[186] p. 313 of Report of 1834 (reprint of 1905).
[191] pp. 306, 307, 313 of Report of 1834.
It is startling to find that the Central Authority, between 1834 and 1847, pursued an entirely different policy. The published documents for this period do not afford any explanation of this difference. They do not show, for instance, whether it meant the deliberate adoption of a new policy, or whether it resulted merely from a discovery that the recommendations of the Report were impracticable in the rural unions. The documents simply assume the necessity for the establishment in each union, not of a group of specialised workhouses for the different classes, but of one institution, to be called "The Union Workhouse," for the paupers as a whole.
In no Special or General Order, in no Circular or published Minute, can we find any recommendation that a board of guardians should carry out the emphatic recommendations of the 1834 Report in favour of classification by institutions, and the adaptation of the existing buildings into specialised workhouses, "assigning one class of paupers to each of the houses comprehended within each incorporation."[195] Nor was the unity introduced and insisted on by the Central Authority one of structure only. That the policy was to have, under the one roof, for all the various kinds of paupers, only one institution and one _régime_, is revealed in every part of the workhouse code. In the elaborate series of Special Orders and General Orders which culminated in the General Consolidated Order of 1847 (still in force), we find a minutely particular body of rules, referring always to "the" workhouse of the Union, applied with practical identity to all unions, providing for the reception under a single roof and subject to a single officer of every kind of pauper, applying to all the inmates, and (with quite insignificant variations, presently to be noted, for the aged, the sick and the infants), treating all the kinds of paupers alike.[196]
[196] See the first of such "Orders and Regulations," in First Annual Report, 1835, pp. 96-110; the Consolidated Order for the Administration of Relief in Town Unions, in Second Annual Report, 1836, pp. 81-89; the General Order, Workhouse Rules, 5th February 1842, in Eighth Annual Report, 1842, pp. 79-104; and the General Consolidated Order, 24th July 1847.