Poorhouse

“ The poorhouse, newly established, cannot hold a fifth part of the poverty of this great town; the richer inhabitants are untiring in their charities, and the Catholic clergyman before mentioned took me to see a delivery of rice, at which he presides every day until the potatoes shall come in. ”

“ Hence we see all around us those who have lived in [Pg 360] wealthy families marrying, with no knowledge of providing for a family, or of using the little they have with economy. So they sink down, year after year, into deeper poverty and wretchedness; ending, perhaps, in the poorhouse; when if the lessons learned in their employer’s house had been those of true economy, they might now be living in neat and comfortable homes. ”

“ They will not go back to the poorhouse, because there they would be flogged for having run away from you: besides, the poorhouse is any thing but a pleasant place. The boys will turn beggars or thieves, and the girls prostitutes; you will have pocketed £10 for each of them, and may get more boys and girls on the same terms, to treat in the same way. This trade is as safe as it is profitable. ”

“ But such attention to the unfit would be merely adding a porch to the poorhouse, the hospital, and the asylum, and there sorting over the material which can be possibly saved from a bad end. The nine-tenths of people who were ordinary would be thus left even more free for individual growth than they now are, when hampered by the inefficient residue. ”

“ His house was to be seized on the mortgage, and he was to move to the poorhouse next day. You never see a man more surprised or worse cut up. Him to the poorhouse? HIM—one of the oldest families on the Cape? ”

“ The pastor put it in his pocket, looked wonderingly at the applicant, and said, "The poorhouse is but a mean place, with accommodation for a few persons, and the present occupants are of the humblest sort. There are now living there an old woman, formerly a servant in respectable families, [Pg 109] who has a room to herself; a half-mad fellow, who will not speak when spoken to unless he can hit on some way of answering in rhyme. ”

“ The word poorhouses has becomes so unfortunate in its connotations that one would scarcely think of using it in connection with these almost separate village-like communities, with abundance of air and light, in which the young women of the better classes took up their own life in small, neat, attractive houses and cared for the aged poor and children in little houses not far from their own. ”

“ To write an essay on the law and the poor in relation to the relief of distress would be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law—the workhouse.
For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house—the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House. ”

“ As the well-to-do look with anxiety to the loss of their property and the consequent sinking to some lower plane of moderate poverty, so the poor look with shuddering or, at last, with despair to sinking into the slough of this hopeless state for which there is no name, because none has been devised adequate to describe its desperate misery. Often but a block, or even but a wall divides the reeking slum where they creep and fester and rot, from the broad, well-lighted, smooth-paved avenue where irresponsible wealth goes clattering by in its wild orgy of extravagance and reckless mirth. ”

“ Of course his workmen complain that they do all the work and he lives in a palace and they in a hovel, that he is burdened with luxuries and is hoarding up millions, whilst they labor through their half-starved lives and have the workhouse to look forward to. So unreasonable! How can the poor expect the genteel pleasures of the wealthy, and when their houses are low and old and the walls mouldy and streets narrow and filthy and no gardens, and ten or fifteen in one room, they ought not to expect the comfort and pure air of four people in one great house set in a park. ”

“ The consequence of this is—and increasingly—that if a rich man says, "I will help in my own parish," there are vast numbers of poor living perhaps near to him, probably within what in the country would be considered easy walking distance, and certainly in the same town, whose lives he does not touch. I cannot tell you how terrible to me appear these [Pg 167] vast spaces of ground covered with houses inhabited by persons at one dead level of poverty; sometimes the tracts appropriated to the houses of the wealthy seem to me in another way more terrible. ”

“ Here are no brown-stone fronts, no elegant homes, but the imprint of poverty is upon all.
Long years before the place was a fashionable locality; but the rapid growth of the city forced the wealthy residents up town, and into their homes, not then as now, superb structures, palatial in their fittings, the poorer classes moved, to again give place to those of a still lower strata of the society that goes to make up the world to be found in metropolitan life.
In a tenement-flat, on the fourth floor of a dingy-looking building, a woman sat alone, a piece of embroidery in her hands. ”

“ We have about 400 in-door paupers in this workhouse, and perhaps twice as many out-door poor, whom the parochial authorities assist as well as they can. Every pauper whom we support in this house costs the rate-payers of this parish about seventeen pounds six and ten-pence per head, which does not include charge for rent, taking the interest of the value of the property. For the children we have a school, and they get the rudiments and that's all. It is an idea with some, and I am afraid, with many poor people, "once a pauper always a pauper." ”

“ I asked why the poor-house was not repaired, and was told that the peasants had purposely built it poorly, fearing that if it were comfortable it might encourage pauperism in the village. The poor are supplied with clothes either from the church or village treasury according to circumstances. A residence of two years in a village compels its inhabitants at the expiration of that time to support the applicant, nor can he be forced to do any work in return for his living. ”

“ We hear every now and then of cases in which, owing to local maladministration, some deserving men and women, honestly struggling to keep their heads above pauperism, are left to perish of hunger or cold. We read well-authenticated, only too well-authenticated, instances of actual starvation taking place in some wealthy district of a great city. We hear of parochial funds squandered and muddled away; of the ratepayers' money wasted in extravagance, and worse than extravagance; of miserable courts and alleys where the deserving and undeserving poor are alike neglected and uncared for. ”

“ It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich. Not only does the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays proportionately more for it than does the rich man for his spacious comfort. A class of house-sweaters has been made possible by the competition of the poor for houses. There are more people than there is room, and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot find shelter elsewhere. ”

“ It all seems strange; it looks so poverty-stricken, so filthy, so sordid, so like the site of a slum after all the houses have been levelled for a dozen years; and this in the midst of our England! I say nothing about land-laws and so forth, but I will say that those who fancy the towns can survive when the farms are deserted are much mistaken. "Are we wealthy?" "Yes," and "No." We are wealthy in the wrong places, and we are poor in the wrong places; and the combination will end in mischief unless we are very soon prepared to make an alteration in most of our ways of living. ”

“ They had to settle in what houses the poor folk were to live, who were to look after them, what allowance was to be made for them. The poor usually had their money paid to them at church, monthly. Then the overseers had to see that every able-bodied man was at work, often having to provide the work, to place out apprentices, and to supply flax or wool for the women and children to spin. Sometimes the poor were boarded out; some of them lived in cottages, or in the poors' house which the parish built. ”

“ It is notorious that overcrowded, insanitary "slum" property is the most paying form of house property to its owners. The part played by rent in the problems of poverty can scarcely be over-estimated. Attempts to mitigate the evil by erecting model dwellings have scarcely touched the lower classes of wage-earners. The labourer prefers a room in a small house to an intrinsically better accommodation in a barrack-like building. ”

“ Some parishes in great cities have comparatively few Poor, while others, perhaps less opulent, are overburthened with them; and there seems to be no good reason why a house-keeper in any town should be called upon to pay more or less for the support of the Poor, because he happens to live on one side of a street or the other. Added to this, there are certain districts in most great towns where poverty and misery seem to have fixed their head-quarters, and where it would be IMPOSSIBLE for the inhabitants to support the expence of maintaining their Poor. ”

“ You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our Shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the Casual Ward of the Workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. ”

“ They certainly have not more than a common share of human frailty. There are those who seem to think that when people are suddenly reduced to poverty, they should become suddenly endowed with the rarest virtues; but it never was so, and, perhaps, never will be so long as the world rolls. In my rambles about this ward, I was astonished at the dismal succession of destitute homes, and the number of struggling owners of little shops, who were watching their stocks sink gradually down to nothing, and looking despondingly at the cold approach of pauperism. ”

“ If his very poverty compels the tenant to live at a rate if not in a style that would beggar a Vanderbilt, paying four prices for everything he needs, from his rent and coal down to the smallest item in his housekeeping account, fashion, no less inexorable in the tenements than on the avenue, exacts of him that he must die in a style that is finally and utterly ruinous. ”

“ When we bear in mind that these houses are also the workshop of large numbers of the poor, and know how the work done in the crowded, tainted air of these dens brings as an inevitable portion of its wage, physical feebleness, disease, and an early death, we recognize the paramount importance of that aspect of the problem of poverty which is termed "The Housing of the Poor."
So much for the quality of the shelter for which the poor pay high prices. Turn to their food. In the poorest parts of London it is scarcely possible for the poor to buy pure food. ”

“ The poor-house, an old building raised by subscription, contains one hundred and sixty-six paupers. It will only admit such poor persons as are completely disabled. Those who can labour a little can obtain the employment they desire, and then receive good attendance and proper support. The sick were taken care of in a distinct infirmary, where each had a separate bed. The healthy slept upon the floor. I enquired why the sick were not provided with iron bedsteads in place of the wooden ones they occupied? ”

“ If poverty did not mean wretched housing, it would be shorn of half its dangers. The London poor are driven to pay one-third of their income for dark, damp rooms which are too small and too few in houses which are ill-built and overcrowded. And above the overcrowding of the house and of the room comes the overcrowding of the bed—equally the result of poverty, and equally dangerous to health. Even if the food which can be provided out of 22s. a week, after 7s. ”

“ The house was clean and healthy, and he had dozens of applications from would-be lodgers. But, though he was poor—and the extra rent would have been a godsend to him—he remained unlet for four months because all the applicants had three or four children. His case is the case of hundreds of people who have decent rooms to let for the labouring poor.
The large families these people invariably have not only keep them in grinding poverty all their lives, but the overpopulation floods the labour market and keeps the scale of wages down to starvation point. ”

“ It is to show, as the late Miss Octavia Hill so admirably showed by practical example, that there is scope for immense improvement in the houses of the poor, even now while the brute fact of their poverty continues. Miss Hill, with the help of John Ruskin, bought up some houses in a most degraded area and made herself the landlady of them. Throughout she adopted the principle that her enterprise, if it was to be valuable as a social object lesson, must be made to pay. ”