they are trained for service at home or in the
colonies, taught household work in kitchen and
laundry, needlework, and where they even
— by help of the infant nursery connected with the
children's hospital close by— receive initiation
in the art and mystery of nursing. Here,
wilh more than the mere name of a Home to
characterise the wisely-devised little institution,
sixty or seventy girls are trained and
aided in the course of a twelvemonth. Many
of them, not only rightly prepared for service
and for honest marriage, but saved also
from the contamination of the adult ward of the
workhouse, may owe to this home the future
happiness avid usefulness of all their lives.
A young girl, by loss of situation or bereavement,
is sometimes driven to the temporary
shelter of the workhouse; on the way thither
it is desired that the doors of a house like this
should be opened to her; that she should have
something really a little like a home to go to— as
like a home as the warm sympathy of strangers
can succeed in making it. Through such an
institution, helping hands may be stretched to
the young, the weak, and honest, to sustain
them and deliver them from evil.

In the hamlet of Brockham, not very far from
Dorking, where a pretty rivulet flows into the
Mole, and a bridge crosses the smooth river that
reflects the old oaks and tall beeches on its
bank, there has been established for the aid of
workhouse girls about fourteen years old, another
sort of Home. The founder and the chief
support of it is the Honourable Mrs. Albert Way.
This lady has for the last fourteen years paid
active attention to the subject of the education
of pauper girls. Bred in the workhouse, eight
out of ten remain essentially paupers; many do,
and more must hereafter, return again and again
to parish care from vain efforts to maintain
themselves. A large majority of the children in
workhouses, she considers to be orphan children
of parents who have been hard-working and industrious,
and who never received parish money.
Sixty per cent are so in the district schools, but
in the workhouses it is not quite so, though bad
enough. The number of the children in our
workhouses last New Year's Day, was above
fifty-two thousand. Of these, eleven thousand
three hundred and eighty-five were fatherless
and motherless. Three thousand four hundred
and forty-six children of widows in the workhouse
with their mothers. It is in the workhouse
that these children— to whom the stigma
of being workhouse-bred ought not to attach
— are made paupers for life.

If they could enter their first service under
fair conditions of comfort, to receive the friendly
care of a mistress wise and kind, the chances for
their future would be very, very different. As a
common rule, girls of fourteen are hired out of
the workhouse by persons who are in need of a
cheap drudge. They get wages that will scarcely
buy them clothes; are overworked; are left untaught
or ill-taught, to become weary, slovenly,
and out of heart with life; are often left much
alone, while their employers, who themselves
must drudge, are absent at their place of work.
These poor little girls break down and are discharged:
they sink under temptations to vice,
that disguise under the false names of rest and
pleasure, its unrest and misery. And so they come
back to the workhouse, not seldom with illegitimate
children in their arms, and there receive as
young mothers a consideration which has been
found suggestive to girls who have not yet
passed from the workhouse into the world, of
an ambition to come back to the house young
mothers too.

Such considerations led Mrs. Way to the
establishment of her Brockham Home for
pauper girls, which has now been in existence
three years and some months. It was two
years old when its plan was described by Mrs.
Way one day last year to the Poor Relief Committee
of the House of Commons. At that
time forty girls, all taken at the age of about
twelve out of the workhouse, had passed through
its discipline. Thirty of the forty were orphans
of parents— bricklayers, painters, carpenters,
farm-labourers, gentlemen's servants— who had
never been upon the parish. Generally the
mother had died when they were young, and the
father, with a large family, had not afterwards
thriven. In the Brockham Home, the design is
that these girls shall have "just the training
that they would receive from a very good
mother." They are entirely cared for at the
institution, which is chiefly maintained by voluntary
subscriptions— some Unions, however,
paying what would have been the cost of workhouse
food and clothing— three shillings a week;
and it is a Home to which they may come
back, as to a parent's house, whenever they are
out of service. Two matrons and a school-
mistress find not the smallest difficulty in the
management of such a place by moral influence
alone. The cost at Brockham is seven shillings
a week for the whole expenses of each person.
In a workhouse, including also whole expense
of staff, &c., it is eight shillings. In the detached
district schools for pauper children, isolation
of the children to the utmost possible
degree from the demoralising influences of the
workhouse is essential. The children fresh from
the workhouse should not, as they pour in with
steady flow, be instantly mixed up with those
under better training. There should be a probationary
ward for the due preparation of new
comers. There should be removed from the
district school, and that in the utmost degree,
all appearance of mere training by the machinery
of paid officials; the children must not be
taught to consider themselves so much stiff
clay in course of being worked up into bricks,
but as being helpless themselves among friends
who are strong to help, with some people about
their daily path who have a loving way with
them that can unlock the treasury within their
desolate hearts, and teach them how to become
rich in the spending of their young affections.
Moreover, for those who have left the district
school and gone to service, there should be, in
some comer of it, a refuge— established partly,