Page:Workhouses and women's work.djvu/20

 our remarks upon this portion of the subject we may quote the statistics given by Mrs. Jameson as to the ages of pauper nurses employed in London workhouses:—

"'There are seventy paid nurses, and five hundred pauper nurses and assistants. One-half of these nurses are above fifty, one-quarter above sixty, many not less than seventy, and some more than eighty years old. An extra allowance of tea or beer is the reward given for their services; but the propensity to drink is so strong, that it is with the utmost difficulty that they are kept from indulging it.'"

We can hardly wonder at this when we find that the habit is encouraged rather than checked by those in authority. In many workhouses it is the custom to allow the nurses a glass of gin daily, besides their portion of beer. Can we wonder that a habit thus acquired grows into drunkenness when the opportunity offers?—indeed it is inevitable that it should do so. If the nurses are so worn out by ill-health and poverty that they require such stimulants to enable them to perform their duty, it is argument enough against their efficiency. But their powers are not strengthened by a process which, it is well known, undermines health and vigour. Let them have good food and tea and coffee in sufficient quantities, and if this will not enable them to perform their work they are not fit to undertake it. Living night and day in sick wards, ill-ventilated as they generally are, may well impair powers both of body and mind, and nurses should not be required to do so. Mrs. Jameson may well remark, after an enumeration of such facts, "These are the sisters of charity to whom our sick poor are confided!"

An amended management of our workhouses is demanded chiefly on the grounds that the persons who are, and under the present state of things must be, received into them, are not all degraded and worthless. But supposing they were of such a character, at any rate they are deserving of treatment at least as good as that bestowed upon criminals. The testimony of visitors and chaplains may be received upon this point. One of the latter says: —

"'The inmates of our workhouses are not generally the dregs and refuse of the population, although of course a great many of these are mixed with the rest. In our workhouse of two hundred and twenty inmates only two come under the class of able-bodied men. This is probably below the general average, but it proves the mistake of treating the entire number of inmates of a workhouse with harshness, as if it was hte [sic] invariable rule that they enter it through their own fault. A"