The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-01-19
PAUPERS.
From the NJ Y. Tribune.

from thc W. , e IilONHe.
The pauper in the body polite threatens to
be the one unsolvable problem Just now in
England and here. Our friends in Philadel-
phia and the guardians of the poor in London
especially appear to find the burden more
than they can bear. What business q man
who can't work and is not ashamed to beg
has to live at all, is a question apparently too
hard for these gentlemen. Even the bugs of
creation find their uses in museums, or
cased in amber, may give rise to poetic in
quiry as to chow the devil they came thera?"
But the pauper, they complain, dead or alive,
Is so much waste matter. Society spews him
out. Science will have mono of him. This
class and order are, alas but too we'll known.
There is no doubt as to how ne got here
He has not only come already, but he keeps
coming every year, gaunt, unweaned army,
in swaddling bands; and he claims it to be a
religious duty SO to keep on coming IN per-
petuUn1 Under these circumstances it is no
wonder that the patience of these guardians
of almshouses should wax threadbare, and
that they should strive to lessen the weight
by every laudahle means open to them.
In one of the English work-houses the
means embraced the inclosng of contuma
cious paupers in air-tight cells over night;
kicking to death; smoking out women who
were trying to escape by the in6rmary chin
ney with chlorine gas, the infrmary being
filed at the time with sick and dying patients.
AT st. George Sin the-East the guardians
divide the trade of the almshouse among
themselves, one supplying the paupers with
boots and shoes, another with liquor third
being tinker in general for the boilers. The
chaplain complaining that the bacchanalian
brother kept the paupers not only drunk, but
busy stealing to pay for their grog, he was
incontinently taken by the nape of the neck
and kicked out of the board. One nurse was
exported for an unpleasant habit she had
of shaking the dying paupers to hurry their
exit-the witness apologizing for her, in the
last case of the kind, by alleging that Mrs.
Sullivan did take an unreasonable long time
dying"
Our neighbors in Philadelphia have massed
all their dead weight of pauperism in Block
ley Almshouse, and the meetings of its
guardians are anticipated in that city of bro
therly love by reporters and people as the
best of raree-shows. A certain Mr. Parker, it
appears, steadily complains that the bread
served to the paupers is not to be distiu-
guished in taste or appearance from wet sand;
that the wards are fuller and fouler than the
Black Hole of Calcutta, and that their in
mates are dying like sheep, aud certainly
with no unreasonable waste of time. The
reverend old Quakers who constitute the rest
of the board as statedly reply to him not by
investigation of the difficulties, but by threats
of 'kicking him out" and oaths against
''jabbering bean poles, calculated to create
astonishment in the minds of all who are ac-
customed to revere Penn and the boa5ted
charities of his grave followers. What truth
there may be in MIR. Parkers allegations we
know not, but the very language of the guar
dians increases the doubt we have often ex-
pressed of the expediency of placing large
bodies of the helpless wards Of the State,
whether paupers, idiots, or insane, in the
care of few men who naturally soon come
to regard misery as a mechanical weight to be
overcome by general hard system and rule.
In England the boarding-out system is rapidly
coming into general use with regard to their
paupers, and, we doubt not, plan approx.
mating to it will before long be found the
most in accordance not only with benevo
lence but economy in this country.