The irregularity of its construction is explained by the fact that the place was established twenty-seven years ago, not by a public body, but by a private individual, Mr. Aubin, the present superintendant. The commencement of such a place was an epoch in the history of pauperism in this country. Before the time of the benevolent Jonas Hanway, no regard was paid to the destitute children of the poor, and those young children, whose ill-fate it was to be born of pauper parents, in town, were condemned to a life that began in the gutters of back lanes, and usually ended in the gaol, by fever, or more suddenly, on the gallows. Hanway secured the passing of a law empowering the parishes to collect the juvenile paupers and send them into the country for nurture and maintenance. It was a step in advance to get the children away from the dens in which they had previously been confined, but the nurture was of a very unsatisfactory kind. When an old woman applied for parish relief, she had two or three children given to her to keep, and out of their allowance she was to help to keep herself. She usually set them to collect firewood for her; or to watch sheep, or to scare crows; and, in their search for fuel, they were often taught to rob hedges, or fences, or trespass on plantations. At seven years’ old they were sent back to finish their education in the workhouses, and frequently remained there for six or seven years without even learning their letters. Indeed, to teach them at all was regarded as a kind of small treason. “Teach paupers to read! What next?” was a common exclamation. Reading was, by a great many people, considered to be a mere premium for laziness—whilst writing was thought to be a temptation to forgery, and its then certain result—the gallows. To collect the pauper children, and “farm them out” to persons who would teach as well as feed them, was the next step in advance. The fruit of this plan was the growth of various places where large numbers of the pauper rising generation were gathered together in houses, the proprietors of which often realised large profits upon the moneys allowed for maintaining this class of the population.