
 who had studied them. We do not suppose a judge's 
 decision, formed in the course of a trial, would be often 
 either set aside or modified. A habit, however, would 
 be formed of considering the sentence, much more than 
 at present, an integral part of the trial. Judicial minds 
 would grow more exacting in requiring it to be shaped 
 on as methodical and scientific principles as those which 
 they recognize as regulating the laws of evidence and 
 legal logic. 
 
 The adoption of this proposal would perhaps 
 be as efficacious as the establishment of a 
 regular Criminal Court of Appeal. 
 
 But, above all, an alteration is needed in 
 
 K
 
 1 30 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 the very spirit of our law and in the traditional 
 bias of the judges, which lead to the passing 
 of harsh and cruel sentences upon persons 
 convicted of offences against property, and 
 sentences just as inadequate upon those who 
 are guilty of outrages against the person. 
 
 If we next turn to the administration of 
 justice in the civil courts, it is to be feared 
 that, notwithstanding the reforms effected 
 during the last few years in our judicial 
 system, there is still much to be desired be- 
 fore legal business can be said to be carried 
 on in such a satisfactory way as to secure 
 justice to poor and rich alike. 
 
 The sufferers from the present state of 
 things are not only the suitors, who are kept 
 for months, and it may be for years, in sus- 
 pense, knowing that heavy costs are mean- 
 while accumulating against them, which in the 
 case of all but the wealthy means ruin, and 
 subject, further, to the dread that their best 
 witnesses may die, or in some way cease to 
 be available before the long deferred cause is 
 heard ; but they include also the witnesses 
 themselves especially those who are strugg-
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 1 3 1 
 
 ling for a maintenance who often suffer 
 serious loss and inconvenience by being kept 
 for weeks from their business occupations, 
 waiting for causes to come on. But beyond 
 these, it may be said that all are sufferers 
 from this state of things who have anything 
 to lose, and who may at any time find them- 
 selves either suitors, defendants, or witnesses ; 
 for at present, innocent persons are liable at 
 any moment to be made victims of merely 
 speculative actions, or to be damaged by 
 fictitious defences if they themselves have 
 found it necessary to seek the protection of 
 the law. In the one case they become the 
 objects of -downright extortion ; in the other 
 they suffer from wearying delay. 
 
 A large proportion of the business set down 
 for common juries is said to be entered with 
 a direct calculation on delay occurring ; and 
 the postponement of trial often amounts to a 
 denial of justice, for suitors frequently, after 
 waiting and waiting in vain for a decision, 
 grow weary and withdraw their causes from 
 the courts; while numbers of cases are 
 settled by the defendants at the last moment 
 before coming on for hearing, plainly show- 
 
 K 2
 
 132 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 ing that many of the pleas are simply 
 efforts on the part of defendants to put 
 off as long as possible, by the aid of the 
 courts themselves, the satisfying of claims 
 which they cannot disprove. Among these 
 surrenders, however, not a few arise from the 
 utter inability of the plaintiff to produce any 
 evidence in support of his suit ; the pro- 
 ceedings, in fact, being from the first simply 
 speculative, and got up in the hope of com- 
 promise, or at least of securing some amount 
 of costs. It is a grievous scandal that unprin- 
 cipled speculators should be able positively 
 to trade upon the terror of a defendant at 
 the law's delay, systematically reckoning 
 upon his knowledge that, the plaintiff being 
 without means, the costs, however iniquitous 
 the action may be, must fall upon himself. 
 In this way, the law itself is made an ac- 
 complice in the very basest schemes of ex- 
 tortion. 
 
 This particular evil seems, at first sight, 
 not easy to deal with. The dilemma may 
 be stated thus : The law as it now stands 
 holds out strong inducements to unprincipled 
 men, who have nothing to lose, to commence
 
 Miscarriage of Jitstice. 133 
 
 actions for the sake of extortion ; on the other 
 hand, the universal enforcement of a demand 
 for security to be given for costs might often 
 result in a practical denial of justice to the 
 poor, since, from want of funds, they would 
 be unable to seek redress, and thus be in 
 reality at the mercy of the rich. But the 
 difficulty might be met by a rule that in every 
 action the plaintiff should be obliged to give 
 security for costs, except where poverty was 
 pleaded, and in such a case, the judge, or 
 some competent person appointed by him, 
 should examine into the merits of the case, 
 and on ' the action being found a bond fide 
 one, relax the requirement for security for 
 costs. It is probable that such a rule 
 would at once put an end to nine-tenths 
 of the trumped-up actions which at present 
 cause so much cruel injustice, while the 
 poor man would still be enabled to have as 
 free access to the courts of law as he now 
 possesses. 
 
 It is difficult to realize the mental suffering 
 often involving utter bodily prostration 
 besides the pecuniary loss, which the excessive 
 delay continually causes, and everybody must
 
 134 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 admit that it is a disgrace to our community 
 that it passively submits to this. But some 
 who have not been painfully enlightened may 
 ask, what occasions such amazing miscarriage 
 of justice ? 
 
 One great cause is undoubtedly the diffi- 
 culty of understanding, on particular points, 
 what the English law is. Even judges them- 
 selves are continually complaining of Acts of 
 Parliament being so badly drawn that, with- 
 out obtaining a legal decision of a case from 
 the House of Lords, it is impossible to know 
 their real intention and scope ; and the pro- 
 bability is that the decision thus obtained is 
 often the conception of the Appeal Judges as 
 to what is right rather than of what the legis- 
 lature itself intended. The obvious remedy 
 for this is that a Judicial Committee, or else 
 some properly qualified official, should be ap- 
 pointed by the legislature to see that the Bills 
 which Parliament is asked to pass are pro- 
 perly drafted, and to supervise their verbal 
 construction as they are carried through 
 the several stages. It is nothing less than 
 grotesquely cruel that the legislature should 
 require some unfortunate victim to be sacri-
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 135 
 
 ficed before the highest Court of Appeal in 
 order that the blundering language of its 
 Acts may be made intelligible. 
 
 There are, again, many cases brought before 
 the Courts which can only be satisfactorily 
 decided by the aid of technical knowledge, 
 and which necessitate a large amount of in- 
 vestigation, and the calling of experienced 
 professional witnesses, involving enormous 
 expense, when perhaps the amount actually 
 in dispute is comparatively trifling. As an 
 instance of this class of actions may be men- 
 tioned " light and air cases," suits to which a 
 person rebuilding property in any of our large 
 towns is always more or less liable ; for, 
 strange as it may seem, there is no settled 
 rule as to the amount of light to which a 
 neighbour is entitled, the decisions of dif- 
 ferent judges not being uniform. Such cases 
 unnecessarily occupy the judges, delay other 
 causes, enable sharp practitioners to com- 
 mence actions for purposes of extortion, 
 and, where the defendant is poor or ill- 
 defended, often result in positive miscarriage 
 of justice and the ruin of the defendant. Yet 
 the whole of this waste of time and money,
 
 o 
 
 6 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 as well as the oppression and the suffering 
 resulting from it, might be prevented by the 
 adoption of the common-sense plan of com- 
 pulsory reference. If it were in the power of 
 either of the parties to a suit, or of the judge, 
 to refer the question in dispute in the first 
 instance to a court of three responsible per- 
 sons one of them a barrister, as assessor, 
 and the other two properly qualified men, 
 the matter might be settled in a minimum of 
 time, and at one-twentieth part of the cost. 
 Moreover, if actions of this kind, and similar 
 ones, as, for example, those relating to alleged 
 infringements of patents, which can only be 
 decided by technical knowledge, were re- 
 moved from the chief courts, a relief would 
 be given to the course of law which would 
 greatly abate, if not do away with the present 
 delay. 
 
 Such Courts of Reference as are here 
 suggested might also be established for the 
 hearing of appeals against rating assessments, 
 and for the settling of compensation for lands 
 taken and injury done under compulsory 
 powers. It would, of course, be necessary 
 that the referees should be men of high
 
 Miscarriage of Jiistice. 137 
 
 standing, and they would have to be paid 
 sufficiently well to induce them to give up 
 private practice ; but there would be plenty 
 of work throughout England for several such 
 courts ; and their establishment would so 
 largely save both the money of suitors and 
 the time of the judges, that few reforms could 
 be more economical and valuable. 
 
 Readers who are informed in these matters 
 will at once distinguish between this sugges- 
 tion and the system of official referees which 
 was brought into existence to enable the 
 judges to dispose by reference of what they 
 call " matters of account." What is here 
 suggested is meant to have a much wider 
 scope than those appointments, and, more- 
 over, the proposal has a bearing upon the 
 practice of what may be called unofficial 
 arbitration, which is said to be fast spreading. 
 Business men, warned of the dilatoriness, the 
 cost, and the uncertainty of the law, are more 
 and more frequently dispensing altogether 
 with the courts, and inserting in their con- 
 tracts and agreements a clause providing for 
 the reference of disputes to an arbitrator. In 
 plain words, they furnish themselves with
 
 I3S Miscarriage ofjiistice. 
 
 private judges, paying them out of their own 
 pockets a striking comment on the failure 
 of our national judicial system. 
 
 Enough has been brought forward to 
 show the unsatisfactory state of the civil 
 law, its defective administration, and the 
 urgent need which exists for at least the 
 following reforms : The supervision of the 
 wording of Acts of Parliament, so that 
 they may be made intelligible ; a codification 
 of the law, laying down some uniform rules of 
 justice which the different courts would only 
 apply, and the application of which could be 
 reckoned on beforehand ; the appointment of 
 Courts of Reference to deal with all tech- 
 nical matters, as well as questions of disputed 
 value ; the requiring of security for costs 
 from plaintiffs, except in special circumstances ; 
 the organization of one Court of Appeal to 
 supply the place of the intermediate courts, 
 which really decide nothing, but cause both 
 expense and delay to the suitors ; and some 
 official reforms securing a general expediting 
 of the proceedings in and out of court. 
 
 But though it is a disgrace to our practical
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 139 
 
 wisdom as a nation that the civil law remains 
 in its present confused state, and that injustice 
 is so often done by reason of delay, and by 
 the way in which the law lends itself to 
 factitious proceedings, it is, as previously 
 pointed out, a still greater disgrace that, in 
 spite of our boasted civilization, our philan- 
 thropy, and our religion, the criminal law is 
 left so bad in spirit and is so unequally 
 administered, that a man who kicked his 
 daughter into a state of unconsciousness, 
 producing paralysis, was free after four 
 months' imprisonment, while many a letter 
 carrier, who, in a moment of temptation, 
 has stolen a few postage stamps, is doomed 
 to linger out in misery a sentence of five 
 long years of penal servitude. 
 
 Before concluding this subject, it will 
 be necessary to say a few words upon 
 the state of the law of England with regard 
 to women. At the present moment our 
 Statute-book contains two Contagious Dis- 
 eases Acts, one of which, when referred to 
 in the press, is, for the sake of distinction, 
 always described as the " Contagious Dis-
 
 140 Miscarriage o 
 
 eases (Animals) Act." The other is referred 
 to as seldom as possible, probably from the 
 conviction that the principle upon which it is 
 founded is utterly opposed to all true decency 
 and justice, inasmuch as it places the weaker 
 portion of the community entirely at the 
 mercy of police officers, doctors, and magis- 
 trates ; so that their reputation, and even their 
 power to earn an honest livelihood, may be 
 ruined by the action of officials who are 
 most unfairly protected by the Acts from all 
 danger of prosecution. 
 
 This Act, which, for the sake of distinction, 
 might be described as the " Contagious Dis- 
 eases (not Animals) Act," although it permits 
 women to be treated as brute beasts, stands 
 self-condemned, even had it accomplished all 
 the physical benefits claimed for it by its 
 advocates, on account of its violation of every 
 true principle of justice. It punishes women, 
 even if only suspected, for that which it teaches 
 is permissible in men. The subject, however, 
 is not one to be dealt with in detail here. 
 Let it suffice to say that the system is doomed 
 to failure; that the experience of foreign 
 countries, where it has for sufficient time
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 141 
 
 been in full force and been carried out with 
 an utter disregard of all principles of liberty 
 or philanthropy, has proved its futility with 
 regard to its object, and has also demon- 
 strated the awful results of violating the laws 
 of morality and justice. In some foreign 
 cities, notably in Brussels, as revealed in 
 State trials, the magistrates, the police, and 
 the doctors have themselves been utterly 
 demoralized by their connection with this 
 system ; while it has enabled the develop- 
 ment of an extensive slave trade the pro- 
 curing by deception of young foreign girls, 
 especially from England large numbers 
 of whom have been held by means of these 
 laws in a condition of infamous slavery, from 
 which the deaths that have from time to 
 time resulted have been a most merciful 
 deliverance. 
 
 But if we turn from this painful subject 
 to the ordinary laws relating to women in 
 England, no just-minded person can fail 
 to regard them with surprise and indigna- 
 tion. To take one example, a girl is only 
 permitted, under the Factories' Act, to work 
 half-time until she reaches the age of fourteen
 
 142 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 years that is to say, the law regards her as 
 an individual not capable of defending herself 
 against inducements to over-work ; until she 
 is sixteen years of age she is not compe- 
 tent to choose her own domicile ; and, what- 
 ever may be her own wishes on the subject, 
 not on herself, but on her parents, falls the 
 liability to prosecution if she be not vac- 
 cinated. But while in these and many other 
 points, she is treated up to sixteen years of 
 age as incapable of protecting herself, there 
 are two matters, and these the most important 
 of all, in which the law recognizes her as an 
 entirely free agent. At thirteen years of 
 age she is held by the law to be old enough 
 and discreet enough to contract marriage, to 
 make that irrevocable contract which binds 
 her whole future life ; and at thirteen years 
 of age she is considered competent to con- 
 sent to her own dishonour. In other words, 
 while the law treats her as a perfect infant, 
 and as incompetent to form a judgment in 
 minor matters, it allows a child of thirteen 
 to ruin her life by a mad marriage, or to 
 consent to the worse ruin of her life by the 
 wiles of a seducer.
 
 Miscarriage of Justice. 143 
 
 Although it may seem almost incredible, it 
 is a fact that this is th& law of England, and 
 that it has been defended by learned judges 
 who have successfully opposed efforts made to 
 amend it ! Hundreds of poor letter-carriers, 
 who in a moment of temptation have stolen 
 a few stamps or a few shillings, have been 
 sternly sentenced to years of slavery in com- 
 pany with the vilest criminals: thousands of 
 men, some of whom may be sitting in judgment 
 on their fellow-creatures, have with impunity 
 stolen from young girls virtue and happiness, 
 and plunged them into life-long misery and de- 
 gradation, at an age when the law itself declares 
 they are such children that they are incapable 
 of deciding even how long they should work. 
 England's law has nothing to say to the thief 
 of a child's virtue, provided she be poor. 
 However skilled and experienced may be 
 the seducer, however weak and ignorant 
 may be the child, if only an implied con- 
 sent is proved, the law justifies the villain. 
 But if the child have property, she receives 
 ample protection as a ward in Chancery. 
 Alas, that it may be said that it is only the 
 poor child that has no protection from the
 
 144 Miscarriage of Justice. 
 
 English law, and may be safely ruined ! Is 
 it surprising that so-called society so readily 
 condones such offences, when the law de- 
 clares them to be no crime ?
 
 V. 
 
 CRIME AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 
 
 A NY treatise on the influence of English 
 law would be imperfect which did not 
 pass under review the important subject of 
 punishment for crime, in its relation not only 
 to the protection of society but also to the 
 reformation of the transgressors. A careful 
 consideration of this subject is the more 
 necessary since there are few questions on 
 which public opinion has run to greater ex- 
 tremes. 
 
 Criminal punishments in England were 
 formerly both cruel and futile, and even as 
 recently as the beginning of the present 
 century criminals were literally treated as 
 if they were no better than savage animals. 
 Outside the walls of Newgate, groups of 
 wretches might constantly be seen hang- 
 ing side by side on the gallows, many of 
 
 L
 
 ] 46 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 them having been condemned to death for 
 such comparatively slight offences as shop- 
 lifting, sheep-stealing, or even the breaking of 
 machinery ; while hanging itself was a merci- 
 ful punishment compared with the fate of 
 those who, escaping the extreme penalty of 
 the law, lingered out their sentences in the 
 loathsome prisons of the time, or crossed the 
 sea in still more terrible convict-ships, which 
 so well deserved the name they had acquired 
 of " floating hells." 
 
 On reading descriptions of the criminal pun- 
 ishments of those days, and the trivial nature 
 of some of the offences for which they were 
 inflicted, few minds can fail to revolt at the 
 shortsighted selfishness of a community which 
 could allow such a state of things so long 
 to exist ; for while the treatment of criminals 
 was abominable in its cruelty, it was so in- 
 efficacious that crime, especially in its most 
 serious aspects, was never so rife as during 
 this period. 
 
 Some fifty years ago, society, aroused at 
 last to a sense of the iniquity and folly of 
 its conduct, rushed to an opposite extreme, 
 and having for so long ignored the fact
 
 Crime audits Punishment. 147 
 
 that criminals were fellow-men, seemed for 
 the time to forget that, though fellow-men, 
 they were also criminals. From exclusively 
 thinking of the protection of the community, 
 it acted as if exclusively interested in the re- 
 formation of the criminal. Since then public 
 opinion has fluctuated, now leaning towards 
 extreme harshness, now towards excessive 
 lenity, apparently unguided by any just prin- 
 ciple, and therefore continuing only unsettled. 
 
 In endeavouring to fix some just principle 
 of criminal punishment, it is necessary to 
 embody the truths contained in both- of the 
 views above referred to, and it will then be 
 evident that, in order to be just and effective, 
 punishment must not only be retributive, 
 but also deterrent and remedial. It is true 
 that an influential party opposes the first of 
 these demands, denouncing the idea of retri- 
 bution as un-Christian, if not inhuman. But 
 this view seems to derive little support 
 either from reason or revelation,* for even 
 
 * We of course put aside such an interpretation of the words 
 "resist not evil" as would apply them to civil government, a view 
 which no one practically holds. 
 
 L 2
 
 1 48 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 the teaching of the New Testament sternly 
 maintains the doctrine of retribution, and 
 denounces indignation and wrath upon every 
 soul of man that doeth evil ; declaring that 
 suffering, in this world or the next that is, 
 either bitter repentance here or pain here- 
 after must needs follow transgression : while 
 St. Paul, referring to the civil magistrate, 
 asserts that "he is a terror to evil doers, for 
 he beareth not the sword in vain." 
 
 The moral conscience of mankind likewise 
 justifies this view. When a great crime is 
 brought to light and the offender escapes ; 
 when, for instance, some heartless villain 
 has ruined and forsaken a weak woman, 
 and she, mad with the agony of despair, 
 destroys her infant, and through the imper- 
 fection of the law suffers, while he escapes 
 punishment ; or when some powerful ruffian 
 maims and injures his half-starved wife or 
 paramour, and through the unjust leniency of 
 his judge suffers only a few weeks' imprison- 
 ment: there is a universal feeling of indigna- 
 tion that justice should have so sadly failed, 
 and this prevails not alone among the persons 
 concerned, but also among those who are in
 
 Crime audits Punishment. 149 
 
 no way directly interested. This feeling is 
 the natural sense of justice planted in the 
 human heart by its Maker, which demands 
 retribution. 
 
 Even Nature in some degree shadows 
 forth the same truth, for the violation of her 
 laws infallibly entails retribution: those who 
 neglect the laws on which health depends, 
 sooner or later suffer retribution in painful 
 sickness ; those who ignore the physical 
 laws which govern our world, are taught 
 their error by sharp and bitter pain. Indeed, 
 this universal law of retribution may be 
 urged as antagonistic to the arguments put 
 forward by some against the infliction of 
 corporal punishment even upon villains 
 guilty of premeditated acts of violence ; 
 for it can hardly be unjust that those 
 who, abusing their superior strength, wilfully 
 inflict pain and suffering on their fellow- 
 creatures, should undergo punishment in 
 some sort similar to the sufferings they 
 have caused. 
 
 It has, indeed, been urged as an objection 
 to corporal punishment that it is in itself de- 
 grading a contention undoubtedly falla-
 
 1 50 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 cious, for St. Paul evidently felt no degra- 
 dation when five times he received forty 
 stripes save one, and the martyrs, of whom 
 the world was not worthy, far from feeling 
 degraded by their trial of cruel scourgings, 
 counted their scars marks of honour. It is, 
 in truth, impossible for man to be degraded 
 because punishment is inflicted on his body, 
 since degradation is of the soul ; and if a 
 villain be degraded (supposing that possible) 
 by suffering corporal punishment for aggra- 
 vated cruelty to some helpless fellow- 
 creature, we must seek for the cause else- 
 where than in the mere fact that the punish- 
 ment he receives is bodily namely, in the 
 feeling that the crime for which this punish- 
 ment is inflicted is so base that society has 
 cast him out. 
 
 It would appear strictly just for the judge to 
 say to a criminal guilty of aggravated assault, 
 You have violated human law by inflicting 
 wilful pain on a weaker fellow-creature ; you 
 must therefore feel what it is to suffer pain 
 in your own body, and as you writhe under 
 its smart be taught to realize what a fellow- 
 creature has suffered through your wilful
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 151 
 
 cruelty. But while this would be just 
 retribution for crimes of violence and cruelty, 
 there would be no such just retribution in 
 inflicting corporal punishment for theft and 
 similar crimes, for in such a case the criminal 
 might rightly protest that the punishment 
 was an injustice, since, although in a time of 
 temptation he had been guilty of theft, and in 
 just retribution might be compelled to make 
 restitution by the sweat of his brow, there 
 could be no justice in lacerating his body 
 when he had respected the bodies of his 
 fellow-men. 
 
 It must, however, be carefully borne in 
 mind that retribution is, after all, but one of 
 the principles that should be taken into account 
 in criminal punishment ; and though it is 
 so important that through its being ignored 
 weakness has resulted in the administration 
 of justice, yet it is even more important that 
 all punishments should be both deterrent 
 and remedial : in other words, the great 
 aim should be to deter the offender from 
 repeating, and others from committing, similar 
 crimes. We are here met by a difficult pro- 
 blem viz., what punishments are the most
 
 152 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 deterrent ? Statistics are so unreliable that 
 we have little data to go upon, and the 
 subject requires careful examination. It may, 
 however, be taken as indisputable that the 
 punishments most deterrent are such as are 
 most distasteful to the special disposition of 
 the culprits, and probably also that the crime 
 itself often indicates the kind of punishment 
 demanded. 
 
 As a rule, the idle swindler and the skulk- 
 ing thief will fear no punishment so much 
 as the enforcement of hard and steady labour. 
 The heartless scoundrel who rejoices in acts 
 of cruelty, and is generally at heart a coward, 
 will dread no punishment so much as the in- 
 fliction of bodily pain. On this latter point 
 there is strong, though not undisputed 
 evidence, for since flogging was adopted as 
 a part of the punishment for robbery with 
 violence this crime has decreased con- 
 siderably, and probably the results would 
 have been more decisive had the judges and 
 magistrates carried out the law more uni- 
 formly. While writing on this subject it may 
 be added that the want of uniformity and 
 certainty in the sentences of our judges and
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 153 
 
 magistrates is probably the greatest defect 
 in the administration of justice, and also a 
 great inducement to crime. The knowledge 
 that every offence will certainly, if proved, 
 carry its full penalty, is of the first import- 
 ance in dealing with the criminal classes. If 
 they feel that there is not only the chance of 
 escaping conviction, but that, if convicted, 
 there is another chance of their crime being 
 dealt with leniently, the deterrent nature of 
 punishment is greatly weakened. 
 
 But while the retributive and deterrent 
 elements of punishment should thus be such 
 as are most distasteful to the criminal, when we 
 come to the remedial element, an altogether 
 different method of treatment is necessary; 
 and the disregard of this fact has led to serious 
 evil effects, with respect to both the criminals 
 themselves and the safety of society. 
 
 It may be considered almost a truism to 
 say that all punishment should be founded 
 upon the principle of strict justice, which will 
 neither respect the person of the poor nor 
 honour the person of the mighty. With jus- 
 tice in this sense mercy must never interfere, 
 inasmuch as to tamper with it, from any con
 
 154 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 sideration whatever, would be fatal to its very 
 existence. Even if pity influence the scales 
 there is justice no longer. Such justice, how- 
 ever, must include mercy, and in the struggle 
 between society and the criminal the law must 
 take up a position from which it can give due 
 weight to the demands of the injured, and at 
 the same time take into account the circum- 
 stances of the wrongdoer. 
 
 A few striking facts will illustrate the 
 necessity for this discrimination. Out of 
 every hundred criminals, it was found, in 
 1880,* that thirty-three could neither read 
 nor write, and only three and a quarter per 
 cent, could read and write well ; and in a 
 Government report we meet with the follow- 
 ing suggestive paragraph : 
 
 It is painful to have to say that it is to parental 
 neglect that by far the larger share of the grosser crimes 
 of the present day is to be attributed ; in London alone 
 many thousands of children are trained to thieving, 
 dragged up to manhood from the guilt-gardens of our 
 great towns. 
 
 Too many criminals have sucked vice into 
 their nature from degraded mothers, whose 
 
 * Vide Judicial Statistics.
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 155 
 
 breasts have at the same time inoculated their 
 physical system with poisonous spirits. They 
 have been taught to thieve from their very 
 earliest years, sometimes, it is true, passing 
 an intermediate time in a so-called reforma- 
 tory school in close association with hundreds 
 of other young thieves, who have been, like 
 themselves, trained in vice. It would be 
 wonderful if under such conditions they 
 should turn out otherwise than a curse to 
 that society which has so neglected them. 
 
 In dealing, therefore, with the criminal 
 classes it must be remembered that every prin- 
 ciple of punishment that does not include 
 mercy is as unjust as it is cruel. Justice itself 
 demands that, while the law must be vindi- 
 cated, the nature of the punishment inflicted 
 should be remedial and restorative, and that 
 every effort should be made to reform the 
 criminal and to enable him to return to the 
 community, not only morally changed, but 
 with the power to maintain himself by honest 
 means. 
 
 In discussing the question how best to 
 reform criminals, it is necessary to examine
 
 156 Crime audits Punishment. 
 
 the motives for the crimes that are com- 
 mitted against society, and these may be 
 divided into two classes, those arising from 
 passion and those arising from covetousness. 
 Under the former are included all crimes 
 against the person, from common assault to 
 murder, where the object is not to obtain 
 property, but rather the gratification of the 
 passions of cruelty, lust, or revenge ; under 
 the latter, all crimes, whether accompanied 
 or unaccompanied by personal violence, in 
 which the aim is to obtain the property of 
 others. It is evident that, as these two 
 classes of crime arise from different causes, 
 they require entirely diverse modes of treat- 
 ment, if the punishment is to be both just 
 and remedial. Besides this, crimes of passion 
 are of course of very unequal degrees of 
 guilt. Some are committed in the haste of 
 the moment, under circumstances of great 
 provocation or temptation; others are of 
 the gravest kind, sometimes perpetrated 
 systematically, or with deliberate malice. 
 
 With regard to the former of these classes 
 of crime, it is probable that justice is on the 
 whole fairly administered ; but with regard to
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 157 
 
 the latter, such as assaults on wives, children, 
 and helpless dependants or planned attacks 
 upon masters, fellow-workmen and police, the 
 case is totally different. In respect of these 
 the administration of justice, as well as the 
 law itself, is, as has been already pointed out, 
 constantly degraded by the inadequacy of the 
 punishments inflicted, by which no just prin- 
 ciple whatever is satisfied. There is no just 
 retribution in the sentence of three or six 
 months' imprisonment passed upon a wretch 
 who has nearly kicked a helpless woman to 
 death, and made her a sufferer for life, 
 nor is the deterrent principle answered any 
 better by such a sentence. On the contrary, 
 the brutal portion of the community are 
 taught by it (and this is a- most serious con- 
 sideration) that the law lightly esteems per- 
 sonal security, that it counts it a greater 
 crime to steal a few shillings than to injure a 
 fellow- creature so long as fatal consequences 
 do not almost instantly result. As might be 
 expected, such offences increase, and the 
 brutality and violence of the dangerous classes 
 are a standing reproach to the English nation. 
 Little progress can be made in carrying
 
 158 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 out just principles of punishment until the 
 pernicious idea which now prevails and 
 which seems to have been fostered by the 
 traditions of feudal law that a man's pro- 
 perty is more sacred than his person, is 
 dispelled. It is absolutely necessary that 
 we should have more stringent laws and a 
 sterner administration of them, to secure the 
 first object of good government viz., the 
 protection of the person and to teach would- 
 be criminals that they who deliberately injure 
 others will have to suffer pain more or less 
 similar to that which they have inflicted, and 
 will not be permitted again to mingle with 
 society till their savage nature has been 
 subdued by suitable remedial treatment. 
 
 With regard to the punishments now in 
 vogue, some are still both unjust and 
 injurious, as, for instance, the treadmill, which 
 the old offenders and the strong find com- 
 paratively easy, while the weakly suffer 
 when upon it most disproportionate pain, 
 and, from want of skill, sometimes meet 
 with severe accidents. It is also a 
 punishment the reverse of remedial, for
 
 Crime and its Punishment 1 59 
 
 if the aim of the community were to 
 make labour utterly distasteful, no surer 
 means could be devised than to connect 
 it with the monotonous, heavy, useless 
 treadmill. Its effect was fairly expressed 
 by a prisoner, who, on leaving gaol said, 
 " Well ! I never loved work much, but I 
 hate it now" In striking contrast to 
 such useless treatment is that which a just 
 principle of punishment would dictate, and 
 which the Old Testament prescribed viz., 
 that " if a thief were taken he should make 
 restitution ;" in other words, that the law 
 should require him to remain in prison till 
 he had by hard labour under hard conditions 
 made reasonable restitution. If this rule 
 were firmly enforced, and the rogue made to 
 feel that work he must, whether in prison or 
 at liberty, there would be no need of the use- 
 less treadmill, the cruel crank, or any other 
 barbarous punishment. 
 
 The idea of obliging thieves to support 
 themselves, and repay the value of their 
 thefts of course, with certain limitations 
 is by no means chimerical ; several prisons 
 having already been made partly or wholly
 
 1 60 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 self-supporting,' and in some cases even 
 remunerative. It is said that one of the 
 chief prisons in the United States contributed 
 a short time back ,5,000 a year to the 
 revenue, while several others are nearly or 
 entirely self-supporting ; and in England, 
 where intelligent, earnest men have been 
 placed in charge of prisons, considerable 
 amounts have been earned. 
 
 The effect of this method of treatment was 
 amusingly illustrated a short time ago. A 
 prisoner on receiving his discharge was in- 
 formed by the governor, who had during 
 his incarceration enforced hard remunerative 
 occupation, of the amount of money he had 
 earned. " Do you mean to say," asked the 
 prisoner, "that I have earned so much 
 towards your salary ?" " Yes," replied the 
 governor, "you have earned for the gaol 
 nearly double the cost of your keep, and so 
 much for me for keeping you at work."* 
 " Then," exclaimed the man, with excessive 
 annoyance, " I'll take care you shall never 
 see me here again." 
 
 * The prisoner in this instance was an exceptionally clever 
 mechanic.
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 161 
 
 It is said that prisoners often reflect with 
 a sort of savage satisfaction that they are 
 making the community pay for keeping 
 them, and frequently boast, when in prison, 
 that they have never robbed a man of a 
 day's labour by doing one themselves, and 
 that they never will. They have no higher 
 aspiration than to gratify their animal nature, 
 and they ought to be compelled, unless physi- 
 cally incapacitated, to earn their subsistence, 
 and be taught the value and importance of 
 work by being also enabled, through their own 
 industry, to provide a fund with which to 
 begin the world afresh when released. 
 
 Our present system presents a striking 
 contrast to such a wise method of dealing with 
 criminals. It actually contaminates the more 
 innocent, teaching prisoners that time and 
 labour are valueless, and sending forth, on their 
 release, those once convicted ten times more 
 the children of hell than before. The follow- 
 ing remarks, which apply entirely to convict 
 prisons, have been gathered from Government 
 reports, from the recommendations of Com- 
 missions of inquiry, and from the professed 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 experiences of men who have undergone 
 penal servitude, their statements being to a 
 great extent confirmed by the reports of chap- 
 lains, governors of prisons, &c. : 
 
 The first evil of the present system is the 
 want of classification. All convicts are now 
 sentenced to at least five years' penal servi- 
 tude, which by good conduct they can re- 
 duce by about nine months. The first nine 
 months are passed in solitary confinement, 
 after which the prisoners are removed to 
 convict prisons, and are indiscriminately 
 associated with the other inmates. The 
 atmosphere in which they are then placed 
 is thus graphically described by one who 
 lived in it : 
 
 The majority of the old convicts are entirely irre- 
 claimable. They are so vile, so filthy, that no reformatory 
 system would have the slightest chance of inspiring their 
 accursed natures with one pure thought or honest aspir- 
 ation. They are dead to all sense of shame, and have 
 all the same leery look of unmistakable cunning. For the 
 most part, they have been educated in penal schools, 
 and after emerging from reformatories, have graduated 
 under the ^Egis of those licensed dens of infamy, the 
 public-house and the gin-palace. I am not exaggerating. 
 I solemnly declare that whatsoever things are filthy,
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 163 
 
 whatsoever things are hateful and fiendish, if there be 
 any vice and infamy deeper and more horrible than all 
 other vice and infamy, it may be found ingrained in the 
 character of the English professional thief. I have not 
 quite done with them. They profess a deep contrition 
 whenever the chaplain approaches them, and express a 
 deep desire to partake as often as possible of the sacra- 
 mental wine.* 
 
 This professional class contributes by far 
 the largest number to the convicts, and is the 
 ruling power, the reigning influence, the active 
 spirit of every prison. The remaining inmates 
 are of very various characters. Among them 
 are educated men who have committed one 
 wrong act ; others a large class who have 
 committed offences under the influence of 
 drink ; there are also a few unfortunates whom 
 poverty has forced into crime ; and besides 
 these there are many very young men who 
 ought never to have been sent to a convict 
 prison at all. Numbers of these various 
 classes enter prison mere novices in crime ; 
 but, whatever may have been their previous 
 character, they are thrown for some years 
 into the closest association with habitual 
 criminals, are sent on to the public works, 
 
 * " Five Years' Penal Servitude." Bentley & Son. 
 
 M 2
 
 164 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 or into the schools, the tailors' or shoe- 
 makers' shops, and are thrust into the closest 
 communion with the abandoned villains 
 whose characteristics have been already 
 described. Practically, the present system 
 binds them as apprentices for three, five, 
 or seven years, to learn the trade of law- 
 breaking, and during this period they are 
 under the influence, tuition, and example 
 of miscreants who, from the cradle to the 
 grave, exist upon pillage and plunder. By 
 these men they are initiated into all the tricks 
 and dodges by which, during their incarce- 
 ration, they can evade the prison discipline 
 or elude work, and at the end of it can 
 enrol themselves in the great army of pro- 
 fessional thieves. They enter prison mere 
 tyros in crime, and by the fostering care 
 of the Government they may, upon their 
 discharge, be safely pronounced thoroughly 
 qualified for the career of habitual criminals. 
 This association extends to every portion of 
 their prison life. During school,the young man 
 bred in the city, the ignorant countryman, the 
 novice in wrong-doing, sit shoulder to shoulder 
 with old and abandoned criminals, who have
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 165 
 
 not the most remote intention to learn, but 
 who attend school as an excuse to get out 
 of their cells, and for a change of scene. 
 While pretending to be mumbling their lessons, 
 they are engaged in ribald chat, in disgust- 
 ing conversation with their neighbours; or 
 else, if they are silent, are making, filthy and 
 licentious drawings on their slates. Again, in 
 the work-room, there may be fifty old thieves, 
 each with one or two youths, beginners in 
 crime as well as in shoemaking, under his 
 instruction. What the apprentice learns 
 may be easily guessed ; it is not to make 
 shoes or garments, but a more easy, if not 
 a more excellent, way of obtaining money. 
 Sitting in such close proximity, conversation 
 among the prisoners is, of course, practically 
 unchecked ; and the peculiarly gross im- 
 morality and obscenity universal among old 
 thieves can hardly fail to do their evil work 
 in forming the character and habits of the 
 new beginners in vice. 
 
 It may, perhaps, be urged that the convict- 
 prison regulations and the supervision of the 
 warders are sufficient to prevent such evil 
 results ; but in the first place the warders
 
 1 66 Crime and its Pimishment. 
 
 themselves are far from immaculate, as is 
 proved by the numberless cases of convic- 
 tion for breaches by them of prison rules. 
 Far more serious charges have, however, 
 been brought against many of them, and, in 
 not a few instances, it is to be feared with 
 justice. Moreover, to a certain extent they 
 are afraid of the habitual criminals. It re- 
 quires a man of great moral courage to do 
 his duty under the present regulations, as 
 any warder acting strictly in performing his 
 duty becomes the object of a conspiracy, and 
 often of a savage attack when off his guard. 
 The writer previously quoted from says : 
 
 There is a tacit understanding between the old 
 thieves and many of the officers who have them in 
 charge. Badly paid, these warders are often open to 
 bribery from the friends of the thieves, and in return 
 allow the convicts as much latitude as is compatible 
 with safety, while, to get up a fictitious character for 
 vigilance, and to earn promotion, they continually report 
 some of the men obnoxious to them often the least 
 vicious and most industrious of the gang whose consti- 
 tutions are ruined by the constant infliction of bread-and- 
 water punishment. While the old thieves have an easy 
 time, recruit their health in anticipation of a new lease 
 of criminal life, and the warders maintain a reputation for 
 vigilance, the men who suffer are the novices in crime.
 
 Crime audits Punishment. 167 
 
 The usual topics of conversation amongst 
 the convicts are the art of thieving, the cause 
 of failure in daring burglaries, the newest 
 invention for picking locks or opening 
 safes, the most recent dodges for successful 
 robberies at railway stations, the most eli- 
 gible districts for shop-lifting. The novice 
 is also instructed in the secrets and mys- 
 teries of the craft, the different machinery 
 for procuring false evidence, and other 
 dodges for evading the law. The language 
 of the criminals is utterly abominable, and 
 the more revolting it is to decency the more 
 it is enjoyed, not only by their companions, 
 but by many of the men selected by the 
 authorities to superintend the labour and 
 assist in the reformation of the convicts. 
 
 In order to improve the present system, 
 and to carry out any just principles 
 of punishment, the following changes are 
 urgently needed. First, and most important 
 of all, is the necessity for strict classifica- 
 tion.* It has been shown that the inmates 
 
 * The Government Report on Prisons, 1879, pp. 215-18, fully 
 bears out this view as to the necessity for better classification.
 
 1 68 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 of our convict prisons belong to various 
 classes, the most numerous of which is that 
 degraded and almost irreclaimable class of 
 habitual criminals, into whose society and 
 association, and under whose influence all 
 other criminals are forced, although, it may 
 be, the latter have been convicted of com- 
 paratively venial crimes, or of crimes committed 
 under the influence of drink, poverty, or all but 
 irresistible temptation. Hence it results that 
 those who are the least guilty are the most 
 heavily punished, because that which is severe 
 punishment to the novice in crime is little 
 felt by the habitual jail-bird. But, further, the 
 system favours the initiation of beginners into 
 every kind of trick, deception, and crime, 
 and their enrolment, under the influence and 
 tuition of their elders, as able recruits for the 
 army of professional thieves. Nor can this 
 evil be prevented so long as there is any 
 
 The Rev. John Clay (many years Chaplain of Preston Gaol) says : 
 "To make a clear distinction between incidental and habitual 
 offences is the first thing needful in a vigorous administration of the 
 criminal law;" and he adds: "The great majority of provincial 
 convicts are not systematic criminals, but rather incidental offenders, 
 who have been impelled to criminal acts under the stimulus of 
 drink.' 1
 
 Crime and Us Punishment. 169 
 
 opportunity for association ; that is, so long as 
 convicts are organized into gangs, and allowed 
 to walk together, to work together, and to 
 receive schooling together. As regards re- 
 convicted felons little alteration is required, 
 since they may be considered incorrigible; but 
 they should be compelled to work harder and 
 their opportunities for conversation should be 
 reduced. With respect, however, to those 
 who are undergoing their first convict punish- 
 ment the case is altogether different. A large 
 number of these are perfectly reclaimable, 
 and the convict prison should be made a 
 school to redeem, instead of, as at present, a 
 means of irretrievably damning most of those 
 who come under its influence for the first 
 time. 
 
 A reduction of the sentences of prisoners 
 on their first conviction from five to four 
 years might be tried ; or, better still, they 
 might be enabled to shorten their terms of 
 imprisonment more than at present by study, 
 industry, and good behaviour, with this pro- 
 vision that the whole period of their first con- 
 viction should be passed in separate confine- 
 ment, and that during the whole of this time
 
 1 70 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 they should neither mix with nor be influenced 
 by communication with other criminals. Those 
 who are ignorant should receive instruction 
 from properly qualified schoolmasters in their 
 cells, and all should be taught some trade;* 
 while, as an incentive to industry, each pri- 
 soner should clearly understand that the 
 amount of money he will receive on his 
 discharge will depend entirely upon the work 
 done by him. In order to preclude any 
 chance of ill effects from separate imprison- 
 ment, properly qualified visitors, either 
 voluntary or deputed by the various religious 
 societies, should be allowed to visit the 
 jails and to strive to influence the minds of 
 the prisoners ; and a more careful selection 
 should be made of prison officers, who need 
 to be better paid and better supervised, to 
 secure that the rules of the prison are not 
 violated. 
 
 With regard to the latter point Sir Edmund 
 F. Du Cane, K.C.B., Chairman of the Com- 
 missioners of Prisons, observes : 
 
 * It may be urged that this would involve undue expenditure, 
 but those who realize the cost to the community of each habitual 
 criminal will recognize in it the truest economy.
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 171 
 
 The importance of selecting good officers for prison 
 duties cannot be overrated. The officer who is in charge 
 of prisoners has such power, for good or evil, over his 
 fellow-men, that I do not think there are many positions 
 more responsible than that which he occupies. Nor, on 
 the whole, are there, I think, many in which the officer 
 is exposed to more temptations to neglect his duty, or 
 abuse his trust. 
 
 And the Rev. John Clay says : 
 
 The Governor has to trust entirely to the warders. 
 With many of the prisoners he never speaks, from the 
 time they enter, to the time they leave the prison. In 
 fact, the " great object of reclaiming the criminal," con- 
 cerning which the regulations of the Home Office so 
 solemnly warn all prison officers, is left almost entirely 
 for the warders to accomplish. The importance of their 
 office is therefore very great. They should be men 
 endowed with divers notable qualities. 
 
 Hence it is of the utmost importance, firstly, 
 that the warders should be selected from 
 amongst men of moral and religious character ; 
 and secondly, that the governors and chap- 
 lains of prisons should direct special endea- 
 vours to the guidance and training of the 
 warders, and not of the prisoners only. 
 
 The universal testimony of those qualified 
 to judge is that with such treatment as that
 
 172 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 indicated almost all except those who may 
 be ranked as the hereditary criminal classes 
 might be reclaimed ; a result which would not 
 only produce an immense saving to the com- 
 munity, by making honest men of those who 
 would otherwise spend their time between 
 preying upon society and being supported 
 by it, but would also restore to the ranks 
 of labour and useful life thousands upon 
 thousands who are now being made habitual 
 criminals by the unwise treatment they expe- 
 rience when under punishment for their first 
 offence. 
 
 The full cost of convicts to the country has 
 never yet been made known, for a large and 
 unfair charge is made on the War Department 
 for their labour, and included in the Army 
 Estimates : a charge which, if there be any 
 truth in the reports of those who have had 
 opportunity of judging, is twenty times the 
 value of the labour performed. 
 
 It is a terrible indictment to bring against 
 England's governing classes, but unhappily 
 it is one only too well borne out by facts, 
 that the criminal law, as at present adminis- 
 tered, does comparatively very little for the
 
 Crime and its Punishment. 173 
 
 reformation of criminals, but much to swell 
 the ranks of the habitual criminal class. 
 
 The following extracts are from the Report 
 of the Royal Commission on Convict Prisons, 
 1879: ' 
 
 Sec. 72. The existing system of penal servitude . . . 
 not only fails to reform offenders .... but produces 
 a deteriorating effect from the indiscriminate association 
 of all classes of convicts on the public works. 
 
 Sec. 73. It cannot be doubted that prisoners are 
 exposed to the risk of contamination during this stage of 
 their punishment. 
 
 Sec. 74. In spite of all the precautions taken by 
 the prison officers, communication can to a con- 
 siderable extent be carried on between prisoners work- 
 ing in association. . . . The less hardened, and espe- 
 cially the younger convicts, must in some instances 
 become confirmed in crime by the evil advice and 
 conversation of men who have spent their lives in defying 
 the law. 
 
 Sec. 75. In Belgium criminals are subjected to 
 cellular imprisonment for much longer periods (than 
 three years) and it is said, without injury : . . . . and 
 it does not appear that prisoners have suffered unduly 
 from imprisonment in the county and borough gaols. . . . 
 sometimes extending to two years. Upon the whole, 
 we are of opinion that, with certain relaxations during 
 the latter part of thesentences, such as longer hours of 
 exercise, more frequent schooling and visits from chap-
 
 1 74 Crime and its Punishment. 
 
 lains and scripture-readers, more books and more time 
 allowed for reading, more frequent communications 
 with their families by letters and visits all of which, 
 however, it must be borne in mind, would materially 
 diminish the severity of the punishment prisoners might 
 be confined in separate cells, without serious risk, for as 
 much as three years.
 
 ( 175 ) 
 
 VI. 
 
 ON THE UNCHARITABLENESS OF 
 INADEQUATE RELIEF. 
 
 A S a sequel to what has been said in rela- 
 ^^ tion to the ill effects of the present ad- 
 ministration of the Poor-Law, it may not 
 be inadmissible to add some remarks on the 
 necessity for careful discrimination in the 
 bestowal of all relief of the poor, whether 
 such relief be given by the Poor- Law authori- 
 ties, by benevolent societies, or by private 
 persons. If any relief is to be beneficial, not 
 only must it be bestowed after thorough ex- 
 amination, but when given, it must be ade- 
 quate: in fact, the bestowal of inadequate 
 relief is no charity. And here we open that 
 important question How is it possible to 
 relieve want and destitution without caus- 
 ing moral harm to the recipients themselves, 
 injury to the community, and, in the end,
 
 1 76 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 ever-increasing destitution and suffering? In 
 considering this important subject it will be 
 necessary to enter somewhat into the question 
 of unnecessary or disserviceable as well as of 
 excessive and indiscriminate relief, not only 
 as regards that relief which is given by the 
 law, but also that which flows from the bene- 
 volence of individuals. It is impossible to 
 separate these two, as they are so closely 
 connected together, and both have the same 
 end, professedly that of charity. 
 
 Those who have made a study of words, 
 know how sadly many have become degraded 
 from their original signification, and, more- 
 over, are aware that this degradation is often 
 fraught with serious moral effect. Such a 
 change has taken place in the case of the 
 word "Charity" once the embodiment of 
 all that was beautiful which contained a 
 meaning that St. Paul himself failed, in one 
 of his most eloquent passages, adequately to 
 express: a meaning, indeed, which can only 
 be fully fathomed by the study of the life 
 and character of Him who first introduced 
 true charity upon earth by giving Himself to 
 raise the fallen and reclaim the lost
 
 Inadequate Relief 177 
 
 The word " Charity" has now become 
 so degraded that it bears an almost odious 
 meaning to those who have studied social 
 questions deeply. On hearing it used, there 
 rise before the mind pictures of pinched-faced 
 charity children, crowded together in some 
 uncomfortable corner of a city church, or 
 being paraded in a semi-pauper dress before 
 the eyes of self-complacent wardens ; or of a 
 crowd of beggars striving to excite sympathy 
 and elicit alms by exhibiting manufactured 
 wounds and unreal ailments ; or, at the 
 best, as in a well-known painting, of a 
 little Lady Bountiful, dressed in costly 
 silks, on her way to church, dropping a 
 penny into the hat of a ragged beggar, who, 
 with a little girl about Lady Bountiful's 
 own age, but whose appearance presents 
 a painful contrast, solicits alms by the 
 wayside. The scene is well painted, and 
 very little imagination is required to com- 
 plete the story. The little Lady Bountiful 
 goes on her way to church with a feeling 
 that she has been very kind and very 
 good ; and when all likely almsgivers have 
 passed by, the beggar drags his little girl 
 
 N
 
 i/8 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 back to mope in some squalid den, while 
 the alms, so foolishly given, are speedily 
 squandered in drunken debauchery. In 
 short, the use of this word "charity" sug- 
 gests such a mass of hypocrisy, idleness, and 
 profligacy, that the mind of every true 
 philanthropist on hearing it is bowed down 
 in sorrow and dismay. 
 
 But charity, in its true sense, is that loving 
 influence which constrains men and women 
 to sacrifice their own ease and pleasure, as 
 well as their money, not for the gratification 
 of selfish emotion, but in order that they may 
 enter into the real need of the sufferers, and do 
 for each case what is really best, even though it 
 necessitate the infliction of pain, both on their 
 own hearts and on those whom they strive 
 to help. Uncharitableness is the reverse of 
 all this. It is exhibited, not only in the ne- 
 glect of the poor, or in the hoarding of the 
 miser, but also when the emotions of the 
 heart are relieved by indiscriminate alms- 
 giving. It includes everything that is selfish, 
 careless, and unchristian, even benevolent 
 works undertaken in a selfish spirit. Its 
 effect cannot be better described than in the
 
 Inadequate Relief. 179 
 
 cynical epigram of the French, which falsely 
 asserts of charity that it " creates one-half of 
 the misery it relieves, but cannot relieve one- 
 half of the misery it creates." 
 
 Having thus defined the meaning of the 
 word " uncharitableness," there remains the 
 definition of the phrase, " inadequate relief ;" 
 and for this purpose it is necessary to con- 
 sider who are the proper recipients of relief. 
 They are, without doubt, all those who, from 
 misfortune, or even from past faults, have 
 fallen into such a condition of helplessness as 
 prevents them from providing sustenance for 
 themselves or those dependent on them. 
 Among these are orphan or deserted chil- 
 dren, men or women who have been rendered 
 destitute by sickness or accident, artizans out 
 of work or compelled by necessity to dispose 
 of the instruments of their trade, men and 
 women who have lost their character, and 
 with it employment : in a word, all the indi- 
 viduals of that vast mass of suffering poverty, 
 not actually resulting from present wrong- 
 doing, which swells and surges around us, are 
 more or less proper objects of relief. And if 
 we accept this definition, then the meaning of 
 
 N 2
 
 1 8o On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 the term " adequate relief" may be very easily 
 understood. It is such assistance as will place 
 a person, when fallen, in a position to rise 
 again ; if with a lost character, in a position to 
 retrieve it, and in the future honourably and 
 honestly to support himself and his family. 
 
 With this explanation, the truth of the 
 assertion is evident that to relieve any 
 necessitous person inadequately is no act of 
 real charity, but the reverse. 
 
 To illustrate one phase of the subject, let 
 us take the case of a destitute orphan child. 
 If we relieve it inadequately, stint it in its 
 food and education, clothe it in pauper gar- 
 ments, and allow it to remain among pauper 
 associations, it can hardly fail when it arrives 
 at man's or woman's estate to be defective 
 in body and degraded in mind a pauper in 
 heart, and probably the progenitor of a race 
 of paupers. But if, with wise charitableness, 
 we separate it from pauper influences, supply 
 the body with ample nourishment, the mind 
 with sound education, and train it to habits 
 of industry, we shall have recovered a life 
 from degradation. It may almost be said, in 
 the inspired words, that we have "saved a
 
 Inadequate Relief. 1 8 1 
 
 soul from death " and " covered a multitude 
 of sins :" the world will be saved from one 
 more individual degradation, and the multi- 
 tude of evils or sins resulting therefrom. 
 
 Take another example : the relief of a man 
 who has been thrown into poverty by want of 
 work. To bestow upon such an one a dole 
 leaves him very much where he was before. 
 When this is spent, far from being the 
 better for the gift, he is worse, for you have 
 given him a taste of the luxury of eating 
 the bread of idleness -a lesson, unhappily, 
 only too speedily learnt and have therefore 
 done him an infinite amount of harm. But 
 if his case be carefully inquired into, suitable 
 work found for him until permanent employ- 
 ment is obtained, sufficient support being 
 meantime provided to sustain his health : 
 then, this action is not only a true fulfilling 
 of the law of love, but is true economy. 
 
 Probably among the greatest causes of the 
 misery and vice that abound in this country 
 may be reckoned the mistaken view that 
 has been taken as regards the administra- 
 tion of Poor- Law relief, and the reckless
 
 io2 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 and lavish bestowal of alms by the bene- 
 volent. It is almost impossible to conceive 
 how far the direct and indirect results of 
 these evils extend. If, as has already been 
 stated, the English workman squanders his 
 means in times of plenty, and makes no pro- 
 vision for old age, it is greatly owing to the 
 fact that he has been taught that the country 
 has provided legal sustenance for the desti- 
 tute, irrespective of desert, and that there are 
 numberless soft-hearted people ready to sup- 
 plement it. 
 
 An illustration of the great harm done by 
 the lax administration of the Poor- Law was 
 strikingly afforded by a report recently pub- 
 lished of a parish in which 1,339 persons were 
 on the Poor-rate, costing the ratepayers no less 
 than 6s. yd. in the , while, in a neighbouring 
 parish, the conditions of which were very 
 similar, and the population almost equal, 
 there were only 150 paupers and a Poor- 
 rate of 2s. ^d. in the . In other words, in 
 the first parish, 1,189 persons who ought to 
 have been supporting themselves were living 
 wholly or partly at the expense of their neigh- 
 bours.
 
 Inadequate Relief. 183 
 
 A worse evil, if possible, is produced 
 by indiscriminate voluntary relief; a striking 
 proof of which was afforded in New York 
 in 1873, when that city suffered for a time 
 under great commercial depression, causing a 
 most unusual amount of distress. Despite 
 the warnings of the experienced, a large 
 number of soup-kitchens and free lodgings 
 were opened, with an effect which was thus 
 graphically described by one present at the 
 
 time : 
 
 The superabundance of relief attracted into the city 
 the floating mass of vagrancy, the beggars and paupers 
 of the whole State ; the streets swarmed with them ; 
 ladies were robbed, even on their own doorsteps ; 
 drunkenness greatly increased ; the lodging houses over- 
 flowed ; the evil rapidly spread ; labourers on the farms 
 in the interior, although receiving good wages, forsook 
 their work and left the farmers without hands ; houseless 
 girls, avoiding the homes where labour was required of 
 them, lodged in the free lodging-houses, obtained free 
 meals, wandered in the streets at night, and, as a result, 
 large numbers of them were enticed to ruin. 
 
 Again, at Darlington, in 1879, owing ro 
 the depression in the iron trade, many per- 
 sons were thrown out of employment, and 
 much real poverty ensued. But exaggerated 
 demands for gratuitous help were also raised;
 
 184 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 large processions of claimants paraded the 
 streets, and the Guardians were almost be- 
 sieged. They invoked Government advice, 
 which was given, and it consisted in this : 
 " None must starve; but apply the workhouse 
 test." This was done, and the Leeds Mercury 
 (Sept. 22, 1879) gave the result as follows: 
 
 Since that period very little has been heard of the 
 distress in Darlington. What has become of the 1,500 
 or 2,000 people who were said to be starving nobody 
 knows. Certainly they are not in the workhouse. There 
 are no longer long processions in the streets, nor appeals 
 to the Guardians. Yet the Relief Committee give no 
 help beyond what may be required to pay the railway 
 fare of persons who want to go elsewhere. 
 
 It would be easy to bring forward numerous 
 similar cases, but these amply illustrate the 
 evil effects of careless or indiscriminate relief, 
 whether given under legal authority or volun- 
 tarily. It hardly needs to be pointed out 
 that if, in the parish before referred to, only 
 the really necessitous had been relieved, 
 and that adequately, the idle would have 
 been forced to work, thus increasing instead 
 of diminishing the country's wealth. Again, 
 had the philanthropists of New York provided 
 labour and encouraged the distressed to emi-
 
 Inadequate Relief. 185 
 
 grate to other localities where work was more 
 plentiful, at the same time strictly refusing 
 alms to vagrants and professional beggars, 
 the result would have been truly charitable ; 
 whereas the course pursued enticed thousands 
 into ruin and profligacy, and did infinite 
 harm. 
 
 But it may be objected : A certain condition 
 of things exists around us, and the extreme 
 of poverty and suffering that abounds is a 
 national disgrace and a reproach to the 
 Christianity of wealthy England : how is it 
 to be dealt with ? To this the first answer 
 must be that this condition of things certainly 
 does not arise from a want of sufficient pecu- 
 niary relief, since there are not only over 
 800,000 persons now supported by the Poor- 
 Law, but it is calculated that, in London alone, 
 from ,4,000,000 to .5,000,000 are yearly ex- 
 pended in so-called charity. It is evident, 
 therefore, that we must seek a solution of the 
 difficulty, not from increased relief, but from 
 its bestowal in a different and more satisfac- 
 tory manner. 
 
 The influence which almsgiving exercises
 
 1 86 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 in increasing destitution by the production 
 of a pauper spirit has been already referred 
 to. It is well known that numbers, even 
 of well-to-do artisans, are not too proud to 
 waste in drink and other luxuries the ample 
 wages they receive in good times, and at the 
 first pinch of poverty to encourage their wives 
 and children to obtain alms from the benevo- 
 lent ; while amongst the classes immediately 
 below these, a large proportion look upon 
 relief from religious societies and benevolent 
 people almost as a right. Hence the ex- 
 istence of so little provident forethought, so 
 little self-denial, so little anxiety to make the 
 best of good times, so much lavish expendi- 
 ture in self-indulgence. Moreover, employers 
 of labour suffer immense loss by the refusal of 
 these very mendicants to exert themselves to 
 meet the urgent demand for labour when trade 
 is brisk and when they might lay by amply 
 for times of depression. There is, indeed, 
 no more independent workman when labour 
 is plentiful than the one who is most ready to 
 seek assistance when it is scarce. The Poor- 
 Law and unorganized charity have, between 
 them, almost destroyed thrift and industry.
 
 Inadequate Relief. 187 
 
 When the Marylebone Chanty Organiza- 
 tion Committee was formed, a notification was 
 placarded, intimating that the old charity 
 regime was over, and that no relief might be 
 expected during the coming winter without 
 thorough investigation. The secretary of a 
 working-men's provident club, on an attempt 
 being made to explain the scheme to him, 
 said : " I may not fully understand your 
 intention, but one thing has struck me very 
 strongly that ever since your placard 
 appeared on the walls, contributions have 
 come tumbling into our club in a wonderful 
 way. Clearly a good lot of my mates have 
 taken the hint." 
 
 In the book from which the above inci- 
 dent is taken,* appears also the following 
 report from a City Missionary, of the de- 
 moralizing influence of unwise almsgiving : 
 
 Two ladies, apparently sisters, were wont in a quiet 
 way to visit a depraved family in a court in my district 
 visits always accompanied with relief. Prior to the fatal 
 settlement of this family, the occupiers of the court were 
 fairly sober and industrious, and open to religious visita- 
 tion. But observing how much better the proteges of 
 these two bountiful ladies throve, they became discon- 
 * " The Charity Organizationist.''
 
 1 88 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 tented ; and as filth and rags appeared to be the step- 
 ping-stones to relief, quickly rendered themselves eligi- 
 ble. In a wonderfully short time the whole court 
 rejected religious ministrations, which brought no alms, 
 and became a nest of squalid vice and drunken 
 pauperism. 
 
 To return to our difficult problem the 
 relief of distress without these injurious effects 
 it must first be noticed that destitution 
 may be divided into three kinds and should 
 be met by three distinct organizations. 
 
 First of all, there is the poverty which 
 falls through misfortune upon members of 
 churches and religious communities. The 
 relief of this would appear to belong ex- 
 clusively to the churches themselves. Any 
 religious community which does not provide 
 for its own poor that is, for those who, in 
 happier times, have consistently maintained 
 a religious confession in communion with it 
 stands self-condemned. The relief of such 
 is the special business of the pastor and 
 officers of the church ; and if any poor mem- 
 ber is suffered by them to fall into such want 
 as to be compelled to apply for extraneous 
 alms or parish relief, the church is convicted
 
 Inadcqiiate Relief, 189 
 
 of want of brotherly love, has denied the 
 Christian faith, and is worse than infidel. 
 Not even here, however, should the great 
 principle be relaxed a principle essential 
 " If the administration of all true charity : 
 to any man will not work, neither shall he 
 eat" 
 
 If this consideration were carefully kept in 
 view, it would tend to do away with the 
 unwise jealousy with which Associations for 
 the Organization of Charity are regarded by 
 some of the clergy, as though they trenched 
 on their own peculiar work. It is the clergy- 
 man's peculiar work to look after the poor 
 members of his own Church, but it devolves 
 equally on all Christian and philanthropic 
 men and women to work together for the 
 elevation of the masses and the relief of the 
 general poverty. The undertaking of gene- 
 ral relief by ministers, evangelists, and dis- 
 trict visitors has been, and always will be, 
 a hindrance to the spread of the Christian 
 religion. It not only produces a lamentable 
 amount of hypocrisy and deceit amongst 
 those seeking alms, but raises in the minds 
 of the better disposed and more independent
 
 190 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 of the working classes a prejudice against 
 religious visitation, which they instinctively 
 connect with unworthy patronage and base 
 deception. 
 
 Clergymen and evangelists who visit the 
 poor with a Bible in one hand and an alms- 
 bag in the other, little know the difficulty they 
 put in the way of the artisan attending a 
 place of worship. There are not many who 
 can bear the taunt which is pretty certain to 
 be thrown at them by their comrades : " Oh ! 
 you are beginning to go to church, are you ? 
 What do you expect to get by it ?" 
 
 A respectable working-man once said to 
 the writer of the book already quoted : 
 
 I don't want any charity ; but there's our own fore- 
 man, with ^3 a week, and only two children, who are 
 always in rags, and his wife constantly in and out of the 
 public-house. When she was took ill, the people of 
 
 Church came to see her. My stars, didn't they 
 
 go it ! Such chicken broth ! Several of my mates have 
 took up with that church since that chicken broth. But 
 then, you see, when my children were ill, the visitor 
 comes in, and when she sees my place look neat and 
 home-like as I have made myself a bookcase and a 
 little furniture, and bought a bit of carpet " Oh," she 
 says, " I am glad to see you so comfortable and that you 
 don't want anything, for I have a great deal of distress
 
 Inadequate Relief. 191 
 
 in my district ;" and then she goes away to the people 
 next door, one of the worst cases of drinking on the sly 
 in the whole place. My wife says to me, she says, " I 
 didn't want their charity ; but it's very hard and hurtful 
 to the feelings to see careless, drunken people get 
 money because they live like hogs." Many o' my mates 
 call it " dirty charity." 
 
 Looking at it in this way, it is not surprising 
 that they reject the religion which they asso- 
 ciate with it. 
 
 A large portion of the remaining poverty 
 is the proper object of relief through the 
 Guardians by means of the Poor- Law. It is 
 not necessary here to enter particularly into 
 this subject,which has been already considered, 
 but in this, as in all other systems of relief, it 
 is essential that what is given should be 
 suitable and sufficient : to destitute children, 
 food, education, and associations which shall 
 completely break off their connection with 
 pauperism ; to able-bodied persons, such relief, 
 and given in such a way, as shall both enable 
 and induce them to relinquish it as speedily 
 as possible ; to the aged, such maintenance as 
 shall prevent their life being a misery to them 
 though here it would seem only just that
 
 192 On the Un charitableness of 
 
 distinction should be made, and that equal 
 advantages should not be given to the drunk- 
 ard and profligate, whose last home is natu- 
 rally the workhouse, with those given to the 
 hard-working, deserving poor, who, having 
 worked till they could work no longer, and 
 starved till they could starve no longer, to 
 keep free from the " House," find themselves 
 at last in extreme necessity. 
 
 One very difficult problem remains viz., 
 how to deal with the case of widows having 
 children. The present system generally is 
 to give a small weekly dole, partly in 
 food and partly in money, and this is utterly 
 wrong as well as cruel, for the result is 
 to form a centre of pauperism in the 
 district, and to keep the families in that 
 worst of all positions, on the verge of destitu- 
 tion insufficiently clothed, insufficiently fed, 
 insufficiently cared for. These children are 
 the most difficult cases the School Boards 
 have to deal with, and there is no doubt 
 that such unwise treatment is one cause 
 of the startling fact that, out of 5,567 
 boys who presented themselves in one 
 year as candidates for the Navy, no less
 
 Inadequate Relief. 193 
 
 than 4,410 proved on examination unsuitable 
 on account of an unsound constitution, liability 
 to fits, or inability to read or write. The 
 conviction of the writer, formed after con- 
 siderable reflection, is that the way to meet 
 this difficulty is to send the elder children of 
 those able-bodied widows who need parochial 
 relief to the district schools, leaving with the 
 mother only such as she herself can well 
 and sufficiently maintain by her own labour, 
 but at the same time giving every facility for 
 such intercourse between the parent and the 
 children as shall keep up the family affection. 
 
 To pass to the third division, that great 
 mass which may be described as semi-paupers, 
 those who, when not actually receiving 
 Poor- Law relief, are ever hovering on the 
 verge of it, and upon whom the greater 
 part of the ,5,000,000 said to be yearly 
 bestowed in charity in London alone, is 
 probably wasted, or ten times worse than 
 wasted. It has already been pointed out 
 how excessive is the evil arising from 
 much of this almsgiving ; how it enervates 
 the working-classes, leading them to refuse 
 
 o
 
 1 94 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 instead of to welcome any extra work in times 
 of pressure ; how it renders them independent 
 towards their employers when trade is brisk, 
 and willingly dependent upon alms when 
 work is slack ; how it destroys the influence 
 of Christian visitors by connecting alms- 
 giving and evangelization together, making 
 hypocrites of those who, through a profes- 
 sion of religion, hope to obtain money, and 
 inducing those whom we most desire to win 
 to refuse religious visitation, lest they should 
 be thought to be seeking for charity ; how 
 its tendency is perpetually to drag down the 
 working-classes ; how it is the source from 
 which profligacy, drunkenness, and nearly 
 all the vices which infest our large towns 
 plentifully flow. 
 
 But how are we to deal with this evil ? 
 We cannot leave those apparently in the 
 extremity of distress unaided; yet, if we yield 
 to our feelings and assist them without careful 
 discrimination, nine times out of ten we in- 
 jure the recipient, and are guilty of a crime 
 against society. It is a difficult problem, but 
 fortunately it has already to a great extent 
 been solved.
 
 Inadequate Relief . 195 
 
 Dr. Chalmers first showed the way in 
 St. John's parish, Glasgow, where, in ten 
 years, he reduced the amount of relief given 
 from ^1,400 to ^"190 yearly, with great 
 advantage to the whole community. The 
 township of Elberfeld, following the same 
 method, in twelve years reduced the number 
 of paupers from 4,800 to 1,800, notwithstand- 
 ing that during that time the population 
 increased from 50,000 to 64,000 and great 
 commercial depression existed.* The system 
 adopted in each place was similiar to that 
 which is recommended by the Charity 
 Organization Society of London, and the 
 principles are these : repression of vagrancy 
 by a strict enforcement of the Vagrancy Laws ; 
 a thorough investigation into every case 
 where relief is applied for; and when the 
 case proves deserving, the bestowal of relief 
 that is both suitable and adequate such as 
 will enable the recipient to rise from the 
 position into which he has fallen. 
 
 * The recent accounts from Elberfeld are, however, less satis- 
 factory than the earlier ones, in consequence of relief having been 
 made too easy, by being given unconditionally and without suffi- 
 cient discrimination. 
 
 O 2
 
 196 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 It may be asked by what means such a 
 system is to be established and carried on. 
 The writer's own experience may show both 
 what is necessary in order to form a Charity 
 Organization Committee and the good that 
 can be effected by it. 
 
 The neighbourhood in which the experi- 
 ment was tried was at the time infested 
 with beggars to such an extent that ladies 
 returning home on winter nights were fre- 
 quently insulted at their own doors, while 
 in an adjacent district there were nests of 
 undoubted impostors. Two or three gentle- 
 men formed themselves into a Committee, 
 sent out circulars to all the householders 
 in the neighbourhood asking for subscrip- 
 tions, and supplied them in return with a 
 number of tickets to be given to beggars 
 applying for alms, with the assurance that 
 any one bearing such a ticket would, if in 
 extremity, be immediately relieved, his case 
 thoroughly investigated, and, if found de- 
 serving, adequate assistance would be given. 
 A charity officer was appointed with instruc- 
 tions to put himself in communication with 
 the police, the Poor- Law authorities, and
 
 Inadequate Relief. 197 
 
 the charitable societies in the neighbour- 
 hood. 
 
 The result was magical. Within twelve 
 months the streets were completely freed 
 from beggars, the impostors forsook their 
 haunts, while the strictest investigation found 
 no case of a deserving person in real dis- 
 tress. The action of the Committee was, if 
 anything, liberal, for, during a severe frost of 
 eight weeks' duration, it distributed money to 
 the extent of from ^18 to ^25 per week, but 
 so thoroughly was every case known, through 
 the charity officer or by the members of the 
 Committee, that within a fortnight from the 
 breaking-up of the frost only 5^. per week 
 was being given away in relief. 
 
 A reproach was, indeed, brought against 
 the Committee, which may be noticed, as 
 a similar foolish complaint is very often 
 made against such institutions, that the 
 total amount of money relief given in one 
 year was only equal to the charity 
 officer's salary. It must never be forgotten 
 that the truest charity is to prevent the 
 demoralization of mendicancy, to compel 
 the idle to become industrious, and assist
 
 198 On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 them to obtain work ; to make the improvi- 
 dent become provident, by the knowledge 
 that if they lavish their earnings upon self- 
 indulgence, when hard times come there will 
 be no indiscriminate relief to fall back upon. 
 Every penny that might have been expended 
 beyond what was actually given would have 
 been disserviceable and harmful, while the fact 
 that the Committee employed a superior man 
 to investigate the cases, ensured that those 
 who really deserved help would obtain that 
 which they needed. 
 
 A properly organized Association, while it 
 shrinks from giving a single dole which cannot 
 adequately relieve but may injure the re- 
 cipient, will not hesitate to expend large sums 
 if thereby the individual can be helped to in- 
 dependence. That this principle is generally 
 carried out is shown by many cases which 
 have recently come before the writer in re- 
 gard to the work of some of the Charity 
 Organization Societies in different parts of 
 London, a few of which will illustrate the 
 treatment required. 
 
 First, there is a case of a widow with 
 five children, who had set up a little shop
 
 Inadequate Relief. 199 
 
 and been ruined by it. She was, at the time 
 the matter was brought before the St. Pancras 
 Committee by a School Board officer, earn- 
 ing only a few shillings by her needle, and 
 utterly unable to support her children. A 
 gentleman, being informed by the Com- 
 mittee of the circumstances, placed one boy in 
 an orphanage ; a girl of six years was sent to 
 a home in the country, i o being paid by the 
 Committee for her admission ; and as the 
 mother's health appeared to be giving way, 
 her eyes being so affected that she was unable 
 to sew, the Committee sent her to a conva- 
 lescent home for a month, and on her return, 
 much improved in health, a sewing-machine 
 was obtained for her. She has now plenty 
 of work, and her eldest boy is earning 6s. a 
 week as a box-maker. By this help the 
 whole family was rescued from poverty, and 
 placed in a condition of self-support. 
 
 Another case, that of a man in great dis- 
 tress from want of work, was sent by a 
 School Board officer to the Poplar Com- 
 mittee. Boots and clothes were given to two 
 children, the mother and her infant were 
 sent into the country for three weeks, and
 
 2OO On the Uncharitableness of 
 
 work having been found for the man, he was 
 enabled to make a fresh start. 
 
 Again, a deserving man, found in great 
 distress from being without work, was re- 
 ferred to the Islington Committee. He had 
 belonged to a Benefit Society, but had been 
 unable to keep up the payments. His goods 
 were mostly pawned, and he was in debt for 
 rent. 2 2s. lod. was expended to tide him 
 over his difficulties, and he was assisted to 
 obtain work. This help has been the means 
 of putting him and his family on their feet 
 again. 
 
 These are only a few of many similar cases, 
 records of which the writer has before him, 
 that have been adequately relieved by these 
 Associations, and nothing is wanted but a 
 complete extension of the system (thoroughly 
 carried out by wise heads and loving hearts, 
 every district being reduced to workable 
 limits and well cared for) to solve the great 
 problem of adequate and beneficial relief, to 
 produce a marked change for the better 
 amongst the poorest classes, to make them 
 more industrious, provident, and it may be 
 even virtuous ; thus reducing the amount
 
 Inadequate Relief. 201 
 
 of destitution, and at the same time 
 adequately relieving that which may still 
 remain. This can, however, only be accom- 
 plished by philanthropic and religious persons 
 acting resolutely, and, at whatever cost to 
 their own feelings, setting their faces against 
 indiscriminate almsgiving, and in sufficient 
 numbers rendering personal service. Let 
 the clergy of all denominations join in this 
 grand work, and, instead of being themselves 
 almoners and making their visitors such, let 
 them co-operate heartily with Committees 
 formed for this purpose, on which they 
 should be largely represented, and where 
 they would be warmly welcomed. They will 
 thus ensure every benefit which now flows 
 from their bestowal of relief, without the 
 great harm caused by the present mode of 
 distribution. 
 
 In conclusion, I repeat that no systems 
 no organizations no associations can of 
 themselves do the true work of charity. It 
 must be accomplished by a combination of 
 heart and head, and through willing human 
 hands. The mistake that has been made in
 
 2O2 Uncharitableness of Inadequate Relief. 
 
 the past has arisen from the belief that 
 charity consisted in merely relieving your 
 neighbour's wants ; while benevolent people 
 have not recognized the fact that if relief is 
 to be given without injury, it is absolutely 
 necessary that the giver must sympathe- 
 tically enter into the feelings of those whom 
 he desires to help, and must, if we may so 
 speak, become, after the example of our great 
 Exemplar, one of them, bearing their woes 
 and carrying their sorrows in order that he 
 may be able at once both to supply their 
 needs and elevate their characters. Chris- 
 tians should remember that, by the very 
 name they bear, they are pledged to this 
 work, 
 
 " And men who work can only work for men, 
 And, not to work in vain, must comprehend 
 Humanity, and so work humanly, 
 And raise men's bodies still by raising souls. 
 The man most man, with tenderest human hands, 
 Works best for men, as God in Nazareth."
 
 ( 203 ) 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE LAW. 
 
 Pauperism in New York State. 
 
 The following striking passages are taken 
 from the New York Times : 
 
 The State of New York Board of Charities, of which 
 Professor Dwight is the President, has issued its fifth 
 annual report. The duty of this Board is to inspect the 
 public charities of the State and make such recommenda- 
 tions to the Legislature as they deem best on their 
 management. Few who have not studied the subject 
 can have an idea how broad is the field of work of our 
 charities receiving aid from the State. Their property 
 interest is enormous, amounting during the past year to 
 20,450,272 dols. of real estate, and 3,727,602 dols. of 
 personal property. The aid they received from the State 
 Treasury reached the sum of 1,635,558 dols., and from 
 municipalities the large amount of 3,341,762 dols., while 
 their total annual receipts were 7,832,902 dols., and their 
 expenditure 7,259,568 dols. The whole number of 
 persons in these institutions during the year was 92,741; 
 the number temporarily relieved, 98,368 ; the number
 
 204 Appendix. 
 
 receiving outside free medical and surgical aid, 294,364; 
 and the number under gratuitous educational training, 
 7?339- In the county poor-houses alone there were 
 during the year 18,933, and in the city institutions 39,286 
 persons. The houses of refuge trained and sheltered 
 5,619 of our youth, the Catholic Protectory containing 
 much the largest number 2,380. Of idiots, 68 1 were 
 specially cared for, and of inebriates 315 in the Bing- 
 hamton Asylum. The number of deaf and dumb in- 
 structed and relieved was 714 ; of blind, 549 ; of insane, 
 S73- [The population of the State approaches 
 4,500,000.] The report of Professor Dwight in regard 
 to the management of our county poor-houses contains 
 suggestions of the highest value. It is well known that 
 when this Board began its labours, the condition of these 
 misnamed houses of charity was shocking in the extreme. 
 There was but little classification, and one of the most 
 terrible diseases which can afflict a civilized community 
 began to break out here in our rural districts hereditary 
 pauperism. The Secretary of the State Board visited one 
 almshouse in Western New York where four generations 
 of females were prostitutes and paupers. Even at this 
 time, in the Westchester Almshouse, there are two or 
 three generations of paupers. The first great step of 
 reform was the classification of the insane, and the 
 withdrawal of large numbers from the country poor- 
 houses and the placing them in the State Willard 
 Asylum, on Seneca Lake. Still another important 
 measure was the separation of the pauper children in 
 Broome County and several adjoining counties from the 
 almshouses, and placing them in an institution near 
 Binghamton, called the Susquehanna Valley Home. 
 This wise measure should at once be imitated in 
 all parts of the State. A pcor-house is no place for 
 children. They catch the bad habits of the institution,
 
 Appendix. 205 
 
 and they grow up lazy and dependent. There is no 
 excuse in this country for retaining a single child in a 
 poor-house. The demand everywhere for children's 
 labour is beyond all supply, and thousands of homes are 
 open to shelter and instruct such unfortunate children. 
 We trust that an Act will pass during this Session of the 
 Legislature requiring the superintendents of the poor in 
 the various counties to place their pauper children in 
 intermediate houses like the Susquehanna Valley Home, 
 which Institutions shall be under State and private 
 management. Every five counties should be allowed a 
 "Children's Home," and the counties need not be re- 
 quired to pay any more for the support of the children 
 than they do now. Then each home should be required 
 to place out very carefully every sound pauper child after 
 a six months' residence. Professor Dwight also recom- 
 mends, very wisely, the establishment of "Industrial 
 Almshouses." Our county poor-houses are now full of 
 able-bodied paupers. Each winter they sail in there for 
 harbour. They ought to be made to support themselves. 
 As it is now, the county paupers of the State only pay 
 one-fifth of their cost, or about 32,342 dols. If State 
 workhouses were established these county able-bodied 
 paupers could be separated, classified, and made to earn 
 their living. Then the county houses could be limited 
 to the sick, aged, and helpless. All that considerable 
 class, moreover, who commit minor offences, and are put 
 for short periods in county gaols, ought to be placed 
 where they would support themselves, and at the same 
 time learn some useful branch of industry. At present 
 these petty criminals spend their time in complete idle- 
 ness in the county gaols, and go out worse than they 
 entered. To improve this class, there should be a sepa- 
 rate department in the State workhouses proposed, and 
 the criminal statutes should be changed, so that the
 
 206 Appendix. 
 
 magistrates could commit them to these workhouses, 
 and for longer terms than is at present the custom. 
 
 Dwellings of the Poor. 
 
 The subjoined evidence was given before 
 the Commission to enquire into the employ- 
 ment of children, young persons, and women 
 in agriculture. 
 
 A witness from Chapel Brampton (North- 
 amptonshire) said : 
 
 I have known cases of one, and sometimes two 
 married daughters living with their husbands in a small 
 cottage with their father and mother and grown-up 
 brothers and sisters. I was in a cottage a few days 
 ago, which measured 16 by 18 feet, in which lived an 
 old man, 84 years of age, his son and son's wife, and 
 eleven children. 
 
 Another witness said : 
 
 Anything more deplorable than the way in which 
 large masses of the population in the neighbourhood of 
 Newent are housed cannot be conceived. The state of 
 their homes tells upon the whole physical condition of 
 the people. Many of them never wash ; the flannel 
 under-vest is perhaps only taken off when it is worn 
 out. 
 
 The following is the description given by a 
 witness of the state of things in Bishop's 
 Castle (Shropshire) :
 
 Appendix. 207 
 
 The houses are deplorable. The majority have only 
 one bedroom ; and as some will keep their girls at 
 home, in some cases grown-up boys and girls are sleep- 
 ing in the same room. It is not at all an uncommon 
 thing for a bolster to be placed at each end of the bed, 
 so that all the family sleep in it, with their feet towards 
 the middle. On a recent occasion, the vicar, going to 
 baptise a child, found five or six children in a bed with 
 the mother, in which the father would have to sleep. 
 
 Mr. Elliott, a surgeon, of Bellingham 
 (Northumberland), stated that 
 
 He had some time ago to step over fourteen beds 
 in one room in an iron-work cottage to relieve a patient ; 
 and had frequently been shocked at the presence of men 
 sleeping in the open apartment above during the time 
 of a woman's confinement. 
 
 An equally deplorable state of things exists 
 even in the metropolis, as is proved by the 
 following account of the proceedings of the 
 Whitechapel Vestry, reported in The Metro- 
 politan, June 25, 1 88 1 : 
 
 The following report from Mr. Battram, sanitary 
 inspector, was read : " I have to direct your atten- 
 tion to the unsanitary condition of the houses in the 
 following courts, viz. : Inkhorn Court, High Street, 
 Whitechapel, Peter's Court, Little Peter's Court, part of 
 the houses in Cartwright Street, Turner Street, Sun 
 Court, Rose Court, Farthing Alley, Searl's Buildings, 
 Hairbrain Court, and Parson's Court. This property 
 has all been taken by the Metropolitan Board of Works, 
 under the Artizans and Labourers' Dwellings Act, 1875.
 
 208 Appendix. 
 
 At Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, Inkhorn Court, the yards are 
 flooded with liquid filth. The public privies are stopped, 
 and they are in a filthy condition. This court is one 
 included in the Flower and Dean Street scheme. I am 
 informed that the tenants have paid no rent for the past 
 month. Some of the houses have been shored up, being 
 dangerous structures. The following are situated in the 
 Whitechapel and Limehouse scheme : Peter's Court ; 
 the houses generally dirty and dilapidated, the drains 
 defective, the privies dilapidated, and the yards badly 
 paved. The houses in Little Peter's Court, Cartwright 
 Street, Turner Street, Sun Court, Farthing Alley, Rose 
 Court. Searl's Buildings, Hairbrain Court, and Parson's 
 Court, are in a similar state. In Sun Court there is no 
 water supply, the tenants having to fetch their water 
 from Rose Court. A more unsanitary state of things 
 than exists in these courts cannot possibly be imagined, 
 and steps should at once be taken to close the houses or 
 to put them into a proper sanitary condition. I have, 
 therefore, to ask you to take such steps as shall cause 
 the above-named defects lo be remedied at once, or it 
 may cause a serious outbreak of fever, or other epidemic 
 disease. I may add that I have communicated with 
 the Metropolitan Board respecting sanitary defects exist- 
 ing in some of these houses; but nothing has been done 
 to remedy the same." 
 
 Mr. Abrahams said it seemed only too clear that 
 somebody should be indicted for this. 
 
 Major Munro said he felt bound to confess that the 
 truth of the representations made by their sanitary 
 officer was beyond denial ; but the Metropolitan Board 
 were not to blame in the matter. 
 
 Mr. Barham said he must deny that overcrowding 
 was not increasing. He could vouch from what he had 
 himself witnessed, that overcrowding of the most mon-
 
 Appendix. 209 
 
 strous and indescribable character went on in Spital- 
 fields. 
 
 It was ordered that the sanitary inspector's report 
 should be forwarded to the Metropolitan Board of 
 Works; and the subject was also remitted to the 
 Committee of Works for consideration. 
 
 The urgent need for remedial legislation is 
 thus urged in a paper on " Overcrowding and 
 Crime," issued by the Howard Association : 
 
 The large amount of overcrowding, both in town and 
 country tenements, is a most fruitful source of crime and 
 vice. Yet its remedy is a subject of the utmost practical 
 difficulty. Mr. Cross, as Home Secretary, devoted most 
 earnest endeavours to grapple with it, by means of the 
 " Artizans' Dwellings Act." But, unfortunately, this Act 
 has in great degree become a failure, and has afresh 
 exemplified the evils of mere permissive legislation. It 
 was rendered applicable to all towns of 25,000 per- 
 sons or upwards, that is to say, to about eighty tosvns. 
 Recent able articles in the London, provincial, and other 
 journals, show that in about sixty towns it remains a 
 dead letter. In eleven it has led to discussion. In two 
 or three it has resulted in the demolition of buildings, but 
 not in their erection. So that it has even been perverted 
 to great mischief. For it has both increased, by the 
 demolitions, the previous overcrowding, and also, the 
 demolitions have involved enormous expense. It is 
 stated that in Lor Ion, under its provisions, the dwellings 
 on six sites have been demolished at a cost to the rate- 
 payers of ^"734,000, the land being resold for less than 
 ; 1 00,000, or at a loss on these sites of more than 
 ;6oo,ooo. 
 
 Here, again, legislation is weak. Private endeavours, 
 
 P
 
 2 1 o Appendix. 
 
 as in the case of the Peabody Dwellings, Sir S. 
 Waterlow's Buildings, and similar undertakings, have 
 done far more. Yet legislation ought to be available for 
 at least some good in this direction. The old Romans 
 had ./Ediles, government officers with great powers over 
 the erection of buildings. Britain also needs adiles. But 
 every proposition of this sort causes an outcry from 
 ignorant or interested persons, on the evils of " grand- 
 motherly" or u paternal" government. Whereas a truly 
 paternal government is a blessing to nations. The 
 majority of mankind are, and must continue to be, in 
 many respects as helpless as children. They need 
 fathers " and guides. And where these are wanting, 
 greedy avarice and noisy, selfish demagogues will step in 
 and take their place. For example, there is free and 
 independent America, where all modes of " paternal " 
 government have been got rid of. But the poor of its 
 cities are, in consequence, the victims of a more cruel 
 avarice and godless despotism than in almost any other 
 part of the world. For example, the Philadelphia 
 Journal remarked in 1879, that in the seventeenth ward 
 of New York city, " the average space for each inhabi- 
 tant, man, woman, and child, is 9^ feet square. It takes 
 fourteen to sixteen feet to bury one. This frightful fact 
 epitomises, in a sentence, our tenement house system. 
 Men live in a little more than half the area of ground 
 their corpses occupy when dead. The consequences 
 in disease moral and political are awful." Practically, 
 thousands have no homes, but merely a part of a small 
 bed at night. Hence the duration of life, of persons of 
 20 years of age, has been shortened in New York since 
 1810 (says the same journal) by nearly fourteen years. 
 
 An English medical statistician, Dr. Drysdale, shows, 
 in a recent letter, that the condition of the poor in 
 England and Wales involves the premature death of
 
 Appendix. 211 
 
 142,000 persons per annum. This is probably much 
 under the mark. One murder creates a sensation. 
 Thousands pass without remark. 
 
 Modern city tenements (and many rural ones also) 
 are, in innumerable instances, unsuitable for the essential 
 objects of Domestic Devotion, Home Happiness, Hos- 
 pitality, Education, and Health. How very much, then, 
 that is opposed to the operation of the Kingdom of 
 God is involved in this ! How essentially a Religious 
 Question does the remedy become. 
 
 Mr. C. L. Corkran, for thirty years the intelligent 
 and good-hearted manager of the East London Mission 
 amongst the poor (of Spitalfields), reports that in his 
 district, " the waste of life, consequent on the condition 
 of the people's dwellings, would be appalling if it was 
 not so common. I could readily find a score of families, 
 each of which, on an average, has lost five children, chiefly 
 in their infancy. This waste of life has its hardening 
 almost deadening effect on the feelings of parents and 
 their surviving offspring. 
 
 Sabbath Desecration, Intemperance, Crime, and 
 Death, are all vastly involved in the question of over- 
 crowding. And overcrowding itself is intimately con- 
 nected with the laws affecting land and buildings. The 
 subject is confessedly most difficult; but, considering 
 its extreme importance, it should have much more atten- 
 tion than it has had hitherto from Governments and 
 Parliament. All parties have too much neglected it for 
 mere outlandish foreign politics and distractions. Only 
 a few philanthropic individuals, or groups, have really 
 taken it up. It is one of the greatest of home interests 
 both from a national and from a private point of view. 
 The evils involved demand that mere local and vested 
 private " rights " shall be, wherever necessary, resolutely 
 and compulsively overriden. ^Ediles are everywhere 
 
 P 2
 
 212 Appendix. 
 
 wanted ; not merely the existing public surveyors, but 
 officers armed with effectual powers to prevent the erec- 
 tion of all dwellings unfit for human habitation, and to 
 make fit those now unfit at the expense of the owners and 
 builders. Deterrents should be raised against bad 
 buildings. 
 
 II. THE ORPHAN'S WRONG. 
 
 The Evil Effects of Bringing up Children 
 in large Pauper Schools. 
 
 Some years since great complaints were 
 made of the continuing prevalence of oph- 
 thalmia amongst the pauper children in the 
 Mitcham Schools. Mr. Hedley, the Govern- 
 ment Inspector, said that " the hospital at 
 Mitcham was of the most improved character, 
 and yet in it he found upwards of thirty chil- 
 dren all suffering from acute ophthalmia." 
 He urged the Guardians to send no more 
 children there, but to keep them in the work- 
 house. This recommendation elicited an 
 objection from a Guardian, who protested 
 against exposing the poor children to the 
 vicious example of elder paupers and " all the 
 blasphemy common to such places." Another
 
 Appendix. 2 1 3 
 
 Guardian, speaking of the Mitcham Schools, 
 said, "they had spent ,28,000 on the 
 wretched place." It was added that the 
 children were costing gs. o\d. per head 
 per week! 
 
 This almost insuperable tendency of the 
 District Schools to generate ophthalmia is 
 acknowledged by Dr. Bridges, who states in 
 a Report inserted in a Blue Book of the 
 Local Government Board : 
 
 I have never as yet visited a pauper school from 
 which ophthalmia in one form or other was entirely 
 absent. 
 
 In the same Blue Book, Mrs. Senior (an 
 Inspector) reports : 
 
 In one school I saw a child of six years old whose 
 language was so horrible that the matron was obliged to 
 send her as soon as lessons were over to one of the 
 dormitories, in order to get her away from the other 
 children. She was probably too young to know that it 
 was to her interest to hold her tongue in the presence of 
 (he officers. In a few years she would be more cunning, 
 and keep her bad language for the playground and dor- 
 mitories. Another matron told me of a family of sisters 
 who used to go in and out with their parents ; the 
 children returned each time more and more versed in sin, 
 and exercised a very bad influence on the other girls. 
 Among many officers who regretted the present system of 
 mixing the two classes of children, .... one school-
 
 214 Appendix. 
 
 mistress told me that the horrors which some children 
 coming from low homes talked of could hardly be 
 imagined ! things of which she had no idea till she learnt 
 them from the children. 
 
 Notwithstanding, it is true that some of the officers 
 and inspectors of pauper establishments hold strong 
 opinions as to the necessity of combining the orphans 
 with the casuals. Thus, in the Local Government Board 
 Report for 1873, Mr. Tufnell asserted that " the casuals 
 get moralized by the orphan class." Whilst this may 
 occasionally be the case to some extent, yet by the daily 
 observed laws of human nature, and also on Scriptural 
 authority, the general result cannot fail to be other than 
 that " evil communications corrupt good manners." It is 
 unjust and cruel to the better class of orphans to associate 
 them habitually with casuals of such a class that an In- 
 spector declares in the 1874 Report, that a school wholly 
 composed of them would be " a hell upon earth" 
 
 The real education that the children need is that of 
 being trained to do useful things in a practical, handy 
 way. Where are they likely to learn this in the every- 
 day life of an industrious household, in conjunction with 
 attendance at a day-school, or in the comparatively 
 artificial helplessness of a crowded pauper boarding- 
 school? As Mr. Peel (late of the Poor- Law Board) 
 observes, in such cases " no family or domestic ties of 
 any kind are established" in these institutions. But, as 
 another authority of much experience remarks, " Family 
 life is God's own method of training, and the further we 
 depart from it the more we shall suffer in consequence." 
 One of the Guardians of the Bath Union (Colonel Grant) 
 writes of the pauper children " They come out nearly 
 useless. They are afraid to put out a candle ; they can- 
 got light a fire." And Sir John MacNeill (chief of the 
 Scotch Poor-Law authorities), from his observation,
 
 Appendix. 2 1 5 
 
 declares that " every child brought up in a poor-house is 
 in heart a pauper." Hence, even on grounds of economy 
 alone, it is most undesirable so to train up workhouse 
 children as to render them life-long dead-weights upon 
 the ratepayers. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to 
 avoid this, except by the boarding-out system. 
 
 An interesting 'article in The Cornhill 
 Magazine thus illustrates the unpractical 
 training given to pauper girls in the large 
 schools, as narrated in the words of a little 
 household drudge of this class : 
 
 " Oh, I've been a servant for years !" said the little 
 thing, who was ready enough to tell us all about herself. 
 " I learnt ironing off the lady ; I didn't know nothing 
 about anything. I didn't know where to buy the wood 
 for the fire," exploding with laughter at the idea. " I run 
 along the street and asked the first person I saw where 
 the wood shop was. I was frightened oh, I was. They 
 wasn't particular kind in my first place. I had plenty 
 to eat it wasn't anything of that. They jest give me 
 an egg, and they says, ' There, get your dinner,' but 
 not anything more. I had always slep in a ward full of 
 other girls, and there I was all alone, and this was a great 
 big house oh, so big ! and they told me to go down- 
 stairs, in a room by the kitchen all alone, with a long 
 black passage. I got to break everything, I was so 
 frightened ; things tumbled down, I shook so, and they 
 
 sent me back to Mrs. , at the schools. They 
 
 said I was no good, as I broke everything ; and so I 
 did oh, I was frightened ! Then I got a place in a 
 family where there was nine children. I was about 
 fourteen then. I earned 25. a week. I used to get up
 
 2i6 Appendix. 
 
 and light the fire, bath them and dress them, and git 
 their breakfasts, and the lady sometimes would go up 
 to London on business, and then I had the baby too, 
 and it couldn't be left, and had to be fed. I'd take them 
 all out for a walk on the common. There was one 
 a cripple. She couldn't walk about. I used to carry 
 her on my back. Then there was dinner, and to wash 
 up after ; and then by that time it would be tea agin. 
 And then I had to put the nine children to bed and bath 
 them, and clean up the rooms and the fires at night : 
 there was no time in the morning. And then there 
 would be the gen'lman's supper to get. Oh ! that was a 
 hard place." 
 
 It is true that considerable attention is 
 devoted in the District Schools to teaching 
 the children geography, spelling, and reading. 
 But these things are of far less value than a 
 knowledge of household duties and family life, 
 of which the District School children are so 
 grossly ignorant. As a writer quoted in the 
 1874 Report of the Local Government Board 
 observes : 
 
 A girl is not necessarily a better woman, because 
 she knows the height of all the mountains of Europe 
 and can work out a fraction in her head ; but she is 
 decidedly better fitted for the duties she will be called 
 upon to penorm in life if she knows how to wash and 
 tend a child, cook simple food well, and thoroughly 
 clean a house. To do these duties really well requires 
 not only intelligence, but special training.
 
 Appendix. 217 
 
 Perhaps the strongest condemnation of the 
 District Schools was contained in a report of 
 the Local Government Board, giving the 
 result of an inquiry into the careers of all the 
 girls sent out to service, from all the metro- 
 politan pauper schools, during the years 
 1871-72. Of these, 670 in number alto- 
 gether, information could only be obtained 
 respecting 490. A majority of these, or 54 
 per cent., were found to have turned out in a 
 manner officially characterized as " unsatis- 
 factory," or "bad." Such an exhaustive 
 investigation can hardly be regarded other- 
 wise than as decisively condemnatory of the 
 existing system, at least so far as the metro- 
 politan districts are concerned. 
 
 Confirmatory evidence is also afforded by 
 the Rescue Society of London, in one of 
 whose annual reports the following statement 
 occurs : 
 
 This Society has received under its care large 
 numbers of girls trained in district schools, who have 
 been found .upon the streets pursuing an abandoned 
 course. Its Committee can, and does, cheerfully bear 
 testimony to the deep interest taken in the welfare of 
 the children by the governors and matrons, and 
 especially by the chaplains attached to the schools ; but
 
 218 Appendix. 
 
 the system is, the Committee think, wrong, and the chief 
 error that which they have referred to. The system of 
 large institutions is bad, even for comparatively innocent 
 children. Many of the inmates of the district schools 
 are vicious. These are intermixed with the better 
 inclined and better trained, and contamination is 
 certain. 
 
 The Advantages and Successful Results of the 
 System of Boarding-out Pauper Children 
 in carefully Selected and Inspected 
 Cottage Homes. 
 
 This system has for over thirty years been 
 in extensive adoption in Scotland with 
 excellent results ; in Ireland it has been 
 increasingly put in practice for upwards of 
 ten years past ; and many counties of Eng- 
 land and Wales have more recently adopted it. 
 
 Mr. James Brown, Inspector of the Poor 
 at Paisley, writes most favourably of the 
 Scotch experience of boarding-out, and 
 adds : 
 
 I don't imagine that we shall ever think of returning 
 to institutional training. Under the most favourable cir- 
 cumstances, institutional training must be defective, and, 
 as far as my experience goes, nothing can compensate 
 for. the absence of the salutary influences of family ties, 
 individual liberty, and familiarity with the ordinary every- 
 day duties and conditions of life.
 
 Appendix. 219 
 
 With regard to Edinburgh and its long 
 continuing and successful practice of boarding- 
 out, the following is extracted from a letter 
 addressed by Mr. G. Greig, Inspector of the 
 Poor for the City Parish of Edinburgh, to 
 Mr. William Tallack, of London, a Member 
 of the Committee for Promoting the 
 Boarding- out of Pauper Orphans : 
 
 The average cost of 294 children boarded-out during 
 the year has been 
 
 For Board 7 16 o 
 
 For Education o 10 9 
 
 For Clothing i 12 o 
 
 For Travelling Expenses, Super- 
 intendence, and Removals ... on 2 
 For Medical Attendance 027 
 
 IQ 12 6 
 
 Or 4*. id. per week. 
 
 I may mention that "travelling expenses, &c., w in- 
 cludes the travelling expenses of my assistant, who visits 
 all the children at least eight times a year, and my own 
 and small committees of the Board, who visit them all 
 once a year. Our allowance to the nurses for each 
 child's board, &c., is y. a week. The system has been 
 in operation here in a limited degree for a great many 
 years, and as at present for twenty-eight years. I have 
 had the conduct of it for twenty years, and have care- 
 fully watched for good and bad results. 
 
 We have just now 280 children out consisting of 
 orphans deierted and separated from their parents
 
 22O Appendix. 
 
 being the fewest we have had these twenty years back ; 
 and I can testify that our system does neither encourage 
 bastardy nor desertion. I know it discourages the latter, 
 as I have tested the point. In this way: A woman 
 deserts her children, they are admitted to the house ; 
 visitors are allowed to see inmates for an hour every 
 Saturday. The mother, by this means, always hears of 
 her children's welfare. I have, however, removed them 
 to the country, giving no information of their where- 
 abouts, when the mother speedily turned up and de- 
 manded delivery of her children. Then as to increasing 
 pauperism : We have children pretty big ones of the 
 third generation on the out-door roll ; but in all my ex- 
 perience not one of the boarded-out children, unless 
 from bodily disease. We have had two or three such, 
 between twenty and thirty years of age, from consump- 
 tion. 
 
 I may say, in regard to bastardy, that it prevails most 
 in Kirkcudbright and Banif and Aberdeen shires, and the 
 system of boarding- out is not in operation in these 
 localities to any extent deserving notice, excepting in the 
 City of Aberdeen, and I therefore cannot think there is 
 any more reason for blaming the boarding-out system 
 for our bastardy disgrace than that we have high moun- 
 tains, damp climate, or any other thing objectors like 
 Professor Fawcett might think of. Many Scotsmen have 
 tried to discover the cause of bastardy and to check it. 
 My friend, Dr. Begg, is sure it is the bothy system and 
 bad cottages, and though he is very zealous to discover 
 the cause, I am quite certain he would never think of 
 the boarding-out system. It gives no encourage- 
 ment to mothers, and by the good moral training of 
 the children there is less chance of their going astray. 
 Not one of my boarded-out girls, during the last twenty 
 years, has returned with any illegitimate children.
 
 Appendix. 221 
 
 In visiting the nurses lately, with members of the 
 Board, we received much gratifying information as to 
 the conduct of the children who had been boarded-out. 
 One young man regularly sent i each term to his 
 former nurse to help pay her rent. Another had brought 
 his wife and family to lodge with his former nurse 
 during his holidays. Another was about to marry his 
 former nurse's daughter, and she told us she was very 
 proud of him. A well-dressed man called on me the 
 other day in great distress, to say his old nurse had 
 died, that he was to bury her, but I would have to get 
 another nurse for the children now with her. This man 
 is a baker, and the nurse told us before that he never 
 forgot her. 
 
 The question may be asked, " How ever 
 can children be healthfully maintained and 
 cared for at a rate under $s. per week 
 each ?" The answer is afforded by the results. 
 It is done. And, generally speaking, the 
 Scotch, Irish, and English children, placed 
 out at this rate, are more comfortable, more 
 kindly treated, more healthy, and turn out 
 morally better, than those on whom from 
 75". 6d. to 155. per week is expended in large 
 institutions where most of the money goes in 
 salaries and cost of buildings. 
 
 The Earl of Delawarr, speaking in the 
 House of Lords, said 
 
 The average cost of a child in a District School is
 
 222 Appendix, 
 
 nearly los. a week, but on the boarding-out system it 
 does not exceed 5*. This system, which has prevailed 
 in Scotland for many years, has been attended with 
 great success. There it has not been confined to orphans 
 and deserted children only, and it is stated that upwards 
 of 7,000 are placed out to be boarded and taken care of. 
 
 Mr. Henley, in a report to the Poor- Law 
 Board in the year 1870, on this system as 
 practised in Scotland, said 
 
 Boarded-out children certainly acquire a more robust 
 constitution, and apparently greater mental activity, 
 than children reared in an ordinary workhouse, and 
 these two points strike at the very root of pauperism, as 
 the majority who fall upon the rates do so from mental 
 or physical weakness. 
 
 George Moore, Esq., the late High Sheriff 
 of Cumberland, wrote : 
 
 Two years ago I introduced this subject to the 
 Boards of the several Unions in Cumberland, and went 
 round to enquire personally, and see how far it might be 
 possible that thoroughly trustworthy people could be 
 found to take charge of these poor children, so that they 
 might be removed from the contaminating influences of 
 our workhouses. I am now happy to be in a position to 
 state that these efforts were most successful, and that 
 now the several unions, more particularly those of 
 Carlisle, Wigton, and Cockermouth, have a large number 
 of children who are boarded out under the system ; and 
 it is working most admirably in this county. I sincerely 
 trust that it may be extended throughout the kingdom.
 
 Appendix. 223 
 
 R. E. Stolterfoht, Esq., of Sandown Park, 
 Wavertree, wrote : 
 
 The system has recommended itself more and more to 
 our approval, the improvement both in the health and 
 intelligence of the children being in each case very great, 
 the foster-parents evincing real interest and affection for 
 the Children. One singular circumstance was that all 
 the children, on reception, suffered from weak eyes or 
 chronic head-colds. 
 
 The Rev. Prebendary Buckle (Vicar of 
 Twerton), ex-Chairman of the Bath Board of 
 Guardians, wrote : 
 
 Experience extending over five years brings an 
 increasing conviction to those who have watched it, that 
 the plan is a good one, and that the majority of the 
 children who come under it reap from it the benefits 
 which had been anticipated. He adds : The tie estab- 
 lished between the children and their foster-parents has 
 a tendency to become an enduring one. 
 
 Colonel C. W. Grant, a Bath Guardian, 
 wrote : 
 
 I believe the system to be an excellent one, un- 
 doubtedly to the benefit of the poor children, and also 
 of the ratepayers, when properly carried out. But I do 
 not think we should expect never to have any failures. 
 We must remember that, too frequently, these " children's 
 teeth have been set on edge by the sour grapes their 
 fathers have eaten," and that there is a great deal to undo 
 and to be untaught. 
 
 The Rev. H. Wood, of Calverton, wrote :
 
 224 Appendix. 
 
 In all cases the personal comfort and habits of the 
 children located here appear to be well cared for by the 
 foster-parents, and a genuine kind interest felt in them. 
 They are neatly and well dressed, without finery on the 
 one hand, or meanness on the other. Workhouses and 
 larger orphan schools are places of refuge indeed, but 
 inevitably deficient in those attributes which alone 
 constitute a home. The contrast as I have witnessed 
 it here, when children drawn from the large pauper 
 schools are placed in a family in the country, cared 
 for by the foster-parents with their own children, fed, 
 clothed, and sent regularly to school and to public 
 worship, is truly refreshing to contemplate. It is a 
 system in agreement with that wisdom and goodness of 
 God which have, from the first, "set the solitary in 
 families." And this has proved itself already to be one of 
 the very best plans for the prevention of crime and for 
 lifting up the lowest classes to respectability and 
 honour. 
 
 The Post-office Servants* Orphan Home. 
 
 Instead of making a large preliminary 
 outlay on buildings and a staff of officers, the 
 Committee of the " Post-office Orphans' 
 Home" have, after careful enquiry, adopted 
 the system of boarding-out their children 
 "with carefully selected foster-parents, who 
 are under the supervision of the Committee ; 
 whereby," they add (and the remark is worthy 
 of Poor- Law Guardians' notice), "the great
 
 Appendix. 225 
 
 expense of maintaining an establishment is 
 altogether avoided." The Chairman of that 
 Committee (Thomas Boucher, Esq., G.P.O.), 
 at one of its annual meetings, expressed for 
 himself and his colleagues a warm approval 
 of " placing orphan children in comfortable 
 homes, with foster-parents under whose 
 guidance and care they can be better trained 
 and fitted for the duties of life than under 
 the cold and formal discipline of a large 
 establishment." 
 
 Summary of Recent Information regarding 
 Boarding-out. 
 
 LEEDS. During the year ending June, 1880, 86 
 children were boarded-out: 36 boys, 50 girls. The 
 Committee's report to the Board of Guardians closes 
 with these words : " Your Committee have, finally, the 
 pleasant duty to perform of congratulating you upon the 
 success attending a new and hitherto untried attempt (in 
 this Union) to rescue from chronic pauperism so many 
 poor children. This success demonstrates clearly the 
 soundness of the views possessed by those Guardians 
 whose advocacy was the means of initiating the measure, 
 and whose energies in that direction have borne ample 
 fruit. The present Committee, vigilantly watching the 
 interests of their little charges, trust they will be able to 
 secure the continuance of a work, which, having been 
 successfully initiated, promises lasting benefits in future"
 
 226 Appendix. 
 
 Average cost per head, per week, 55. $^d. Nine 
 children were claimed by relatives and taken off the rates 
 when it was found they would be boarded- out where 
 ready access could not be had to them. 
 
 CORK. Eighteen years' experience up to August, 
 1880. 650 children boarded-out in several districts. 
 209 of that number still out; 417 have been adopted 
 by foster-parents and are doing well ; 20 have died ; 4 
 returned to workhouse, but are now ready to go out to 
 service. 
 
 The Committee report: "After an experience of 18 
 years in the practical working of boarding-out, we have 
 in the strongest possible language to recommend the 
 system to the earnest consideration of the Board, in the 
 hope that they will urge the Local Government Board to 
 bring the subject before Government, and show the vital 
 importance of having the provisions of the Boarding-out 
 Act extended." 
 
 The Medical Officer reported, June a6th, 1880: "I 
 have this day inspected the children, and found them in 
 excellent health. Their clean appearance and happy 
 faces testify to the care taken of them. Some of the 
 nurses informed me of their intention to adopt those 
 children now in their charge." 
 
 OXFORD The Diocesan Conference, October, 1880, 
 after thorough investigation by an appointed Committee, 
 who considered the subject of " Boarding-out of Pauper 
 Children in connection with the Church's duty to care for 
 them," accepted the recommendations of the Committee, 
 the first of which was, " That for the fostering of this 
 movement small Committees of Clergy and Laity be 
 nominated in each of the three Counties of the Diocese. 
 Reports to be made annually to the Conference."
 
 Appendix. 227 
 
 WINDERMERE. Boarding-out Committee. Miss 
 Preusser, in her Report, May, 1881, gives the position 
 of all the 48 children who have been under her Com- 
 mittee's care. Of these, 16 are in service, and with 
 one exception giving satisfaction ; one has died of con- 
 sumption, after four years in service; one has been 
 returned to the workhouse ; and two have been claimed 
 by relatives. The rest are still under care. 
 
 NOTTINGHAM. Five years' trial with most satisfactory 
 results. 42 children have been dealt with. " It is our 
 experience," writes Mrs. Enfield of Nottingham, " that 
 the children are treated and considered in every way by 
 their foster-parents as their own children, and that the 
 children get to love and respect them as parents. The 
 Local Government Board Inspector reports that the 
 children, as a whole, compare favourably in health and 
 intelligence with the children in the workhouses." 
 
 AMPTHILL. The Hon Mrs. Lowther writes : " I am 
 glad to say that all the children under our Committee 
 (above 40) are prospering, and that there has been no draw- 
 back in any case. I have no hesitation in saying that the 
 system, when properly carried out, works admirably ; and 
 I am anxious to see it more universally adopted, being 
 more practical, more economical, and more conducive 
 to the well-doing of the children than any other." 
 
 WAVERTREE, near Liverpool. Committee ten years at 
 work. 21 children under care, of whom 3 have been 
 claimed by relatives, i is married. 8 are still in homes, i 
 is a pupil-teacher, 8 are in service. 
 
 CLIFTON, near Bristol. Miss Woodward, Hon. Secre- 
 tary to the Committee, writes : " After the experience of 
 eleven years we feel qualified to speak most favourably 
 of boarding-out orphan children in cottage homes. With 
 
 Q2
 
 228 Appendix. 
 
 careful supervision it must succeed. In several instances 
 the children when taken out of the Workhouse were so 
 extremely delicate that there appeared little prospect of 
 raising them ; but owing to the change of living, and the 
 unwearied care of the foster-mothers, they rapidly im- 
 proved. Only one death from illness has occurred, and 
 that took place soon after the Committee was formed." 
 
 BIRMINGHAM. King's Norton Boarding-out Com- 
 mittee has had 191 children under its care. Cost, 45. zd. 
 per head, per week, in 1880. 
 
 TAMWORTH. October, 1881. Guardians decided to 
 commence Boarding-out system. 
 
 YORK. Boarding-out was commenced about a year 
 ago, when 15 children were placed under the system. 
 No printed report has been issued yet, but Mr. Henry 
 King writes : "So far as I can judge, the most sanguine 
 anticipations I had formed are in a fair way of being 
 realized; the reports as to the comfort and well-being of 
 the children are most satisfactory." 
 
 KINGSTON-ON-THAMES In March, 1881, there were 
 between 30 and 40 children boarded out, and the 
 Guardians are most satisfied with the results of the 
 system. They have no trouble with the children, and 
 during the whole of the time (about ten years) that the 
 system has been in work, there has not been one case 
 of illness except a child with scrofulous glands, who has 
 beeu sent to the sea-side.
 
 Appendix. 229 
 
 III. INTEMPERANCE. 
 
 Intemperance as a Source of Crime. 
 
 In addressing the Grand Jury at the 
 Stafford Assizes recently, Mr. Justice Fry 
 remarked upon the large number of cases 
 from drunkenness, and said that the calendar 
 resulting was one which must make every 
 man ask himself whether he was exerting his 
 power and influence to the uttermost to put 
 an end to that fertile source of crime, evil, and 
 misery. It was indeed difficult to say how 
 much happier England would be if there were 
 more sobriety and prudence on the part of 
 the poorer classes. 
 
 Baron Dowse, presiding at the Dublin 
 Commission Court, at the trial for murder of 
 a Police-constable, remarked in his summing- 
 up : " / find drink at the bottom of almost 
 every crime committed in Dublin." 
 
 The opinion of the Rev. J. W. Horsley, 
 M.A., Chaplain of H.M. Prison, Clerkenwell, 
 on this subject is very valuable, on account 
 of his extensive experience in dealing with 
 criminals. He writes as follows :
 
 230 Appendix. 
 
 The question, then, is this : What proportion of 
 crime is directly or indirectly due to intemperate habits, 
 the national drinking customs, and the facilities afforded 
 for the continuance and spreading of the evil? My 
 answer is, that half of the crime of England and Wales, 
 at least, is directly, and an additional one-fourth in- 
 directly, caused by intemperance. From Sir Matthew 
 Hale to Mr. Justice Lush, judges have repeatedly said 
 that their impression, derived from constant experience 
 in every county, was that more than half of the crimes 
 brought before them were so caused, sometimes by the 
 influence of drink upon the offender, and sometimes by 
 its influence on his victim. Lord Coleridge affirmed 
 from the bench, " But for drink we might shut up nine 
 out of ten of our prisons." And it must be here remem- 
 bered that the majority of crimes arising out of intem- 
 perance do not come before the judges at assize, being 
 summarily dealt with by justices and police-magistrates. 
 The thirty odd thousand cases of " drunk and incapable," 
 and "drunk and disorderly," in London alone, came not at 
 all under the cognizance of the judges of superior courts, 
 a fact which strengthens the argument to be drawn from 
 their utterances. Much evidence given before the Lords' 
 Committee on Intemperance deals with this point. Thus 
 Canon Ellison hands in extracts from the returns received 
 by the Church of England Temperance Society from 
 chief constables, who say that of the criminals who come 
 under their care, 75 per cent, 80, 85 per cent, two- 
 thirds, five-fifths, four-fifths, nearly all, have been the 
 victims of drinking habits and associates ; while to the 
 question, What proportion of those taken into custody 
 are under the influence of liquor ? answers are given vary- 
 ing from 25 to 90 per cent A similar return from the 
 governors or chaplains of gaols ascribes crime to drink 
 n the proportion of from 50 to 90 per cent, the average
 
 Appendix. 231 
 
 of twenty-two returns giving 76 per cent. ; while the pro- 
 portion of recommittals, due to drinking, is said to be 
 "75 per cent.," u four fifths," "nearly all." Mr. Fowler 
 says that in Swansea nineteen out of twenty offences are 
 connected with drink, either directly, or arising out of 
 the poverty induced by drink. Mr. R. O. Jones believes 
 that three-fourths of the crime, or a great deal more, is 
 the result of drinking. Mr. S. L. Anderson, Crown 
 Solicitor in Ireland, says that the result of his experience 
 and observation is that more than three-fourths of all the 
 crimes prosecuted by indictment in Dublin are so caused, 
 directly or indirectly; a proportion which would be largely 
 increased, as has already been pointed out, if offences 
 summarily dealt with were included. In the County of 
 Berwick, of 354 persons apprehended for criminal 
 offences, 225 were drunk at the time. The Rev. J. 
 Nugent says that nine-tenths of the prisoners in Liver- 
 pool gaol come there directly or indirectly through drink. 
 One chief constable, of Blackburn, says it is not an 
 exaggerated statement to say that 75 per cent of all 
 crimes and offences can be traced to drunkenness. Mr. 
 J. Jervis thinks that three-fourths of the crime in Ports- 
 mouth is attributable to drink. 
 
 This evidence might be extended largely, and coming 
 as it does from all parts of the country, and from persons 
 in official positions not merely teetotal fanatics, as some 
 might politely say it is the more remarkable in its con- 
 cord. My personal experience leads me to fear simply 
 that I may be understating the truth in taking the propor- 
 tion of 75 per cent. Occasionally, for example, I deter- 
 mine, on receiving my daily lists of fresh admissions, on 
 which the names and ages, but not the charges, are given, 
 that I will see what proportion obtains in the first nine or 
 twelve. On these lists almost invariably are nine out of 
 twelve drink-caused cases, sometimes ten, sometimes even
 
 232 Appendix. 
 
 eleven. Two such lists are before me as I write. One 
 contains nine women, seven of whom have been directly 
 and one indirectly brought in through drunkenness. The 
 other contains six directly and two indirectly incarcerated 
 through intemperance. To take another line of evidence : 
 I noted one day that of twenty-two cases before the magis- 
 trate at Marylebone Police Court, twenty-one were charges 
 of drunkenness, whereof fourteen were women. I ob- 
 tained, therefore, a return of all the charges heard at that 
 court in a week, and found that of 154 no less than 
 124 were for drunkenness. My friend, the Chaplain of 
 Westminster Prison, writes that of 216 female con- 
 victed prisoners brought in in one week 187 were con- 
 victed of drunkenness or -offences arising out of drink. 
 Then a letter comes from a Metropolitan police magis- 
 trate, from which I make the following extract : " It will 
 be found, I believe, that drunkenness is at the bottom of 
 nearly all crime. Yesterday, for instance, there were 
 sixty-nine day charges before me, all arising, more or 
 less, out of drunkenness, with the exception of twenty-two, 
 which were almost entirely made up of charges against 
 boys for playing tip-cat and gambling. These twenty- 
 two cases may therefore be put on one side. On look- 
 ing over the charge-book this morning I see that yester- 
 day the sentences to terms of imprisonment for offences 
 connected with or arising out of drunkenness amounted 
 in the aggregate to something like twenty-nine months' 
 imprisonment, and that is not taking into consideration 
 persons who may have been sent to prison in default of 
 paying fines. There were a number of cases of brutal 
 assaults, all committed by persons under the influence of 
 drink, and only one case of felony and that was committed 
 by a woman who was under the influence of drink at the 
 time." 
 
 Test it as we may, it is evident over and over again
 
 Appendix. 233 
 
 that 75 per cent, is rather below than above the mark as 
 the per-centage of crime due to intemperance. 
 
 Under the same head comes the crime of attempting 
 suicide. I examine and tabulate carefully 300 consecu- 
 tive cases (about 350 come under my notice in the course 
 of the year), and find that 172 are caused by drink. I take 
 thirty-three cases brought in last August, and find that 
 eighteen are directly, three indirectly, and four probably, 
 caused by intemperance. Bad enough ; but sometimes 
 it is worse e.g., in July, 1878, I found that of twenty- 
 eight cases twenty-one were directly and one indirectly 
 caused by the drunkenness of the prisoners, three by the 
 drunkenness of husbands, and only three not apparently 
 due to drink. 
 
 It may, therefore, be seen what a terribly wide basis 
 exists on which one grounds the assertion that 75 per cent. 
 of crime is directly or indirectly attributable to intemper- 
 ance. Terrible is this state of affairs ; more terrible is it 
 to remember that the drunkards apprehended are but a 
 tithe of those to whom that name must be given, for 
 every one can nearly enumerate many quiet sots or other 
 drunkards known to him on whom the policeman's hand 
 has never been laid. In Birmingham there are some 
 1,850 publics. On a certain night thirty-five of them 
 were watched, and 883 persons were seen to leave their 
 portals drunk, but yet the police records showed that on 
 that night only twenty-nine persons were arrested for 
 drunkenness. 
 
 An authority, speaking at a meeting at 
 North Creake, said : 
 
 I am afraid many of the beerhouses are little better 
 than brothels. So strong is the competition that many 
 houses keep a loose girl as an extra attraction.
 
 234 Appendix. 
 
 Magisterial Action. 
 
 The following letter appeared recently in 
 the correspondence column of the London 
 Daily Chronicle: 
 
 Sir, Any one visiting our Police Courts to hear the 
 night charges cannot help feeling surprised and ashamed 
 to see the batch of " drunk and disorderlies" brought up 
 morning after morning before the sitting Magistrates. 
 Discharged, or a fine of five, ten, or twenty shillings, or 
 imprisonment for so many days, invariably follows the 
 constable's evidence. The fine in nine cases out of ten 
 is paid before the rising of the Court by a " round robin " 
 among the drunkard's dissolute companions, the only 
 effect being a return to old haunts and associates neither 
 wiser nor better, but only a few shillings the poorer. Sir, 
 would it not be worth a trial if, at the magistrate's dis- 
 cretion, the inebriates were remanded (without the option 
 of bail) for three, five or seven days ? Total abstinence, 
 even for so short a time, would unmistakably bring the 
 drunkards face to face with their social degradation. 
 Kindly advice, or, if necessary, a severe reprimand from 
 the Bench, might be the arresting step in saving many 
 intemperate waifs from a downward course of crime, 
 disease, and poverty. With your help, abler pens than 
 mine may be induced to take up this national drawback, 
 and introduce a better method than our present stereo- 
 typed and useless system, which does absolutely worse 
 than nothing towards the reclamation of the habitual 
 drunkard. 
 
 Legislation in Holland. 
 
 Legislation in nouana. 
 A Bill for repressing the abuse of alcoholic
 
 Appendix. 235 
 
 liquors passed the Second Chamber of the 
 Dutch Legislature in May last by a majority 
 of forty-nine, there being sixty votes recorded 
 in its favour and eleven against it. The Bill 
 provides for the granting of licenses in pro- 
 portion to population, and the prevention of 
 a disproportionate accumulation of public 
 beerhouses and bars at any spot. It 
 prohibits the sale of spirits in the public 
 streets, or in those parts of towns inhabited 
 exclusively by workmen. It further provides 
 for the punishment by imprisonment of 
 persons convicted of drunkenness in public 
 places. The maximum number of licensed 
 houses in future is to be one for every five 
 hundred inhabitants in cities of over 50,000 
 population, one for every four hundred 
 persons in places of from 20,000 to 50,000 
 inhabitants, one for every three hundred 
 persons in places of between 10,000 and 
 20,000 inhabitants, and one for every two 
 hundred and fifty persons in all communities 
 containing a population of less than 10,000. 
 Existing houses, however, are permitted to 
 remain open during the life of the present 
 proprietors.
 
 236 Appendix. 
 
 The Nation's Drink Bill for 1880. 
 
 The following are extracts from a letter by 
 Mr. William Hoyle, of Bury, Lancashire, 
 respecting the expenditure upon intoxicating 
 liquors : 
 
 The quantity of malt used in brewing during the nine 
 months ending September 30, 1880, was 31,787,518 
 bushels, and of sugar, 1,019,466 cwt., which was equal 
 to 4,349,721 bushels of malt. Adding the two together, 
 we get a total of 36,137,239 bushels; and taking the 
 excise standard of two bushels of malt as brewing one 
 barrel of beer it gives a total of 650,470,302 gallons of 
 beer brewed from January ist to September 3cth. On 
 the ist of October the malt duty was abolished, and in 
 place thereof a tax was put upon beer. The returns for 
 the last three months of the year are given in beer, and 
 they shew that during that period there were 7,072,741 
 barrels, or 254,618,676 gallons of beer consumed, or a 
 total for the year of 905,088,978 gallons. The returns 
 for spirits and wine are issued in the same form as 
 formerly. The following table gives particulars of the 
 quantities used, together with the money expended 
 thereon. To enable a comparison to be made, I append 
 the expenditure for 1879 : 
 
 1880. 1879. 
 
 Gallons. s. d. 
 
 Beer consumed 905,088,97831 i 6 ... 67,881,673 ... 73,557,809 
 
 British Spirits do 38,457,486 20 o ... 28,457,486 ... 27,936,650 
 
 Foreign Spirits do 8,477,512 24 o ... 10,173,014 ... 11,449,021 
 
 Wine 15,852,335 ,, 18 o ... 14,267,102 ... 13,450,583 
 
 British Wines, &c. (est) ... 15,000,000 ,,20 ... 1,500,000 ... 1,750,000 
 
 122,279,275 128,143,863 
 
 Shewing a decrease in consumption as compared with
 
 Appendix. 237 
 
 J ^79 of ^5,864,588, or 4*6 per cent. Twenty years ago, 
 in 1860, the drink bill was ^86,897,683. Year by year, 
 with two or three trifling exceptions, it continued to 
 grow, until in 1876 it reached the enormous total of 
 ^147,288,760. In 1877 it fell to ^142,009,231 ; in 
 1878 it rose a little, being ^142, 188,900; since 1878 it 
 has fallen, as the table I have given shows. If the figures 
 relating to the consumption of beer for the last three 
 months of the year be compared with those for the pre- 
 vious nine months, it will be seen that there is a consider- 
 able increase shown. Those, however, who followed the 
 Budget debates during July of last year will see reason 
 to ascribe this increase not wholly to an increased con- 
 sumption, but partly to the fact that the new method of 
 collecting the duty from beer instead of from the malt 
 registers more correctly the actual consumption, and that 
 in former years the beer which was brewed and sold was 
 considerably more than the returns of malt indicated. 
 In Great Britain, according to Mr. Caird, the average 
 rent of agricultural land is estimated at 30^. per acre. In 
 Ireland, from returns which are issued by the Govern- 
 ment, it appears to be about 1 5 s. per acre. 
 
 In Great Britain there are 32,101,909 acres returned as cultivated 
 
 land, which at 305. gives ^48,152.863 
 
 In Ireland 15,357,856 acres, which at 15*. gives 11,518,392 
 
 Giving a tota of .59,671,255 
 
 Comparing these figures with the figures of the drink bill, 
 it will be seen that the latter is more than double the 
 entire rental of all the agricultural land in the United 
 Kingdom.
 
 238 Appendix. 
 
 IV. MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 Inadequate Sentences. 
 
 The following cases are taken from the 
 newspapers named respectively at the close 
 of each extract : 
 
 BARBAROUS CRUELTY TO AN INFANT. 
 
 Our correspondent telegraphs : At March, Thomas 
 Vernon, of Liverpool, was committed for one month for 
 brutally ill-treating a child thirteen months old. Mrs. Hart 
 proved that the prisoner asked for lodgings for himself, 
 wife, and babe, and, on being refused, said " If it was 
 
 not for this Httie we could get lodgings anywhere." 
 
 He struck the infant in the face with his clenched fist 
 five or six times till the blood gushed from its eyes, 
 nose, mouth, and ears, and he then grasped its throat 
 and hit it again. Mr. Thomas O'Connor, surgeon, spoke 
 of the marks about the child's face, breast, and under 
 each ear. There was also a swelling on its throat, 
 and it had one arm broken. The child's life was in 
 danger. Great astonishment was expressed at the 
 lenient sentence passed on the prisoner. Echo. 
 
 EXTRAORDINARY SENTENCES FOR WIFE-KILLING. 
 
 Cases of shocking brutality to women are becoming so 
 common in our police records that it is a matter of 
 extreme regret when the dispensers of justice allow 
 themselves to be misled by sentimental reasons into 
 visiting these offences with less severe sentences than 
 they deserve. On Thursday, Lord Coleridge, presiding 
 at the Central Criminal Court, had before him a man,
 
 Appendix. 239 
 
 John Hunt by name, who, in a fit of drunken fury, had 
 chased his wife round a field at Eltham, knocked her 
 down, and then kicked her about the head in a manner 
 which resulted in the death of his victim in the space of 
 a very few minutes. Yet this atrocious ruffian has 
 escaped with only six weeks 1 imprisonment, a sentence 
 which is a good deal milder than is often inflicted on 
 some hapless offender for the petty larceny of a pocket- 
 handkerchief. The one only point in favour of this 
 Eltham labourer, whom a soft-hearted jury recommended 
 to mercy, was that he does not seem to have felt any 
 deliberate malice against the wife whom he so cruelly did 
 to death. They had had frequent quarrels before, he 
 confessed, but on the whole lived "on terms of affection," 
 and when he had recovered from the drunken fit in which 
 the act was committed he appears to have been genuinely 
 sorry for what he had done. All this was properly 
 adduced in Court as evidence to reduce the crime from 
 murder, for which the prisoner was indicted, to one of 
 simple manslaughter ; but in no way justified so lenient 
 and palpably insufficient a sentence being pronounced as 
 this miserable farce of six weeks 1 incarceration for a crime 
 for which six years would have been too light a penalty. 
 It is no wonder, as we read, that " the sentence caused 
 some surprise in Court." At the same sitting another 
 prisoner, James Lewis by name, was indicted for the 
 manslaughter of a woman with whom he lived. The 
 facts were of a somewhat similar description, and here 
 too the fatal injuries were inflicted while the perpetrator 
 of the outrage was under the influence of drink. The 
 chief difference between this and the previous incident 
 was that in the second case the woman was kicked in the 
 back, while the wife of the Eltham labourer was kicked in 
 the head, death resulting in both instances. Probably 
 the public will be surprised to hear that James Lewis
 
 240 Appendix. 
 
 received a sentence of five years' penal servitude, which is 
 not a day too much for the dastardly attack he committed 
 on a defenceless woman, but which undoubtedly offers a 
 startling contrast to the ridiculously mild sentence passed 
 on the more fortunate wife-kicker at Eltham. Daily 
 Telegraph, June, 1881. 
 
 OUTRAGE ON POLICE OFFICERS. 
 
 On Thursday, at the Jarrow Borough Police Court, 
 John Conroy and William Donnelly were charged with 
 having been drunk and disorderly, and with having 
 assaulted Police Constable Harland. It appears that 
 on Saturday night the officer saw the two prisoners 
 drunk in Ferry Street, and creating a disturbance. He 
 went and cautioned them, and ordered them home, when 
 they immediately struck and knocked him down. While 
 he was on the ground, the prisoners kicked him in the 
 most brutal and unmerciful manner, until Sergeant Heslop 
 came to his assistance. Sergeant Heslop in his evidence 
 stated that he thought the prisoners would have killed 
 Harland if he (witness) had not arrived in time. Conroy, 
 who had been previously convicted, was committed for 
 one months and Donnelly ter fourteen days' imprisonment. 
 Newcastle Chronicle, October 16, 1880. 
 
 ATROCIOUS BARBARITY TO A DONKEY. 
 
 At the Liverpool Police Court, before Mr. Mansfield, 
 on Monday last, a man named Mahoney was convicted 
 of having driven a four-pronged stable-fork into the side 
 of a donkey, the last time with such force that the prongs 
 of the fork were so bent that it could not be withdrawn, 
 and was therefore left in the animal's side all night. He 
 was sentenced to three weeks' imprisonment with hard 
 labour. Times, August 16, 1881,
 
 Appendix. 241 
 
 BRUTAL OUTRAGES ON WOMEN. 
 
 The records of the police courts afford but melancholy 
 reading to those who look for speedy results from the 
 humanizing influences of the times in which we 
 live. Take, for instance, one day's reports from the 
 different Metropolitan police courts. At Lambeth, a 
 man was committed for trial for brutally ill-using a 
 woman. The evidence showed that he knocked her 
 down, threw himself upon her, and tore her face open 
 with his teeth. In the next case that came on at the 
 same Court a man was charged with dragging his wife 
 from her bed to the bottom of the house, and then 
 beating her about the head with a piece of iron. But 
 that she managed to attract a policeman by her cries she 
 would probably have been murdered ; yet the brute who 
 so ill-used her was let off with two months' imprisonment. 
 At Marylebone, a labourer was charged with beating his 
 wife with a broom until she became senseless. At 
 Hammersmith, Daniel Griffith had to answer to a similar 
 charge, the instrument employed being in this case a big 
 stick, so vigorously applied that the woman is now 
 dangerously ill in the West London Hospital ; whilst at 
 the Thames Court it was proved that one John Hallsy, 
 incensed at the refusal of an unfortunate girl to treat 
 him, first knocked her down and then turned upon a 
 third party, who sought to protect the poor woman from 
 further violence, and stabbed him in several places. 
 We talk of Irish outrages. They are bad enough ; but, 
 at least, those who commit them can often plead that 
 they are maddened by misery and injustice for which the 
 law has hitherto given them no redress. That plea will 
 not often hold good in England ; yet we are accustomed 
 
 R
 
 242 Appendix. 
 
 to plume ourselves upon being the most moral and 
 the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. 
 The claim only requires to be examined to be dis- 
 allowed. 
 
 Then take another day's reports. At the Worship 
 Street police court a young man was charged with horribly 
 ill-treating his wife because she interfered between him 
 and a man with whom he was quarrelling. He struck 
 her a heavy blow in the breast, and battered her face ; 
 she was nursing a young child, and a medical certificate 
 bore witness to her injuries. Mr. Hannay did not 
 punish him at all, but contented himself with binding the 
 ruffian over to keep the peace. The same course was 
 adopted by Mr. Marshall and Mr. Lermitte with 
 reference to a man who systematically and habitually 
 starved and ill-used his wife and threatened her life, and 
 had on one occasion beaten her about the head and 
 snatched her baby from her to throw at her, but she 
 managed to rescue it. The man seemed to have no 
 complaint against her, and could only be got to give a 
 generous assurance that he " would not mind" trying to 
 live happily with her. Another wretch kicked his wife, 
 who was enceinte, and who is now suffering terribly at the 
 hospital. In this case the Bench ordered a remand. At 
 Hammersmith, a man was charged with frightfully beating 
 an unfortunate woman in the face because he thought 
 she had stolen his watch, which he seems to have after- 
 wards found where he had put it. He was committed 
 for trial. Another man was sentenced to two months' 
 hard labour for an assault on his wife. Weekly Register > 
 September 10, 1881.
 
 Appendix. 
 
 243 
 
 Disproportionate Sentences. 
 
 Offences against the Person. 
 
 At the Clerkenwell Police 
 Court, on May 12, 1881, 
 Dennis O'Connor, a labourer, 
 was charged with violently as- 
 saulting the Rev. John Brooke 
 and Mr. Redmond Steele, a 
 barrister-at-law. Evidence was 
 given that while the two gentle- 
 men were conversing the pre- 
 vious night in front of Mr. 
 Brooke's residence, O'Connor 
 pushed against them, and when 
 remonstrated with, struck Mr. 
 Brooke a violent blow in the 
 mouth, knocking him down. 
 On Mr. Steele interfering, he 
 too was knocked down and 
 violently kicked on the right 
 hip, and on the right arm, elbow, 
 and knee. O'Connor was given 
 into the custody of a constable 
 who arrived in time to witness 
 part of the assault. Both prosecu- 
 tors stated in court that they 
 were suffering severely from the 
 effects of his violence. Mr. 
 Barstow, the magistrate, sen- 
 tenced defendant to a fine o/qos. 
 or one month's imprisonment with 
 hard labour. Prisoner was re- 
 moved in custody. 
 
 Caroline Egerton, a widow, 
 was sent to prison with hard 
 labour for six months by the 
 Halifax magistrates, on April 4, 
 1 88 1, for an almost incredible act 
 of brutality towards her daugh. 
 ter Annie, aged thirteen. Be- 
 
 Offences against Property. 
 
 The Bristol magistrates, in 
 May, 1 88 1, sentenced a boy thir- 
 teen years of age, named George 
 Winterson, to ten days' imprison- 
 ment, and five years in a reform- 
 atory for sleeping in a tramcar. 
 The justices had previously im- 
 posed a fine of hali-a-crown, or 
 three days' imprisonment, but 
 the mother, being appealed to, 
 declined to pay the fine, believ- 
 ing three days' detention would 
 do the boy good, as he was in 
 the habit of sleeping out. The 
 magistrates then committed him 
 as above, and informed the 
 mother that her husband would 
 have to pay a good many half- 
 crowns towards his maintenance 
 in the reformatory. 
 
 At Ixworth Petty Sessions, in 
 May, before Admiral Horton 
 and other magistrates, Edward 
 Simper, labourer, was committed 
 for fourteen days, in default of 
 paying 2$s. and costs, for being 
 in company with a man, named 
 Rayner, who took game eggs from 
 nests where they were at work 
 Simper did not take any, and 
 nothing was known against him. 
 
 R 2
 
 244 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 cause the child had told a false- 
 hood she applied a red-hot poker 
 to her tongue, and in the struggle 
 to free herself the girl was 
 severely burned on the tongue, 
 cheek, neck, and shoulders. 
 
 At Reigate, on May 16, 1881, 
 a man named Read was sent 
 to prison for fourteen days for 
 assaulting his son. He came 
 home drunk the previous Satur- 
 day night, and threatened to 
 murder everybody in the house. 
 He shook and bullied his wife, 
 who was dying of internal cancer 
 and was in great suffering. His 
 son pulled him off at her request, 
 and the inhuman monster then 
 assaulted him. While the man 
 was in custody his wife died. 
 
 At Woolwich, on May 24, 
 1881, William Bulkwell, a navvy, 
 was charged with the following 
 offences : Police-constable John 
 Green said he found the prisoner 
 in the street bleeding from the 
 head, as though he had been 
 fighting or falling about. He 
 was taken to the police-station, 
 where a surgeon was sent for,and 
 his head washed and dressed ; 
 but while this was being done, 
 the prisoner suddenly turned and 
 snapped at the hand of Inspector 
 Owlett, who was holding his 
 head, and bit one of his fingers 
 off. The inspector, who was in 
 court, said that it was the fore- 
 finger of his right hand, and that 
 it was bitten off at the first joint. 
 He had the piece in his pocket. 
 Mary Ann Nash said the 
 
 At the Middlesex Sessions, in 
 May, 1881, William Stevens, 
 forty, pleaded guilty to stealing a 
 sleeve-link, value is. 3</., from 
 the person of Mr. Robert Long, 
 and was sentenced to five years' 
 penal servitude, to be followed by 
 seven years' police supervision. 
 Arthur Smith and William 
 Kellard, two young men, were 
 found guilty of stealing a bag con- 
 taining a small sum of money 
 and various articles of little 
 value, from the person of Miss 
 Dibden, while walking along the 
 Euston Road, and were each 
 sentenced to six years' penal 
 servitude, to be folloit-ed by three 
 years' police supervision. Charles 
 Silverside, thirty-four, for a 
 somewhat similar offence, was 
 sentenced to five years' penal
 
 Appendix. 
 
 245 
 
 prisoner quarrelled with her on 
 the previous night, and bit her 
 through the fleshy part of the 
 hand. The prisoner treated the 
 matter with indifference, and 
 Mr. Balguy sentenced him to 
 four months' imprisonment with 
 hard labour. 
 
 At Westminster, John Carter, 
 a rough-looking fellow, about 
 thirty years of age, was charged 
 with a violent assault upon Annie 
 Palmer, of Currie Street, Nine 
 Elms, a woman with whom he 
 lived. The prosecutrix stated 
 that she had lived with the pri- 
 soner over three years, but fre- 
 quently passed a most wretched 
 existence. A day or two before, 
 because she had no money to 
 give him, he struck her and gave 
 her a black eye. She forgave 
 him that, as she had often done ; 
 but the previous night, when she 
 was in Chelsea, because she 
 asked him for money for a bit of 
 food, he struck her again in the 
 eye, and caused her intense pain. 
 He also kicked her in the groin. 
 Mr. D'Eyncourt said it was 
 evident that prisoner, even in 
 Court, was a perfect savage. 
 He should restrain his savage 
 propensities, for a time at all 
 events, by sending him to prison 
 for two months with hard labour. 
 
 The following comments by the London 
 press also bring out the remarkable disparity 
 between sentences for offences against the 
 person, and tor those against property : 
 
 servitude. Henry Randall, 
 twenty, was found guilty of 
 stealing a watch and sundry 
 articles of wearing apparel from 
 his lodgings, and he was ordered 
 to be kept in penal servitude for 
 five years, to be followed by two 
 years' police supervision. Pre- 
 vious convictions were proved 
 against each of the prisoners. 
 
 At Durham, two boys, named 
 Joseph Stoves and James Suther- 
 land, aged respectively twelve 
 and ten years, were charged with 
 stealing apples belonging to 
 Thomas Anderson, at Kepler 
 Gardens. The elder boy was 
 found in the garden with his 
 pockets full of apples ; the other 
 boy, Sutherland, in the act of 
 pulling apples off the trees. The 
 value of the apples taken by the 
 prisoners was threepence. Pri- 
 soners elected to be tried sum- 
 marily, and the chairman said 
 that the parents ought to have 
 taken better care of them ; but 
 as they appeared to have been 
 unable to do so, prisoners would 
 be sent where they would be taken 
 care of and punished. Stoves 
 was then sentenced to two months' 
 imprisonment with hard labour, 
 and the other boy to one month's 
 hard labour.
 
 246 Appendix. 
 
 The magistrates of Accrington have, we are sorry to 
 say, adopted the Barstow Brutal Assault Tariff. In that 
 town, for the small charge of twenty shillings and a 
 shilling or two for costs, a member of the ruffian class 
 may go up to an unoffending woman who is passing 
 along the street not merely a member of the unfortu- 
 nate class, but the wife, or sister, or mother of a respect- 
 able citizen may fell her to the ground, and kick her 
 about the face and body. We presume that a somewhat 
 higher tariff would be charged if the victim happened to 
 be the wife, sister, or daughter of a magistrate. Ac- 
 crington must be a nice place to live in for cowardly 
 roughs with worse than brutal propensities. It was only 
 a few weeks ago that a strong outcry was raised in Lan- 
 cashire against the astonishingly light sentence which 
 Mr. Justice Watkin Williams passed upon two ruffians 
 who had wantonly kicked a man to death with their 
 heavy clogs, and he was warned that such misplaced 
 leniency was rather calculated to increase, than act as a 
 deterrent from, crime. The sentence of the Accrington 
 magistrates goes yet further in the same direction. It is 
 high time that the Home Secretary took seriously into 
 consideration whether it is not possible so to alter the 
 law as to make it obligatory upon eccentric Magistrates 
 to treat with as much seriousness a savage and wanton 
 attack upon the person as the theft of a pocket hand- 
 kerchief, or of a loaf of bread. The very same paper 
 that records the Accrington case reports also the infliction 
 of a fine of ^50 upon the landlady of an hotel at Bala 
 for buying ten pheasants from an unlicensed person. 
 Echo, May 19, 1881. 
 
 Lord Coleridge has improved upon the Barstow 
 Brutal Assault Tariff. The drunken labourer at Eltham, 
 who threw his wife down and then gave her a kick on the 
 head, from which she died in seven or eight minutes,
 
 Appendix. 247 
 
 has been sentenced by him to six weeks' hard labour. 
 The judgment, it is said, caused some surprise in Court ; 
 it will certainly excite still more surprise outside it. There 
 were several extenuating circumstances in the case. Both 
 the prisoner and his wife were drunk ; the latter had had 
 the hardihood to kick her husband's dog ; and the man 
 bore a good character for general sobriety, kindness, and 
 industry. These things afforded some ground for a 
 mitigation of punishment ; but, on the other hand, too 
 great a stretch of mercy is a positive cruelty to the 
 numerous class who run a constant risk of brutal ill- 
 treatment from drunken labourers who think more of 
 their dogs than their wives. Lord Coleridge himself 
 does not consider that drunkenness is any great extenua- 
 tion, for he remarked that the prisoner had wilfully 
 deprived himself of reason. He then went on to observe 
 that he must pass upon the prisoner a sentence to show 
 that human life was a precious thing, and that sentence 
 was six weeks' hard labour. In another Court, under 
 the same roof, a man was being tried for receiving a 
 stolen parcel of india-rubber cuttings, for which he 
 received a sentence of twelve months' hard labour. The 
 life of a woman, it seems, is not nearly so precious as a 
 parcel of india-rubber cuttings. Echo, May 27, 1881. 
 
 Street ruffians, if they are wise, will not overtax the 
 patience of the public. They are becoming immoderately 
 violent, and although treated, as usual, with inexplicable 
 leniency by magistrates, evidently stand in some danger 
 of losing even the sympathy of the bench, in which case 
 they will be left absolutely without friends outside of their 
 immediate circles. What, for instance, could be more 
 unpardonable than the conduct of a man, by name 
 Crockett, who was charged at the Thames Police Court 
 yesterday with committing a violent and aggravated 
 assault on an inoffensive woman whom he happened to
 
 248 Appendix. 
 
 meet as he was walking along Tower Hill, on Tuesday 
 night ? For no reason except wanton brutality, Crockett 
 struck the complainant so frightful a blow on the mouth 
 that he actually knocked out four of her front teeth, 
 loosened all the remainder, and split her lip open. The 
 magistrate, observing that the prisoner ' appeared to be 
 a very violent young man,' sentenced him to two months' 
 imprisonment with hard labour, adding that the ' punish- 
 ment was less than he deserved.' True enough ; but 
 why should this ruffian be treated with any tenderness? 
 St. James's Gazette, June 23, 1881. 
 
 V. CRIME AND ITS PUNISHMENT. 
 Otir Convict System. 
 
 There are two distinct classes of prisons in 
 this country, viz. : 
 
 1. LOCAL GAOLS. For ordinary offenders, 
 whose sentences do not exceed two years. 
 (There are no sentences of three or four years, 
 passed now.) 
 
 2. CONVICT PRISONS. For criminals sen- 
 tenced to " Penal Servitude," the shortest 
 sentence being for five years. Convicts 
 have to spend the first nine months 
 of their sentence in separate confinement 
 in one of the cellular prisons of Penton-
 
 Appendix. 249 
 
 ville, Millbank, or Mountjoy (Ireland). The 
 remainder of their terms, forming the prin- 
 cipal portion of the time, is occupied in 
 working in the Gang Prisons, or on Convict 
 Public Works viz., Chatham, Portsmouth, 
 Portland, Woking, Dartmoor, Parkhurst, and 
 Spike Island (near Cork). 
 
 Necessity for the Classification of Prisoners. 
 
 The following is an extract from observa- 
 tions by the Ordinary of Newgate Gaol, which 
 appeared a few years since in The Times: 
 
 Those who laboured for the reformation of criminals had 
 by no means the best chance of accomplishing the object 
 for which they strived until a system was organized for the 
 careful classification of prisoners. By indiscriminately 
 associating old offenders with first offenders in the con- 
 vict prisons, they would bring down men comparatively 
 pure to the depraved notions and feelings of those whose 
 lives had been one catalogue of crime. In Newgate the 
 separate system was of the greatest value in that respect. 
 There was nothing to hinder any one who chose from 
 yielding to the good advice which he received, backed as 
 it was by his enforced reflection upon the consequences 
 which were inseparable from an evil life. During the 
 nine months of probation, as they were termed, which 
 immediately followed a sentence of penal servitude, every- 
 thing was favourable to reformation. Every prisoner was 
 easily accessible to the chaplain ; and the separate 
 system, so far as communication of prisoners with each
 
 250 Appendix. 
 
 other was concerned, was as limited as possible. But all 
 that was entirely altered when convicts arrived at the 
 public works prisons. There men laboured together in 
 gangs of from ten or fifteen to fifty, and communication 
 was easy and incessant. 
 
 The following is an article on the classifi- 
 cation of prisoners, by an Ex-prisoner, which 
 appeared in The Weekly Times ; 
 
 When I was at Portland there was a party or gang 
 called " No. 32 party." It was under the charge of an 
 old soldier, and it was composed of so great a variety of 
 elements that I cannot do better than select it for the 
 purpose of showing how great is the unwisdom of the 
 present association of prisoners. To begin with, there 
 was an old " fence," who, if the party had been organized 
 into a committee, would certainly have been selected by 
 the majority as their chairman. It is only doing him 
 justice to say that there is no species of dishonesty or 
 villainy with which he was not thoroughly acquainted. 
 He had graduated in all the arts of thievery, and come 
 off with high honours. He was an authority with all the 
 thieves of the party, and it was admitted by them that if 
 anybody knew his way about, Brown did. He had com- 
 menced his education in a reformatory school, where he 
 had the opportunity to learn from a hundred young 
 thieves an immense variety of clever tricks which enabled 
 him at the end of his term to play havoc with the pockets 
 of old gentlemen and unprotected ladies. Before he 
 was eighteen years of age, and after having served ten or 
 a dozen short terms of imprisonment, Brown had so 
 distinguished himself that the late Chief Baron Pollock 
 thought that five years of penal servitude was the least 
 consideration to which he was entitled. He was sent to
 
 Appendix. 251 
 
 Portland, and there in the brickfield he made a chum 
 out of a clever burglar who was doing ten years. Of an 
 enterprising turn of mind, Brown determined to make 
 the best use of his time ; and long before his sentence 
 had expired, he had thoroughly qualified himself for this 
 new branch of thievery. On his release he sought the 
 acquaintance of some thieves to whom he had been 
 recommended while in prison, and they soon found him 
 a "joint" to do. It is necessary I should explain that 
 doing a "joint " means effecting a burglarious entrance. 
 His first adventure in this line was accomplished with 
 comparative ease, but it showed a capacity for calculation 
 which augured well for his luture success as a burglar. 
 In a morning walk through the City he had noticed a 
 warehouseman arrive, unlock a door, take out the key, 
 apparently hang it behind the door, and then after 
 fastening the door open ascend the staircase into a 
 warehouse. It was but the work of a moment for 
 Brown to possess himself of the key and adjourn to his 
 chambers in Kent Street, Borough. Arrived there, he 
 began to put into operation a " little game" in which he 
 had been instructed by his chum at Portland. He first 
 provided himself with a flat tin box just a little too large 
 to contain the key. Into this box he put some prepara- 
 tion, the name of which, although he told me, I forget. 
 It is, however, something which is used by engravers to 
 finish their plates, and is, I presume, a sort of paste. He 
 then inserted the key into the box of preparation, and, 
 pressing the sides, obtained a perfect cast of the key. 
 His next care was to replace the key behind the door of 
 the warehouse, that no suspicion might be aroused. He 
 then found his way to a locksmith who was in the con- 
 fidence of the craft, and had a key manufactured. Thus 
 armed he could of course enter at pleasure without 
 running the risk of being seen picking or forcing the
 
 252 Appendix. 
 
 lock. For several nights he obtained from the warehouse 
 small parcels which were not likely to be immediately 
 missed ; and at last, having made his preparations for 
 removing the spoil rapidly, he made a large haul. After 
 this, Mr. Brown boasted of a series of successes ; he 
 married a very clever young lady who was engaged in the 
 shoplifting business, and Fortune constantly favoured 
 both " the brave " and " the fair." 
 
 Three years' run of luck was brought to a close by 
 a vigilant detective, through whose efforts Mr. Brown 
 was again .under lock and key. At his trial, the only 
 evidence as to character was the certificate of his former 
 convictions, which obtained for him eight years more in 
 her Majesty's service. At the close of this sentence, he 
 thought it wise to adopt a more retired life, and set up 
 business as " a fence." In this calling he made the ac- 
 quaintance of a large number of London thieves, 
 amongst whom he was very popular, for he had the repu- 
 tation of paying a fair price, meaning that he would give 
 as much as 3*. 6d. for every sovereign's worth of value. 
 In the pursuit of this calling he made a slip which ob- 
 tained him fourteen years more of penal servitude, in 
 the course of which he was stationed at Gibraltar. He 
 lived through this, and again started business as "a fence, 1 ' 
 and in the year 1876 he had come to Portland, at sixty 
 years of age, to do his fourth term of imprisonment. His 
 sentence now was twenty years, so that his public career 
 as a thief and a receiver may be said to have ended. 
 I have been thus particular in describing his accomplish- 
 ments and his career, because at the time I was in " 32 
 party" he was the tutor and confidential adviser of 
 all the young prisoners with whom he came in contact. 
 
 Another of the dangerous classes in "32 party" was 
 a Birmingham man, who had been imprisoned for passing 
 counterfeit money. He was, as I was told by other
 
 Appendix. 253 
 
 prisoners who had been his customers, a very clever 
 coiner, and, as a coiner, had successfully eluded the 
 vigilance of the police for many years. At one time, 
 when he fancied that they were on his track, he had 
 emigrated with his plant to South America, and he told 
 me that in Rio he had so successfully engraved the face 
 of the Emperor of Brazil, that the loyal subjects of that 
 enlightened ruler had no hesitation in paying him seven- 
 teen dollars for what cost him the same number of 
 shillings to manufacture. He was, I understand, parti- 
 cularly clever in producing counterfeit presentments of 
 the sovereign and the florin. He told me that the per- 
 fection of his work depended upon the amount of real 
 value he put into it, and for about us. $d. he could 
 produce a sovereign which would be accepted without 
 hesitation. This man had been in the smiths' shop near 
 the new church at Portland, and had, he told me, manu- 
 factured " snide " shillings and florins in the very prison 
 shop, the material having been obtained for him by a 
 prison officer, who bought many pounds of tobacco with 
 the spurious coin. 
 
 A third man in this party was a man who had spent 
 altogether seventeen years in prison for pocket-picking. 
 He boasted that he got eleven gold watches and three 
 silver ones, and seventeen purses, on the departure plat- 
 form of the Crystal Palace at Sy den ham during a certain 
 Easter holiday. His description of the ingenuity dis- 
 played in these robberies was amazing. I think he will 
 not return to the world until 1881, but there are doubtless 
 some of his Portland pupils now in active service, of 
 whom sightseers should beware. A fourth hopeful was a 
 man of fifty-five, who told me that he had saved quite a 
 nice little bit of money in the horse trade I mean the 
 horse-steading trade. He used to take country trips, 
 make descents upon unprotected stables, and in the
 
 254 Appendix. 
 
 night run the horses to London. He had a house with 
 a stable somewhere in the neighbourhood of the " Dogs' 
 Home," on the Surrey side of the river. Those who 
 knew the man outside the prison, spoke of him as a very 
 clever artist. His neighbours, thinking he was a horse- 
 dealer, were not surprised to see a variety of horses 
 coming out of his stables ; but, had they watched 
 narrowly, they would have discovered that the horse 
 which went into his stable at night never came out again. 
 A chestnut or a grey may have gone into his stable over- 
 night, but, if a search were made next day, nothing would 
 be found but a black or a bay. He was so clever a dis- 
 guiser that he used to boast that he had once sold a dealer 
 his own horse, which he had stolen from him a few weeks 
 previously. Fifteen years before I saw this man, he had 
 done a " lagging" at Portland. He came back in 1874, 
 having had, as he said, a fourteen years' run of luck. He 
 was unrecognised by the police, and so had got off with 
 a seven years' sentence. He had got a " bit of money" 
 put away, and his intention was, on his release, to retire 
 from active service, but to buy stolen horses from others 
 at a low figure, and then, to use his own words, " fake 
 them up," and sell them to cab-owners. He was very 
 anxious to enlist help for the future, and one or two 
 young men in the party whom he thought " smart" enough 
 for the business had promised to communicate with him 
 on their discharge, and, in the course of their work, 
 listened eagerly to his instructions. Another shining 
 light in "32 party" was a fellow who, amongst thieves, 
 was known as a " running postman." His vocation was 
 to run rapidly through the country from farm-house to 
 manor-house, and from mansion to vicarage, ostensibly 
 as the bearer of a begging-letter. He was so pious 
 (professionally) that he was very successful in quartering 
 himself for the night upon innocent farmers and parsons.
 
 Appendix. 255 
 
 By his own admission, he made it a rule never to leave 
 empty-handed. He had been convicted for small and 
 large offences in different parts of the country thirty-four 
 times, and was, in 1874, doing his third " lagging." There 
 were two or three others of the thief class. There was 
 Swinton, a clever burglar of thirty years' standing, who 
 used to boast triumphantly that he was only doing his 
 second imprisonment. He could detail the particular 
 ways in which the safes of different makers could be 
 opened, and it may be imagined with what eagerness all 
 he had to tell was swallowed by men who had nothing 
 else to occupy their minds. There was a dock-thief, 
 who, under pretence of working in the Docks, did a good 
 deal of thieving there, and who had been convicted 
 before. There was a Liverpool thief, who for twenty 
 years had picked a subsistence out of other people's 
 pockets upon the landing-stage prior to the departure of 
 steamers. He was an old thief. There was a bright 
 youth of fifty from Newcastle, a very canny Scot, whose 
 boast it was that at Glasgow, and afterwards at Newcastle, 
 he had always done very well by " picking up" men on 
 Saturday nights in public-houses before they reached home 
 with their wages. He had, he said, thirty pounds in the 
 hands of a Newcastle publican as a nest-egg, with which 
 he proposed to " rig himself out" on his discharge, prior 
 to starting business afresh in some other large town. All 
 these men were inveterate, constitutional, or professional 
 thieves. Thievery was not only their business, but their 
 pastime. They revelled in their infamy, and it may be 
 fairly assumed that as soon as they are released they will 
 return to their " wallowing in the mire." 
 
 In close association with this hopeful band,in "32 party," 
 there were a dozen men and boys of quite a different 
 character, none of whom had ever, until their present 
 sentence, been in prison ; some of them highly culpable,
 
 256 Appendix. 
 
 because, like myself, they had possessed early advantages 
 which should have preserved them from crime, no matter 
 how great the temptation ; others deserving of pity more 
 than blame, and who were really being punished because 
 they had miserable homes in which the gaunt spectre of 
 want had stood at the threshold as they were about to enter 
 in search of the evening meal, and had impelled them 
 to turn back and commit a theft. Two others there were 
 who had been guilty of no dishonesty, hard-working and 
 industrious young men, who thought it grand to get 
 drunk on each succeeding Saturday night, and who, on 
 one of these occasions, and while under the influence of 
 the demon Drink, had struck so hard a blow at a fellow- 
 creature as had sent him into eternity. They were under 
 a sentence of five years for manslaughter. When these 
 two young men first went into "32 party" at Portland I 
 am pretty sure that if anybody had called them thieves 
 there would have been a fight. What they are now, after 
 living a few years under the tutorship of the constitu- 
 tional and professional thieves I have described, I cannot 
 undertake to say, because I have had no means of fol- 
 lowing their steps ; but I can say truthfully that so 
 long as I was there with them, I saw them week after 
 week becoming more and more reckless, more and more 
 obscene in their conversation, more and more interested 
 in the disgusting and dangerous conversation of the 
 heroes of a hundred crimes. I sincerely hope that when 
 they were discharged they went out to a renewed life of 
 honest industry, which, for the future, would be tempered 
 by sobriety, but I do not believe they did ; and if they 
 did, they did it in defiance of all the evil influences with 
 which the Government had surrounded them at Portland. 
 Before I left Portland, the young men in question had 
 begun to laugh at and ridicule everything that partook 
 of decency, and I should be most agreeably disappointed
 
 Appendix. 257 
 
 if I could discover that they had not joined the "regular 
 army" of crime. Another first offender who should most 
 certainly not have been associated with the avowed foes 
 of society, was a shopkeeper from a northern town, who 
 for twenty years had carried on an honest business, and 
 who had reared a large family in respectability and 
 honour. He was one of the very few cases of first 
 offenders I met with which could not be traced to the 
 influence of drink. He was a victim of " hard times." 
 An execution had been obtained against his stock and 
 furniture. His creditor was willing to stave it off upon 
 receiving a note of hand with an endorsement. The 
 note was given, but the endorsement was a forgery. No 
 doubt the poor fellow hoped to take up the bill, but 
 the fraud was discovered, and he was sent into penal 
 servitude for seven years. Such crimes are dangerous 
 to the best interests of society, and must, of course, be 
 punished ; but I very much doubt whether the best 
 interests of society were served when that erring man 
 was put into association with Messrs. Brown and Swinton 
 for seven years. Another first offender was a man of 
 partial education who was the owner of a laundry at 
 Glasgow. He had been tempted into sin in a very 
 peculiar way. For years he had been a Good Templar, 
 and things had gone well with him. He was employed 
 by a wholesale shirt and collar manufacturer in Glasgow 
 to dress their goods. This brought him into contact 
 with their manager, a fast young man of dazzling exterior. 
 The laundryman, flattered by his notice, became his com- 
 panion at the billiard-table, and was soon induced to 
 drink. The tempter soon wanted to borrow some money. 
 The money was supplied, and repaid by entering in a 
 book a larger quantity of goods dressed by the laundry- 
 man. This was a fraud ; but the mode adopted by the 
 Government to punish and reform this man is, I think, 
 
 S
 
 258 Appendix. 
 
 indefensible. There was a young man of the middle 
 class also in "32 party," who had been a bank clerk in 
 London. Vanity, and a desire to emulate men who had 
 larger means had led him to commit an act of dishonesty. 
 He should undoubtedly have been made to feel that 
 " the way of the transgressor is hard ;" but if, as I believe, 
 this young man had lots of good in him, which only re- 
 quired to be fortified by a little more moral courage, it 
 must be admitted that the Government took special 
 pains to prevent his -acquiring it. 
 
 I havebeen particular in describing the elements of which 
 "32 party" was composed, because I believe it to be a fair 
 sample of other parties in all Public Works Prisons. The 
 young and the old, the novice and the adept, the vilest 
 of the vile and the comparatively innocent, who have been 
 tempted into one sin, are thrown together indiscriminately. 
 
 The vicious party is noisy and assuming, and self- 
 asserting and intolerant; ever circulating its nauseous 
 and disgusting dogmas. The more innocent are naturally 
 retiring and quiet at first, but the fact that they have fallen 
 into sin shows that they have weak natures. Can it be 
 wondered at, if, being taught by their surroundings that 
 for the future they will be scouted and scorned by the 
 good and the virtuous, they join the army of the avowed 
 foes of society, and determine that for the rest of their 
 lives they will defy all moral restraints and be revenged 
 upon society for having consigned them to infamy instead 
 of regenerating them ? This will of course be met by 
 the old objection, that it is very easy to find fault, but 
 not so easy to propound a remedy. Now, having shown 
 in this letter exactly what the evil is, I propose in my 
 next to propound the remedy, and to show that a proper 
 classification of prisoners is not only easy, but that one 
 result of it would be a large reduction in the cost of prison 
 establishments.
 
 Appendix. 259 
 
 I also propose to argue that on the common ground 
 of humanity, leaving Christianity altogether out of the 
 question, it is the duty of the Government to make some 
 effort to rescue the fallen. 
 
 The following is a letter to The Standard 
 on the same subject : 
 
 Sir, There has been of late a great deal written 
 about prisons and their inmates, and, having myself un- 
 fortunately been convicted and sentenced to five years' 
 penal servitude, I am able to contribute to what has 
 been already said. 
 
 Crime springs invariably from want of thought. 
 Young men do wrong, and from bad they get to worse, 
 simply through that unchristian spirit so strongly visible 
 in this country of unforgiveness. Sending them to prison 
 does not reclaim them, but, on the contrary, makes them 
 hardened. If men were kept in separate confinement 
 for short terms it would do them more good than send- 
 ing them to Public Works Prisons, where, unfortunately, 
 there is no classification of either crime or prisoners, 
 and where the warders, all of whom have been in either 
 the Army or Navy, are often brutal, pampering the old 
 gaol bird, and exceeding their duty with those unfortu- 
 nate men who see prison for the first time. Redress 
 there is none, as you are not allowed to call another 
 prisoner as a witness in proving your charge against an 
 officer to the Governor; the result of which is, the 
 Governor dismisses the case, and the officer in return 
 charges you with making a false report, and gets you 
 punished. This is the justice of her Majesty's Prisons ; 
 but, of course, it is part of the rules and regulations, no 
 doubt. 
 
 It is not so much as a matter of complaint that I 
 have written you, but to offer a few suggestions which 
 
 S 2
 
 260 Appendix. 
 
 would, I am sure, tend to keep men out of prison and 
 lessen the expense. The mark system is undoubtedly 
 the very best, and the licence, or ticket of leave, the 
 very worst. My suggestion is to abolish the licence 
 system, not the police supervision, and give every man 
 a better chance of once more becoming a respectable 
 member of society, and, at the same time, keep a better 
 check on criminals. This I will now explain. Every 
 prisoner's sentence is calculated at the rate of six marks 
 per diem, and for good conduct and industry he is 
 entitled to receive eight marks per diem, which gives 
 him a remission of one quarter of his sentence ; this 
 remission at present dates at nine months from convic- 
 tion, instead of from conviction. Now, all prisoners are 
 treated alike, whether it is a man's first offence or his 
 third (without counting sometimes as much as a dozen 
 minor offences ranging from one month to two years), 
 which in my opinion is unjust. I would, therefore, 
 propose that all prisoners from six months and upwards 
 should receive remission at the rate of twelve marks 
 per diem for first offence, ten marks per diem for second, 
 eight marks for third, and six for fourth offence ; that 
 the remission should be for good conduct and industry, 
 and should not be revoked during the first sentence ; 
 but that (although, in the meantime, the released prisoner 
 should be entirely free and entitled to all the privileges 
 and protection of any other citizen) the remission should 
 be forfeited in the event of a reconviction. The prisoner 
 would then have to serve, in addition to his second 
 sentence, the unexpired portion of the first, and receive 
 ten marks per diem, and so on till he reached his fourth 
 conviction, when he would receive no remission, but be 
 liable, in case of misconduct, to serve beyond his sen- 
 tence any number of marks which the Governor might 
 fine him for breach of prison rules. The class of hardened
 
 Appendix. 261 
 
 old criminals at present receive no punishment with the 
 exception of one, two, or three days' punishment-cells, 
 which every man gets. They having no marks to lose, 
 those who have receive a far greater punishment than 
 these hardened old villains in proportion to their offence, 
 which is unjust. 
 
 This system would entirely do away with the licence, 
 as well as that gross injustice which at present causes 
 judges to punish men not for their offence but for all 
 past offences. I allude to prison warders attending to 
 prove convictions. Also all prisoners who have reached 
 their fourth conviction or more should have to undergo 
 police supervision for the same time as their sentence 
 that is, if their sentence were five years it would carry 
 five years' police supervision without a Judge ordering it. 
 
 These suggestions of mine, if adopted, would give a 
 better chance to those truly unfortunate men who are at 
 present wasting years of their lives in prison, to the great 
 injury of their moral, mental, and bodily constitution 
 through such lengthened association with the vilest of man- 
 kind. I am quite certain when this meets the eye of Gover- 
 nors and Directors of her Majesty's prisons, that they will 
 readily agree with my suggestions in part, if not altogether. 
 
 Concerning the food, on the whole, it is both good 
 and wholesome, but insufficient. As a proof, I lost in 
 three years and eleven months sixty-five pounds of flesh, 
 and have gained since my release two stone four pounds 
 in fifteen months, but am still suffering from debility, 
 caused through the great strain on the constitution and 
 insufficient food. The Governors I served under were 
 the right men in the right place : Captain Alexander and 
 Major Griffiths the latter especially are most just in 
 all their actions with both officers and men. 
 
 I am, Sir, your obedient servant, 
 
 " EX-CONVICT."
 
 262 Appendix. 
 
 A Scriptural Treatment of Criminals. 
 
 A pamphlet entitled, " Humanity and 
 Humanitarianism," has these remarks : 
 
 There are two opposite extremes, each mischievous to 
 all parties concerned, towards which systems of criminal 
 treatment are in turn liable to tend. Either, with a 
 narrow heedlessness of the causes of crime, they are apt 
 to aim at mere vindictive chastisement, almost always 
 proved by the results to be ineffectual, even for deter- 
 rence ; or, with humane intentions, they permit such re- 
 laxation of needful stringency as to render the condition 
 of the criminal more comfortable and desirable than that 
 of the honest toiling poor, and so increase, rather than 
 decrease, the ranks of offenders. 
 
 Hence, notwithstanding the progress of the age in 
 many important movements, there has been compara- 
 tively little sustained adoption of a system combining 
 effectually deterrence with reformation, by making it the 
 basis of prison discipline to compel every offender to 
 render both amends and restitution, so far as possible, to 
 the State or to those whom he has injured ; and at the 
 same time, by a sufficiently prolonged course of labour 
 and instruction, to form such habits of industry and virtue 
 as shall furnish to the criminal himself the education and 
 guidance which every member of human society needs 
 from some quarter, either private or public, but which so 
 large a number fail to receive in time to prevent evil 
 courses. This twofold principle of treatment is both 
 preventive and restorative, both beneficent and puni- 
 tory. It combines the two Scriptural principles of 
 retributive justice and humane consideration. It recon- 
 ciles " Eye for eye and tooth for tooth" with " What- 
 soever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
 
 Appendix. 263 
 
 so to them." It unites the Mosaic command relative to 
 the stealer of property " He shall make restitution 
 unto the owner thereof" (Exodus xxii. 12), with the 
 New Testament precepts " Even when we were with 
 you, this we commanded you, that if any would not 
 work, neither should he eat" (2 Thess. iii., 10), and 
 " Let him that stole steal no more ; -but rather let him 
 labour, working with his hands the thing which is good" 
 (Ephes. iv. 28). 
 
 Crime must be rendered really unprofitable to the 
 criminal. His idle habits must be effectually altered, 
 which cannot be done by the system so prevalent in 
 Great Britain, of causing scores of thousands of 
 offenders. to play at "bo-peep" with their jailers, by 
 successive sentences of imprisonment for week upon 
 week and fortnight upon fortnight a system which 
 brings the law and magistracy into contempt ; effects 
 no reformation, but does great mischief by its degrad- 
 ing effects ; affords no time for the formation, or even 
 inculcation of right habits ; and saddles the honest 
 ratepayer with enormous costs which are a sheer dead 
 loss, in addition to the other injuries he has to suffer 
 from this class of misdemeanants. For example, in one 
 prison, that of Dundee, by no means an extraordinarily 
 unfavourable illustration, the official report for 1869 
 admitted that " no fewer than fifty-three of the prisoners 
 had been convicted upwards of fifty times." What a 
 failure of the present system does this prove ! 
 
 It must be fairly conceded that our con- 
 victs are taught much useful labour, and that 
 many of the officials are anxious to do their 
 duty towards those under their care. But 
 the system greatly impedes them.
 
 ( 2 6 4 ) 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS 
 
 OF 
 
 "OUR LAWS AND OUR POOR." 
 
 FROM 
 
 7^i? Times. 
 
 The Morning Post. 
 
 The Daily News. 
 
 The Standard. 
 
 The Daily Chronicle. 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 The Court Journal. 
 
 The City Press. 
 
 The School Board Chronicle. 
 
 The Rock. 
 
 The Friend. 
 
 The Freemason. 
 
 The English Independent. 
 
 The Record. 
 
 The Christian Globe. 
 
 The Cosmopolitan. 
 
 The Times. 
 
 Mr. Francis Peek, whose name is well known in the 
 metropolis as an active and zealous member of the 
 London School Board, has done good service to the 
 cause of social reform by a little volume, under this title, 
 published by John B. Day, Savoy Street, Strand, in which 
 he shows how hardly the existing laws are practically 
 found to press upon the better disposed among our poor, 
 and how often, as at present administered, they offer a 
 premium to indolence and even to crime. 
 
 He divides his subject into three parts, treating 
 respectively of the operation of the law ; the wrongs of 
 orphans ; and, lastly, the just principles and true theory 
 of punishment. In the first part, he shows by an appeal 
 to facts that the deaths by starvation in the wealthiest
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 265 
 
 city in the world must exceed a hundred in the year, if 
 it be true that Coroners' juries have returned that verdict 
 in 83 cases in only the central division of Middlesex, 
 which does not include the poorer districts across the 
 water ; and that, taking into account the entire map of 
 England and Wales, "one in every 27 of our fellow- 
 countrymen and fellow-countrywomen is a pauper." 
 
 He next proceeds to account for this state of things, 
 which he ascribes to the operation of several causes, 
 such as reckless and improvident marriages, the relief of 
 the idle, drunken, and vicious poor at the cost of their 
 industrious brethren, the utter want of discrimination in 
 the distribution of Poor-Law relief, and the mixture of 
 confirmed vagrants with temporary sufferers from want in 
 our workhouses. In the next chapter the author gives 
 us some statistics as to the sanitary, or rather insanitary, 
 arrangements of the homes of the poor in Bethnal Green, 
 in the parish of St. George the Martyr, and in the West- 
 minster Bridge Road, to which, we fancy, he might easily 
 have added others equally as gloomy in Clerkenwell and in 
 the neighbourhood of Gray's Inn Lane. These wretched 
 homes tend to encourage drunkenness, if they do not 
 actually cause it ; and the homes are further demoralized 
 by the inadequacy of the law for enforcing the duties of 
 men towards their wives and their children. " To present 
 this wrong in a more forcible manner," writes Mr. Peek, 
 " let us compare the relative positions of the virtuous 
 married woman and of the abandoned outcast, who lives 
 at her pleasure, bringing into the world a family of ille- 
 gitimate children. The poor, virtuous woman is in reality 
 a slave to her husband, dependent on his whim for every- 
 thing except the barest necessaries of life, and exposed 
 to suffer in herself, and through her children, from every 
 freak of his bad temper, or his drunkenness. But, for 
 the shameless outcast (so called) the law enforces a very
 
 266 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 different treatment. It provides that, for every illegiti- 
 mate child, she can claim from its father from half-a- 
 crown to 5$. a week for its maintenance, and thus with 
 a family of four or five illegitimate children she may live 
 in uncontrolled comfort and comparative luxury, while 
 her virtuous sister is toiling early and late to meet the 
 wants of her legitimate family, and is, perhaps, suffering 
 from the whims of a dissolute husband, being able to 
 claim only the few shillings he has left of his wages after 
 his drunken orgies." 
 
 Mr. Peek goes on to consider the fate of legitimate 
 orphan children consigned to a workhouse existence, 
 where no distinction or separation is made between them 
 and those who have been brought up in vice from their 
 infancy. For the preservation of such children as the 
 former, with a view to inspire them with a hope of rising 
 above their forlorn condition, Mr. Peek advocates the 
 plan of removing them from the atmosphere of the work- 
 house and its surroundings, and of "boarding them out" 
 among the respectable cottagers, as is done by wholesale 
 in some other countries, where the plan is found to work 
 exceedingly well and to show satisfactory results. 
 
 We will not follow Mr. Peek into the last of the 
 three sections of his little book, in which he discusses 
 the vexed question as to what is the real end and object 
 of punishment ; but it is worth while considering seriously 
 his statement that, whereas one of the chief prisons in 
 the United States, after defraying the entire cost of its 
 inmates, has contributed profits to the extent of .5,000 
 a year to the revenue of the State, here in England, 
 whenever it has been sought to make prison labour re- 
 munerative, we have only such meagre results to show 
 as earnings of ^"5 and ^7 in Stafford and Wakefield 
 gaols respectively, to meet the cost of each criminal 
 about ^32 a year while "in the county gaol of Rut-
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 267 
 
 land each prisoner costs ^125 a year, and earns nothing." 
 Whatever may be thought of the social doctrines and 
 principles laid down by Mr. Peek, at all events he has 
 brought forward in the compass of less than 200 pages 
 an important array of facts. The late Sir John Bowring 
 and other philanthropists have, from time to time, en- 
 deavoured to show how prison labour could be made 
 remunerative in England ; but the attempt has never yet 
 been made with sufficient earnestness or on a sufficiently 
 large scale. 
 
 The Morning Post. 
 
 There are books and books, some being written by 
 mere theorists or compilers, whilst others are the em- 
 bodiment of the observations and experience of practical 
 men. A work which comes under the latter description, 
 and is entitled "Our Laws and Our Poor" (J. B. Day, 
 London), has just been written by Mr. Francis Peek, an 
 eminent London merchant and active member of the 
 Metropolitan School Board and of the Howard Associa- 
 tion. In the volume now under notice he gives expression 
 to the conclusions respecting the operation of the laws 
 affecting pauperism and crime as they have been forced 
 upon his own observation during the performance of his 
 official and philanthropic duties. He does not advocate 
 any sweeping or radical changes, being himself a man 
 of moderate political views and an attached member of 
 the Church of England; but he considers that, in several 
 directions, important modifications of the existing laws 
 affecting the poorer classes are urgently needed. 
 
 " The author advocates at least for the orphan and 
 deserted children a much more general resort than at 
 present to the practice of boarding them out in healthy 
 cottage homes (by no means " farming" them out in 
 numbers, but never placing more than two in each
 
 268 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 cottage, and always under suitable care and supervision). 
 Wherever carried out under these conditions the plan 
 has answered admirably. 
 
 Mr. Peek protests against the " casting out " of pauper 
 children, but earnestly recommends their being boarded 
 out under carefully supervised and wholesome conditions 
 of family life and home industry, away from the taint of 
 Union-houses and the barrack-like system of large 
 pauper schools, where hundreds of poor children are 
 massed together. For his observations on various other 
 important matters, we must refer the reader to the pages 
 of his thoughtfully written and very suggestive work. 
 
 The Daily News. 
 
 Mr. Peek's fundamental idea is that the public do 
 not sufficiently recognize the influence of the laws of 
 the land upon the moral standard of the poor. Of the 
 extent of the evil here indicated, few, perhaps, who have 
 not read this book, have any notion. His remedy lies 
 in a reform of our relieving-system, which can only be 
 carried out by an increase of the number of relieving 
 officers and a careful supervision of their labours. Mr. 
 Peek's remarks on the rearing of pauper orphan children, 
 for whom he suggests the finding of foster-parents in their 
 own rankj as opposed to the Union-school system, will be 
 read with interest. 
 
 It is startling to find that the cost of each child in 
 the pauper District Schools is, all things included, about 
 twelve shillings a week, or as much as the entire wages 
 of an agricultural labourer. A less sum would clearly 
 give an industrious pair of foster-parents a powerful 
 motive to bring up a child decently and honestly, where 
 it would be removed from the notoriously corrupting and 
 humiliating influences of training among pauper children. 
 
 We are, unfortunately, unable to do more than direct
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 269 
 
 attention to these subjects as treated in Mr. Peek's 
 volume, which deals, however, in a practical way with 
 the evils of our Prison System. 
 
 The Standard. 
 
 As a Member of the London School Board and 
 Chairman of the Society for Promoting the Boarding-out 
 of Pauper Orphans, Mr. Peek has a right to be heard on 
 the subject of " Our Laws and Our Poor ;" and the aim 
 of his little book is to awaken a benevolent interest in 
 the condition of the pauper and criminal classes of our 
 population. His view of the matter is that bad social 
 customs, bad laws, and selfish neglect, lie at the root of 
 much of the moral evil we see around us ; but that cor- 
 rectives must be applied with discrimination and judg- 
 ment. His suggested reforms, if not practicable at the 
 present time, are at least worthy of consideration, being 
 dictated by a humane sentiment and a feeling of sympathy 
 with that portion of our fellow-subjects whose miserable 
 condition he is anxious to ameliorate. 
 
 The Daily Chronicle. 
 
 The easy-going dwellers in our City electors and 
 elected those who feel self-satisfied with the way in 
 which they treat the world and those who delight in self- 
 mortification, should read the book one of no startling 
 size, and composed of no dreaded statistics just given 
 to the world under this title by the pen of Mr. Francis 
 Peek, one of the representatives of the City of London on 
 the London School Board. We venture to say that there 
 will be few, and those few need not be envied, who will 
 rise from its perusal without qualms of conscience and 
 feelings of shame and fear. Qualms of conscience will 
 come to those who do not insist upon the hideous wrongs
 
 270 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 perpetrated in the name of law upon the lowly and meek 
 being remedied. It is all very well for men and women 
 to answer, " We have no power," for the history of some 
 of the most important legislative Acts shows that they 
 have been gained by the mere proof of the evil existing. 
 Let it be remembered that all who have sense, have 
 power for good. Qualms of conscience will come to 
 those who have not exercised this power, and should 
 come to legislators such as those who have given to the 
 leman and her children what is denied to the married 
 woman and her children the right to a proportionate 
 part of a man's earnings for the maintenance of those 
 whom he has caused to exist. The rulers of the law the 
 administrative powers have cause to feel ashamed of 
 the existence of a state of things in which the idle are 
 encouraged to be idle, the improvident are encouraged 
 to avoid the savings' bank, and the vicious suffer not for 
 wasted opportunities and misapplied lives so long, at 
 least, as they keep to the level of pauperism. The so- 
 called charitable, too, should have their fears aroused in 
 that they have not acted wisely. To them will come 
 the reproach which " Old Tithonus" gave to the Queen 
 of Light, that she gave, as " wealthy men, who care not 
 how they give," what had been to him a long life of 
 sorrow, and their fears will be increased when they find 
 that their indiscriminate charity has bred evils which are 
 past recall, and that the objects of their alms are plague- 
 spots, festering all around. 
 
 If Mr. Peek had some sensational evil to deal with, 
 he might hope to at once arrest public attention if it 
 was something even which affected only one person sen- 
 sationally, he might engage the attention of all London 
 for more than a week, and engross the thought of the 
 country for as long. But the subjects have no such 
 striking features. One of the evils of which he speaks
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 271 
 
 or rather one branch affects, as he says, one in 27 of 
 our population ; but others say others, too, who have 
 given official attention to the subject that it affects no 
 less than one in every seven of our population. This 
 difference is a proof that Mr. Peek has no desire to ex- 
 aggerate, and it is easy to see how the enormous difference 
 between these two calculations arises. 
 
 The points which Mr. Peek's book urges in re- 
 gard to the treatment of the poor are discriminate poor- 
 relief, discriminate charity, and the proper training of 
 pauper children by training them in families in preference 
 to institutionising them. Discriminate poor-relief can be 
 given by distinguishing between the worthy and the un- 
 worthy poor, and he earnestly bids the charitable to place 
 restraint upon their feelings so as to be just to their 
 neighbours and to the poor. In eloquent language he 
 tells the story of the present anomalies of the Poor-Laws, 
 and this story is as interesting as the creation of a 
 novelist's brain, save in the respect that what Mr. Peek 
 tells is true and, worse, true of ourselves and is of 
 existing evils. People are always ready to enlist them- 
 selves on behalf of wrongs a long way off, and their 
 sympathy is often aroused when the object of the sym- 
 pathy is beyond help Just laws, equitably 
 
 administered without provision being made for their 
 equitable administration, laws are worse than useless 
 are necessary, and with them, though we may have that 
 poverty which we are told on Divine authority we shall 
 have always with us, we shall not have so much of the 
 vice, the idleness, and helplessness which are now its 
 accompaniments. 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 The little volume lately published by Mr. Peek, 
 under the title of " Our Laws and Our Poor," contains
 
 272 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 some interesting information and remarks "on the question 
 of remunerative prison labour. It has been often main- 
 tained by reformers of our gaol system that prison labour 
 could be made generally remunerative ; and attempts 
 are even now made to do this, but not, it is asserted, on a 
 sufficiently large scale. Yet that there would be no great 
 difficulty in making our criminals pay for their own main- 
 tenance instead of burdening the community, provided 
 earnest and intelligent men are placed at the head of our 
 prisons, is a position which is amusingly illustrated by an 
 anecdote related by Mr. Peek in the work above referred 
 to. A prisoner was receiving his discharge from a 
 governor, who, during his imprisonment, had enforced 
 hard but remunerative .employment, and now, on leaving 
 explained to his late charge his reasons for doing so. 
 " Do you mean to say," asked the prisoner, " that I have 
 earned so much towards your salary?" " Yes," replied 
 the governor, " you have earned for the gaol nearly double 
 the cost of your own keep, and so much more for me 
 for keeping you at your work." " Then you shall never 
 see me here again," said the man, with excessive annoy- 
 ance. There can be no doubt, it is added, that criminals 
 often reflect with a sort of savage satisfaction that at 
 present they are making the community pay heavily for 
 keeping them shut up, and it is well they should be un- 
 deceived in the matter. It is, indeed, highly desirable 
 that the feeling of " excessive annoyance" experienced 
 by this prisoner should be very generally diffused among 
 his class, and that the captive should more often than at 
 present " regain his freedom with a sigh" at the thought 
 that he has actually been working for the benefit of 
 society during the term of his imprisonment. 
 
 The Court Journal. 
 " Our Laws and Our Poor," by Mr. Francis Peek, is
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 273 
 
 a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Poor- Law 
 administration. The author has made the condition of 
 the poor an especial study, and as he has contributed 
 most liberally to all plans for the amelioration of the con- 
 dition of the pauper class, his observations and suggestions 
 of improvement are those of a practical reformer, and do 
 not proceed from the pen of a doctrinaire. Mr. Peek's 
 useful remarks are supplemented by an appendix, con- 
 taining numerous statistics and extracts from official 
 reports bearing upon the poor and the laws affecting 
 their condition. " Our Laws and Our Poor" will prove 
 of great assistance to the legislator, and to those bene- 
 volent men and women who are endeavouring to stem 
 the torrent of vice and misery so prevalent in our midst. 
 
 The City Press. 
 
 Many of the miseries of the poor are traced by 
 the author to the pernicious tendency of our present 
 Poor- Laws to offer a direct premium for improvidence 
 and sloth. For example, he mentions that in a small 
 country town, recently, a benevolent gentlemen of in- 
 fluence was anxious to establish a provident savings' 
 bank, and called a meeting of the working classes, with 
 a view to enlist their co-operation. He urged upon 
 them the duty of saving during the period of health and 
 strength, for times of sickness and old age, and at first 
 appeared to carry the meeting with him. At length 
 however, a labourer rose, and asked to be informed 
 whether, in case he should give up his beer, and by 
 constant industry and application save sufficient to 
 keep himself and wife in necessaries when no longer 
 able to work for them, he would thereby be placed in 
 any better position than any other man who spent every- 
 thing he had earned on himself and then claimed 
 
 T
 
 274 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 parochial relief. Of course no advantage was, or could 
 be, shown under the existing Poor-Law, and the philan- 
 thropist's scheme fell to the ground. This simple 
 incident is very suggestive of the evil influence which 
 the Poor-Law has exerted, and still exerts, upon the 
 working classes. They assert the right to spend all 
 they earn without concern for the future, and feel neither 
 shame in claiming, nor gratitude in receiving, the suste- 
 nance to which the law declares them entitled. The 
 first step, therefore, to reduce the mass of pauperism is 
 to undo the effect of the past teaching of the law, and 
 introduce a healthier sentiment, by a legal recognition of 
 the indisputable truth that improvidence is a crime. 
 But at present the law justifies the poor in their widely- 
 spread conviction that " self-denial is folly." Hence the 
 writer advocates making character, and not mere destitu- 
 tution, the great qualification for obtaining out-door 
 relief. On the heavy, hulking, lazy pauper, who has 
 squandered his money in rioting and drunkenness, the 
 law should bestow no unconditional relief; nothing but 
 the barest sustenance, and that only with hard labour and 
 in the Union-house, under the most stringent of condi- 
 tions, as nearly like prison life as possible. By a rigid 
 and general enforcement of this policy on all paupers of 
 the idle, drunken, wife-neglecting class, the public saving 
 would soon be considerable, for fewer paupers would 
 claim this salutary mode of " relief," and also there would 
 be more money to spare for a more kindly and discrimi- 
 nating treatment than at present of the better classes 
 of the poor the virtuous victims of unavoidable mis- 
 fortune, the respectable widow, the diseased, the aged, 
 and the young children. 
 
 For the author's observations on various other im- 
 portant matters we must refer the reader to the pages of 
 his thoughtfully-written and very suggestive work.
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 275 
 
 The School Board Chronicle. 
 
 Mr. Francis Peek is entitled to be heard on the 
 condition of the poor in this country. He does not 
 stand afar off and study reports and statistics. He 
 makes himself acquainted, by personal observation, with 
 the evils and the miseries of poverty, pauperism, and the 
 outcast life of the lowest classes. His life may be said 
 to be devoted, to a large extent, to the task of alleviating 
 those evils and those miseries, and of taking such 
 measures as may be possible for stopping their spreading 
 and their perpetuation. He is no rash politician, follow- 
 ing a cry or taking up with a charter, He has not gone 
 among the poor with a theory to be confirmed, but has 
 gone among them first with the sole view of seeing what 
 it might be possible to do for them by charity ; and he 
 has come away from the study with certain convictions, 
 the result of his own experience and reflections. His 
 chapters on " The Influence of the Law" are worthy of 
 the gravest consideration of politicians, and of every 
 man who is entitled to vote in a Parliamentary or a 
 local election. 
 
 The Rock. 
 
 From the author's position as a member of the 
 Howard Association he has evidently been able to 
 collect a very large number of striking facts, and he uses 
 them to good purpose. There is no mawkish sentimen- 
 tality in his pages. The treatment he urges is one that 
 shall be at once retributive, deterrent, and remedial. 
 Mr. Peek is well known as the determined and energetic 
 promoter of Bible education, and in this volume his 
 extreme value for the Book glows forth ; for the refrain 
 throughout every part is that on Bible principles alone 
 can wise laws be made, and that the key to all reform 
 is found in the principle, " Whatsoever ye would that
 
 276 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 men should do to you, do ye to them likewise." We 
 recommend the careful perusal of this book to all our 
 readers, and join with the author in the concluding 
 wish of the preface, " that it may add many recruits to 
 that militant band of those who think, and feel, and 
 work for others." 
 
 The Friend. 
 
 This little work has been written by Mr. Francis 
 Peek, an active member of the School Board of London, 
 and also of the Howard Association. It will be found 
 both interesting and instructive to those of our readers 
 who desire to see a further modification of the law in 
 the direction of promoting increased providence and 
 temperance in the habits of the people. 
 
 The book itself is written by a philanthropic and 
 practical man, personally cognisant of the condition of 
 the various classes of his fellow countrymen, and actively 
 engaged in efforts for their welfare. 
 
 The Freemason. 
 
 Mr. Francis Peek, one of the members of the 
 London School Board, who has shown more than an 
 earnest desire to inculcate a knowledge of the volume 
 of the Sacred Law, for he has endowed his purpose of 
 encouraging that knowledge among the poor children of 
 London at a cost to himself of ^500 a year, has now 
 come forward with a small volume, under the title of 
 " Our Laws and Our Poor," in which he advocates that 
 system of discriminate charity carried out by our Brother- 
 hood, and evinces a statesmanlike knowledge of the 
 Poor- Laws, of defects in details, of the results of mal- 
 administration, and of the evils to the community at 
 large resulting from the ignorance displayed by the mere 
 politicians who fill the high places. Mr. Peek's book is
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 277 
 
 opportune, for changes must come into our Poor-Law, 
 and in pity to the poor to whom relief is administered, 
 and on behalf of the poor, some of whose hard earnings 
 go in rates, it is to be hoped that his earnest expressions 
 will bring to him helpers in his work. 
 
 The English Independent. 
 
 We heartily welcome all such attempts to disturb the 
 apathy which is too prevalent in regard to the enormous 
 evils having their existence in our midst. Having had 
 occasion to differ widely from Mr. Peek as to the 
 advocacy which he has given to the system of denomi- 
 nationalism in our State-paid schools, we are specially 
 rejoiced to find him in the matters thus touched upon 
 so untrammelled by preconceived ideas, so accessible 
 to the lessons taught by the logic of facts, and so 
 thoroughly imbued with the spirit of enthusiasm for the 
 removal of abuses. Without, of course, endorsing all 
 his views, we heartily welcome him as a fellow-labourer 
 in the career of practical philanthropy, and commend 
 the facts and suggestions which he has embodied in this 
 volume as calculated to prove by no means unfruitful 
 for good in the future relations of the community, both 
 with its suffering and with its erring members. 
 
 The Record. 
 
 In the volume before us, under the topics of " The 
 Influence of the Law," " The Orphan's Wrong," and " Just 
 Principles of Punishment," Mr. Peek has drawn attention 
 to what he believes to be fertile sources of mischief and 
 crime, his object being to bring public opinion to bear 
 on these questions, and so lead to a more active inter- 
 ference by the Legislature and the Government on 
 behalf of the suffering poor. Since the work was sent 
 to the press, an effort has been made to deal with two
 
 278 Extracts from Reviews. 
 
 of the evils of which the author treats, viz., in regard to 
 Labourers' Dwellings and Offences against the Person ; 
 but the measures for these purposes are regarded only 
 as instalments of what is actually required. As regards 
 the Boarding-out of Orphans, on which Mr. Peek is 
 peculiarly qualified to speak, we have little doubt that 
 the advantages of the system must, sooner or later, 
 commend it to the notice of the Local Government 
 Boards and Boards of Guardians, and ensure its wide 
 adoption. 
 
 It is easier to criticize than to legislate, easier to 
 expose evils than to suggest an effectual remedy. Never- 
 theless, exposure is a step towards a remedy, and in this 
 respect Mr. Peek's book may render some service, es- 
 pecially in drawing recruits, as he desires, "to the 
 militant band of those who think and feel and work for 
 others." 
 
 The Christian Globe. 
 
 The key-note of a new warfare against bad Poor- 
 Laws, the ill-effects of which are heightened by mal- 
 administration of a most deplorable character, has been 
 struck by the writer of a small volume, entitled " Our 
 Laws and our Poor." In this book much is given in a 
 small compass. The lines of Mr. Peek's charges are 
 clearly and sharply drawn, and, in distinct language, is 
 given the issue that our laws are cruel to the helpless 
 and deserving, and unjust to honest independent workers, 
 from whom the law demands the means for the support 
 of the reckless and depraved. The author states that 
 it is his hope in some measure to accomplish two things 
 by the publication of this book one " to induce some 
 benevolent men, now hesitating as to their vocation in 
 life, to cast in their lot with the many workers who, 
 while differing in forms of faith, are yet united in one 
 great desire to resist the progress of those mighty
 
 Extracts from Reviews. 279 
 
 powers of evil which, day by day, are degrading, crushing 
 into misery, and destroying so many of our fellow-crea- 
 tures, and strewing our paths with human wrecks, on 
 which it is difficult to look without pain and humiliation." 
 
 It is the duty, indeed, of every right-doing man and 
 woman to say "Amen" to the prayer which will be raised 
 in many hearts that Mr. Peek's hopes may be more than 
 fulfilled that he may live to see his ethics recognized 
 by all as the true principles upon which we shall deal 
 with our poor, both by law and by charity. 
 
 In this volume of essays, its author has justified the 
 choice of the citizens of London when they re-elected 
 him to represent them on their School Board. There is 
 not a page in this book which does not bear the impress 
 of deep thought and sound judgment, and no reader 
 with the type and feeling of thoughtful Englishmen, 
 anxious to do right and eschew wrong, but will thank 
 Mr. Peek for having drawn attention to these things. 
 
 The Cosmopolitan. 
 
 Another book of hard facts, almost as painful to read 
 as "The Devil's Chain," is entitled " Our Laws and our 
 Poor," from the pen of Francis Peek, Esq., a member of 
 the London School Board. It is an earnest and severe 
 criticism of the Poor- Laws and the treatment of the 
 poor in England. A spirit of honest genuine philan- 
 thropy pervades this work, which ought to have an 
 immediate effect on legislation. Mr. Peek deals in 
 stubborn facts, with which he illustrates the Influence of 
 the Law, the Wrongs of Orphans, and the Principles of 
 Punishment." 
 
 PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND COk 
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