moral and physical evils, however, of workhouse schools, there is a consent of opinion which is quite overwhelming. The Poor Law Commissioners, in their volume on the training of pauper children, admit that although many improvements have been made in the management of the schools for these children as compared with the corruption to which they were exposed in the parish workhouses before the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act, yet the moral and religious influences of education are not without many obstructions when the school is within the workhouse, even when it is conducted by an efficient teacher; and that under ordinary circumstances, considering the frequent deficiencies of the teachers and the pernicious influences inseparable from residence in a workhouse, it is vain to hope for much beneficial influence from the school on the habits and characters of the children; for even where the classification is maintained with most strictness, they are always more or less associated with the women. The young single women in the house have, many of them, children, whom they are of course permitted to see; and the girls cannot learn any household work without coming into contact with these women, for it is they on whom this kind of work chiefly devolves. Such associations, even where much vigilance exists, must be polluting. A workhouse cannot, with the greatest attention to classification, be made a place in which young girls can be kept from these chances of corruption. Such, in substance, are the admissions of the highest authority, and they are amply borne out by the testimony of Assistant Commissioners, Poor Law and School Inspectors, and others. Mr. Tufnell, in one of his reports to the Committee of Council, gives the following account of a workhouse school by the schoolmaster; premising that it is in one of the ordinary workhouses in the south of England-that there is nothing unusual in the character of the district or the internal arrangements of the house, nor any indication that the case was in any way exceptional. The boys,' he says, 'had for years 'formed habits of lying, stealing, and destroying property, and 'their morals were not merely neglected, but actually corrupted 'by those who should have fitted them for virtuous and respectable 'living. I have now under my care some of the boys who carried on a system of burglary for three years, and were in the habit 'of using the vilest language imaginable to their teacher, when reprimanded by him.' In another part of the same report, he says of a particular workhouse, which he describes as a fair specimen of the system, that the school, instead of depauperizing the children, nursed them for the able-bodied men's yard and the county jail. One young man of twenty-one, who had been in the school, told him that thirty-eight, besides himself, had

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gone from the school to the able-bodied class; of these, two were transported for ten years, four for fifteen, and one for twenty years twelve had been in prison, and only seven were doing pretty well. Some of the thirty-nine were, and no doubt are still, almost permanently chargeable.

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Dr. Temple quotes from the reports of some of the teachers. 'I think,' writes one, 'the boys in this union will never be depauperized; they have to mix with the men, most of whom "are "jail-birds." I have found them talking to the boys about the jail, and of "bright fellows finding their way to the jail." Another says: 'Nothing can be done while the boys are in the 'union. The common topic of conversation among the children 'is the arrival of women of the town to be confined here.' A third, writing from a union where the boys work in the field with the men, remarks, My work of three weeks is ruined in as many minutes.' Mr. Cumin declares that it seems impossible to exaggerate the amount of lying, low cunning, laziness, insubordination, and profligacy which characterise the pauper class in workhouses; and this spirit naturally infects the mass of poor children who are born and bred up in so pestilential an atmosphere. He procured from the master of the Plymouth workhouse a return which showed, as far as possible, what had become of the boys and girls who had left the union school. Of seventy-four giris no fewer than thirty-seven had returned to the workhouse; of fifty-six boys ten or twelve had returned, many of them several times. Of the seventy-four girls only thirteen were known to be doing well; of the fifty-six boys eighteen. This, as he remarks, confirms the general evidence, which goes to prove that workhouse training is, as might be expected, even more prejudicial to girls than to boys. He also observes that one of the most fatal effects of bringing up the children in contact with adult paupers is the loss, or rather perhaps the absence, of all desire for independence. They have no wish to earn their own living, and are content to spend their days in a workhouse. This, as might be anticipated, is especially the case where industrial training forms little or no part of the education. Boys and girls who have never been accustomed to hard work naturally rebel when they are set to do it. 'They 'long for the workhouse, where they can spend their lives in eating, drinking, sleeping, and play.' At Plymouth Mr. Cumin was told that on an average one child every fortnight left service to return to the work house. Does not this go far to prove what we have asserted above, that the workhouse school is a nursery of pauperism?

With regard to the girls, it is impossible to doubt that life in the workhouse is too often a positive training in immorality. They are taught household work, as Miss Twining remarks in

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her evidence, necessarily in communication with the adults, and learn the care and management of babies in company with their unmarried mothers. One cannot imagine a more fatal risk for these girls, just going out into the world, friendless and without protection, than to see constantly before them these women ' with their babies: the workhouse seems their recognised home, 'they have, mostly, nothing to do but to sit and nurse their 'babies by a good fire and to gossip with each other. There is no pretence of its being a place of penance or hardship. Why 'should not these girls go and do likewise? And so, of course, they do, and a constant supply is kept up.' In support of her view she adduces, among other testimony, that of a good schoolmistress, who was asked why she seemed so depressed and spiritless about her work in one of these schools: 'Because,' she said, she felt that she was training up the girls for a life of 'vice and depravity: it was impossible under existing circum'stances that it should be otherwise: one after another went ' out to carry on the lessons learnt from the adults, and returned, 'like them, ruined and degraded, to be a lifelong pauper.' It would be easy to go on citing evidence to the same purpose to almost any extent; but it would be little more than a repetition of the same sentiments, often in nearly the same words; while we have only been able to find one solitary witness on the other side. Mr. Browne, Inspector of Schools, in a report to the Committee of Council, does battle in behalf of the workhouse schools. He thinks there is reason to believe that exaggerated notions prevail as to the contaminating influences,'' the moral poison,' of which our other authorities speak in such strong language; and he pleads that it is unjust to compare a wellmanaged district school with a badly-managed workhouse, and 'infer from that comparison that all workhouse schools must be 'bad.' No doubt it would be, if any one had done so; but the unfavourable inference has been drawn not from one or two peculiarly ill-managed schools, but from the examination of a

1 The remarks of M. de Pontès on this point are worth noting. 'The essential principle of keeping the child untainted by the contamination of others of his own age who are already initiated in vice, the offspring of tramps, vagrants, and prostitutes, is not sufficiently attended to [in workhouses]..... Nor is it possible always to prevent contact between the children and adult paupers, which, to say the least, must have a deleterious effect on their young minds; for it suggests to the idle that there are other ways of living in tolerable comfort besides honest hard work, and familiarizes them with the thought of depending on charity for their daily bread instead of on their own exertions. That these are radical defects

is proved by the fact that without reckoning the contingent furnished by the Union to the criminal population, the most refractory and disorderly inmates of the workhouse itself are precisely those whose childhood was passed in these establishments.'-Social Reform in England, p. 188. Eng. Trans.

Further on he speaks of the fatal effect on the morality of the children of the companionship of dissolute women admitted for their confinements, 'presenting the spectacle of unblushing vice and shameless profligacy.' Their place, he observes is the penitentiary, and not the work house.

large number of average character; not by comparison with schools which are better managed, but from their own intrinsic demerits. And although it may be conceded that Mr. Browne has shown that a well-managed workhouse school may, and here and there actually does exist, as for instance at Berwickupon-Tweed, he has altogether failed to show, and indeed scarcely attempts to show, that the difficulties to be contended with are not incomparably greater in the one case than in the other so great, in truth, as to be in the majority of instances all but insuperable. While fully admitting that Mr. Browne's judgment is entitled to great respect, we cannot allow it to outweigh the great concurrence of opinion on the opposite side expressed by those not less qualified to judge; nor do we think that the most candid study of his defence will induce our readers to dissent from the proposition laid down by the Poor Law Inquiry Commissioners, That children who enter a workhouse quit it, if they ever do quit it, corrupted where they were well-disposed, and hardened where they were vicious;' nor from the conclusions arrived at by the Education Commissioners, That pauperism is hereditary, and that the children 'born and bred as members of that class furnish the great mass of the pauper and criminal population; that the best prospect of a permanent diminution of pauperism and crime is to be found in the proper education of such children;' but, 'That the workhouse schools are generally so managed that the 'children contained in them learn from infancy to regard the workhouses as their homes, and associate with grown-up paupers whose influence destroys their moral character and prevents the growth of a spirit of independence.' Hence it follows that the first step towards any improvement is to remove them altogether from these influences by the establishment of district, or at any rate separate schools, though they give a decided preference to the former; and they recommend that the formation of such schools should be made compulsory, since in their judgment the experience of those already established proves conclusively that this remedy is efficient, that they give an education which effectually tends to emancipate the children 'from pauperism.' It is not, of course, pretended that any schools, however well-regulated, will ensure the children turning out all that they ought to be, or that they will counteract all the evils incidental to their position; but at all events it will give them a fair chance, which is now in effect denied them. Schools have their temptations like all other places; but when Mr. Browne says that the distinction between a district school and a workhouse is not that temptation is absent in the one case and present in the other, but that the temptations in the two cases are not precisely of the same kind, and that it is by

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no means clear that those of the workhouse always preponde'rate,' he appears to forget that in the workhouse school the school temptations remain the same, with those of the workhouse superadded; and the suggestion that they are on an equal footing in this respect, as it is contrary to à priori probability, so it certainly does not appear to be sustained by the facts. The evidence clearly shows that where the experiment has been tried a very great and rapid improvement in the condition of the children has been the unvarying result.

Of district schools in general Mr. Tufnell says, after specifying his peculiar means of obtaining information, 'From these sources I know that the number of failures in these schools are not on the average more than two or three per cent.; and I believe that if you test the number of failures in the highest 'class schools, even those frequented by the peerage, you will 'find a greater proportion of failures in life than among the 'children of the district schools. When the Poor Law was 'first founded, some investigation was made into the education 'of the pauper children of London, and it was found then that more than fifty per cent. of the children turned out failures. They became either thieves or prostitutes or paupers, or something of that sort. By district schools we have reduced the 'proportion to two or three per cent. instead of fifty or sixty.' By way of contrast to the Marylebone school, at that time in the house, from which almost all the girls are said to have turned out prostitutes, he showed that from the South Metropolitan, out of 81 boys and 102 girls sent out to service in one year only four were known to have lost their places from misconduct; and of 237 children sent out the year following the number was smaller still.

Of the North Surrey School Mr. Rudge, the chaplain, reported as follows in 1852 : Of the moral effects I can speak with the utmost satisfaction; whereas at the commencement of our labours complaints of disobedience and bad conduct were of 'constant occurrence, with frequent insolence and occasionally even personal violence, they are now very rare indeed. The 'vicious habits which once occasioned so much pain and anxiety have almost entirely disappeared; corporal punishment is becoming almost unknown amongst us. . . . I am convinced 'there is not a boy in the whole school who would not shrink " from a return to the workhouse as degrading, so long as it is possible to gain a livelihood by honest industry.' Five years later he reports that the whole number of children who had passed under his charge in that period was 2,839; the average number admitted yearly being 540, the average number removed by their parents or the boards of guardians 252. Of the whole number only 16 had been sent back to the workhouses as having