The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-16
'. A LONDON woRKHousE.

Hard Work and Slim Diet for the In-
 mates. #
 "London workhouses are under the Jurisdiction of the local government
 board, and that body has seen fitfin it's wisdom to draw the line which sepa-
 rates young men from old men at ones sixtieth birthday." writes an inmate of one of these houses to Chambers 5otir- nal. T shall treat chiefly of the young men, quorum pars full. @,tr
 "There Is no stone breaking done in the Princes Road Workhouse. as in most other places of the kind, the only task works being grinding nine pecks os corn on mill per day and picking four pounds os oakum, Not all of the men adjudged to the latter task can finish 1t, and, so far as my observation went, very few, indeed. were able to empty their mills before bedtime I had one day on mill myself: and, with my utmost efforts at the cruelty mono.onous work, I succeeded in turn ing out only Ave >peeks. It is an exer- else that can be confidently recommends ed as a cure for obesity:. only that is not common complaint among the in mates of a workhouse. Like every oth- lser contrivance os the sort. devised to measure up to mans full strength, there Is a knack in it which, if the op- orator is lucky enough to hit upon it., | will enable him to come off successful ] ly: but even then it Is work which. as ] the men pithily express it, wants doin'.' | The secret of oaixum picking Is, be- lieve,m much more easily compassed, 1t | being not so much a matter of sheer strength and endurance as of patience and ingenuity. The taskmaster-the | officer who has the power Of making I your life miserable or tolerable in the workhouse--can see at a glance wheth- CT a man is trying to do his level best on the corn mill; and if he finds him l really unable to finish the allotted task, l he puts him next day on something l else more within his strength-that is 1 if the mill, on it's part, fails in It's chief function, which is to drive it's able bod 1 jed ,manipulator out at the gate. Al the ather work is of a general kind-- saving and chopping wood, scrubbine floors, cleaning stairs, passages and windows, and painting, all of which are carried on under the supervision of the lynx eyed labor master
 "The dietary scale for the young mer
 is as follows: On three days of the
 week there is meat dinner of five ounces of boiled beef with thin, white j gravy, potatoes and four ounces, ol
 bread. On Monday dinner consists of g pint of pea soup and six ounces O
 bread; on Wednesday and Saturday
 six ounces of bread, with a piece oi
 cheese and an onion, and pint of ar
 unheard of species of soup, made O
 oatmeal and a few vegetables. In boti
 kinds of soup there are always placed {
 few small cubes of left over meat of th'
 toughness of gutta percha, and abso lutely tasteless, which I make bold tt
 hold responsible for the prevalence o
 nightmare in the young mems dormito
 ry On the nights following the soup din
 ners. On Friday perhaps the best din
 ner of all is served, round of sue
 pudding, which, iil my own case a
 least, eased the qualms of an ever be setting hunger better than ever did tn meat (beef, never mutton), which wa
 almost always tough and cartilaginous