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Abbeychurch had been a quiet dull place, scarcely more than a large village, until the days of railroads, when the sober inhabitants, and especially the Vicar and his family, were startled by the news that the line of the new Baysmouth railway was marked out so as to pass exactly through the centre of the court round which the alms-houses were built.
The coachman answered by a surly grunt, and, plying his whip with redoubled zeal, shaped his course down Dyot Street; traversed that part of Holborn, which is now called Broad Street, and where two ancient alms-houses were, then, standing in the middle of that great thoroughfare, exactly opposite the opening of Compston Street; and, diving under a wide gateway on the left, soon reached a more open space, surrounded by mean habitations, coach-houses and stables, called Kendrick Yard, at the further end of which Saint Giles's round-house was situated.
One of the most glorious features of our modern civilization is the wide-spread system of public benevolence extended to missions, to destitute churches, to hospitals, to colleges, to alms-houses, to the support of the poor, who are not left to die unheeded as in the ancient world.
There are two old men in Titbull's Alms-Houses who, I have been given to understand, knew each other in the world beyond its pump and iron railings, when they were both 'in trade. They make the best of their reverses, and are looked upon with great contempt.
Were the superfluities of a nation valued, and made a perpetual tax on benevolence, there were be more alms-houses than poor, schools than scholars; and enough to spare for government besides. Love labour; for if thou dost not want it for food thou mayest for physick. It is wholesome for thy body, and good for thy mind.
Answer, ye jails and alms-houses throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain, which, in Collingwood's time, were swept clean of the last lingering villain and pauper to man his majesty's fleets.
You arraign, and perhaps punish, the apothecary who sells by mistake his deadly drug. With a philosophical air, Mr. Krone will tell you he deals out his poison without scruple, fills alms-houses without a pang of remorse, and proves that a politician-maker may do much to degrade society and remain in high favor with his friends of the bench of justice.
When the time comes that schools for idiots are established all over the country, he thinks "it will be found more difficult to get good teachers for them than to get good professors for our colleges." After excepting five or six alms-houses in which the idiots are treated both kindly and wisely, the commissioners say, "the general condition of those at the public charge is most deplorable.
Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent exertions.
"Certainly, their lot was as hard as death," said Grandfather. "All that could be done for them, in the English provinces, was to send them to the alms-houses, or bind them out to task-masters. And this was the fate of persons, who had possessed a comfortable property in their native country.
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