PAUPERISM

Lyttelton Times, Volume VI, Issue 405, 20 September 1856, Page 3

PAUPERISM

INCREASING WITH THE INCREASE OF CRIME. (From the "Weekly Despatch.) The " signs of the times" are far more significant than agreeable. Side by side with a fearful amount of criminal statistics, advance, also, dreadful items, showing a large increase in the number of the miserable poor. Our prisons are built upon scales almost collossal; but crime laughs at the huge machinery which onty adds to the burden of the nation without being either a punishment or a prevention. So, also, are our unions, work-houses, and the like. .They have been increased, enlarged, and multiplied, aud yet they do not, shelter the outcast nor protect the homeless. Still do the arches .of. the " Adelphi" yield the friendless one a miserable bhelter, and the streets are still filled by hordes of shivering paupers,\vhile around the grim Pancras doors, which will not open let them knock ever so earnestly, the starving scores and hundreds cluster, forming scenes which are an outrage to the eye of humanity, and exhibiting pictures of such incredible destitution as are the shame and reproach of any Christian people. A return recently made by the House of Commons shows that in 624 unions and parishes of England and Wales on the Ist of January last, the increase in the number of paupers receiving in and out-door relief was twenty thousand in excess of the number receiv-

ing relief on the same date of the preceding pear. Twenty thousand paupers added in one year to the immense army of famine and wretchedness already on our hands! and of these nearly eight thousand were adult and able-bodied ! The totals were, on the first of January, 1855, 850,453, while on the Ist of January, 1856, they amounted to 876,655 ! Whence comes this appalling contribution, and through what cause do nearly a mit,x,ion of paupers (not to speak of the struggling poor, the professional mendicant, and those who prey on the public) appear in the midst of the wealth, the industrial enterprise, and the vast floating capital "'of England ! Men have quitted the spade and plough, the forge and factory, and joined the ranks of the armies abroad. Men, by .hundreds and by thousands, have emigrated this past year, and yet the dreadful pressux*e from without does not appear to have relaxed in any way. Pauperism has increased its numbers as if with a malignant force of aggregation, and, in defiance of cheaper meat, a cheaper loaf, and other necessaries equally reduced. What is most remarkable too, is that the more industrial and manufacturing counties show a larger increase in this dismal element than those possessing smaller capital and fewer manufactures. Lancashire added seven thousand to its paupers, and yet Lancashire is one of the greatest workshops in the world. Middlesex the centre of wealth and opulence of business, trade, and enterprise, could, also, add its quota of 6767 ; Surrey, Warwick, and Staffordshire, are unhappily competitors also and with success. If we look around us with shuddering c) Tes on the vices and crimes of the age, it is only to acknowledge with a forlorn conviction of the truth, that there are demoralizing agencies abroad which resist every means a..d agency of repression y. that cruelty, lust, drunkenness, and crimes which show how utterly abandoned a man may become, and with what an infernal skill he can construct the deadliest schemes, are the broad, open, and glaring, characteristicsof the day; and that added to these is a mass of pauperism so vast and unwieldy that the shoulders of the community bend under the hideous load. That pauperism will go on increasing and multiplying "seeems to be more than probable, and that it will become at last a dominant power to break forth and fester like ulcerous sores contaminating and poisoning all that is exterior to it, appears to be a mere^matter of course. It will gather into murmurs, tumults, and social perils, The outlaws thus actuated by the direst despotic powers—hunger and hatred blended — will kill, burn, and destroy, and an internecine warfare, in which poli'ies will for once have no existence, seems not very far dUtan*.