Letters to The Times and Lancet on famine fever and public charities / by Sir Charles Trevelyan.

  • Trevelyan, Charles Edward, Sir, 1807-1886.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters to The Times and Lancet on famine fever and public charities / by Sir Charles Trevelyan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    laniily by «eiidiiig the girls into orphanages and the boys into industrial schools, the woman herself being generally supported by out-door relief and gi’ocery tickets. In its actual results this is worse than the desertion by the husband, who is often a good riddance; and it is difficult to see what is to be the end of the present rage for mewing up such a large proportion of our juvenile population in vast institu- tions. The disposition to pond up boy labour in the streets of London is also most unfortunate, for, although blacking shoes or sweeping crossings is better than thieving, it is at best a lazy, shifty, men- dicant sort of life, leading to nothing really useful or self-supporting. * * God forbid that I should ‘ despise the day of small things ’ when Lord Shaftesbury and John MacGregor gathered the first- fruits of our proletaire harvest and garnered them in comparative safety. Neither do I deny that ‘ in such a mixed population as ours there must be a variety of employments of various degrees of excellence down to those which pure political economy might consider very inferior and even objectionable.’ But what I am prepared to maintain is, that, having now arrived at an advanced stage of the undertaking, we ought to review our proceedings, and modify our plan according to the means and opportunities now open to us. In an able article in the Reformatory and Refuge Joiornal for January 1872, Mr. W. E. Hubbard, junior, observed, ‘ It cannot bo too emphatically asserted that any kind of street occupation should only be temporary, a stepping-stone from the slough of idle destitution to the firm ground of honest industry. Street work is essentially bad, for it involves a great amount of idleness, and of itself leads to nothing better.’ This cannot, I am afraid, be much improved ; but, on the other hand, what a prospect of advantage, both to the young people themselves and to the country at large, has been opened by the fact that our great national industries are languishing for want of labour, and could absorb almost any quantity !