Volume 1

The Minority report of the Poor law commission.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The Minority report of the Poor law commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    night in the same dormitories as the adult men. In all the small Workhouses and in many of the larger ones, the infants are wholly attended to by, and are actually in charge of, aged, and often mentally defective, paupers ; the able-bodied mothers having, during the first year, daily access to their own babies for nursing, and, subse- quently, such opportunities for visiting the common nursery as the master may decide. In the better managed, and in the largest establishments the nursery is, it is true, in charge of a salaried nurse, but even here the handling of the babies is mostly left to pauper inmates. However desirable may be the intercourse between an infant and its own degraded mother, it is not to the advantage of the scores of infants in the nursery to be perpetually in close companionship, for the first three or four or five years of their lives, with a stream of mothers of various types that we have mentioned. Such a nursery imbedded in the midst of an institution containing, not merely hundreds, but thousands of paupers of the most diverse classes is im- pregnated through and through with the atmosphere of pauperism. (b) The Unspecialised Management of the General Mixed Workhouse Apart from this promiscuity — which, be it noted, increases with the size of the establishment—it is an inherent defect of the General Mixed Workhouse that it makes impossible the proper treatment of any one of the various classes of paupers agglomerated within its walls. It is, indeed, largely on the ground that it actually pre- vented the subjecting of each class to its “ appropriate treatment” that the General Mixed Workhouse was con- demned by the Royal Commissioners of 1834. We have satisfied ourselves that this condemnation is still entirely justified. The very uniformity of regimen to which all the inmates are subjected makes it impracticable to deal properly with any one class. But a more insidious, and, as we think, equally disastrous incident of the mixed institution is what we