It was suggested in one workhouse board-room that a bath ought unquestionably to be supplied, when a guardian got up and stated "he were agin it." He never had one in his house in his life, and he didn't see why a pauper should enjoy what he didn't want. On another occasion the absence of a proper light at the entrance door was dwelt upon, and a gas-lamp was proposed. This was seconded by another worthy, who, approving of the gas-lamp, said, "and I'd have it lighted with ile."
Now the first of these gentlemen may be a regular saint. He never bathed, and he regarded his neighbour as himself. To be sure, if he was a saint he was also a pig; but swinishness has not seldom been combined with sanctity. The other guardian, who didn't know better than that a gas-lamp could be lighted with "ile," was himself so destitute of all enlightenment that he may be excused as a simply irresponsible clown.
The euphemisms of Poor Law inspectors, who used colourless words such as "inadequate" and "insufficient" when "barbarous," "brutal" and "horrible" would have been nearer the mark, had been exposed by the _British Medical Journal_ in 1868. If destitution was not a crime, why, asked _Punch_, was the pauper treated worse than the criminal? These abuses, in the exposure of which he joined hands with serious medical journals, explain and justify the intense and even passionate desire of self-respecting poor people to avoid the Union.
Though no lover of Jews, _Punch_ in 1869 contrasts Jewish guardians favourably with their so-called Christian brother officials. Dickens's picture of old Betty in _Our Mutual Friend_ is hardly overdrawn, and a year after Dickens's death _Punch_ was still contrasting the comforts of prison life with the usual conditions of life amongst the submerged poor.
The State had not yet awakened to a sense of its responsibilities to the "legal poor." Much was being done by practical philanthropy, and it may be fairly said that no appeal to _Punch_ for assistance or encouragement was left unanswered. Wholehearted in his support of Ragged Schools, he comes forward in 1858 to plead the cause of their logical corollary--Ragged Playgrounds:--
Deprive a boy of healthy, fair and open games, and you drive him to resort to unwholesome, foul and sneaking ones. Deny him any playground but a hole-and-corner court, and you'll find that he'll betake himself to hole-and-corner games in it. In default of wholesome cricket, he'll become a dab at chuck-farthing; and will get from pitch and toss to still worse kinds of time-slaughter.