The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1840-09-15 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

POVERTY AND CRIME-THEIR PUNISHMENT  AND REWARD  (From the Stockport Advertiser.)  It appears from recent statistical returns, that the daily cost to the country of each prisoner in Newgate is Is. 91d., or 12s. Sid. weekly, and that the average daily cost of individual prisoners in the London, Middlesex, and Surrey gaols, is Is. lid. or 7s. 81d. weekly. Now let us look "at home," where " Charity" ought "to begin." For the poor in the Cirencester Union, in the counties of Gloucester and Wilts, the Somerset House triumvirate, gave it under their hands and seals, on the 10th of October, 1836, that the dietary for able-bodied men should be 61bs. 2oz. of bread per week ; soz. of bacon, (the only meat allowed !) 7oz. of cheese, 61bs. of potatoes, 2 pints of soup, and 7 pints of gruel. Now we should like to examine the quality of these provisions, and we should like to ascertain the justness of their weight It might not be a very difficult effort perhaps to form a tolerably accurate idea of the quality of the bacon, cheese, &c. likely to be sent to a workhouse, by a screweddown contractor, or of the richness of the soup. By the bye, what is the soup made of ? According to this dietary system, the weekly cost of provisions for an able-bodied, hardworking pauper, [they take care that the paupers shall have a " full allowance" of labour, however deficient they may be in food,] will be less than two shillings--or perhaps what a Newgate prisoner's diet costs daily ; and we have seen some dietary tables, in which the weekly cost has been less than fifteenpence ! Suppose the weight of the articles to be honest, and their quality to be fair, we take it for granted that the quantity is not adequate to the due sustenance of nature. Nor are five ounces of bacon per week a sufficient proportion of animal food for either man or woman. The contrast thus furnished Letween the diet of prisoners and that of paupers, must be anything but pleisant to the feelings of the latter; many of whom, in their better days, have contributed largely to the poor-rates themselves, and kept excellent tables of their own. Nothing would delight us more than to possess the power of subjecting the triumvirate to just such a diet (the" gruel" included) as that of the unions for just three months, and we most earnestly exhort every elector, whether tory, whig, or radical, to demand from every candidate who may solicit his suffrages at the next election, a solemn pledge that he will exert himself to the utmost of his power to obtain some alteration of the present heartless, cruel, un-English mode of administering the poor-laws.  We freely assent to the justness of the position, that neither gaols nor workhouses ought to be formed upon the model of palaces, or of luxurious banquetting halls ; they ought not to be rendered objects of attraction to the idle, the unprincipled, or the infamous. On the other hand we contend that neither thieves nor paupers should be tasked beyond their physical powers—should be injured in their frames or constitutions—should be subjected to disease or starvation. In this humane, benevolent, and enlightened age—this age of black emancipation and religious freedom--the thieves have wonderfully little to complain of. So averse are the " lib -rals " in their spirit of super-philanthropy, to the inflicton of corporeal punishment, that even a murderer can hardly obtain an introduction to the final executioner of the law. Lucky is it for the thieves that they are not under the control of the amiable and tender-hearted poor-law commissioners.