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hospitals and dispensaries, and indirectly by insisting upon the 
speedy removal of unsanitary property, and the prompt closing 
of cellar dwellings, ought to receive ungrudging support. Care- 
fulness in distribution and an insistance upon giving indoor 
relief and none other in cases of personal uncleanliness, 
besottedness, or moral turpitude, have had no small effect in 
lessening applications for relief. But a very large amount of 
positive good has been wrought by the many aids to thrift that 
have sprung up in our midst during the last forty years. A 
reference to Appendix Table 8, will convince you at a glance, 
Burnley being only the cotton districts in miniature, that the 
working classes of Lancashire are, as a whole, cultivating saving 
habits. Amongst 165,000 inhabitants there are 30,000 depositors 
of less sums than £100, and upwards of 2,000 small property 
owners, who at the outset generally borrow money from the 
local Building Societies, and whose gross return does not exceed 
£20 yearly. 
An examination of Mr. Henley’s latest returns of pauperism 
in Lancashire, enables anyone interested to discover at once the 
presence of an increasingly dangerous plague spot. Outside 
Manchester and Liverpool, emergence from an environment of 
chronic pauperism is steady and decided. Eliminate those two 
unions, and you will find that the proportion throughout 
Lancashire of paupers to population, will fall from 1 in 61 to 
1 in 67 nearly. The pauperism of the two cities was estimated 
as being, on the 1st of January last, 1 in 35 and 1 in 34 
respectively, in Mr. Henley’s valuable report; but the latest 
census returns and Mr. Henley’s supplementary figures based 
upon them, emphasize their frightful position by giving 1 in 34 
and 1 in 26 respectively, or an average, taking the two cities 
together, of one pauper to every 29°4 of the inhabitants. The 
work of the Manchester Board of Guardians and of the Liverpool 
Select Vestry, is one from which many of us would shrink. 
They have to deal as best they may with a continuous flow from 
two sources, one from within the other from without, of English, 
Scotch, Irish, and Welsh out-of-works, and of brow-beaten 
starved-out immigrants. Nothing could be further from my 
thoughts than an unsympathetic criticism of the Poor Law 
work, courageously and efficiently discharged, both in Liverpool 
and Manchester, but it may not be unserviceable to bring to 
light the immense and rapidly increasing difficulties by which 
they are beset, because in their case, where the evils ever 
attendant upon pauperism are most pronounced, the application 
of the principle of Compulsory Insurance—as a remedy—is 
practically impossible. Labour, in both cities, is largely 
intermittent, and yet for that very reason, easy to obtain, in 
snatches. 
