In all such cases as these, and in a thousand more, the children, though awfully ignorant, are wilfully kept from school. They make money; they bring beef to the pot, tobacco to the pipe, cards to the fingers, and rum to the lips. Send them to church! Not so. “Sunday is our best day.” Send them to school! “We cannot afford that,” said a father. “How much will you pay us?” said a drunken mother. Send them to work! “Bedad! we knows better than that!” said a son of ----, we shall not say where. Nay, so profitable is begging that children are hired for the purpose. Hence, the difficulty which many a missionary experiences when he tries to get the right sort of children for the Ragged or Mission School. “A spirit-dealer in High street informs me that he draws £10 more on the pay days of the Glasgow poor than on any other days of the week. Another spirit-dealer says that the paupers regularly come to him and spend in drink what they receive. I asked him how he knew they were paupers? He replied, that they made no secret of it; he heard them talk about what they got, and how long they had to wait for it. They go in hundreds from the long closes in High street. An inspector informs me, that he observed a lame pauper, not two hours after he had received 8_s._, carried to the police office drunk on a barrow. He also found a pauper, aged eighty years, so drunk that she was not able to rise from her chair, and singing, ‘The world is bound to maintain me, sing yo, sing yo, sing yo,’ to some other jovial paupers who joined in her revels. He frequently finds paupers drunk on their beds after they have received their aliment; and having spent all in a single night, they live in a starving condition, _or beg, or steal_, until next pay-day comes round.... Widows, left with children under ten years of age, receive a great deal of out-door relief from this Board, to bring them up. A large proportion of these are dissipated characters, who drink the money which is intended for the benefit of their children, _whom they send out to beg, and thus grow up uneducated_, and become, if they survive the bad treatment to which they are subjected, pests to society, like their mothers.” Mr. Bishop, of the Liverpool Domestic Mission Society, in his annual report for 1852, speaks as follows:--