or retain competent teachers." The only sure
remedy was said to be, the compulsory establishment
of district and separate schools, and compulsion
upon guardians to make them use the power
they now have— and do not use— of teaching
children of the out-door paupers, with consent
of their parents. Such education, paid for from
the rates, should be made the condition of outdoor
relief. Such were the conclusions in this
matter arrived at last year by the Education
Commission, and they have led to the taking
this year, by the select committee upon poor
relief, of exculpatory evidence by poor-law
inspectors.

We will give a sketch of the rebutting argument.
Tn the first place, it is urged that much
of the ill character of workhouse schools dates
from before the year 'forty-seven, or is founded
on reports and statements made before that date,
when the system of workhouse education, one
year in advance of Europe as to that matter,
was revolutionised. In that year the grant
obtained by Sir Robert Peel's government, of
thirty thousand a year for the salaries of teachers
in workhouse schools, came into play, under
supervision of the Committee of Councils on
Education. Reform of the schools was got in
this way by reform of the teachers, and the
general tone of inspectors' reports has been for
the last fifteen years growing more and more
favourable. It was in the year 'forty-eight that
the first district schools were established. As
good an intellectual education is now given in an
in-door workhouse school, as in a national or district
school. As to advantages of workhouse
society and morals of the taught, Mr. Doyle,
inspector for the Midland district, who is a
strong and able advocate of the workhouse as
against the separate or district schools, scouts
the idea of workhouse contamination, and considers
it a triumph to show by investigation that
on a given day about three-fourths of the adult
women in all the workhouses of his district were
mothers of illegitimate children, and that of
these one in each dozen had been in a workhouse
school. Mr. Doyle shows quite satisfactorily
that while the intellectual results at the workhouse
school are certainly not below those of the
district school, the district schools, as now constituted,
have their full share of complete failure
in results. In the workhouse school the number
of children under one teacher is small, and
regular attendance is assured; this approximates
it in one respect to the family system; but Mr.
Doyle objects also to all association of homes
established by benevolent persons with the poor-law
administration. Any connexion with the
poor-law system, like the payment by a board of
guardians of three shillings a week— the cost of
workhouse maintenance— towards the care of a
pauper orphan in the Brockham Home, Mr.
Doyle thinks " entirely unsound in principle,
and quite impracticable. . . . There can," he
says, ' be no greater mistake, I think, than to
mix up the operation of two totally distinct
principles— the principle of charity, and the
principle of poor-law administration."

There is, no doubt, a notion in some minds,
obtained (however it may seem to an official mind
unsound and impracticable) from the highest
source, that the principle of Charity is the principle
which should animate all human actions,
and that, whatever is totally distinct from it, is
nothing worth. There is a notion that by the
best machinery, if it be machinery alone, it is not
in man or nation rightly to consider the poor,
and be a father to the fatherless. There is a
notion that the principle of Charity is to the
principle of poor-law administration very much
as soul to substance; and if that notion be
true, it is bold doctrine that tells us soul and
body cannot be kept too much apart.

But, after all, Mr. Doyle has to admit of the
workhouse girls pretty much what Mrs. Way
asserts, and what daily common experience shows
to be true; he acknowledges it to be " true to
a great extent" of workhouse girls, as a very
intelligent union clerk had said to him, that
"when put out to service they only find places
with persons who are little better than the class
they take as servants; the consequence is, there
is no prospect or even chance for a girl to get
on with such people; they give them bare wages
to find them shoes and stockings, and sometimes
refuse to give them any at all; they keep them
six or twelve months, during which time the
whole of the clothing they took with them is
worn out, the mistresses then quarrel with them,
and there is often no place for them but the
workhouse again, or they are perhaps driven to
something worse." Well, do we not come back
then, even with the advocate of an impeccable
impassive poor-law, to the need of that spirit of
human Charity which we find working at Brockham
and in Great Ormond-street? Let there be
from the advocates for the thorough drying of
the pauper's crust, license for some womanly help
to the poor girls at any rate. The boys, no
doubt, fight their way up when there is stuff in
them. If he have cunning and greed enough,
the workhouse boy sent out to sweep an office
may learn how to sweep money by the dustpanful
out of his neighbours' tills, may learn to be
a famous " operator" in the money market, and
to die in the blessed assurance that he is bequeathing
a plum to his heirs.

Mr. Weale, another poor-law inspector, reports
to the committee his inquiry into the facts
which induced the chairman of the board of
guardians at Birmingham, to declare to the
board, four years ago, "that the system of
bringing up children in the workhouse had
utterly failed in rendering them useful members
of society;" that " independently of their ignorance,
they were untruthful and dishonest;" and
that his visit to the disorderly girls' ward on that
very day " afforded a lamentable confirmation of
the fact that the guardians were bringing up
their girls in a manner that would only tend to
increase pauperism, and he might say prostitution,
in the town." The chairman of the board
was not speaking at random; he founded his
statement on inquiries made, without exception,
into the cases of all the girls sent from the