The Sun.
London, England, 1861-04-13 00:00:00

W ORKHOU6E CHILDREN.

The report of the Education Commission draws
a very melancholy picture of the condition of the
children in workhouses. Workhouse influences
have a very marked tendency to produce helpless-
ness and prevent the growth of independence of
character. An Assistant-Commissioner remarks
that it is difficult to convey a definite idea of a child
brought up from its infancy in the workhouse.
Doomed never to have known the meaning of
" borne," cut off from the exercise,of the ordinary
affections, in many instances diseased in body and
feeble in mind, these poor children exhibit little of
the vigour and joyousness of youth. Listless and
subservient in manner, they seem to be broken
down, by misfortune before they have entered upon
life. Such a child is content to spend its days in a
workhouse. The Commissioner says :—" Some of
the tradesmen who had taken union boys as appren-
tices told me that it took several years before they
acquired the desire for independence—the wish to
earn their own bread." This is especially the case
where there is little or no industrial training; boys
who have never been accustomed to handle a spade,
and girls who have never had to scrub the floors,
rebel when they are put to such work. On the other
hand, association with old paupers tends the more
to corrupt them. "It seems impossible to exagge-
rate the spirit of lying, low cunning, laziness,
insubordination, and profligacy which charac-
terises the pauper class in workhouses, and this ,
spirit naturally infects the mass of poor
children who are bred up in so pestilen-
tial an atmosphere." The case is even
more hopeless with the girls than with
the boys. The adult single women in the
house have often children whom they are allowed
to see, and the girls cannot learn any domestic duty
without coming occasionally in contact with this
class, who are employed in household work. Girls
just going out into the liberty of the world are
brought in contact with them, as they sit by a
good fire nursing their babies and gossiping. The
girls mix also with the children of tramps and of
paupers coming in for a short timet and who bring
in evil enough to undo any good the teacher may
do ; and all the children who have parents in the
house are liable to be taken out with them when
they choose to leave for a few days, perhaps to at-
tend a fair. A good schoolmistress said, " She felt
she was training up girls for a life of vice and
infamy." "One girl," says another mistress, ".and
not a bad specimen of a pauper girl, said to me the
other day, My cousin Sally left the house some
time ago, and now she has come back with a baby,
and I hope I shall soon go out and come back too
with a baby.' " Now, there is a known remedy for
this sad state of things—the establishment of dis-
trict or separate schools at a distance from the
workhouse, withdrawing the children entirely from
the adults, and from bad pareidaJ influence, for
such we know it is. Such schools, where established,
have had the most remarkable and striking success.
The object in view is to emancipate the children
from pauperism, teach them not to become paupers
themselves, and open a better life to them ; and
these schools offer the best prospect of a permanent
diminution of pauperism and crime. But the guar-
dians are unwilling to establish them; in 1859 there
were only 7,000 children in them, and 37,000 in
the workhouses. There seems no resource but by
the Legislature interposing to close this fountain
of evil.