The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-06 00:00:00

DEATH IN THE STREETS.

Three deaths in the streets or public places have
been recorded this week. Upwards of three hun-
dred occur annually. There is no lack of hospitals
and workhouses in this great city. Beds there are
in scores awaiting the limbs of these half-frozen
creatures ; empty beds by dozens in hospital wards,
and in workhouse wards, with warm fires, fat
nurses, funds for food, and clothing too. All this
is provided by the benevolent for the miserable
vagrants of London. But there is a certain stiff-
ness about the regulations under which these
bounties are dispensed which hinders their adapta-
tion to the cases of the very miserable and the very
destitute. Hospitals and workhouses need to be
touched with a more democratic and catholic toler-
ance of extreme poverty and misery. Follow an
unhappy wanderer in London, stricken with dis-
ease, without a sou in the world, and it is not diffi-
cult to see how and why he should die in the streets.
It is easy, also, to see how the rules which dismiss
him to that horrible fate may be amended in the
interests of humanity. You may watch such an
unhappy sufferer stumble up the hospital steps,
and, after some waiting, obtain an audience of the
dresser or house surgeon. He has no letter, and
cannot be relieved without such an official recom-
mendation of a governor ; or, by a liberal interpre-
tation, he is admitted to share
as ethhee
suffersbenefi frtsoofmthnoe
charity as "a casualty."
sudden accident or acute disease, these benefits are
confined to a bottle of medicine.into the
this in his
pocket he wanders forth again the street, and
tossed about from relieving officer to workhouse
porter, fails even here to fiord a harbour of rest ; for,
shame to say, only a few of our workhouses possess
casual wards for the poor. Unless the miserable
applicant can establish some legal claim by residence
or birth, he is apt to b e driven again into the streets.
And there he may die ; there, now and again, many
actually die.
i The stones cry out against so in-
human and inelastic a system. Let all the work-
houses be compelled to provide casual wads; let
the governors adopt, partially at least, the free
keep always system, and
ys a corner for the sick and
houseless. Let us resolve to have no more deaths
in the streets.--Lancet.

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_ „e triumphant majority by 4;li
and Dyeing Works Bill was read
the House of Commons is a hopeful sign of the
times, and very gratifying to all well-wishers to
the working classes. The object of this bill, which
has been introduced by Mr. Crook and Lord Ashley,
ko has a sort of hereditary claim to father such a
measure, is to place the employment of women,
young persons, and children in bleaching and dye-
ing works under the regulations of the Factory Acts.
The necessity for some legislation of this kind was
fully made out in the report, with its corroborative
evidence, sent in by Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, the
commissioner appointed in 1554 to inquire into the
subject, as well as in the more recent evidence given
before a select committee of the Houseiof Commons.
That committee, or rather the majority of its mem-
bers, strangely enough, reported against any Par-
liamentary interference, whilst they admitted that
the circumstances connected with the employment
of women and children in those works were deserv-
ing of consideration, and that the grievances alleged
were in part susceptible of remedy. They confined
their recommendations to advising the master
bleachers and dyers of the United Kingdom to con-
sider whether the rAuction in the hours of labour,
which had already taken place in the establishments
of some, might not be more generally adopted in
the varieusprocesses of the business. But the battle
of the Factory Acts has not been fought and won
in vain by the advocates of the true wealth of the
nation ; and the evidence to which we have referred
makes out a clear case for a similar interference to
protect weak women and young children in their
contracts for work and daily bread. One witness, a
physician, who, during 15 or 16 years, has been in
the habit of giving advice to the families of persons
employed in the bleaching works, declares that he
has known the young women to have been at work
for 17 or 18 hours daily for a week together ; and
the three volumes that contain the evidence given
before the committee are full of notices of similar
cases from medical men and clergymen, as well as
from operatives. The most interesting and striking
evidence is that given by an old discharged bleacher
—discharged on account of his age—to :whom one
of his masters, who was also examined by the
committee, gives the character of "a remarkably
good servant and a very steady man." We
learn from his evidence that the condition of
the bleachers in Lancashire has deteriorated
greatly during the last forty or fifty years. At the
beginning of that period the hours of labour were
shorter, being then usually from six in the morning
till six at night ; and the work was done in bleach-
ing-fields, not under cover as now. " I can tell
you one thing," he said, " when we bleached goods
on the ground, years ago, when young men were
springing up about Bolton, I believe I could have
picked out 500 men that would have done for the
Life Guards ; but if you want to cone down there
now, I do not think you could get one of them fit
for a marine." So that, although the bleachers
have stilt the reputation of being a healthy race of
men, their continued strength is in spite, and not
in consequence, of their present employment. " I
had two boys with me," the same witness said,
speaking of what had happened a few years ago,
" who commenced about nine years of age, and they
grew up, and when they were married neither of
t hem could tell a letter. They have become young
men ; and some time back, when the people came
down there to take an estimate of how many there
were of one religion and how manyof another, one
of them came to me and asked, What religion am
Ito call myself?' I said to him, Call yourself by
what you are ;' i,nd he said What am Itodo ?.
I said You may call yourself nothing, according
to where you go to.' He said' Well, 1 never went
to any place of worship since I went there with
Kit ?; and another says 1 never went since I went
with Nan' " i.e, since they were married. In another
part of his evidence he girt s a terrible account of
his wife's toil :—" It would sometimes happen on a
Monday morning, when a ship order came in, we
have commenced at two or three o'clock or some-
times at twelve o'clock ; and my wife has had her
stays laced at twelve o'clock on Sunday night, and
she has never had them unlaced again, and never
been in her bed all the week ; she has been lying
on a table, or any place wherever she could get to
for half an hour." Some points ii this witness's
evidence were found fault with by his employers at
a subsequent meeting of the committee ; but, on
comparing the evidence of the two parties together,
we fear we must acknowledge that there is every
probability, in spite of the corrections sug-
gested by the employers, that such enormities have
been far from uncommon. The rest of the evidence
shows that these cases are not to be looked on as
isolated instances; these are examples—though
perhaps salient examples—of a large class of in.
dustrial evils to which the nation is determined to
put an end.

IVomen and children cannot continue to be em-
ployed as they are in bleaching works with im-
punity. There is an imperious demand for some
improvement on the ground of health, or morality,
and of education. We have here a special evil call-
ing for a special remedy. The benevolent efforts of
individual masters are unavailing; they are de-
feated by the competition of less scrupulous em-
ployers. The experience of the factories illustrates
the case of the bleaching works. Previously to the
passing of the Factory Acts—with which all, mas-
ters and " hands" alike, are now satisfied—numer-
ous attempts were made on the part of individual
masters to diminish the excessive hours of women's
and children's labour. But those who made the
attempt only victimised themselves and tkeir work-
people, for ruin stared them in the face from the
competition of less benevolent employers. No cer-
tain success can be gained in these matters without
the strong hand of the law enforcing the universal
observance of the dictates of reason and humanity.
In the case before us, the experience of the Factory
Acts is useful also another way. Everyone remri-
bers how it was proved irrefragably by statistical
arithmetic that the passing of these acts would be
speedily followed by the destruction of the manu-
facturing prosperity of England. But experience
has scattered those false prophecies to the winds,
and has shown that manufacturing prosperity is
actually compatible with humanity. So in the
bleaching works—the long continued labour—the
"pushes," as they are called—which, it is argued,
are absolutely necessary to the existence of the
business—without which, it is said, the trade can-
not be carried on—will be fount to be altogether
unnecessary as soon as the law of the land has de-
clared that they shall no longer take place, under-
mining as they do the physical and moral well-
being of each successive generation.—Morning
Post,