WORK-House, a place where indigent, vagrant, and idle people, are set to work, and supplied with food and clothing.

Work-houses are of two kinds, or at least are employed for two different purposes. Some are used as prisons for vagrants or sturdy beggars, who are there confined and compelled to labour for the benefit of the society which maintains them; whilst others, sometimes called poor-house, are charitable asylums for such indigent persons as through age or infirmity are unable to support themselves by their own labour. The former kind of work-house, when under proper management, may be made to serve the best of purposes; of the latter we are acquainted with none which entirely commands our approbation.

To make confinement in a work-house operate to the correction of vagrants and disorderly persons (and if it produce not this effect it can hardly be considered as a beneficial institution), the prisoners should be shut up in separate cells, and compelled to labour for their own subsistence. A crew of thieves and vagabonds associating with each other is a hell upon earth, in which every individual is hardened in his crimes by the countenance and conversation of his companions; and wretches who, when at liberty, choose to beg or steal rather than to earn a comfortable livelihood by honest industry, will submit to any punishment which a humane overseer can inflict rather than work for the benefit of others. No punishment indeed will compel a vagrant to labour. He may assume the appearance of it, but he will make no progress; and the pretext of sickness or weakness is ever at hand for an excuse. Hence it is that thieves and trumpets strumpets are too often dismissed from work-houses and bridewells ten times more the children of the devil than when they entered them.

To remedy these evils, we can think of no better method than to confine each prisoner in a cell by himself, and to furnish him daily with such an allowance of bread and water as may preserve him from immediate death; for the only compulsion to make such men work seriously is the fear of want, and the only way to reform them is to leave them to their own meditations on the consequences of their past conduct. There are surely very few persons, if any, whose aversion from labour would not be conquered by the pinchings of hunger and the certain prospect of perishing by famine; and it is to be hoped that there are not many so totally divested of every latent principle of virtue as not to be brought by such solitude to a due sense of their former wickedness. Should one or two, however, be occasionally found to very obdurate as to suffer themselves to perish rather than work, their deaths would prove a salutary beacon to others, and their blood would be on their own heads; for we have the express command of St Paul himself, that "if any will not work, neither should he eat."

No doubt it would be proper that the meditations of vagabonds confined in a work-house should be directed by the private admonitions of a pious and intelligent clergyman; but it is not every clergyman who is qualified to discharge such a duty. If he be actuated by a zeal not according to knowledge, or if he have not with equal care studied human nature and the word of God, his admonitions will be more likely to provoke the profane ridicule of his auditor, and harden him in his wickedness, than to excite in his breast such sorrow for his sins as shall "bring forth fruits meet for repentance." To render the instruction of thieves and vagrants of any use, it must be accurately adapted to the case of each individual; and however excellent it may be in itself, it will not be listened to unless offered at seasons of uncommon seriousness, which the instructor should therefore carefully observe.

That such wholesome severity as this would often reform the inhabitants of work-houses, appears extremely probable from the effects of a similar treatment of common prostitutes mentioned by Lord Kames in his Sketches of the History of Man: "A number of those wretches were in Edinburgh confined in a house of correction, on a daily allowance of threepence, of which part was embezzled by the servants of the house. Pinching hunger did not reform their manners; for being absolutely idle, they encouraged each other in vice, waiting impatiently for the hour of deliverance. Mr Stirling the superintendent, with the consent of the magistrates, removed them to a clean house; and, instead of money, appointed for each a pound of oatmeal daily, with salt, water, and fire for cooking. Relieved now from distress, they longed for comfort. What would they not give for milk or ale? Work (says he) will procure you plenty. To some who offered to spin, he gave flax and wheels, engaging to pay them half the price of their yarn, retaining the other half for the materials furnished. The spinners earned about ninepence weekly; a comfortable addition to what they had before. The rest undertook to spin, one after another; and before the end of the first quarter they were all of them intent upon work. It was a branch of his plan to let free such as merited that favour; and some of them appeared to be so thoroughly reformed as to be in no danger of a relapse."

Work-houses erected as charitable asylums appear to us, in every view that we can take of them, as institutions which can serve no good purpose. Economy is the great motive which inclines people to this mode of providing for the poor. There is comparatively but a very small number of mankind in any country so aged and infirm as not to be able to contribute, in some degree, to their subsistence by their own labour; and in such houses it is thought that proper work may be provided for them, so that the public shall have nothing to give in charity but what the poor are absolutely unable to procure for themselves. It is imagined likewise, that numbers collected at a common table, can be maintained at less expense than in separate houses; and foot soldiers are given for an example, who could not live on their pay if they did not meet together. But the cases are not parallel. "Soldiers having the management of their pay, can club for a bit of meat; but as the inhabitants of a poor-house are maintained by the public, the same quantity of provisions must be allotted to each. The consequence is what might be expected: the bulk of them reserve part of their victuals for purchasing ale or spirits. It is vain to expect work from them: poor wretches void of shame will never work seriously, where the profit accrues to the public, not to themselves. Hunger is the only effectual means for compelling such persons to work."

The poor, therefore, should be supported in their own houses; and to support them properly, the first thing to be done is, to eliminate what each can earn by his own labour; for as far only as that falls short of maintenance, is there room for charity. In repairing those evils which society did not or could not prevent, it ought to be careful not to counteract the wise purposes of nature, nor to do more than to give the poor a fair chance to work for themselves. The present distress must be relieved, the sick and the aged provided for; but the children must be instructed; and labour, not alms, offered to those who have some ability to work, however small that ability may be. They will be as industrious as possible, because they work for themselves; and a weekly sum of charity under their own management will turn to better account than in a poor-house under the direction of mercenaries. Not a penny of it will be laid out on fermented liquors, unless perhaps as a medicine in sickness. Nor does such low fair call for pity to those who can afford no better. Ale makes no part of the maintenance of those who, in many parts of Scotland, live by the sweat of their brows; and yet the person who should banish ale from a charity work-house, would be exclaimed against as hard-hearted, and even void of humanity.

That such a mode of supporting the poor in their own houses is practicable, will hardly admit of a dispute; for it has been actually put in practice in the city of Hamburgh ever since the year 1788. At that period such revenues as had till then been expended in alms by the several church-wardens, and those of which the administration had been connected with the work-house, were united under one administration with such sums as were collected from private benevolence. The city was divided into sixty districts, containing each an equal equal number of poor; and over these 180 overseers were appointed. Actual relief was the first object; but at the very moment that this provision was secured, measures were taken to prevent any man from receiving a shilling which he could have been able to earn for himself. By these methods, which our limits will not permit us to state, the overseers were able to make a calculation tolerably exact of what each pauper wanted for bare subsistence, in addition to the fruits of his own labour. A flax-yarn-spinning manufacture was established, in which the yarn is paid for, not by its weight, but by its measure. The clean flax is sold to the poor at a low price, and a certain measure of yarn again bought from them at 30 per cent. above the usual price; so that the overseers are sure that all the yarn spun by the poor will be brought into their office. Every pauper brings with him a book in which the quantity delivered is carefully noted down, which furnishes the overseers with a continual average of the state of industry among their poor.

As soon as this institution was established, the overseers went through their difficulties, and, in all such mansions as could be supposed to harbour want, if the inhabitants stood in need of support? The question to all such poor as wished for relief, and were able to spin, was, Whether they did earn by their work 1s. 6d. a-week? for experience had taught the inhabitants of Hamburgh, that many poor live upon that sum; and they knew enough of their poor to suppose, that 1s. 6d. avowed earning was equal to something more. If the answer was affirmative, the pauper stood not in need of weekly assistance. If it was negative, work was given him, which, by being paid 30 per cent. above its value, afforded him 1s. 6d. a-week easily, if he was even an indifferent hand. The far more frequent cases were partial inability by age, or weakness, or want of skill. For poor of the latter description a school was opened, and in three months time the business was easily learnt. During that time, the pauper got first 2s. a-week, and every week afterwards 2d. less, till in the twelfth week he got nothing at all but his earnings, and was dismissed, with a wheel and a pound of flax gratis.

The quantity of work which disabled poor were capable of doing in a week was easily and accurately ascertained by a week's trial in the spinning-school. The result was produced weekly before appointed members of the committee, and the sum which the poor could earn was noted down in their small books. The overseer was directed to pay them weekly what their earnings fell short of 1s. 6d. in every such week, when it appeared from their books that they had earned to the known extent of their abilities. From that moment applications became less frequent; and the committee had an infallible standard for distinguishing real want: for whenever the pauper, if in health (if not, he was peculiarly provided for), had not earned what he could, then he had either been lazy, or had found more lucrative work; in either case, he was not entitled to a relief for that week, whatever he might be for the following.

This mode of providing for the poor, which attracted the notice and obtained the eulogium of the minister and the British house of commons, has for six years been in Hamburgh attended with the happiest consequences. In the streets of that city a beggar is rarely to be seen, whilst those who stand in need of the charitable contributions of the rich, are much more comfortably, as well as at much less expense, maintained at home, with their children about them, than they could be in work-houses, under the management of mercenary overseers. For a fuller account of this judicious institution, we must refer the readers to Voght's Account of the Management of the Poor in Hamburgh, since the year 1788, in a Letter to some Friends of the Poor in Great Britain.