dmission into
every house. But once within it her scope of action is far larger than
the parson's. To the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter"
she adds the more secular and effective power of the bread-ticket. "The
way to the heart of the poor," as she pithily puts it, "lies through
their stomachs." Her religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and
fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and severe upon dirty
floors. She flings open the window and lectures her flock on the
advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and
gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion
for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and
improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for
the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole
life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows the wages of
the husband and the occasional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there
is for dinner and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. She has her
theory as to the hour when children ought to be in bed, and fetches in
Tommy, much weeping, from the last mud-pie of sunset. Only "the master"
himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband and the District
Visitor there exists a sort of armed neutrality. Her visits are
generally paid when he is at work. If she arrives when he happens to be
at home, he calls for "missus," and retires sheepishly to the 'Blue
Boar.' The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a corner gets little for
her pains. He "supposes" that "missus" knows where and when the children
go to school, and that "missus" may some day or other be induced to go
to church. But the theory of the British labourer is that with his home
or his family, their religion or their education, he has nothing
personally to do. And so he has nothing to do with the District Visitor.
His only demand is that she should let him alone, and the wise District
Visitor soon learns, as parson and curate have long learnt, to let him
alone.

Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, and as we have seen
it is of far wider scope even here than the work of the clergy. But,
fussy and dictatorial as she is, the District Visitor is as a rule more
popular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson is only doing
a duty he is bound to do while the District Visitor is a volunteer. The
parson, as the poor roughly say, is