inistered under an old special act (Gilbert's Act).
The inspector had instituted a brewery in the house for his own benefit.
In Stockport, July 31st, 1844, a man, seventy-two years old, was brought
before the Justice of the Peace for refusing to break stones, and
insisting that, by reason of his age and a stiff knee, he was unfit for
his work. In vain did he offer to undertake any work adapted to his
physical strength; he was sentenced to two weeks upon the treadmill. In
the workhouse at Basford, an inspecting official found that the sheets
had not been changed in thirteen weeks, shirts in four weeks, stockings
in two to ten months, so that of forty-five boys but three had stockings,
and all their shirts were in tatters. The beds swarmed with vermin, and
the tableware was washed in the slop-pails. In the west of London
workhouse, a porter who had infected four girls with syphilis was not
discharged, and another who had concealed a deaf and dumb girl four days
and nights in his bed was also retained.

As in life, so in death. The poor are dumped into the earth like
infected cattle. The pauper burial-ground of St. Brides, London, is a
bare morass, in use as a cemetery since the time of Charles II., and
filled with heaps of bones; every Wednesday the paupers are thrown into a
ditch fourteen feet deep; a curate rattles through the Litany at the top
of his speed; the ditch is loosely covered in, to be re-opened the next
Wednesday, and filled with corpses as long as one more can be forced in.
The putrefaction thus engendered contaminates the whole neighbourhood. In
Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along
the Irk: this, too, is a rough, desolate place. About two years ago a
railroad was carried through it. If it had been a respectable cemetery,
how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the
desecration! But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the
outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It
was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies
to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it
happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water
oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and
filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The
disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in
further detail