"who enter the workhouse quit it, if they ever
quit it, corrupted where they were well disposed,
and hardened where they were viscious." More
shame on the spirit of the Poor Law! In
workhouse experience adult pauperism  and vice are
identified, and the whole system is based on a
gross misconception of the English character.
As if no English cottager had ever felt a vital
truth in the Divine reproof to certain murmurers,
"Is thine eye evil, because I am good?" it is
assumed that to reduce the workhouse system
below the level of the comfort enjoyed by the
poorest of the men who can support themselves,
all graces and charities of life, all signs of that
which is really divine in our religion, as it works
through the deeds of our lives, are to be banished
from the workhouse. Let health be supported
with the least amount of bodily indulgence—we
don't complain of the gruel— but most surely
the workhouse is the very last place in which it
is wise to starve the heart and pen the soul of
the poor; and most surely the English labourer
is the very last man to grudge oil poured into
the wounds of him who has fallen by the way.
ln the workhouse, vice finds itself regarded as
the proper nature of the pauper, while the
griefs of honest poverty are disregarded, and
we might almost say that there is no peace
except for the wicked. The Poor Law theory
may be right as regards the gruel. But it is
wrong, utterly and wickedly wrong, a denial
of God's precepts, a libel on the character of
men, when it excludes the vital principle of
Christianity, the only effective means of raising
the fallen, from the system upon which a nation
proceeds for the feeding of the hungry and the
clothing of the naked. Englishmen, the bad as
much as the good, love liberty too well to press
into the workhouse for the sake of the kind
feeling now denied expression. They must be
terribly starved in their affections if they will
go virtually into prison for the hope of getting
a kind word there; and if that is what may
tempt, let us thank God when they can be
tempted so! How many difficulties would be
overcome, if the tender spirit of humanity once
made itself felt in the working of the Poor Law.
Then there might be, as now there cannot be,
such classification of the inmates, and such
influence exerted on their characters, as would
convert the very workhouse into national
schools, though none of them contained a
schoolmaster.  As it is, to go back to the
immediate subject, we have an inspector fairly
owning that there is "nothing in the functions or
objects of Poor Law administration in the slightest
degree germane to education or to the moral
training of children."

The School within the workhouse, as matters
are now managed, can yield little good result.
The workhouse schoolmaster is appointed by
the guardians, and paid by the treasury according
to a scale fixed  by the Poor Law Board,
which is careful to put him in subjection to the
workhouse master, who is usually his inferior in
attainments; so it is secured for the teacher,
that he leads a wetched life. By every law
of political economy his more skilled labour
entitled to the higher pay, that he does not
receive because discipline is said to require
that he should be in subjection to the master,
whose servant he is not, and who has no power
whatever of removing him. The workhouse
master, ignorant of the school master's work
can interfere with it to make it useless. That
is the only result got by the pedantic notion
that the master is to be supreme. The teacher's
work does not interfere with the details of
workhouse management. His duty being
defined, he might be allowed to do it, and, in
doing it, might rank at least as the master's
equal: being in fact almost always his superior.

To the suggestion that the entire charge of
educating children of out-door paupers shall by
compulsion, not, as is now the case, by
permission under Mr. Denison's Act, be entrusted
to the Poor Law guardians, we can give no
vigorous assent. Failing signs of a heart and
soul in Poor Law action, we would rather see an
extension of the system of the Ragged Schools,
which finds no favour with Mr. Senior, but
which has, we are very sure, caused the
establishment of many schools that are much better
than their somewhat foolish name. If we cannot
have what is the best thing— a national way,
with the national heart in it, of dealing with the
destitute—then let us supplement the
shortcomings of routine, by enlargement of the
appetite for earnest, generous, and energetic voluntary
work. It is not only in defence against
material invasion that the strength of England
must lie in her volunteers.

IGNOBLE DUKES.

THE German princes—and especially the
little ones—are still too much attached to the
despotic principles of their grandfathers of the
eighteenth century. If they yield, now and then,
to the pressure of the moment, it is still hard
for them to look on the people otherwise than
as part of a property that is their own inheritance.
The good old princely way, however,
having to be maintained now with a difference,
let us consider the good old German sovereign,
all of the olden time, while yet his memory is
green.

See him at home, for example, in the smallest
kingdom in Europe. Würtemberg was formerly
a large earldom, but was raised at the end of
the fifteenth century to the rank of dukedom,
and was at last created a kingdom by the grace
of Napoleon Bonaparte. Eberhard Lewis, who
lived between sixteen 'seventy-seven and seventeen
'thirty-three, succeeded his father when
yet in the cradle, and was declared of age at
sixteen. Although his dukedom had been
devastated by the wars against Louis the
Fourteenth of France,  his court, which had been
already Frenchified, was arranged with the
greatest splendour. There being a great dearth
of nobility in Würtemberg, noblemen from all
parts of Germany, but especially from Mecklenburg,
flocked round the young duke. Church