win my lord again?" of her answer to his greeting:

"Those that do teach young babes, Do it with gentle means and easy tasks; He might have chid me so; for, in good faith,

I am a child to chiding :"

we get what none other of her contemporaries can give; much they can give which she can not ; but this is hers alone, this seeming simple tenderness and grace, these "tears in the voice," as the French say-in a word, this charm, for there is indeed no other word that can so fitly denote this rare and delicate quality. It has been objected to her that in the scene with Iago she is something too familiar, forgets too far the distinction between the captain's wife and the poor ancient. But surely this is not so. She has been in a manner entrusted to Iago's keeping from the first; his wife is her companion and confidant; she has the utmost faith in his honesty and kindliness; surely it is not unnatural that in the sudden shock and pressure of this stunning blow she should turn for comfort and protection to the stoutest shelter near her.

For Cassio there is Mr. Terriss, a very promising young actor, of pleasing

presence and appearance, and who does not seem inclined, as some young actors are apt to seem, to rely solely on these aids to distinction. His Cassio is a very spirited and agreeable performance, soldierly and yet wellbred, as of one equally at home in camp and court. Alone, of all the Cassios our later stage has seen, he remains a gentleman in his cups; such an one as, one can truly see, would never hold with Iago that the offence of a bodily wound is greater than the offence of a lost reputation. The solemn, yet never tedious, gravity of Mr. Meade's Brabantio, his stately anger, and no less stately tenderness; the clear and polished elocution of Mr. Beaumont as the Duke; the foolishness of Mr. Pinero's Roderigo, never degenerating into buffooneryhe is quite as earnest in his way as Iago himself-all these are well worthy of note; all tending, each in its own degree, to give that proper finish and proportion to the whole which is so greatly to be desired in all such work; and which is, perhaps, a more distinctive and a more valuable feature of this presentation than even the individual merits of Mr. Irving and Mr. Booth, or the happy meeting of two such distinguished actors on one stage.

THE quality which most perplexes the foreign student of British character is usually the reverential attachment which the Englishman entertains for the institutions of his country. In itself the attachment is not astonishing, but when it is found how exceedingly slight is the ordinary Briton's acquaintance with the practical working of these institutions, his devoted affection for them becomes a legitimate subject for critical contemplation. Only a limited minority have any knowledge of ordinary parlia mentary procedure, and by the vast majority the late difficulties of carrying on business in the Lower House must have been very imperfectly comprehended.

But there are subjects worse known than the regular course of a bill in the House of Commons. Not to insist upon the general ignorance of the ordinary process of the law, a much simpler and more important branch of investigation presents itself in the Poor Law administration. How many of us connect any definite idea with the little paragraph which appears every week in our morning newspapers

"Last week the total number of paupers in the metropolis was 102,380, of whom 53,813 were in workhouses, and 48,567 received out-door relief."

How many of us have turned over

1 Ninth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1879-1880.

Recollections of Workhouse Visiting and Management during Twenty-five Years. By L. Twining. (C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1880.) First Report of the Association for Promoting Trained Nursing in Workhouse Infirmaries. 44, Berner's Street, Oxford Street, 1880.

the pages of that most instructive volume the Report of the Local Government Board! We should be sorry to inquire how many Honourable Members, who receive it by right, have looked beyond the cover. The pro

found indifference with which most of us view the administration of the Poor Law may be gathered from the number of ratepayers who pay any attention to the election of guardians. We are constantly listening to every variety of vilification of the guardians of this Union or that, but we never care to remember that the remedy lies in our own hands, and that if the guardians do not do their duty it is our business to set them right at the next election. The schedule of candidates proceeds from our letter-box to our waste-paper basket; we do not take the trouble to find out what manner of men these are who propose to govern our poor; we drop the notice into the fire, and then begin a memorial on the maladministration of the poorrates!

We do not even concern ourselves enough to pay a visit to the building in which two-thirds of our rates are applied to their uses. Probably not one reader in fifty of this article has ever been inside a workhouse, except perhaps at Christmastide to sing carols and serve tea and cake to neat rows of beds occupied by tidy old women. To inspect the work house he helps to maintain does not appear to the ratepayer a part of his duty as a citizen. He is content with a perpetual growl over the rates.

There is one division of the Poor Law administration which one would

imagine might claim some share of public interest. We have instituted a day of succour for the great voluntary hospitals of London, and no one can grudge the money that is thus given for the healing of the sick and suffering. But why have we no warm corner of the heart for the workhouse infirmaries that fulfil the same high mission of healing towards a far vaster and more helpless multitude of sick poor? Do people realize that there are ten thousand poor stretched on the beds of workhouse infirmaries in the London district alone at this moment a sick town within our great city? Let us not dismiss these ten thousand suffering men and women and children from a place in our sympathy because they are "paupers," nor flatter ourselves that only hopeless chronic disease, the decrepitude of age, and small ailments of no moment, are found in these infirmaries. The patients are not universally paupers in perpetuity, or taken from pauper classes-though it is hard to see why their poverty should deprive them of our pity-but frequently consist of respectable working men temporarily incapacitated and impoverished and compelled to accept the assistance afforded by the Poor Law infirmaries. Even people of the middle class and professional men have been reduced by stress of circumstances to a bed in one of these institutions. And although the most serious and difficult cases are taken to the hospitals, many acute cases requiring great skill and care are received into workhouse infirmaries.

1 A trained nurse's report, now before me, of some cases under her charge during a few months at a metropolitan workhouse infirmary, fully bears out this statement. One case was a frightful ulcer in the leg, with erysipelas up to the thigh, requiring the most skilful and assiduous treatment to avoid the necessity of amputation. Consumption, acute bronchitis, scalp wounds with erysipelas, fractured limbs, and other ailments demanding good nursing, came under the care of this nurse, and it may safely be said that many of them would have been aggravated, and might have ended

Mr. T. Holmes, senior surgeon to St. George's Hospital, speaking at the first annual meeting of the Association for Trained Nursing in Workhouse Infirmaries, said very justly: "I can conceive no objects more worthy, and in the present state of the infirmaries more absolutely needed, than those of your Association. The hospitals of London do not, and cannot, provide for the medical attendance of the sick of this great city. It is utterly impossible. They are lost in an ocean of poverty with which they struggle in vain. The hospitals

are not really intended to provide for the sickness of the metropolis. On the contrary, they are to give medical and surgical relief in certain exceptional cases; and for the bulk of the sickness of the metropolis, for the poorest class, there are these infirmaries. There are rising up in every part of London enormous buildings--larger a great deal than the hospitals, admirably constructed and officered-buildings in all respects fitted for the cure of disease. The patients contained in these institutions are by no means entirely paupers. Any member of a Board of Guardians will bear me out in that. There are working men and women, paupers for the moment, perhaps, who immediately on recovery lose that pauperism entirely, and go back to their work. They are in the same condition as patients in hospitals, and in point of fact the same persons. Neither the classes, nor even the class, of disease, differ so much as you may imagine. There is a great proportion of moderately acute cases which require a great deal of nursing-not merely chronic cases slowly dying in the infirmary wards-and also a large class of persons who are really sick, and require very careful and good nursing." 2

fatally, if she had not received a proper surgical training.

2 Annual Report, Association for Trained Nursing, p. 11.

Mr. T. M. Dolan, the medical officer of the Halifax Union Infirmaries, confirms this statement. "Our patients," he says, "are not composed in toto of the improvident, the dissolute, the extravagant, or the vicious; the majority are the victims of circumstances, deserving poor, whom illness alone has led on the downward step to pauperism. Thus we find in our wards the pensionless discharged soldier with aortic aneurism; the would-be thrifty mechanic with phthisis; the baker, bronchitic from the result of his employment; the out-door labourer with rheumatism or pneumonia, the sequence of exposure to cold and wet; and the representatives of all trades and classes, suffering from various diseases which have first drained their private resources, and then prevented them from earning a living. When all other sources of charity are dried up, the workhouse infirmaries alone remain for them as their haven of refuge."1

If then workhouse infirmaries stand in so close a relation with the voluntary hospitals which have long received a large measure of public sympathy and support, is it not worth while to examine as far as we can the present provision for the ten thousand sick poor who depend for their cure upon these institutions? We shall find three classes of infirmaries :

1. Infirmaries belonging to separate unions.

2. Sick Asylums, i.e. infirmaries to which several Unions conjointly send

their sick.

3. Sick wards reserved within the workhouse itself.

Of the separate infirmaries there are seventeen open in the London district. The number of beds provided in each varies from about 200 to 1,000. The following is a list of these institutions, with the number of beds, beginning

1 Some Remarks on Workhouse Hospitals, by T. M. Dolan, F.R.C.S. Ed., (Leeds, 1879).

St. Marylebone has built an infirmary for 750 patients at a cost of 120,000l., which has just been opened.

The sick asylums are three in number:-Highgate, with its offshoot in Cleveland Street, containing 523 and 281 beds respectively, for the sick of St. Giles and St. George, Bloomsbury, St. Pancras, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the Strand, and part of Westminster; and Poplar sick asylum at Bromley, for the sick of the Poplar and Stepney Unions, containing 586 beds.

Six unions or parishes still keep their sick in the mixed workhouses Bethnal Green, Hampstead, Lewisham, Paddington, Fulham, and Mile End

Old Town; but the last three are making arrangements for separate infirmaries.2

2 Ninth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1880, p. xxxii. This Report is not so detailed on the subject of infirmaries as that of 1879; and in both there are serious omissions. There are no statistics of the

aggregate sick in the metropolitan infirmaries, nor of the average in each institution. Salaries of officers, proportion of nurses to patients, returns of deaths, nature of cases and diseases, and many other important subjects, are left unnoticed.

Such is the space allotted to the 10,000 sick. Any one who has read the reports of Dr. Smith and Mr. Farnall to the Poor Law Board before the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867, or Miss Twining's admirable record of her long experience in workhouse visiting, will appreciate the immense improvement represented by the statistics given above. Much however remains to be done in the matter of building. The unions which still keep their sick in workhouse wards must have separate infirmaries under a properly trained superintendent. Any one who has visited the sick ward within a workhouse knows the importance of effectually severing the infirmary from the workhouse in management as well as locality. But besides this obvious change the existing separate infirmaries are not roomy enough. It is not infrequent to see two patients in one bed for want of adequate accommodation, and the overflow of the infirmary is often consigned to a common ward in the workhouse, under the control, not of the infirmary matron, but of the matron of the workhouse. Additions to several infirmaries are thus urgently needed. The sick poor who for want of an infirmary, want of room, or other reasons, are kept in sick wards in the common workhouse, are principally found in the following unions: -St. Pancras, St. Giles, Westminster (Poland Street), Paddington, Bethnal Green, Hampstead, Lambeth, Fulham, Lewisham, and (for the present) St. Marylebone. At Kensington the accommodation in the infirmary has been found inadequate, and wards in the workhouse have been used for the overflow.

The list of infirmaries given above excludes those set apart for infectious diseases and the insane and imbecile. But by themselves they represent a very considerable outlay. An institution of the class now demanded costs about 100,000l. to erect and fit; and the annual expenditure on one such

infirmary has been known to reach the sum of 25,000l. The whole annual expenditure on the twenty infirmaries and sick asylums may be reckoned at something over 300,000l., giving an average of 15,000l. each.

The new infirmaries required, and the additions to those already built, are therefore expensive desiderata, though not the less essential. But sick people have other requisites besides breathing space. They require skilled medical attendance and careful nursing. In these important departments the smallness of the present expenditure contrasts curiously with the magnificence of the building funds. It is difficult to see why the surgeon of a workhouse should be paid only half the salary drawn by the surgeon of a prison. In spite of the inadequacy of their salaries, the class of medical officers in whom the supreme control of the infirmaries, under the Board of Guardians, is vested, is one deserving the highest respect. In their absence, however, the nurses have entire authority. It is the system of appointing and managing nurses that most needs investigation and revision.

So much has been said and written on the evils of pauper-nursing, that it is not necessary to descant here upon the miserable condition of those sick persons who depend for their care and cure upon women taken from the workhouse attached to the infirmary. Pauper-nursing was legally abolished in the Metropolis by the Act of 1867, and is generally supposed to be extinct. The Local Government Board Report for 1878-9 complacently remarks that "in all the sick asylums and separate infirmaries the system of employing pauper inmates in the practical work of the sick wards, leaving to the paid nurses merely the work of general supervision, has been now entirely superseded by the employment of paid nurses. The facts, however, are not So. Pauper-nursing is not 1 Local Government Board, Eighth Annual Report, 1879, p. xxxviii.

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