RUSSELL PREDICTIONS

ON

THE WORKING CLASS, THE NATIONAL DEBT,
AND THE NEW POOR LAW,

DISSECTED.

BY JOHN BOWEN,

ONE OF THE CLASS.

RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED TO THE RIGHT HON. HENRY
LABOUCHERE, M. P. FOR TAUNTON, &c., &c.

Annual Rate of mortality in the town of Taunton
Annual Rate of mortality in the Taunton Union Workhouse,
on an average of three years, before the outbreak of cholera

"The only room fit for the purposes of a ward, in the whole establishment,
is the Board Room, in which the Guardians meet a few hours a week."

"The Union-house is very subject to epidemics, to measles, scarlet fever,
typhus, diarrhoea constant, especially in the children, dysentery, scurvy. So
far as I know (says the Medical Officer) no child, dry nursed, has been raised
beyond four years of age; and the only child that has attained that age has
died of cholera."

"Defective nourishment is one powerful predisposing cause to attacks of
cholera. I have examined the diet-table in use in the Workhouse previous to
the outbreak of the disease, and I am decidedly of opinion that it was not
suitable, and, consequently, that the state of constitution which such a dietary
tends to produce, would be such as to fall a prey very readily to epidemic
Diarrhoea appeared in the house a considerable time before

disease..
cholera broke out, and yet no change in the diet was made."

"It is a very striking fact, that while out of 276 unfortunate inmates of the
Workhouse, no fewer than sixty have been cut off within a week from cholera,
there has not been a solitary case either of cholera or diarrhoea in the gaol."
DR. SUTHERLAND's Report to the General Board of Health.

"The Prison-like appearance of the new Workhouses, and the notion that they
are intended to torment the poor, inspires a salutary dread of them.

66 (Signed)

E. CARLETON TUFNELL,

"Assistant Poor Law Commissioner."

LONDON:

HATCHARD & SON, 187, PICCADILLY.

24767

1850.

S. WEST, PRINTER, BRIDGWATER.

ODLE

TO THE RIGHT HON. HENRY LABOUCHERE, M. P.

FOR TAUNTON, &c., &c.

SIR,

BELIEVING there were legitimate reasons for especially bespeaking your attention to the most important part of the following pages, I was in the very act of inscribing them to you, when I heard of a bereavement which imperatively demanded a respectful abstinence from any immediate appeal. But, alas, while exercising this deferential abstinence, this reverence for sorrow, I was myself, again and again, brought under dispensations equally fatal and appalling, and then laid prostrate;-dispensations to which I would no further refer, than to request you to remember, that grief and disease are mighty levellers, as well as stern prompters, and may be reasonably appealed to in the possible event of a deficiency in conventional observances.

The power that has smote us, in its wisdom, and in its mercy too, however we may repine, has strongly impressed on me the duty of again urging the cause of the impotent and the necessitous, the widow and the orphan, in such a form, and with such appliances, as may, under an honest exercise of judgment, promise to be most effective. Under that impression, I have arrived at the conclusion, that our National contrivances for destroying the helpless, cannot be better exemplified than by a reference to Official Reports on the late frightful occurrences in the Taunton Union Workhouse; and that such a practical exemplification of the System cannot be more appropriately addressed, than to a Statesman of admitted private and public worth, who is a Member of Parliament

for Taunton, and the Minister in that department of the State which affords the most ample means of testing the accuracy of statements, charging an appalling extent of homicide on Official contrivances, and Official management, carried out under an elaborate system of Official inspection and control.

The destructive operation of this National system, on the helpless, is attested by the documentary evidence of one public department, that of "The General Board of Health," while the Guardians, in their defence, charge on another department of the public service, the contrivances by which this destruction has been effected, under a system, which, during a period of fifteen years, they (the Guardians) have complacently administered, with no other responsibility, as it would appear, than attaches to other executioners in the performance of their repulsive duty.

In referring to the alleged fact, that in ill-drained, over-crowded neighbourhoods, "out of every two persons who die, one perishes from preventible causes," an able writer, in the "Edinburgh Review" for April last, justly observes, "though we do not take these persons out of their houses and murder them, we do the same thing in effect;—we neglect them in their poisonous homes, and leave them there to a lingering but certain death." But that, which it is said we do not do in such cases, is actually done every day, under the New Poor Law, with perfect impunity. We do thrust legitimate claimants for relief, helpless infancy and destitute old age, into poisonous homes, and leave them there, with defective nourishment, to a lingering but certain death.

I believe it is unnecessary to press on you the consideration, that the guilt of these sordid homicides is fearfully aggravated by the fact, that the victims so thrust out unto death, have an older and a better title to needful sustentation, and essential relief, from Property, than its present holders, the thrusters out, are likely to have in one case out of a hundred. Even admitting the Parchment Right of the poor, of two centuries and a half standing, to have been constitutionally quashed by the enactment of 1834, it has been declared by the highest legal authorities, that "the right to live stands on a deeper foundation than any right to property can possibly do."