Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With AppendicesChadwick, Edwin
History
Report to Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State For the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry Into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; With Appendices
Chadwick, Edwin
Housing -- Great Britain; Public health -- Great Britain
were those which had been the scenes of the murders by Burke and Hare.
Yet amidst these were the residences of working men engaged in regular
industry. The indiscriminate mixture of workpeople and their children in
the immediate vicinity, and often in the same rooms with persons whose
character was denoted by the question and answer more than once
exchanged, “When were you last washed?” “When I was last in prison,” was
only one mark of the entire degradation to which they had been brought.
The working-classes living in these districts were equally marked by the
abandonment, of every civil or social regulation. Asking some children
in one of the rooms of the wynds in which they swarmed in Glasgow what
were their names, they hesitated to answer, when one of the inmates
said, they called them ——, mentioning some nicknames. “The fact is,”
observed Captain Miller, the superintendent of the police, “they really
have no names. Within this range of buildings I have no doubt I should
be able to find a thousand children who have no names whatever, or only
nicknames, like dogs.” There were found amidst the occupants, labourers
earning wages undoubtedly sufficient to have paid for comfortable
tenements, men and women who were intelligent, and so far as could be
ascertained, had received the ordinary education which should have given
better tastes and led to better habits. My own observations have been
confirmed by the statement of Mr. Sheriff Alison, of Glasgow, that in
the great manufacturing towns of Scotland, “in the contest with whiskey,
in their crowded population, education has been entirely overthrown.”
The ministers, it will be seen, make similar reports from the rural
districts. On the observation of other districts, and the comparison of
the habits of the same workmen in town and country, it will be seen that
I consider that the use of the whiskey and the prostration of the
education and moral habits for which the Scottish labourers have been
distinguished is, to a considerable extent, attributable to the
surrounding physical circumstances, including the effects of the bad
ventilation. The labourers presented to our notice in the condition
described, in the crowded districts, were almost all Scotch. It is
common to ascribe the extreme of misery and vice wholly to the Irish
portion of the population of the towns in Scotland. A short inspection
on the spot would correct this error. Mr. Baird, in his report on the
sanitary condition of the poor of Glasgow, observes that “the bad name
of the poor Irish had been too long attached to them.” Dr. Cowan, of
Glasgow, stated that “From ample opportunities of observation, they
appeared to him to exhibit much less of that squalid misery and
addiction to the use of ardent spirits than the Scotch of the same
grade.” Instances were indeed stated to us, where the Irish were
preferred for employment from their superior steadiness and docility;
and Mr. Stuart, the Factory Inspector for Scotland, states, that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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