Volume 13

Annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales.

  • Great Britain. Poor Law Commissioners.
Date:
1835-1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    relief, yet finding themselves in the midst of an appalling state of distress/without funds to relieve the sufferers effectively, or to alleviate in any material degree the universal distress. Possessed of a workhouse, capable of holding only a few hundred inmates at one time, the Guardians are looked to with hope by thou- sands of famishing persons, and are called on to exercise, for a time, the mournful task of selection from the distressed objects who present themselves for admission as their last refuge from death. It is not now a question whether the parties applying are fit objects for relief. The Guardians have now to determine which of the applicants can be rejected with the least risk of their perishing through immediate want. In a short time the several departments of the workhouse are filled, and then arises a still more painful dilemma than any which has preceded that occurrence. Are persons presenting themselves in the last extremities of want—persons on the point of death through starvation—to be denied admittance to such an institution? Or, on the olher hand, ought the lives of some of those already admitted to be sacrificed by over-crowding the workhouse with new inmates, and thereby creating a large mortality by pestilence ? 109. That which we believe to be the right course, under such trying circumstances, is the course least in accordance with the feelings of the parties locally conducting the ad- ministration of relief;—eye-witnesses of the distress endured, they find it difficult, almost impossible, to resist the immediate impulse of the desire to relieve the individual cases brought before them ; thus applicant after applicant is admitted to the workhouse by the Guardians, long after the limit of sanitary safety has been reached. In the operation of such benevolent but dangerous impulses, it is forgotten that the very object sought, that of making the limited means of relief available to the utmost extent, is most surely sacrificed by this course of proceeding; that effectual relief, even to the extent of the existing accommodation, cannot be given, if contagious disease takes possession of the work- house ; that the relief purported to be afforded in an establish- ment, when once so infected, is not relief, but a delusion fatal to the recipients; and that the Guardians, in attempting to go beyond due sanitary limits, turn what was designed and adapted for good purposes, into active evil, and deprive them- selves of the power of using effectually those means of relief which have actually been placed at their command. 110. We have not failed to urge these views upon the Guardians of Unions in which we have seen this incautious disposition manifested, and we have invariably on such occasions called into action the proper functions of the medical officers of the workhouses, and placed upon them the direct responsibility