not the remotest hint of a desire to ask whether
the duty is performed, whether there is helplessness
and destitution, which the strong arm of the
most generous and charitable nation upon earth,
has yet failed to support. No. The sole and whole
inquiry is, How many pounds less have been paid,
how many pounds more are to be saved?

The Poor Law Amendment Act came into
operation in the autumn of 1834. During the
twenty-two last years of the old system, an
average of six millions and a half a year was
given by England to the poor. Since the Amendment
Act, the yearly average has been less than
five millions and a quarter; in a quarter of a
century, more than thirty-three millions of pounds
have been deducted from the sum that would,
under the old system, have been paid; and of the
remainder, twenty millions have been spent in
building workhouses and paying salaries of union
officers. These count, of course, as items of
poor relief: the sum now spent in England for
national poor relief being a little more than five
millions and a half, yielded by the poor-rate.
The poor-rate includes borough or police-rate,
law expenses, cost of registries; more than a
fourth of the sum raised under the name of
poor-rate, having, in fact, no connexion
whatever with relief of the poor. "More than a
fourth is the estimate of the Board." We think
they might have said more than a third.

And still the cry is, lo, how much we save!
The average rate per head on the population for
support of its destitute poor, used to be ten and
fourpence; now, glory be to us, it is six and a
halfpenny. Increase of population being
considered, if we had gone on at the same rate per
head, ninety-one millions would have been spent
on the poor over and above what we have asked
you for. In proportion to the increased wealth
of the country, the charge on your pockets,
people of England, is half what it used to be
before we, the mighty Poor Law Board, began to
look after the paupers. Looking at the matter in
regard to proportion with the comparison of
commerce, you are now saving three shillings
out of four. In spite of the increase since the
act came into force of from fourteen to twenty
million of population, we, the Board, have
actually diminished by three-quarters of a
million the yearly national dole to the destitute,
Kiss red tape on the hem of our garments!

But we, for the public, cannot read with
patience the felicitations founded on such figures.
It is not true, it is notoriously and manifestly
false, that they mean simply a proportionate ceasing
of the poor from among us. Six million more
people, and yet no more poor, yet even fewer
poor? Turn out of any street of London
into its by-lanes and alleys; see dense towns
within the town, Agar Town, Bethnal-green,
Rotherhithe, Radcliffe, Wapping, small cities
of hunger; ask any country doctor whether
there are rural poor, and how much suffering
they learn to regard as but the natural wear
and tear of a life that is one long ache of
privation; then join in the congratulations of the
Poor Law Board at the decrease of poverty.

The Poor Law Board cannot require to be
told what its figures really mean. We all know
in what way the unpatronised pauper is kept off
the rates as long as possible. Here, for example,
is a piece of experience so matter of course that
it may be wondered why we cite it. A woman,
during the intense frost, was met in the evening
carrying home her weekly quartern loaf from
Saint Pancras Workhouse. (Was it not there
that guardians of the poor, not long ago, excited
wrath among parishioners by putting themselves
on the parish for hot dinners at their weekly
meetings?) The woman was met shivering with cold;
she had been waiting for her dole, from twelve
o'clock till half-past four, in a room with a
stone floor, which she declared had not been
warmed in any way. "I could have stood it
better," she said, "if there hadn't been such a
dreadful cold draught from them wentilating
places all round the floor." The "ventilators"
out of which the cold blast came, were the pipes
of the disused warming apparatus. It was not
desirable to use that apparatus for the benefit of
paupers, even when the thermometer wavered
between freezing and zero. Everybody who waited
would get deservedly pinched for coming, and,
though half a dozen, or a dozen, or a score,
would feel it afterwards in their lungs, or be
plagued with rheumatic pains when they desired
to be industrious, the whole gain of so much
discouragement to the demand for parish bread
was not to be sacrificed on that account. A
vestryman is asked whether this woman's story,
not the first or the tenth of its kind, could be
true; were the poor really exposed to so much
suffering when they came for relief? "Yes,"
he replied, "and wilfully. I have tried to effect
a change, but only three would side with me.
The rest thought that if the poor creatures were
made too comfortable, more would come." We
take our illustration from St. Pancras simply
because it is natural for anybody to look to St.
Pancras of evil repute, when he wishes to lay
his hand on any sort of abuse incident to the
administration of the Poor Law. But the
illustration serves for the whole system, which
makes workhouses discouragements to poverty,
and gaols encouragements to crime. It is
because everybody knows that by this system of
encouragement practised in a hundred petty
ways, there has been secured, not only a
constant lessening of the amount of relief given to
the poor, but a constant increase of the repugnance
with which it is taken; it is because of
this, that in the late days of extreme suffering,
it was everywhere but to the ordained almoners
of the public that th public sent its alms for
distribution.

We say that the Poor Law Board is a costly
abuse, and a pernicious sham. We believe that
there is scarcely one public department, if one,
under the unfortunate necessity of having to do
business with it, that does not know it to be a
heap of troublesome and complacent rottenness.
It is in fairness to be observed, on the other
hand, that there are some Boards of Guardians,
chiefly composed of ignorant and noisy men,