III.] POOR MAN'S FRIEND. 57 



rent to the laws of England, and of which this Bur- 

 dett's son forms a part. The poor creatures, if they 

 complain; if their hunger make them cry out, are 

 either punished by even harder measures, or are 

 slapped into prison. Alas ! the jail is really become 

 a place of relief j a scene of comparative good living: 

 hence the invention of the tread-mill! What shall 

 we see next '? Workhouses, badges, hundred-houses, 

 select-vestries, tread-mills, gravel-carts, and liar- 

 ness ! What shall we see next ! And what should 

 we see at last, if this infernal THING could conti- 

 nue for only a few years longer ? 



60. In order to form a judgment of the cruelty of 

 making our working neighbours live upon 2 %d. a day ; 

 that is to say 2d. and rather more than a halfpenny, 

 let us see what the surgeons allow in the hospitals, 

 to patients with broken limbs, who, of course, have no 

 work to do, and who cannot even take any exercise. 

 In GUY'S HOSPITAL, London, the daily allowance to 

 patients, having simple fractures, is this : 6 ounces 

 of meat ; 12 ounces of hread ; 1 pint of broth ; 2 quarts 

 of good beer. This is the daily allowance. Then, 

 in addition to this, the same patient has 12 ounces of 

 butter a week. These articles, for a week, amount to 

 not less at present retail prices (and those are the 

 poor man's prices,) than 6s. 9d. a week ; while the 

 working man is allowed Is. Id. a week ! For, he 

 cannot and he will not see his wife and children actu- 

 ally drop down dead with hunger before his face; 

 and this is Avhat he must see, if he take to himself 

 more than bjifth of the allowance for the family. 



61. Now, pray, observe, that surgeons, and parti- 

 cularly those eminent surgeons who frame rules and 

 regulations for great establishments like that of Guy's 

 Hospital, are competent judges of what nature re- 

 quires in the way of food and of drink. They are, 

 indeed, not only competent judges, but they are the 

 best of judges: they know precisely what is neces- 

 sary ; and having the power to order the proper al- 

 lowance, they order it. If, then, they mate an al- 

 lowance like that, which we have seen, fa a person 



