“The guardians decided that the stone-yard is derogatory, and abolished the labour test. They had no sufficient labour for men, so they allow them to remain in practical idleness. There are over two hundred and fifty young men in the workhouse to-day, amply fed, well clothed, and maintained week by week, and month by month, in idleness. They are lazy, good-for-nothing scamps, many of them, as their records clearly show. Naturally they take advantage of the glorious prospect of plenty to eat and nothing to do. There is another army, only less numerous, of young women in the prime of years and of health, equally idle. “A few days since, I went over the ‘workhouse’ at midday, and watched the great rooms packed with legal idlers, all busy eating a dinner such as few labourers outside have. ‘Do you mean seriously to tell me that these men have no proper employment?’ I asked my guide, as we stood in a great room thronged with not far short of three hundred men, mostly varying in age from eighteen to forty, all sound limbed, all physically fit. ‘We use them as far as we can in cleaning up,’ my informant replied. “The next extraordinary point at Poplar is the feeding of the inmates. No one denies that the pauper should have a sufficiency of wholesome food, and most of us would willingly support the generous feeding of the old and the infirm. But the Poplar guardians have gone to the extreme here. They work on the policy avowed by some of them that ‘the poor man ought to have the best sometimes.’ They are going to give him the best when he is in the workhouse, and they do! The butter costs, bought by the ton, 1_s._ 2-3/4_d._ a pound. I am informed that the contractors are required to supply only ‘Denny’s best Irish’ bacon. The meat is of the very finest quality to be bought, and the bread is of a grade and perfection rarely to be had in shops or restaurants. I examined the dinners being served in the course of an ordinary visit, and I declare in sober truth that the quality was at least as high as that given in an average West End club. The mealy potatoes and the fine boiled meats certainly equal those served in the modest club where I lunch.” This, my working-men listeners, is what you and I are paying for. The obvious result upon any district where the rates must be raised to an impossible height in order to support the idle and worthless, is that such a district ceases to be an area of employment. The great manufacturing firms decline to continue their operations in a place where local taxation is so heavy that it prevents them from paying a dividend to their shareholders.