398 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



have been steadily increasing, and may now be counted by 

 thousands. The fact of a slight diminution in the amount 

 of State relief under the poor law is, therefore, quite 

 consistent with a great increase of real poverty ; yet this 

 slight diminution is again and again cited to show that 

 the people are really better oft" This decrease is, how- 

 ever, wholly due to the growing system, favoured by the 

 authorities, of refusing all outdoor relief, the place of 

 which is fully taken by the increase of private and 

 systematized charity. And there is good proof that this 

 vast growth of charitable relief has not overtaken the still 

 greater increase of real pauperism. This proof is to be 

 found in the steadily increasing proportion of the 

 population of London which dies in the workhouses. The 

 registrar-general gives this number as 6,7 Jf3 in 1872 ; in 

 1881 it had risen to 10,692, and in 1891 to ^^,^7^. Thus 

 the deaths of paupers in workhouses had increased 85 per 

 cent, from 1872 to 1891, while the total deaths in London 

 during the same period had increased from 70,893 to 

 90,216, or 27 per cent. It may be thought that this has 

 been caused by the influx of the poor into the towns ; but 

 it is mainly the young that thus emigrate ; and the 

 re o-istrar- general shows that the same increase of deaths 

 in workhouses has occurred, though in a less degree, in 

 • the whole country. In his report for 1888, the only one 

 I have at hand, he says : 



' ' The proportion of deaths recorded m workhouses, which 

 steadily increased from 5 '6 per cent, in 1875 to 6*7 per cent, in 1885, 

 further rose, after a slight decline in 1886 and 1887, to 6*9 per cent, 

 in 1888." 



The same continuous increase of aged pauperism is 

 thus proved to occur in all England, but to be especially 

 great in the larger cities ; and this fact appears to me to 

 demonstrate the increase of poverty during the last twenty 

 years of rapidly increasing wealth and ever-growing 

 luxury. And at the same time, notwithstanding all the 

 efforts of all the charitable institutions and philanthropic 

 associations, we see every week in the papers, though 

 only a few of these cases get noticed, such headings as 



