By the end of this decade, however, the evils attendant upon unregulated immigration were beginning to make themselves felt among the native population. Chief among these was the danger from an increase of pauperism. The frightful shipping conditions, which had marked previous periods, continued with practically no amelioration. The records of the time are full of heartrending tales of crowded, filthy, unventilated ships, and penniless, starved, diseased immigrants, often landed in a state of absolute destitution. The sickening details of these accounts make the most lurid description of present-day steerage conditions seem absolutely colorless. Under such circumstances it was inevitable that a very large number of these miserable victims should come immediately, or in a very short time, upon the public for support. The censuses of the poorhouses showed an altogether disproportionate number of foreign-born paupers among the inmates. In Philadelphia, for instance, it appears that at the beginning of the thirties the foreign-born paupers made up nearly one third of the total number, and by 1834 this proportion had increased to practically one half.[60] Such a state of affairs naturally aroused the consternation of the natives, and the feeling was made more intense by the belief that many of these paupers were taken directly from the almshouses of foreign countries, and shipped to this country at public expense. This matter has been the subject of so much debate that it will be worth while to examine the truth of these charges in this connection. Mrs. Trollope, writing in 1832, said, “I frequently heard vehement complaints, and constantly met the same in the newspapers, of a practice stated to be very generally adopted in Britain of sending out cargoes of parish paupers to the United States. A Baltimore paper heads some such remarks with the words ‘INFAMOUS CONDUCT’ and then tells us of a cargo of aged paupers just arrived from England, adding ‘John Bull has squeezed the orange and now insolently casts the skin in our faces.’” Mrs. Trollope states that careful investigation on her part failed to substantiate this charge.[61] The article referred to is one which appeared in _Niles’ Register_ for July 3, 1830. It gives an account of the ship _Anacreon_ from Liverpool, which arrived at Norfolk with 168 passengers, three fourths of whom were transported English paupers, cast on our shores at about four pounds ten shillings per head. Many of them were very aged. The editor’s vehement protest against such action contrasts sharply with the complacency with which the same journal had viewed the advent of a crowd of transported Irish paupers seven years earlier.[62]