“The workhouse of _Amsterdam_ is a vast building, capable of containing upwards of 1,500 inmates. The imposing character of its exterior, the elegance of its entrance-hall, and the decorations of the rooms appropriated to public business, were in marked contrast with the aspect of the several wards. The inmates chiefly consisted of the lowest and least moral part of the population of the great cities, who had sought refuge in the workhouse because they had forfeited their claim to regular employment, and the vigilance of the police did not permit them to subsist by mendicancy. The sexes were strictly separated at all times, but the children were in the same apartment with the adults of each sex. The males and females each occupied separate day-rooms, in which the dirt and disorder were very offensive. In these rooms the inmates ate their meals, without any attention to regularity or propriety. Here also they worked in the looms, or at other occupations. The first group of men to whom we advanced, were seated at a table playing at cards; we found another party playing at draughts, and a third at hazard. Others were idly sauntering up and down the room. The women’s day-room presented a scene of similar disorder. Both men and boys were clothed in a coarse kind of sacking. The chief article of their diet is rye-bread, almost black, and not over-abundant, with an indefinite quantity of boiled buttermilk; but they are permitted to work at certain rates of wages, and to spend a portion of their earnings at a canteen in the house, where coffee tobacco gin &c. may be obtained. On application for admission, the paupers undergo a strict examination as to their ability to maintain themselves; and while inmates they are not permitted to go abroad, ‘unless they give positive hopes that on re-entering society, they will render themselves worthy of their liberty, by diligently endeavouring to gain their own livelihood by honest means.’ “The establishment at La Cambré, near _Brussels_, was superior in its internal arrangements to the workhouse at Amsterdam, particularly in the separate classification of the aged, the children, and the adults, and also in the good arrangement and cleanliness of the sleeping-rooms. The sexes are strictly separated, as is invariably the case in all the other Dutch and Belgian institutions. By the penal code, a mendicant once condemned to a depôt de mendicité for begging, may be kept there during the remainder of his life; but in practice, he is allowed to leave the establishment whenever the commission of superintendence are satisfied that he is disposed to labour for his subsistence, without resorting to mendicancy.