In winter's cold, when poor and old for some assistance call, And come to beg a trifle at the portals of his hall, He refers them to the workhouse, that stands open wide for all; For this is how the parish great relieve the parish small, Like this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time. Here is the portrait of the pauper:-- Houseless, famish'd, desp'rate man, A ragged wretch am I! And how, and when, and where I can, I feed, and lodge, and lie. And I must to the workhouse go, _If_ better may not be; Ay, _if_, indeed! The workhouse! No! The gaol--the gaol for me. * * * * * There shall I get the larger crust, The warmer house-room there; And choose a prison since I must, I'll choose it for its fare. The dog will snatch the biggest bone, So much the wiser he: Call me a dog--the name I'll own-- The gaol--the gaol for me. The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers, and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved _Punch_ to indignant irony: "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates were fed at a trough, six at a time. In 1857 the workhouse children at Bath were not allowed to see the pantomime _Jack and the Beanstalk_. Owing to the intervention of the Guardians, headed by a clergyman, the children were actually stopped at the door of the theatre. But in "Dust from a Bath-brick" _Punch_ dusted the jackets of the Guardians in his best style. Again and again we find him protesting against the regulation of the new Poor Law which separated man and wife directly they entered the workhouse. For professional mendicants he had no sympathy. Witness the ironical lines on "The Jolly London Beggars":-- A fig for honest occupation, Beggary's an easier trade; Industry is mere starvation, Mendicancy's better paid. [Sidenote: _Bigamy or Divorce?_] In the long campaign for the reform of the Marriage Laws _Punch_ never ceased to reiterate his conviction that cheap divorce was a better remedy than the punishment of the brutal husband. Yet when Mr. Justice Maule delivered his historic judgment in 1845, _Punch_ hardly rendered justice to that masterpiece of fruitful irony:-- WAGGERY OF THE BENCH