With regard to the adults, well or sick, it was apparently part of the policy to ignore, and even to prohibit, recreation. Playing at cards and all other games of chance were absolutely forbidden to all classes of inmates at all hours and seasons. Smoking was peremptorily prohibited in any room in the workhouse, except by the special direction of the medical officer, and the boards of guardians were told that they might prohibit it in the yards if they chose. No visitors were allowed (otherwise than to the sick) except at the will, and actually in the presence, of the master or matron. It even required a special exception, not made until 1842, to enable parents to see their children who were in the same workhouse "at some one time in each day."[253] [253] General Order of 5th February 1842, art. 10, proviso 6, in Eighth Annual Report, 1842, p. 81. (vii.) _Employment_ We may infer from the scheme of daily life just described, which the Central Authority imposed on all classes of workhouse inmates, that it laid great stress, as a matter of policy, on the ten hours of work which it exacted from all who were neither physically disabled nor below the age of seven. The bulk of the inmates, especially the aged and infirm, the women and children, and, we may add, the defectives, were evidently to be employed on the ordinary household service and attendance of the workhouse and its inmates. It was expressly ordered that all the paupers so employed were to be under "the strictest superintendence," not to be given "offices of trust"; and confined to "offices of mere labour which can be performed under trustworthy superintendence."[254] But this household service did not suffice to find occupation for the able-bodied, especially the men. The Report of 1834, it will be remembered, had been emphatic in recommending that all pauper employment should be in accordance with the spirit of the Act of Elizabeth, useful to "the employer as well as to the employed," and that everything which gave to labour a repulsive aspect was to be avoided as mischievous. The Central Authority did not adopt this policy, even at the beginning of its work, and by 1847 had adopted a contrary one. From the outset the policy laid down was that the pauper was not to work on his own account, was not to be remunerated for his labour, and was not to obtain any personal advantage from working harder or more skilfully than the prescribed minimum. But the policy of the Central Authority, at first, was that the work should be useful, and for the benefit of the union. Thus, in 1836 it was ordered that the clothing of all the paupers should, "as far as possible, be made by the paupers in the workhouse."[255] This project promptly disappears from the documents, presumably on the discovery that tailoring and bootmaking were skilled occupations, beyond the capacity of ordinary workhouse inmates.