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Some system such as Ruskin's, with powerful local legislation, could not fail to end the trouble which is at the present moment making a tremendous drain on the pockets of the law-abiding citizen of this country, in that system of workhouses, which besides being subversive of the very idea of home-life amongst our poor, degrades the non-worker, and rankles as a lasting shame in the hearts of those whom misfortune alone has driven to that last resource of the unfortunate.
The workhouses were crowded with politicians, critics, poets, novelists, bishops, sporting tipsters, scholars, heirs, soldiers, dudes, painters, journalists, peers, bookmakers, landlords, punsters, idealists, and other incorrigible persons.
I may say that I took a ten-pound note with me, and through the Post Office sent portions of it on before me and walked towards it. When I got to the "George" at Hereford I had £7, 13s. 6d. left out of the £10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term for the former is the "spike," for the latter the "skipper." I went on "spike" and "skipper" both.
But for a week they sought in vain among the busy streets by day and in the empty courts by night, among the shipping, in the railway-stations, in the workhouses, at the printing-offices. Mr Sniff did them more than one friendly turn, and armed them with the talisman of his name to get them admittance where no other key would pass them.
In secret she devoured the reports of medical commissions, the pamphlets of sanitary authorities, the histories of hospitals and homes. She spent the intervals of the London season in ragged schools and workhouses.
Prisons, rescue homes, workhouses, inebriate reformatories, all have failed to reclaim her, and she lives to spread moral corruption. I hope that, in some of my chapters, I have made it clear that a large proportion of the underworld people are industrious and persevering. I want in this chapter to show that many of them have also ability and brains, gifts and graces.
Though it is still unhappily true that drunkenness slays its tens of thousands among us, and largely helps to people our workhouses, our madhouses, and our gaols, yet the fiend walks not now, as it used to do, in unfettered freedom.
There are better rations in Bedlam, than in any of the gaols; let alone the workhouses." "Ay; go mad for rations! There's no feigning there, Poppins. The world is doing that. But, Poppins, Hamlet feigned; and so do I. Let the wind blow as it may, I know a hawk from a handsaw. Therefore you need not fear me." "I don't; but I won't let you go on to that bridge alone.
He casually mentioned that able-bodied paupers only got two meals in the day. This was such a surprising statement to me that I said, "Your workhouse then is harder to the poor inmates than the workhouses elsewhere. I have made enquiry in several places as to the diet given, and they invariably told me of three meals, mentioning also that they had meat allowed them three times per week."
Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses.
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