committee of inquiry into the working of the Poor Law, which sat from 1860 to 1863; but the evidence was shamefully partial, or, when honest and unpalatable, was ridiculed and slighted by the committee. Anything more disheartening than the reception accorded to such important evidence as that which was tendered by Miss Twining and other ladies, who possessed a really unique knowledge of the working of in-door poor relief, has rarely been witnessed. The best proof that the committee was either intellectually incompetent, or else was wilfully mystified (which is far more probable), is the fact that their ultimate report suggested only a few most feeble and ineffective recommendations for improvement, and ignored, absolutely and totally, the insufficient provision for the wants of the sick which prevails in the workhouses.

As a specimen of the kind of information which the visiting ladies acquired, and endeavoured to spread, respecting the state of the workhouses, we may quote the following from one of Miss Frances Power Cobbe's 'Studies' *:

Every large workhouse (says Miss Cobbe) combines the following institutions: 1. A workhouse proper, or place of labour for ablebodied pauper males. 2. Ditto, for females. 3. A temporary asylum or casual ward, for pauper travellers, males. 4. Ditto, for females. 5. A hospital for the sick, curable and incurable, males. 6. Ditto, for females. 7. An asylum for aged and incurable males. 8. Ditto, for females. 9. A blind asylum for males. 10. Ditto, for females. 11. A deaf and dumb asylum for males. 12. Ditto, for females. 13. A lunatic asylum, males. 14. Ditto, for females. 15. An asylum for epileptics and idiots, males. 16. Ditto, for females. 17. A boys' school. 18. A girls' school. 19. An infant school. 20. A nursery for infants. 21. A lying-in hospital. 22. A penitentiary (black ward).'

A monstrous agglomeration, truly. How could any possible governor or master, even if a man of the highest intelligence, manage the affairs of such a complicated establishment efficiently? How much less could it have been expected that a discharged policeman or a broken-down publican could perform the task satisfactorily?

Of course, the theory is, that the master's defects of judgment and temper will be rectified by the supervision of the board of guardians. And here we approach the most important part of the remarks which we have to make; for the principal object of this paper is to show that boards of guardians, elected in any such manner as that which at present prevails, are of necessity 'Studies, New and Old, on Ethical and Social Subjects.' London : Trübner, 1865.

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incompetent to the exercise of any effective check on the resident officials, owing to their ignorance of the special wants of the various classes of workhouse inmates.

There are between six and seven hundred workhouses in England and Wales, and each of them is, of course, nominally governed by the board of guardians of the union which it represents. In London and the large towns, the guardians are, on the whole, drawn from the shopkeeping class; here and there a clergyman, or a private gentleman of two, may belong to a board, but usually these are not the active members, and very often they retire altogether from taking part in parish affairs after a few encounters with the less educated majority of the board. And the worst of it is, that in the very districts where the problem of parish relief becomes most intensely difficult of solution, from the large mass of poverty which has to be dealt with, hardly any can be found to fill the office of guardian except the small shopkeepers, who, as a class, are of a very low order of intelligence and education. In the provincial towns of moderate size, very much the same state of things prevails, but a somewhat larger proportion of educated men is generally. found on the boards; and, besides, the business of workhouse management is by no means the serious and difficult affair in these places that it is in the crowded districts of London. In the great provincial cities, the bulk of the boards is still derived from the small shopkeeping class; but there are not unfrequently a certain number of men of a higher intelligence and of wider views of political economy, who take an active part in the business. In the purely rural districts, the boards of guardians are mostly composed of farmers, with a certain infusion of clergy and country gentlemen. In exceptional instances, it may happen that a rural board of guardians is entirely led by some squire or parson of intelligence and benevolent disposition; but in the majority of cases, the substantial policy of these boards is that which seems good in the eyes of farmers, and those not usually of the wealthier and more educated sort. And that is as much as to say that it is the policy of the stupidest, and, at the same time, the most flinty-hearted class of men in the whole country. Such being the material of which boards of guardians are composed, let us see what is the mode in which they set about the task of supervising the management of the workhouses. The board usually meets once a week at the workhouse. It is, perhaps, scarcely a matter of regret that there is rarely a full attendance on these occasions, for, if the few active members understood their business, it is probable that they would work far more effectively than a cumbrous body of twenty, thirty, or

forty persons. But it should be distinctly understood that in the formal weekly meeting of the boards very little business is done except such as the master thinks proper to have done. Although so large a portion of the business of every workhouse concerns the sick inmates, the medical man is not, as a rule, present at the meetings of the board; and if the guardians condescend to ask for his presence, it is, in the majority of instances, in order that they may snub him for some requisition on behalf of his patients, which would involve expense. A large part of the time occupied by the meetings is taken up with the consideration of applications for out-relief; if that can be called consideration which consists, in most instances, of making the applicants file rapidly before the chair, and granting or refusing their request after half a dozen words of inquiry. The remainder of the time is occupied with hearing the reports from overseers of out-districts, the master's report of the number of inmates of the house, the births, deaths, and other casualties which have occurred, and finally with financial considerations. In all this there is nothing which amounts to accurate inquiry into the condition and treatment of the workhouse inmates. That work is supposed to be done by a visiting committee, which is appointed under the law from among the guardians, and is bound to visit the whole house weekly, and to report the result of its observations in the 'visitors' book.' It is seldom, however, that the contents of this book excite any special remark at the board meetings. We believe we shall not be contradicted by any one who has practical experience in these matters, when we say that in reality the board takes its impression of the state of the inmates, substantially, from the master or matron.

Now, of two things one is certain. Either the visiting committees perform their duties of inspection well and thoroughly, and are conscientiously able to report in their book that everything in the workhouse is satisfactory, or the fact that their reports are so brief and meagre, and so seldom call upon the boards for any important action, proves that they go through their task in a perfunctory and imperfect manner. Before proceeding to

state such facts as afford direct evidence as to the conduct of the visitors in particular workhouses, let us try to form a rough estimate of the probability that they can perform their duties effectively. In making this estimate we have first to consider that they are usually men of business, in active occupation, and quite unable to devote more than an hour or two in a week to the work of inspection. In the course of this hour or two they are supposed to examine every part of a building which may contain from 100 to 3,000 inmates. Not to take extreme cases,

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however, in the one direction or the other, let us imagine the case of the metropolitan workhouse described by Miss Cobbe,* which contained 586 inmates. Of these it appears that 344 were over sixty years of age (the majority greatly older), and of those below sixty, seventeen were idiots, ten blind, thirtythree were children under sixteen years, three were deaf and dumb, fifty-six were sick or maimed,' thirty-two were epileptic, eleven were nursing mothers, thirty-two were persons of bad habits or character, and only forty-eight were in such a condition that they might possibly earn a living. Now, remembering that the greater part of the 344 persons over sixty would certainly be virtually patients requiring medical care and special appliances, let us try to imagine the degree of success which would attend the efforts of a visiting committee, composed of two or three laymen ignorant of matters medical, to investigate the condition of this workhouse population in the course of an hour or two hours. Could any reasonable person expect the affair to be anything but a complete farce? We have been informed by one of the Lancet Commissioners that his inspection of the Strand Workhouse, which contained a not very dissimilar population, in numbers and character, occupied four visits, and a total period of more than twelve hours, although he came provided with a good deal of information which economised his time, and was, of course, medically educated. The smallest reflection on such facts as these will show how absurd is the idea that the present system of visiting committees, composed of fully-occupied men of business, could provide the boards with anything like efficient knowledge of the state of the inmates, even if the visitors did their best. But they do not, as a rule, do their best. In many workhouses we have found that the visits of the committees are most irregular, and that they often take their opinion entirely from the master and matron. Very rarely do any of them take the precaution of varying the hours of their visits, and especially of visiting the house in the evening, when laxity of discipline would be most likely to be found. Their almost constant neglect, also, of any appeal to the medical officer for his opinion as to matters whereon they might distrust their own judgment, is notorious. But the best proof of the inefficiency of their inspections has been given by the results of certain recent investigations; of which one or two instances may be quoted here. At the now ill-famed Farnham Workhouse it was stated (and amply proved in the course of the public inquiry afterwards held) that for a long series of years no wash-basins whatever were

* Studies,' &c., p. 154.

provided for the bed-ridden sick, who were washed in a way not mentionable in these pages. The visiting committee had inspected' the wards in which this disgusting state of things existed hundreds of times, but they had never remarked the obvious absence of washing apparatus, nor put a single question as to the means of personal cleanliness. And a still more shocking instance of their obtuse perceptions was afforded by the fact that they had never made any effort to supply proper night nursing, although in one of the wards a poor creature had been burnt and frightened to death by the ignorant attempts of her wretched companions to warm her feet with a heated brick. This dreadful affair was not followed by any inquest, or any improvement in the management whatever. Yet there is no reason to think that the guardians of Farnham were an exceptionally hard-hearted set of men; the shocking abuses which they had allowed to grow up in their establishment seem to have been purely the result of ignorance and indolence on their own part, and special ill-fortune in the choice of their paid officers. Even in some of the wards of Kensington Workhouse-a model building in some respects, and presided over by guardians and a visiting committee of unusual intelligence and humanity-the Commissioners found the same filthy arrangements (or lack of arrangements) for washing the sick as were discovered at Farnham, and almost equally gross deficiencies in the nursing staff. At Rotherhithe, at Paddington, at the Strand, and at half a dozen more workhouses, it appeared that gross cruelties had been inflicted on the sick by the wretchedly incompetent and brutal pauper nurses; yet the visiting committees had never discovered, or at any rate never commented on these facts; and the limited steps which have been taken by guardian boards toward procuring properly trained nurses have been almost entirely forced upon them by the remonstrances of the Poor Law Board, urged thereto by

Mr. Villiers and Mr. Farnall.

But there is no need to prove again in detail what has been proved a score of times already, not merely by the investigations of amateur commissioners, but by the reports of the officials specially appointed by Government to investigate the trustworthiness of the allegation of the Lancet, that boards of guardians are entirely incompetent of themselves to judge of the needs of the mixed populations of their workhouses, or to manage those establishments with anything like efficiency. Nor can the slightest reliance be placed on the machinery of inspection, by which the Poor Law Board has hitherto affected to control and regulate the proceedings of the guardians. It