MikhailT/lj-speech huggingface dataset:
It was practically inoperative as regards the penalties for neglect. It was no doubt as irksome and inconvenient to the Secretary of State
to avail himself of his powers, as it was difficult to bring home the derelictions of duties and evasion of the acts. Too much was left to the inspectors.
It was nearly impossible for them to exercise a very close supervision over the whole of the prisons of the country.
There were only two of them, and they could not visit each prison more than once in each year, sometimes not oftener than once in eighteen months.
The task imposed upon them, tending as it did to the imposition of a fine upon the local authorities, was not a pleasant one,
and it is not strange if they did not very frequently hand up the offenders to the reproof and correction of the Secretary of State.
As the almost inevitable consequence, while the more glaring defects in prison management disappeared,
matters went on after the 1865 Act much the same as they had done before. Districts differed greatly in the attention they paid to prison affairs.
In one part the most praiseworthy activity prevailed,
in another there was half-heartedness, even apathy and an almost complete contempt for the provisions of the act.
As the years passed, great want of uniformity continued to prevail throughout the prisons of the United Kingdom.
The whole question assumed sufficient importance to become a part of the Government program when Lord Beaconsfield took office in 1874.
The Home Secretary in that administration,
Mr. (now Sir Richard) Cross, having applied himself vigorously to the task of reorganizing the whole system, became convinced
that no complete reform could be accomplished so long as the prisons were left under the jurisdiction of the local authorities.
The Prisons Bill of 1876 contemplated the transfer of the prisons to Government.
This bill, reintroduced in 1877, became law that year, after which the whole of the prisons, including Newgate,
passed under the more direct control of the State.
Since then a strong central authority has labored steadfastly to compass concentration,
in the administration of prisons.
Three years after the advent of the prison commissioners, it was decided that Newgate was an excessively costly and redundant establishment.
It was only filled at the periods when the sessions of the Central Criminal Court were in progress;
at others an expensive staff was maintained with little or nothing to do.
At a short distance stood another prison of detention, that of Clerkenwell,
with spare accommodation sufficient to receive all prisoners who were then committed to Newgate. These arguments were unanswerable.
Accordingly, it was ordered by Sir William Harcourt, the present Secretary of State, that Newgate should cease to be used as a regular prison,
and it is now, except during sessions or when the gallows is in requisition, practically and for ever closed.
Marion Harland's Cookery for Beginners. Bread Sponge and Breakfast Breads.
Bread raised with what is known to bakers as a “sponge,” requires more time and a trifle more work than the simpler form for which I have just already given directions.
But it keeps fresh longer, is softer and more nutritious, and a second-rate brand of flour thus treated produces a better loaf
than when mixed up with yeast and water only.
Sponge-making is, therefore, an important if not an essential accomplishment in a cook, be she novice or veteran.
Three potatoes of fair size, peeled and boiled mealy.
Five tablespoonfuls of yeast. One tablespoonful of white sugar.
One tablespoonful of butter.
Three cups of lukewarm water in which the potatoes were boiled, strained through a coarse cloth.
One heaping cup of sifted flour.
Put the potatoes into a large bowl or tray and mash them to powder with a potato beetle, or a wooden spoon.
While still hot, mix in the sugar and butter, beating all to a lumpless cream.
Add a few spoonfuls at a time, the potato-water alternately with the flour by the handful,
beating the batter smooth as you go on until all of the liquid and flour has gone in.
Beat hard one minute before pouring in the yeast.
it is well to stir into the yeast a bit of soda no larger than a grain of corn already wet up in a teaspoonful of boiling water.
Now whip up the batter with a wooden spoon for another minute, and the sponge is made.
Throw a cloth over the bowl and set by for five or six hours to rise.
If you intend to bake in the forenoon, make the sponge at bedtime. If in the afternoon, early in the morning.
When the sponge is light sift a quart and a cup of flour into a bowl or tray with two teaspoonfuls of salt.
Into a hollow, like a crater in the middle of the flour, empty your sponge-bowl, and work the flour down into it.
Wash out the bowl with a little lukewarm water and add this to the dough. If it should prove too soft, work in, cautiously, a little more flour.
If too stiff, warm water, a spoonful at a time until you can handle the paste easily. The danger is in getting it too stiff. Now.
knead and set for risings first and second, as you have already been instructed. This sponge will be found especially useful in making Graham Bread.
One quart of Graham flour, one cup of white flour.
One half cup of Indian meal. One half cup of molasses. Two teaspoonfuls of salt. Soda, the size of a pea.
Half the quantity of sponge given in preceding receipt.
Warm water for rinsing bowl -- about half a cup.
Put the brown or Graham flour unsifted into the bread-bowl.
Sift into it white flour, meal and salt, and stir up well while dry.
Into the “crater” dug out in the middle, pour the sponge, warm water, the molasses, and soda dissolved in hot water.
Knead as you would white bread, and set aside for the rising.
It will not swell so fast as the white, so give yourself more time for making it.
When light, knead well and long;
make into two loaves, then put into well-greased pans and leave for an hour, or until it becomes more than twice the original size of the dough.
Take care that it does not burn in baking. The molasses renders it liable to scorching.
The oven must be steady, but not so hot as for white bread, nor will the Graham bread be done quite so soon as that made of bolted flour.
Turn the pans once while baking, moving them as gently as possible.
If rudely shaken or jarred, there will be heavy streaks in loaves.
Graham bread is wholesome and sweet, and ought to be eaten frequently in every family, particularly by young people whose bones and teeth are in forming.
The phosphates which the process of “bolting” removes to a large extent from white flour, go directly to the manufacture of bone,
and these also tend to nourish and strengthen the brain.
After mixing your bread in the morning either with sponge or with yeast, divide the kneaded dough into two portions.
Mould one into a round ball, and set aside for a loaf as already directed.
Make a hole in the middle of the other batch and pour into it a tablespoonful of butter, just melted, but not hot.
Close the dough over it, dust your hands and kneading-board with flour and work in the shortening until the dough is elastic and ceases to be sticky.
Put it into a floured bowl, cover with a cloth and set away out of draught and undue heat, for three hours.
Knead it again, then, and wait upon its rising for another three hours. The dough should be as soft as can be handled.
When it is light for the second time flour your board, rubbing in the flour and blowing lightly away what does not adhere to the surface.
Toss the lump dough upon it and knead thoroughly for five minutes.
Flour a rolling-pin and roll the dough into a sheet not more than half an inch thick.
Cut this into round cakes with a biscuit-cutter or a sharp-edged tumbler and fold, not quite in the middle,
in the form of turnovers, pinching the corners of the fold pretty hard to hinder the flap of dough from flying up as the rising proceeds.
Rub the bottom and sides of a baking-pan with sweet lard or butter. Do this with a bit of clean soft rag or tissue-paper,
visiting every corner of the pan, but not leaving thick layers and streaks of grease after it.
Arrange the rolls in regular rows in the pan about a quarter of an inch apart.
Cover with a cloth and set nearer the fire than you dared trust the dough, and let them rise for an hour.
Peep under the cloth two or three times to see whether they rise evenly, and turn the pan around once that all may be equally exposed to the heat.
When the time is up and the rolls are puffy and promising, set them in a pretty quick oven and bake half an hour,
turning the pan once in this time, and covering with clean -- never printed -- paper, should they brown too fast.
Break the rolls apart from one another and eat warm. They are also good cold, and if the directions be followed implicitly, very good always.
Graham Rolls are made by treating the dough mixed for Graham bread as above and following the foregoing receipt in every section, but allowing more time for rising and baking.
They are even better when cold than hot.
Breakfast Biscuit.
Two cups of fresh milk slightly warmed.
One quart and a cup of flour sifted.
Five tablespoonfuls of yeast.
One even tablespoonful of white sugar.
One even teaspoonful of salt.
Bit of soda as large as a pea, dissolved in hot water.
One tablespoonful of butter, just melted, not hot.
Yolk of one egg beaten light.
Sift the flour, salt and sugar into a bowl,
hollow the heap in the center and pour in the milk, working down the flour into the liquid with a spoon or your hands until it is thoroughly melted.
Into a second hollow pour the yeast and knead thoroughly for fifteen minutes.
Wrap bowl and biscuit in a thick cloth and set to rise where it will neither become chilled nor sour over night.
Study the temperature in different parts of the kitchen and kitchen closets to the end of finding the best places for raising dough and sponge.
Do all this at bedtime. Early in the morning turn out the dough upon a floured board, work it for a minute into manageable shape;
drill several finger-holes in it and fill them with the melted butter, the dissolved soda and the beaten yolk of egg.
Pinch the dough hard to stop the mouths of these cavities,
and knead for ten minutes, carefully at first, lest the liquids should be wasted, and more boldly when they are absorbed by the paste.
Roll out into a sheet half an inch thick with a floured rolling-pin; cut into round cakes, set these closely together in a well-greased pan;
prick each with a fork and let them rise near the fire for half an hour, covered with a light cloth.
Bake from twenty to twenty-five minutes in a quick oven, turning the pan around once, quickly and lightly.
Break apart from one another and pile on a plate, throwing a clean doily or a small napkin over them. Break open at table.
Hot rolls and muffins should never be cut.
One word with regard to getting up early in order to give dough a chance for the second rising.
It is not a wholesome practice for any woman -- least of all a young girl to be out of bed two hours before she eats her breakfast.
Studying upon an empty stomach provokes dyspepsia and injures the eyes.
Active exercise in like circumstances tempts debility and disease.
Yet our bread and rolls must be looked after at the proper time.
Have yourself called on biscuit mornings an hour earlier than usual.
Rise, wash face and hands, rinse the mouth out and brush back the hair.
Put on stockings and slippers, such underclothing as may be needed to prevent cold, a wrapper and the kitchen apron.
Cover your hair entirely with a handkerchief or sweeping cap.
Before beginning operations downstairs eat a half-slice of dry bread or a biscuit.
You will not relish it, but take it all the same to appease the empty, discontented stomach.
Having made out your rolls and tucked them up snugly for the final rise, return to your chamber for a comfortable bath and toilet.
When habited for the day in all except the outer gown, collar, etc., slip on the wrapper again and run down to put the biscuits in the oven.
Unless it is too hot, they will get no harm while you finish dressing in ten minutes, just in season to turn the pan.
From the beginning of your apprenticeship in housewifery, learn how to "dovetail" your duties neatly into one another.
A wise accommodation of parts and angles, and compactness in the adjustment of "must-be-dones"
are better than mere personal strength in the accomplishment of such tasks as fall to women to perform.
Master these, and do not let them master you.
Weave the little duties in and under and among what seem to be the greater.
While your bread is taking a three hours’ rise, you are free in body and mind for other things.
The grand secret of keeping house well and without worry, lies in the art of packing and fitting different kinds of work and in picking up the minutes.
Other things besides rising dough get on quite as well without your standing by to watch them.
The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Franklin D Roosevelt, Section 6.
September 30, 1934.
Three months have passed since I talked with you shortly after the adjournment of the Congress.
Tonight I continue that report, though, because of the shortness of time, I must defer a number of subjects to a later date.
Recently the most notable public questions that have concerned us all
have had to do with industry and labor and with respect to these, certain developments have taken place which I consider of importance.
I am happy to report that after years of uncertainty, culminating in the collapse of the spring of 1933,
we are bringing order out of the old chaos
with a greater certainty of the employment of labor at a reasonable wage and of more business at a fair profit.
These governmental and industrial developments hold promise of new achievements for the nation.
Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity
with respect to industry and business, but nearly all are agreed that private enterprise in times such as these
but also our processes of civilization.
The underlying necessity for such activity
is indeed as strong now as it was years ago when Elihu Root said the following very significant words:
Instead of the give and take of free individual contract,
the tremendous power of organization has combined great aggregations of capital in enormous industrial establishments
working through vast agencies of commerce and employing great masses of men in movements of production
and transportation and trade, so great in the mass that each individual concerned in them is quite helpless by himself.
The relations between the employer and the employed, between the owners of aggregated capital and the units of organized labor,
between the small producer, the small trader, the consumer,
and the great transporting and manufacturing and distributing agencies,
all present new questions for the solution of which the old reliance upon the free action of individual wills appears quite inadequate.
And in many directions, the intervention of that organized control which we call government
seems necessary to produce the same result of justice and right conduct
which obtained through the attrition of individuals before the new conditions arose.
It was in this spirit thus described by Secretary Root
that we approached our task of reviving private enterprise in March, 1933.
Our first problem was, of course, the banking situation because, as you know, the banks had collapsed.
Some banks could not be saved but the great majority of them, either through their own resources or with government aid,
have been restored to complete public confidence.
This has given safety to millions of depositors in these banks.
Closely following this great constructive effort we have, through various federal agencies,
saved debtors and creditors alike in many other fields of enterprise, such as loans on farm mortgages and home mortgages;
loans to the railroads and insurance companies and, finally, help for home owners and industry itself.
In all of these efforts the government has come to the assistance of business
and with the full expectation that the money used to assist these enterprises will eventually be repaid.
I believe it will be.
The second step we have taken in the restoration of normal business enterprise
has been to clean up thoroughly unwholesome conditions in the field of investment.
In this we have had assistance from many bankers and businessmen,
most of whom recognize the past evils in the banking system, in the sale of securities, in the deliberate encouragement of stock gambling,
in the sale of unsound mortgages and in many other ways in which the public lost billions of dollars.
They saw that without changes in the policies and methods of investment
there could be no recovery of public confidence in the security of savings.
The country now enjoys the safety of bank savings under the new banking laws,
the careful checking of new securities under the Securities Act
and the curtailment of rank stock speculation through the Securities Exchange Act.
I sincerely hope that as a result
people will be discouraged in unhappy efforts to get rich quick by speculating in securities.
The average person almost always loses.
Only a very small minority of the people of this country believe in gambling as a substitute for the old philosophy of Benjamin Franklin
that the way to wealth is through work.
In meeting the problems of industrial recovery the chief agency of the government has been the National Recovery Administration.
Under its guidance, trades and industries covering over 90 percent of all industrial employees
have adopted codes of fair competition, which have been approved by the President.
Under these codes, in the industries covered, child labor has been eliminated.
The work day and the work week have been shortened.
Minimum wages have been established and other wages adjusted toward a rising standard of living.
The emergency purpose of the N.R.A. was to put men to work and since its creation more than four million persons have been reemployed,
in great part through the cooperation of American business brought about under the codes.
Benefits of the Industrial Recovery Program have come,
not only to labor in the form of new jobs, in relief from overwork and in relief from underpay,
but also to the owners and managers of industry because,
together with a great increase in the payrolls, there has come a substantial rise in the total of industrial profits
a rise from a deficit figure in the first quarter of 1933
to a level of sustained profits within one year from the inauguration of N.R.A.
Now it should not be expected that even employed labor and capital would be completely satisfied with present conditions.
Employed workers have not by any means all enjoyed a return to the earnings of prosperous times,
although millions of hitherto underprivileged workers are today far better paid than ever before.
Also, billions of dollars of invested capital have today a greater security of present and future earning power than before.
This is because of the establishment of fair, competitive standards and because of relief from unfair competition
in wage cutting which depresses markets and destroys purchasing power.
But it is an undeniable fact that the restoration of other billions of sound investments to a reasonable earning power
could not be brought about in one year.
There is no magic formula,
no economic panacea, which could simply revive over-night the heavy industries and the trades dependent upon them.
Nevertheless the gains of trade and industry, as a whole, have been substantial.
In these gains and in the policies of the administration there are assurances that hearten all forward- looking men and women
with the confidence that we are definitely rebuilding our political and economic system on the lines laid down by the New Deal
lines which as I have so often made clear, are in complete accord with the underlying principles of orderly popular government
which Americans have demanded since the white man first came to these shores.
We count, in the future as in the past, on the driving power of individual initiative
and the incentive of fair private profit,
strengthened with the acceptance of those obligations to the public interest which rest upon us all.
We have the right to expect that this driving power will be given patriotically and whole-heartedly to our nation.
We have passed through the formative period of code making in the National Recovery Administration
and have effected a reorganization of the N.R.A.
suited to the needs of the next phase, which is, in turn, a period of preparation for legislation which will determine its permanent form.
In this recent reorganization we have recognized three distinct functions:
first, the legislative or policy making function;
second, the administrative function of code making and revision; and, third, the judicial function, which includes enforcement,
consumer complaints and the settlement of disputes between employers and employees and between one employer and another.
We are now prepared to move into this second phase, on the basis of our experience in the first phase
under the able and energetic leadership of General Johnson.
we shall watch carefully the working of this new machinery for the second phase of N.R.A.,
in order that the functions of N.R.A. which have proved their worth may be made a part of the permanent machinery of government.
Let me call your attention to the fact that the national Industrial Recovery Act
gave businessmen the opportunity they had sought for years to improve business conditions through what has been called self-government in industry.
If the codes which have been written have been too complicated,
if they have gone too far in such matters as price fixing and limitation of production,
let it be remembered that so far as possible, consistent with the immediate public interest of this past year
and the vital necessity of improving labor conditions,
the representatives of trade and industry were permitted to write their ideas into the codes.
It is now time to review these actions as a whole to determine through deliberative means in the light of experience,
from the standpoint of the good of the industries themselves, as well as the general public interest,
whether the methods and policies adopted in the emergency
have been best calculated to promote industrial recovery and a permanent improvement of business and labor conditions.
There may be a serious question as to the wisdom of many of those devices to control production,
or to prevent destructive price cutting which many business organizations have insisted were necessary,
or whether their effect may have been to prevent that volume of production which would make possible lower prices and increased employment.
Another question arises as to whether in fixing minimum wages on the basis of an hourly or weekly wage
we have reached into the heart of the problem which is to provide such annual earnings for the lowest paid worker as will meet his minimum needs.
We also question the wisdom of extending code requirements suited to the great industrial centers and to large employers,
to the great number of small employers in the smaller communities.
During the last twelve months our industrial recovery has been to some extent retarded by strikes,
including a few of major importance.
I would not minimize the inevitable losses to employers and employees and to the general public through such conflicts.
But I would point out that the extent and severity of labor disputes during this period
has been far less than in any previous, comparable period.
When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests;
when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance,
it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right
to organize themselves for collective bargaining as embodied in Section 7 (a) of the national Industrial Recovery Act.
Machinery set up by the federal government has provided some new methods of adjustment.
Both employers and employees must share the blame of not using them as fully as they should.