workhouse experience differs from the one
recorded last week in every particular but one—
the irresponsibility of the discipline and the
self-constituted character of the rules. Here,
as elsewhere, and we are now on the borders of
Cheshire and Staffordshire, having crossed
England in our search, the management is of the
kind in vogue when the New Poor Law wiseacres
determined to put down poverty and misfortune
thirty years ago, with such modifications
and "readings" as perfectly unfettered
guardians may devise. The place is beautifully
clean, the inmates are tolerably fed, the beds
and bedding, day-rooms and sick-wards, are
arranged with mathematical precision, and the
entire establishment is as sternly repressive
and soul-depressing as the most misanthropic
could desire. To say the sick are insufficiently
cared for, is to repeat that we are in a workhouse;
to say that the aged and infirm are left to tend
or annoy each other without help or supervision
throughout the night, and that the entire
establishment does not show a single trace of human
interest or fellow-feeling, save the boasted
hearse, is to repeat, consistently, that we are
in a workhouse. To say that helplessness,
misfortune, and infirmity are so many crimes
and misdemeanours, is to iterate once more
that we are in a workhouse. Yet some of the
maladministration within the house seems to
arise from sheer wantonness or ignorance, and
not from deliberate cruelty, as in the casual
wards. Thus, with but ten people ill, and a
resident paid nurse to attend to them, we find
the door of communication between her room
and the male sick=ward carefully locked at
night, and the medicines administered by a
pauper, whose appearance, open-mouthed,
hollow-cheeked, and vacant, recals Smike. He
is described as "a very superior young man,
who oughtn't to be in here," but he stares
idiotically when addressed, and says wonderingly,
after promptings by the master and coaxings
by the nurse, "Yes, sir, I'm wardsman," in
reply to a question as to another pauper's age!
"He's hard of hearing: that makes him seem
stupid," the master explains; and then,
translating a request we have made twice, "Show
the gentleman where you sleep, can't you!"
precedes us into a room judiciously divided
from the nurse's by a stone staircase, three
thick doors, a substantial flooring, and a lock
and key at night. Some old men, who are too
far gone in torpidity and old age to even lift
their eyes from the fire they gaze into and sit
round, an old man in bed, with eyes closed and
sheet tucked under chin, in that terribly
suggestive fashion which seems common to
bedridden paupers, and a much younger man, who
rises from his chair near the fire to assure us
earnestly that he is as well as he could wish,
and would like to be let out that minute,
make up the party. "Nothing much the
matter with any of them," the nurse
explains, nervously plucking at her apron with
both fingers, as I have seen witnesses do
under cross-examination. "Why does the
doctor put them on the sick-list, then?" "Oh,
they're too old to be good for anything, for
the old man in bed is more than ninety, and
one of them sitting by the fire is eighty-five.
The younger man is always praying, falling
down on his knees in the middle of the day,
when nobody expects it"—a compliance with
the scriptural injunction concerning prayer
without ceasing which has landed him in the
infirmary ward. "Not very strong in his
head," the master opines; "though his father
was a mayor, and he has relations well to do,
who turned him off because he went speaking
of some lawsuit." Old men, helpless from age
and infirmity, together with a man "not
strong in the head," looked after by a deaf
wardsman with an impediment in his brain
—this picture suggests such frightful
possibilities, that we ask, with some particularity,
the nurse's precise duty in regard to
them. Indefinite supervision by day, and a
generous trustfulness in fate by night, appear
to form the code by which that functionary is
governed. It is necessary, you see, to lock
the door dividing the sick-wards for women
from the sick-wards for men; and as the nurse's
room is with the latter, it follows that the deaf
wardsman has sole charge during the hours
when assistance is needed most. "No, sir,
there is no bell, and no way of communicating
to me from the ward where the old men are;
but the young man has only to get up, and
come up those stone stairs at the end of the
passage, and then along this corridor, and if
he kicks at the locked door at the end of it,
my room's not far off, and I'm sure to hear if
anything's wanted. But it's very seldom, I
assure you, that I'm required. Oh, sir! of
course I should get up directly, if he came,
and he'd be sure to come if anything was the
matter." We suggest, diffidently, that locking
up aged invalids and incapable paupers together,
and leaving it to the conscience and judgment
of the latter to decide upon the necessity for
leaving a warm bed, and traversing a couple of
cold corridors and a stone staircase, to kick at
a door until a nurse is roused from her bed
some yards off, appears a somewhat elaborate
form of How not to do it. But both master
and nurse are thoroughly convinced that any
departure from the present admirable arrangements
—bringing into use, for example, some
rooms on the same floor as the nurse's room, in
which beds were lying empty, and which have
not been used since "the year of the cholera
and Irish fever"—would be injudicious and
unwise: so we prudently change the subject,
and visit the day-room of the old men not
on the sick-list. Fireless, comfortless, clean,
and cold, and without old men. These are all
at work, some in the garden, others about the
outhouses; and in one of the latter we come
upon a cluster of feeble wretches, some blear-
eyed, and either palsied, or shaking with the
cold, who are cowering together and coughing
against each other this bitter November day,
in a place flowing with water, without a fire,