Further illustrations of the practical operation of the Scotch system of management of the poor / by W.P. Alison, M.D., &c., Professor of the Institutes of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh.

  • Alison, William Pulteney, 1790-1859.
Date:
[1841]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Further illustrations of the practical operation of the Scotch system of management of the poor / by W.P. Alison, M.D., &c., Professor of the Institutes of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    8/34 (page 8)
    (Abstract of Return, p. 18) ; but the parochial relief granted “ is wholly inadequate to do more than pay the weekly rent of their miserable dwellings” (p. 19). Take, for example, the case, which all must admit to be one deserving of sympathy and assistance, the case of widows with young children. I make out from the first nine pages of this report a list of 20 widows, with, in all, 59 children under 10 years of age dependent on them, three of them having fever in their families, two others them- selves ill, and two having children dying; the whole parochial assistance given to all these families is 3/. 14s. per month, averaging 3s. 8d. a-month, or not quite lie?, a-week, to each family. Any one who has attended to the subject must know, that the earnings of these widows, each burdened, on an average, with three young helpless children, must be very scanty; and farther, at the time when visited and in the receipt of this allowance, they appear to have been almost all out of work, and the whole weekly earnings of the 20 families are not stated at more than 6s. It may easily be conceived that the condition of these families as to lodging, clothing, or furniture, is stated as equally miserable as that of those who have no legal relief at all; many are accordingly described as having no bedding, no blankets, very little clothing, and their children almost naked ; and if it be, as I maintain, a curse to a country to have numerous families reared in it without any notions of comfort, it may be judged from what I have stated whether this curse is likely to be averted by the relief here given. Again, taking the first 23 aged and disabled women who are here recorded as receiving this parochial relief, we find that they have 41. 6s. divided among them in a month, which amounts to rather less than 3.9. 9d. a-month—e. rather less than three halfpence a-day—for each; and the whole earnings of the 23 are stated at only 6.9. a-week, which sum is divided among 5 of them, leaving 18 of the 23 with no ostensible income but the three halfpence a-day for lodging, food, fuel, and clothing. It is not here stated, and indeed can often hardly be ascertained, what assistance these persons receive from relations or friends, farther than that almost all of them are stated to have no children alive; but any one who knows the destitute inhabitants of a large town, will at once admit that in many of the cases thus taken indiscriminately, there will be no such assistance at all; and that the miserable state of destitution as to lodging, clothing, and furniture, described in this report, is, in the case of many, the necessary and unavoidable result of their misfortunes and infirmities; admitting, in the absence of more efficient legal relief, only of such precarious and variable alleviation as they can obtain by one form or another of mendicity. I shall only observe as to these facts, that while the inadequate pro- vision for the aged and disabled labourers is the part of the system most repugnant to the feelings of humanity and the precepts of Christianity, the inadequate provision for the families of widows and disabled labourers is, in a political view, still more injurious, because it poisons one of the sources of national prosperity, and leads naturally to a perpetuation of the same evils. Mr. Scott, in his account of the pauperism at Peterhead, (a town hitherto unassessed,) gives more precise details as to all the sources of income which persons so circumstanced can command,—earnings,