Some enter a few months before their confinement, driven to that inhospitable shelter from the sense of the value of their remaining character. And here a word is required as to the neglect of any proper method of classification. There should be in all our workhouses accommodation which would allow of the separation of characters among classes; and power and encouragement should be given to the master and matron to carry this plan into effectual working. The more respectable of the young women might be placed under the supervision of one of the staff, so that the time which necessarily elapses before they can be again sent out should be to them a time of instruction in what is good and desirable, instead of, as it now too often is, a time when they are corrupted by the evil influence of others worse than themselves. But these 253--what becomes of them? On their recovery they cannot remain in the infirmary, and must be sent to the able-bodied house, there to live on prison fare and to associate with the criminal and wilfully idle. Rather than do this many a young woman prefers to go out, taking her three-weeks-old babe with her, resolved to ‘get on’ as best she can. That ‘best’ is often the ‘worst.’ With her character gone, with two mouths to feed instead of one, and with the loss of self-respect rapidly following the loss of the respect of others, the unfortunate mother too often falls into hopeless vice; or, perhaps, the giant temptation presents itself of sacrificing the little wailing life which stands between her and respectability. Unhelped, unencouraged as they are, who can wonder that such mothers, so sorely tried, sometimes fall, and that the crime of infanticide is horribly rife? But, frequent as such results are, the end is not always thus tragic; the ruined girl often returns to her father’s house and to the same conditions of life as before she fell. But this course, though not so apparently bad, is yet often very harmful. Her presence familiarises the younger members with vice, an unadvisable familiarity; for vice, while it gains much attractive power, gains also more deterrent force by its mystery in the minds of the young. Sometimes the unwedded mother, on leaving the workhouse, honestly tries to get work at sack-making, factory-work, anything which will enable her to keep her little one near her; but it is a hard, an almost impossible task. The care of the child impedes the work, and thus it has to be put out to daily nurse. The ignorance, if not the apathy, of its badly paid nurse and the unsuitability of its food too often combine to extinguish the little flame which was burning to guide its mother back to virtue by the paths of love and self-control. These, briefly, are some of the present evils which beset the lives of the young women who become mothers in our workhouses.