Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/9

 and the officers overworked, and extra assistance needed, whilst the sick wards of another part of the town will have abundance of room, and a service of officers little occupied. In respect to medical relief, it may be observed that it is contrary to sound principle, and most injurious in its operation, that the public service should be mixed up with private practice, which necessarily withdraws the interest of the officer from his duty towards the destitute. It would be far more economical, instead of two men's half-time, half in public practice and half in private, to have one man's whole time, and that time directed to the work of mitigation as well as of cure.

Classification of Pauper Children and others in separate Establishments originally Proposed. Our proposal in respect to existing pauperism and establishments was to have classified, by the appropriation of separate houses, each to one class of objects, as would have been extensively practicable in populous urban districts, with the existing tenements, assigning one house to the males, another to the females, one for the sick, and most especially one for orphan and destitute children, instead of putting all classes under one roof. The moral evils which have been inflicted on children—female children more particularly—from bringing them up in the same house with dissolute adults, from the influence of whose example, under the existing conditions of the single union houses, it has been found impracticable to protect them. These evils, so created, are the subject of the regular remonstrances of Miss Twining and the Ladies' Workhouse Visiting Committee, and are maintained in despite of the continued representations of school inspectors, and of the proof of the superior working of the half school time system and industrial training in the separate houses and district schools. It followed, on the principle of classification in separate houses laid down, that lunatics and idiots, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, who are still scattered about solitarily amidst other classes, to their mutual annoyance and misery, should have been gathered together, and placed in distinct establishments, where they might receive their befiting [sic] treatment.

The improvement, which has been effected in Ireland as well as in England, stops short of one great result contemplated and practicable, with the aid of a well-directed compulsory system of relief—namely, the suppression of habitual beggary, and the entire clearance of those seed-plots of juvenile delinquency and adult crime. To effect this, to put a stop to hereditary pauperism, to cut off the vicious succession of those who live habitually as mendicants or depredators, society must be brought to appreciate and to act upon the profound old Hebrew maxim—that he who neglects to teach his son a trade brings him up as a thief.