1773 THE WORKHOUSE A "HOUSE OF TERROR" 052. [SCOTT, John.] Observations on the present state of the parochial and vagrant Poor. London: Edward and Charles Dilly. 1773. 135,[1]p. Contemporary quarter calf, neatly rebacked. Rebound in quarter calf, marbled boards. An excellent copy. KRESS 6977. HIGGS 5824. GOLDSMITHS 11070. Defoe, in 1729, had complained of the squalor and filth of workhouses. In this pamphlet Scott takes up the same theme. Since the Act of 1723 speculators had come forward with bids to "farm" the poor of the various administrative areas. It was the equivalent of what we would now call "contracting-out". Under this system the contractor's profit depended upon his being as severe with the poor as possible. His interest lay in skimping food and making the institution in every way a "House of Terror". In short, by 1773, as Scott pointed out, the workhouse under the Act of 1723 had become "...a dreadful engine of oppression...By means of this statute the parochial managers are impowered to establish a set of petty tyrants as their substitutes, who, farming the poor at a certain price, accumulate dishonest wealth by abridging them of reasonable food, and imposing on them unreasonable labour. A thorough acquaintance with the interior economy of these wretched receptacles of misery, or rather parish prisons called workhouses, is not easily to be acquired; in these as in other arbitrary governments complaint is mutiny and treason, to every appearance of which a double portion of punishment is invariably annexed: particular incidents shocking to humanity may have sometimes transpired, but the whole mystery of iniquity perhaps never has been nor ever will be developed. One thing is too publicly known to admit of denial, that those workhouses are scenes of filthiness and confusion; that the old and young, sick and healthy, are promiscuously crowded into ill-contrived apartments, not of sufficient capacity to contain with convenience half the number of miserable beings condemned to such deplorable inhabitation, and that speedy death is almost ever to the aged and infirm, and often to the youthful and robust, the consequence of removal from more salubrious air to such mansions of putridity. " An important pamphlet by an authority described by the Webbs as "an able writer". See Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The Old Poor Law pp. 169, 248, 271, 278-281, 375, 381.