Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/14

504 diseases —most necessary and humane so long as, from ignorance of sanitary science, the diseases were inevitable; but this is like going on without any conception or capacity to receive, or to act upon ideas, that the marshes admit of being drained, and being made, in place of fever nests, fields of healthful and inferior production. Of the existing causes of destitution and pauperism to which the class of independent labourers are subject, a larger proportion are those which do arise from localising causes, bad sanitary conditions, ill-drained, and cesspool-tainted, and over-crowded habitations; over-crowded, illventilated schools, and unduly prolonged hours of sedentary constraint, without due physical exercise for the young; over-crowded and ill- ventilated places of work, and over-long 4iours in them for the adults; with the results—excessive sickness and mortality, and premature disability for work, premature chargeability on some fund, public or private, which fund the shortness of the workman's career commonly prevents him from providing for himself. These causes of disability and pauperism are everywhere gross and patent. It may be said, in the words of the Psalmist, that the earth is "filled with the habitations of cruelty." By partial sanitary appliances, these causes of misery and destitution have, in various instances, been reduced one third, and, it is proved, may be reduced one-half; and that the period of self-support and working ability of the labourer or the artisan may be extended, as I have estimated, ten years or more, so as to enable him to make those reserves, to ensure the ease and independence and respectable self-support which is the last mundane consolation of old age. The landowners in Scotland, who are apprehensive of the increasing pressure of pauperism, and especially the owners of the single-roomed tenements, in which a million of the population of Scotland reside, will best ward off future burthens by exertions in this direction; and next to it, in this other, in arresting juvenile mendicity and vagrancy, and in cutting off the vicious succession to pauperism and vice, by imparting to the young industrial aptitudes, by means of early physical, as well as intellectual, moral and religious training. The efficiency of this great means of prevention has been demonstrated. I may assume that I have elsewhere proved that on the half school-time system, the common elementary instruction may be imparted in half the hours of the day now occupied, in half the period of years now occupied to the detriment of productive occupation, and at half the expense that is now incurred for inferior mental instruction, divested of the physical training, which is so necessary to impart industrial aptitudes. If these great means of prevention, educational, and sanitary be duly prosecuted, pauperism must eventually be of comparatively unfrequent occurrence, and a charge of little public account.