A WORD FOR THE POOR TO LORD ALTHORP. 425 



leave my children!'" Are we to have scenes like these daily, in every 

 village in England ? 



" Classification" indeed ! Suppose it accomplished suppose the 

 system to be perfected in every detail and department suppose a 

 body of men cooped up in a building, for which (whatever the com- 

 missioners may call it) some obnoxious name is sure to be invented 

 feeling as men will feel, when thus wantonly cut off from all domestic 

 communion, and placed under worse than servile coercion their 

 wives removed from them ; their children in the hands of strangers ; 

 harassed by a discipline repugnant to their habits, and disgusted by 

 the exaction of labour in which they have no intention ! My Lord, 

 can any man doubt, or, rather I should say, can any man calculate, 

 what would be the consequence of having three thousand such semi- 

 naries of mischief studded over the country ? 



But perhaps the commissioners will tell us that no such result will 

 accrue that their workhouses (or whatever else they may be called 

 hereafter) are not planned with a view of being tenanted, but are 

 merely to be built in terror em. As it is pithily abridged in the 

 Times, they are to be " a self-acting test of the claim of the applicant, 

 for if the claimant does not comply with the terms on which relief is 

 given to the destitute, he will get nothing ; and if he does comply, the 

 compliance will prove his destination." Is this a Christian way to 

 treat him ? To offer him a scorpion when he is hungry, and a 

 spunge of gall when he is dry, and turn away upon his refusal as a 

 test that he has no need of our charity ? But the commissioners may 

 be deceived, as men often are when they argue ex pede. The com- 

 missioners argue from individual instances, to a general result ; but 

 they should be reminded that their experiment will have to be tried 

 in a different state, and on a different scale of things from the present. 

 Force upon one or two paupers, say even of the worst class, the alter- 

 native of the workhouse or nothing, and it is ten to one that, at any 

 sacrifice, they would prefer nothing. Force the same alternative 

 upon all, and the problem is changed in its terms. The degradation 

 is in the exception a general rule might do away with all sense of it. 

 Turn one or two boys out of a school, and they will regard it as a 

 disgrace expel them all, and they might make a holiday of it, or 

 something worse. Suppose, my Lord, that the legislature were to 

 pass such a law, as the commissioners advise them, and that the poor 

 were to combine to take them at their word ? I fear that there are men 

 in England, as well as Ireland, who would not scruple to teach the 

 people how to defeat a bad law by obeying it ; and, in that case, I 

 leave your lordship to solve the question with which I started 

 namely, whether the suggestion of the commissioners, even if prac- 

 ticable, would be productive of any benefit. " En avant ! one and 

 all ! to the work-house !" In a month the government would be 

 compelled to suspend the law by an order in council. 



A bill, however, founded upon the report of the commissioners, 

 cannot be carried into practical operation. If the legislature attempt 

 it, they will be compelled, first or last, to recede; and to recede 

 before popular resistance, is to invite the pressure of popular en- 

 croachment. In the settlement of the Poor Laws, the legislature, of 

 all things, should be most careful not to make the poor a party to it ; 



