s of the poor and the
public?--From respect to any such right, ought so great a libel on our
political economy to be suffered to exist, as a receptacle for the
poor in the middle of an uncultivated and unappropriated waste? To
dwell further on so mortifying a proof of the fallibility of human
wisdom may, however, pique the pride of those who enjoy the power to
organize a better system:--I therefore forbear!

These and other considerations prompted me to visit the interior. I
found it clean and airy, but the best rooms were not appropriated to
the poor. The master and matron were plain honest people, who, I have
no doubt, do all the justice that is possible with a wretched pittance
of 5_s._ 6_d._ per head per week. Should 4_s._ 6_d._ remain to provide
each with twenty-one meals, this is but two-pence half-penny per meal!
Think of this, ye pampered minions of wealth, who gorge turtle at a
guinea a pound, who _beastialize_ yourselves with wine at a shilling a
glass, and who wantonly devour a guinea's worth of fruit after
finishing a sumptuous dinner!--The guardians have judiciously annexed
to the house an acre or two of ground for a garden, which is
cultivated by the paupers, and supplies them with sufficient
vegetables. This, though a faint approach to my plan, is yet
sufficient to prove what the whole common would effect, if properly
applied to the wants and natural claims of the poor. It is too often
pretended that these wastes are incapable of cultivation--but the
fertile appearance of enclosed patches constantly falsifies such
selfish and malignant assertions.

I visited the community of these paupers, consisting in this small
parish of only thirty men, women, and children, in one large room.
Among them were some disgusting-looking idiots, a class of objects who
seem to be the constant nuisance of every poor-house.[4] How painful
it must be to honest poverty to be brought into contact with such
wretched creatures, who are often vicious, and, in their tricks and
habits, always offensive and dirty. Surely, for the sake of these
degraded specimens of our kind, as well as out of respect to the
parish-poor, who have no choice but to live with them, every county
ought to be provided with a special Asylum for idiots; whose purpose
should be to smoothen their passage through life, and to render it as
little noisome to others, and to one another, as possible.

[4] Since these observations were first published, a new law