Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/206

 supports or alleviations are unknown among the votaries of ardent spirits.

Wherever food is deficient, it may be safely concluded that there is a still greater scarcity of clothing among the indigent. The physiologist has no need to try experiments upon the capability which the human system possesses of resisting low temperatures, when he can enquire into the circumstances of a poor population during an inclement season. We have often been astonished at the minimum of clothing to which individuals in these ranks reduce themselves, when pressed by the calls of hunger, far more imperious than the urgencies of frost and snow. In the winter of 1831 and 1832, when engaged with others in enquiries into the condition of the poor, with a view to arm them, if possible, against the threatened pestilence, we frequently found a family of five or six persons with one threadbare blanket between them, and the mother with a single flannel petticoat in the same predicament; all other articles of warm covering having been long before bartered for food, or deposited at the pawn-brokers.

It would be difficult to designate the miserable creatures reduced to this degree of destitution, as belonging to any particular class. They are such as may be found in almost every populous district; in this place they consist principally of unemployed labourers, artisans, and seamen, among our own people, and of hordes of Irish adventurers, whose existence seems to have no other object than that of showing upon how little extraneous material their athletic frames can be maintained, and how little derived from outward sources of enjoyment is the current of their happy spirits.