"Any little extra allowance of tea or sugar, left by pitying friends, went in this way. One nurse made five shillings a week by thus fleecing the poor inmates. Those who could not pay this tax were neglected, and implored in vain to be turned in their beds. The matron knows that these things exist, but has no power to prevent them; she knows not what tyranny may be exercised in her absence by her deputies, for the wretched creatures dare not complain, knowing how it would be visited upon them."
In some workhouses many who can work will not; in others the inmates are confined to such labor as is degrading, such as is a punishment in prisons, which excites no faculty of attention, or hope, or sympathy, which contemplates no improvement, namely, picking oakum, etc., and this lest there should exist some kind of competition injurious to tradesmen.
As to the "out-door relief" at certain workhouses, Mrs. Jameson says it was distributed to creatures penned up for hours in foul air, who waited sullenly for the bread doled out with curses. She complains again here of the system which brings a brutal and vulgar power to bear on vulgarity or brutality, the bad and defective organization to bear on one bad and defective, "so you increase and multiply and excite, as in a hot-bed, all the material of evil instead of neutralizing it with good, and, thus leavened, you turn it out on society to contaminate all around."
Rev. J. S. Brewer, a workhouse chaplain, in his lectures to ladies on practical subjects, writes of the insensible influence which the mere presence of ladies, their voice, their common words, their ordinary manners, their thoughts, all that they carry unconsciously about them, can exercise on the poor; but this applies to real ladies, cultivated, gentle, well-born, well-bred. There are no people more alive to gentle blood and gentle manners than the English poor. He confirms in other respects the preceding remarks of Mrs. Jameson, and says of the children:
"The disorderly girls and boys of our streets are mainly the produce of the workhouse and the workhouse schools. Over them the society has no hold, because they have been taught to feel that they have nothing in common with their fellow-men. Their experience is not of a home or parents, but of a workhouse and a governor, of a prison and of a jailer."
Nature exhibits two contrasted methods for controlling that tendency to increase of population beyond a due proportion to the means of subsistence, which seems to justify in the eyes of some political economists the partial destruction of the species by war. One of these methods is extermination; the other, elevation. Malthus says, in substance: I would share all my having with the poor. I would proclaim this the duty of the rich, were it possible, by even enforcing and continuing the most liberal distribution of goods, while all were working faithfully to increase the yield of the earth as fast as the mouths that consume it would multiply; but extensive observation and experience proves that, the easier life is made for the poor, the faster they increase; this increase is at a ratio so much greater than the means of subsistence are capable of reaching, that we should soon be all paupers unless we restrain each local population within the ratio of its provisions.
Malthus understood that high-toned character and uncommon force of will were essential to the perfection of such restraint. He invokes the influence of the church and of education to this effect. One step further, however, in the filiation of ideas would have led him to perceive a supreme harmony in the equilibrium between population and subsistence, arising out of the perfection of organic types and individual characters; so that quality is the cure of quantity.
If it be true, as travellers affirm, that in Europe the temperate are divided from the intemperate populations by a curve which, commencing at the eastern extremity of France, intersects Berlin and terminates at Sevastopol, being the northern limit of the vine-growing countries; then, a fortiori, will the greatest temperance be found among peoples whose refinement not only rejects distilled liquors but the coarser qualities of wine, and will have either the very best or none.
This law is universal. Compare the order of mammifers, a high type like man or the elephant, with a low type like the rabbit or mouse. Species are more prolific with each grade in their descent. Now compare the order of mammifers with the order of fishes, passing through the birds and reptiles, embracing all vertebrate animals; still the lower are more prolific, and consequently more subject to destruction. Now compare the vertebrate type with the insect, passing through the articulate. Still the same increase of numerical ratio down the scale of life; and when we reach polyps and plants, every section, every bud, may become a complete organism, and multiplication takes place by several methods at once—seeds, tubers, roots, suckers, buds, etc. Follow this law in the science of breeding. Even among fish, the fat and well-conditioned breed but slowly, and "ponds of misery" are kept for breeding carps. The history of the turf verifies similar facts in the physiology of the horse.