COUNT RUMFORD. 117 



large. The name of every member of the motley crew 

 was inserted in prepared lists, and they were sent off to 

 their haunts with instructions to appear on the following- 

 day at the military workhouse, where they would inhabit 

 comfortable warm rooms, enjoy a warm dinner daily, and 

 be provided with remunerative work. In the suburbs the 

 same measures were followed up successfully by patrols 

 of soldiers and police. 



With his iron resolution was associated, in those 

 days, a plastic tact which enabled him to avoid 

 jealousies and collisions that a man of more hectoring 

 temper and less self-restraint would infallibly have 

 incurred. To the schools for poor students, the Sisters 

 of Charity, the hospital for lepers, and other institutions, 

 had been conceded the right of making periodic appeals 

 from house to house ; German apprentices had also been 

 permitted to beg upon their travels ; all of these had 

 their claims adjusted. After he had swept his swarm of 

 paupers into the quarters provided for them, Thompson's 

 hardest work began. Here the inflexible order which 

 characterised him through life came as a natural force 

 to his aid. ' He encouraged a spirit of industry, pride, 

 self-respect, and emulation, rinding help even in trifling 

 distinctions of apparel.' His pauper workhouse was 

 self-supporting, while its inmates were happy. For 

 several years they made up all the clothing of the 

 Bavarian troops, realising sometimes a profit of 10,000 

 florins a year. Thompson himself constructed and 

 arranged a kitchen which provided daily a warm and 

 nutritious dinner for a thousand or fifteen hundred 

 persons, an incredibly small amount of fuel sufficing to 

 cook a dinner of this magnitude. The military work- 

 house was also remunerative. Its profits for six years 

 exceeded a hundred thousand dollars. The military 

 workhouse at Mannheim was unfortunately set on fire 



