Volume 1
The Minority report of the Poor law commission.
- Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress 1905-09
- Date:
- 1909
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: The Minority report of the Poor law commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.
29/978 page 15
![on an institution which is, we believe, unknown to any other country. We need not quote again the opinion of the Royal Commissioners of 1834. In 1862 the principal author of their Report, Nassau Senior himself, recorded his protest against the perpetuation of the General Mixed Workhouse which they had done their best to rid the country from, and with which, nevertheless, Boards of Guardians, at the instance of the Poor Law Board, were covering both England and Ireland. “We recommended,” he said, “ that in every Union there should be a separate school; we said that the children who went to the Work- house were hardened if they were already vicious, and became contaminated if they were innocent. We recom- mended that in every Union there should be a building for the children and one for the able-bodied males, and another building for the able-bodied females; and another for the sick. We supposed the use of four buildings in every Union—four distinct institutions—except this, that they need not be Workhouses. You might easily hire a house [apiece] for four distinct institutions separate from one another. We never contemplated having the children under the same roof with the adults.” The feelings of surprise and dismay with which Nassau Senior watched the perpetuation of the General Mixed Workhouse were widely shared. “During the last ten years,” said a learned lawyer in 1852, “I have visited many prisons and lunatic asylums not only in England, but in France and Germany. A single English Workhouse contains more that justly calls for condemnation in the principle on which it is established, than is found in the very worst prisons or public lunatic asylums that I have seen. The Workhouse as now organised is a reproach and disgrace peculiar to England, nothing corresponding to it is found throughout the whole Continent of Europe. In France, the medical patients of our Workhouses would be found in ‘ hopitaux ’; the infirm aged poor would be in ‘hospices’; and the blind, the idiot, the lunatic, the bastard child and the vagrant would similarly be placed in an appropriate but separate establishment. With us a common malebolge is provided for them all; and in some](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24872726_0001_0029.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
