“The three-year-old children were in a bare and desolate room, sitting about on the floor and on wooden benches, and in dismal workhouse dress. The older ones had all gone out to school ... except a cripple, and a dreary little girl who sat in a cold room with bare legs and her feet in a pail of water as a ‘cure’ for broken chilblains.... The children’s wards left on our minds a marked impression of confusion and defective administration.... In appearance the children were dirty, untidy, ill-kept, and almost neglected. Their clothes might be described with little exaggeration as ragged.... The boys’ day-room is absolutely dreary and bare, and they share a yard and lavatories with the young men.... An old man sleeps with the boys. It is a serious drawback (says the inspector) that every Saturday and Sunday, to say nothing of summer and winter holidays, have for the most part to be spent in the workhouse, where they either live amid rigid discipline and get no freedom, or else if left to themselves are likely to come under the evil influence of adult inmates. The Local Government Board inspectors point out that, even if the children go to the elementary schools for teaching, the practice of rearing them in the workhouse exposes them to the contamination of communication with the adult inmates whose influence is often hideously depraving.” “Terrible!” my reader will say; “but surely the reform requires legislation, and the Poor Law is too large a subject to tinker on, it must be dealt with after time has been given for due thought.” To this I would reply that even if it did require legislation there has been time enough to obtain it during all these years that the evils have existed; but to quote the Majority Report: “So far as the ‘in-and-out’ children are concerned it is probable that no further power would be needed, since the Guardians already have power under the Poor Law Act, 1899, to adopt children until the age of eighteen.” This Act, I may say in passing, was initiated, drafted, and finally secured, not by the responsible authorities but by the efforts of the State Children’s Association. Why, then, has not the Local Government Board removed the children from the workhouses? Why, indeed? (_c_) _The Ins and Outs._--In 1896 the Departmental Committee quoted the evidence of Mr. Lockwood, the Local Government Board Inspector, who referred to “cases of children who are constantly in and out of the workhouse, dragged about the streets by their parents, and who practically get no education at all,” and he puts in a table of “particulars of eleven families representing the more prominent ‘ins and outs’” of one Metropolitan West-end workhouse of whom “one family of three children had been admitted and discharged sixty-two times in thirteen months.” Other cases were given, for instance:-- “D----, a general labourer, who has three boys and a girl, who come in and out on an average once a week.