Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1882 — Pauperism in England. [ARTICLE]

Pauperism in England.

II a resident of Illinois were to ask me to describe pauperism and poor-re-lief in England and Wales, its extent and cost, I would say to him, picture to yourself a country in area only 1,000,000 acres larger than your own State, but containing a population eight times as large; this population distributed unequally, 15 per cent, of it to be found in one city, and nearly 12,000,000 (or half the population of England alone) living in London and the four great manufacturing counties of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire ; where 212 persons reside in cities and towns to every 100 residing in the rural districts, or two to one; where frequently 1,000,000 of the population are put down in the blue books as paupers. Instead of this territory being divided into 102 counties as Illinois is, the inquirer must imagine it parceled out into 647 unions, which vary in area from 60 to 150 square miles. In each of these unions may be found a work-house, varying in its a > commodations from St. Pancras, which accommodates nearly 4,000, and Liverpool 3,000, and Birmingham 2,000, to those in such unions as Rothbury and Dulverton, which each have a capacity of about fifty pauper-power. It would be as difficult to give a correct notion of the style and size of these buildings as to picture the variegated surface of the globe. Some are said to be lofty, some low, but all are massive. Some (for instance, the one at Birmingham or that at Liverpool) might be called an elegant retreat, while others would look beside it like a group of wheelbarrows round the Lord Mayor’s coach—lost in the splendor of the gilded spectacle. To add up the aggregate capacities of those work-houses makes one believe that they were expected to contain half the population of the country. But as a matter of fact (the large towns excepted) they do not contain in many cases half, iu some not a quarter of the inmates for which they were built, so that the waste in keeping up large, unfilled establishments, each with an expensive staff of officers, is very great indeed. To complete our picture, we must add an army of nearly 7,000 paid officials constantly engaged in one branch or another of the poor-law administration, and whose aggregate salaries and rations came last year to over $5,000,000, while the total maintenance of indoor paupers was only about $8,750,000. The total annual cost of pauperism and outdoor relief in Great Britain and Ireland is, in round figures, nearly $50,000,000. —Robert P. Porter , in Chicago Inter Ocean.