The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

"'Well,' replied the undertaker, 'I was thinking that if I pay so much toward 'em, I've a right to get as much out of 'em as I can, Mr. Bumble; and so—and so—I think I'll take the boy myself.'

"Mr. Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm and led him into the building. Mr. Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes, and then it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening 'upon liking'—a phrase which means, in the case of a parish apprentice, that if the master find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out of a boy without putting too much food in him, he shall have him for a term of years to do what he likes with.

"When little Oliver was taken before 'the gentlemen' that evening, and informed that he was to go that night as general house-lad to a coffin-maker's, and that if he complained of his situation, or ever came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be drowned or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so little emotion, that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened young rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith."

Some years ago an investigation into the treatment of the poor in St. Pancras workhouse was made. It originated in the suicide of a girl, who, having left her place, drowned herself rather than return to the workhouse to be confined in the "shed"—a place of confinement for refractory and ill-disposed paupers. The unanimous verdict of the coroner's jury was to this effect, and had appended to it an opinion that the discipline of the shed was unnecessarily severe. This verdict led to an investigation.

Mr. Howarth, senior churchwarden, a guardian, and a barrister, explained that the shed was used for separating able-bodied, idle, and dissolute paupers from the aged and respectable inmates of the house. The shed was not, he declared, a place of confinement any more than the workhouse itself. The place in question consists of two rooms, a day-room and a dormitory, on the basement of the main building, two feet below the level of the soil, each about thirty-five feet long by fifteen wide and seven high. The bedroom contains ten beds, occupied sometimes by sixteen, sometimes by twenty or twenty-four paupers. According to the hospital calculation of a cube of nine feet to an occupant, the dormitory should accommodate six persons. The damp from an adjoining cesspool oozes through the walls. This pleasant apartment communicates with a yard forty feet long, and from fifteen to twenty broad, with a flagged pavement and high walls. This yard is kept always locked. But it is not a place of confinement. Oh no! it is a place of separation.

Let us see the evidence of James Hill, who waits on the occupants of the shed:—"They are locked up night and day. They frequently escape over the walls. They are put in for misconduct."

Mr. Lee, the master of the workhouse, declares that if the persons in the shed make application to come out, they are frequently released. He is "not aware if he has any legal right to refuse them, but does sometimes exercise that authority." One of the women is there for throwing her clothes over the wall; another for getting "overtaken in liquor" while out of the house, and losing her pail and brush. A third inmate is a girl of weak intellect, who went out for a day, was made drunk and insensible by a male pauper, and suffered dreadful maltreatment.

All the pauper witnesses represent the shed as a place of punishment. The six ounces of meat given three times a week by the dietary, is reduced to four ounces for the shed paupers. Still all this, in Mr. Howarth's eyes, neither constitutes the shed a place of confinement nor of punishment. It is a place of separation. So is a prison. It is a prison in a prison; a lower depth in the lowest deep of workhouse wretchedness and restraint.

Are we to be told that this is "classification," (as the report of the directors impudently calls it,) by which the young and old, imbecile and drunken, sickly and turbulent, are shut up together day and night picking oakum; looking out through the heavy day on the bare walls of their wretched yard—at night breathing their own fœtid exhalations and the miasma of a cesspool, twenty-four of them sometimes in a space only fit to accommodate six with due regard to health and decency? And all this at the arbitrary will of master or matron, unchecked by the board! One poor creature had been there for three years. She had not come out because "she was in such bad health, and had nowhere to go." Yet she was shut up, because she was considered able bodied and fit for work, when her appearance belied it, and spoke her broken spirit and shattered constitution.

Mr. W. Lee, guardian, seemed blessed with an unusual amount of ignorance as to his legal powers and responsibilities. He kept no account of persons confined in the black-hole, for forty-eight hours sometimes, and without directions from the board. He thought the matron had power to put paupers in the strong room. On one point he was certain: he "had no doubt that persons have been confined without his orders." He "had no doubt that he had received instructions from the board about the refractory ward, but he does not know where to find them." "If any paupers committed to the ward feel aggrieved, they can apply to be released, and he had no doubt he would release them." He made no weekly report of punishments. He reigned supreme, monarch of all he surveyed, wielding the terrors of shed and black-hole unquestioned and unchecked.