Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on the training of pauper children : with appendices.

  • Great Britain. Poor Law Commissioners.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on the training of pauper children : with appendices. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are discreet in their enjoymens, which are of a more rational and refined kind; they are more refined themselves, and they have a taste for much better society, which they approach respectfully, and consequently find much readier admittance to it; they culti- vate music ; they read ; they enjoy the pleasures of scenery, and make parties for excursions into the country; they are economical, and their economy extends beyond their own purse to the stock of their master ; they are consequently honest and trustworthy. The effects of the deficiency of education is most strongly marked in the Italians, who, with the advantage of superior natural capa- city, are of the lowest class of workmen, though they comprehend clearly and quickly, as I have stated, any simple proposition made or explanation given to them, and are enabled quickly to execute any kind of work when they have seen it performed once; yet their minds, as I imagine from want of development by training or school education, seem to have no kind of logic, no power of systematic arrangement, no capacity for collecting any series of observations and making sound inductions from the whole of them. This want of the capacity of mental arrangement is shown in their manual operations. An Italian will execute a simple operation with great dexterity ; but when a number of them are put together all is confusion; they cannot arrange their respective parts in a complicated operation, and are comparatively inefficient except under a very powerful control. As an example of this I may mention that within a few years after the first introduction of cotton spinning in Naples, in the year 1830, the spinners produced twenty-four hanks of cotton yarn from No. 16 to 20 per spindle, which is equal to the production of the best English hands; and yet up to this time not one of the Neapolitan operatives is ad- vanced far enough to take the superintendence of the operations of a single room, the superintendents being all northerns, who, though much less gifted by nature, have obtained a higher degree of order or arrangement imparted to their minds by a superior education. This example is derived from a new branch of indus- try ; others have come within my experience in branches of in- dustry in which the Italians excel, such as in masons’ work. I look on the Neapolitans individually as being the most skilful masons in Europe. When, however, they are employed in num- bers and concentrated masses, the same want of what I call logical arrangement again becomes perceptible, and I have constantly been obliged to employ as superintendents, northerns, such as the better educated Swiss and Germans, who, though inferior in per- sonal ability, were from education fit to arrange and control the work with forethought and system. These observations apply to the Neapolitan workmen. Those in the north of Italy, chiefly in Lombardy, who have a comparatively better education, from a forethought and arrangement to their natural capacity, and in