A third says
“I have often trembled when I have gone at the call of duty to visit the receptacles of wretchedness, because I felt that I could not relieve the misery which I must look upon; and in such cases, nothing but a sense of duty could compel me to go and visit the poor.”
And a fourth minister mentions that his poor parishioners had stated to him
“that they regarded themselves as outcasts from the sympathy of their fellow-men.”
It also appears from Dr. Alison’s evidence that this distress is increasing. You read of Glasgow, always fruitful in extreme instances of misery, that in one of the private poor-houses, 22 children were found, all afflicted with fever, and occupying a room about fourteen feet square. The Superintendent of the Glasgow Police, speaking of a district in the centre of the town, says
“These places are filled by a population of many thousands of miserable creatures. The houses in which they live are altogether unfit for human beings, and every apartment is filled with a promiscuous crowd of men, women and children, in a state of filth and misery. In many of the houses there is scarcely any ventilation. Dunghills lie in the vicinity of the dwellings, and from the extremely defective sewerage, filth of every kind constantly accumulates.”
Touching the immediate object of the enquiry, the relief of paupers, we find that Humanity having gone with cold and cautious steps (giving 4s. a month, sometimes, to fathers and mothers of families) through the Southern and middle regions of Scotland, becomes in the Highlands nearly petrified: at “the utmost” is only able to divide amongst “the impotent poor about 3s. 6d. a-head for the whole year.” I dare say many things may be urged against this, as against all other evidence—a bit picked off here, another pruned off there—this statement modified, that a little explained. Do what you will: this evidence, like that of the Health of Towns Commission, remains a sad memorial of negligence on the part of the governing and employing classes.
It may be said that the improvidence of the labouring people themselves is a large item in the account of the causes of their distress. I do not contend that it is not, nor
even that it is not the largest; and, indeed, it would be very rash to assert that this class has, alone, been innocent of the causes of its own distress. But whatever part of their improvidence is something in addition to the improvidence of ordinary mortals, belongs, I believe, to their want of education and of guidance. It is, therefore, only putting the matter one step further off, to say that their distress is mainly caused by their improvidence, when so much of their improvidence is the fruit of their unguided ignorance. However true it may be, that moral remedies are the most wanted, we must not forget that such remedies can only be worked out by living men; and that it is to the most educated in heart and mind that we must turn first, to elicit and to spread any moral regeneration. Besides, there is a state of physical degradation, not unfrequent in our lowest classes, where, if moral good were sown, it could hardly be expected to grow, or even to maintain its existence.
The extracts given in the foregoing pages present some of the salient points which these new materials afford of the distressed state of the labouring classes. It is a part of the subject requiring to be dwelt upon; for I believe there are many persons in this country who, however cultivated in other respects, are totally unaware of the condition of that first material of a state, the labouring population, aye even of that portion of it within a few streets of their own residences.