very generally carried into effect. The Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, dated May 1st, 1841, states that this system had been ordered to be adopted in four hundred and thirty seven workhouses, and there were only one hundred and fifty one workhouses where the order had not been sent. The following remarks on the inhumanity of this course, appeared in the London Times—“ although the last winter was unusually long and severe, yet it would appear that the harshest provisions of the Poor Law Amendment Act, were carried into effect with unrelenting severity, when the rigour of the weather called for every modification of its oppressive enactments." If a poor man with a feeble wife, and several small children now applies for assistance from the parish, the only conditions on which he obtains it are, that he goes to the workhouse, if it is not already too crowded to afford him admission, where he must first be separated from his wife, the sexes being placed in different apartments,then he must surrender his children to the parish officers to be disposed of as they see fit; generally to be torn from their parents and apprenticed in a factory to waste away their strength in its never ceasing toil, often under a brutal master,-or to be sent to the coal mines to be tortured into a premature grave by barbarities worse than are inflicted. · in the middle passage, and compared with which American slavery, even as it has been pictured by the most crazy abolitionists, seems a state of

felicity. I well know what language I employ— my statistics on the collieries will make good this bold assertion.

Yes, the government which enacted this law reasoned well when they supposed that by placing such an alternative before the ten thousands of wretched families of England, the expense of the workhouse system would be made less. Strange would it be if it had not thus turned out. The Poor Rates fell from £7,500,000 in 1834 to £5,110,000 in 1840, and it is astonishing they did not fall lower.

A humane nobleman in the House of Lords said, "The Whig government boast of the saving they have effected by the Poor Law Amendment Bill; why, the administration could have been more economical still. They might have decreed that every poor wretch in the parish workhouses should not only sleep on straw, but make it his diet, and they would have effected a greater saving still, perhaps. But for God's sake, let not noble lords boast of an economy in British government, which makes the workhouse an inquisition. There is a good reason why the poor should not crowd the workhouses; the truth is, they have been converted into abodes of privation and gloom, which even the starving pauper cannot tolerate."

Facts elicited by recent discussions, examinations, and reports, have sufficiently proved that every shilling the government has saved the coun

try in the Poor Rates, has been the price of suffering too horrible to be described. Not only has out-door relief been withheld, but the diet of the workhouses has been so reduced to effect a still greater saving, that instances are not rare of paupers committing crimes in the workhouses for the purpose of getting into the jails, where they are treated better as criminals, than they were before as objects of charity. In the London Phalanx, of Nov. 20, 1841, I find a long and able article extracted from the Times, in which this language is found. "Our readers are aware of the innumerable complaints that come up to us from all quarters respecting the insufficiency of the dietaries adopted in too many of our Union Workhouses. The dietary fixed for the Cirencester Union was so meagre and niggardly, that nobody was surprised at hearing that in districts where it was enforced, many of our unfortunate poor preferred dying under the rapid effects of positive hunger at home, to submitting themselves to the lingering, but not less fatal torments which appeared to be the inevitable result in every workhouse where it was tried. Unfortunately it now appears, that the London paupers complain almost as bitterly as the paupers of the provinces of the insufficient sustenance which they receive whilst inmates of the workhouse. Nay more, so many of them when thrown out of employment, prefer the dietary of the metropolitan prisons, to the dietary of the metropolitan work

house, that it has become very necessary to check a custom now very rife among them, we mean that of perpetrating petty offences against property,—for instance breaking lamps and windowsfor the purpose of ensuring themselves a commitment to Bridewell, where the food is more plentiful, and the government less harsh than that to which they must submit, if relieved in the usual manner as paupers in the workhouse. What do our readers think is the project which has been devised to suppress this growing evil? Not that of raising the dietary of the workhouse to that of the prison, but that of reducing the dietary of the prison to that of the workhouse! Yes, Sir Peter Laurie says, 'That it ought to be known that the Governors of Bridewell have, at a meeting this week, agreed to reduce the dietary of the prison to that of the Poor Law Union in its vicinity: It is found to be desirable that the inmates of the workhouse should not be attracted by the better food of the prison, nor ought criminals to be supplied with better food than the poor.' The prison was still left to the poor as a refuge from the horrors of the workhouse. Of that wretched, paltry fragment of hope they are now bereft. Workhouse and prison are to be regulated in future on the same principles."

In October, 1841, at a meeting in Norwich, in St. Andrew's Hall, a working-man said, "My name is George Lamb; I assure you, gentlemen, as I now stand here, if you put me into prison, I

shall be glad of it, for I shall have more food there than I have now. I am a native of Norwich, and have worked for Mr. Willet fifteen years. I know the difference between the discipline of the workhouse and the prison, having been in both places. I was put into the workhouse in the county, and for getting over the wall was sent to Walsingham prison, where my treatment was better than in the workhouse."

From a London paper, I find the following account of a person who chose to escape from Lambeth workhouse and die in the street, rather than undergo what she was there subjected to.

"Last evening an inquest was held before Mr. Higgs, at the Edinburgh Castle, Strand, on the body of Charlotte Classen, aged sixty-four, who died at the steps of a door in White Hart Street, Drury Lane, on Saturday. Deborah Johnson, a witness, first knew the deceased three weeks before. She then appeared very hungry, and some tea and food were given to her. She appeared in great want, and in a very filthy condition, and on Saturday last she called, and seemed in a dying state. Witness had advised her to go into the workhouse, but the deceased said she would rather die in the streets than go into the workhouse. Robert Booth, a relative, described the deceased as having been once in good circumstances; she had received a good education. The body was in a dreadfully emaciated state."

I could accumulate evidence of this kind which