Thence we went to the school-rooms, which were underneath the chapel.  The pupils, like the children whom we had just seen, were, in large proportion, foundlings.  Almost without exception, they looked sickly, with marks of eruptive trouble in their doltish faces, and a general tendency to diseases of the eye.  Moreover, the poor little wretches appeared to be uneasy within their skins, and screwed themselves about on the benches in a disagreeably suggestive way, as if they had inherited the evil habits of their parents as an innermost garment of the same texture and material as the shirt of Nessus, and must wear it with unspeakable discomfort as long as they lived.  I saw only a single child that looked healthy; and on my pointing him out, the governor informed me that this little boy, the sole exception to the miserable aspect of his school-fellows, was not a foundling, nor properly a workhouse child, being born of respectable parentage, and his father one of the officers of the institution.  As for the remainder,—­the hundred pale abortions to be counted against one rosy-cheeked boy,—­what shall we say or do?  Depressed by the sight of so much misery, and uninventive of remedies for the evils that force themselves on my perception, I can do little more than recur to the idea already hinted at in the early part of this article, regarding the speedy necessity of a new deluge.  So far as these children are concerned, at any rate, it would be a blessing to the human race, which they will contribute to enervate and corrupt,—­a greater blessing to themselves, who inherit no patrimony but disease and vice, and in whose souls if there be a spark of God’s life, this seems the only possible mode of keeping it aglow,—­if every one of them could be drowned to-night, by their best friends, instead of being put tenderly to bed.  This heroic method of treating human maladies, moral and material, is certainly beyond the scope of man’s discretionary rights, and probably will not be adopted by Divine Providence until the opportunity of milder reformation shall have been offered us, again and again, through a series of future ages.

It may be fair to acknowledge that the humane and excellent governor, as well as other persons better acquainted with the subject than myself, took a less gloomy view of it, though still so dark a one as to involve scanty consolation.  They remarked that individuals of the male sex, picked up in the streets and nurtured in the work-house, sometimes succeed tolerably well in life, because they are taught trades before being turned into the world, and, by dint of immaculate behavior and good luck, are not unlikely to get employment and earn a livelihood.  The case is different with the girls.  They can only go to service, and are invariably rejected by families of respectability on account of their origin, and for the better reason of their unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the meanest situations in a well-ordered English household.  Their resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their slimy way on stepping-stones.