SUGGESTIVE FACTS AS TO CAUSES AND PREVENTION OF DESTITUTION REVEALED BY A STUDY OF A MID-WESTERN ALMSHOUSE[5]
[5] In taking the rather exhaustive social histories of the 200 inmates of the Sangamon County Poor Farm, I was assisted by Mary Humphrey and Mary Johnson, without whose intelligent and enthusiastic co-operation this preliminary study could not have been made.
SUPERINTENDENT HEALTH DEPARTMENT, SPRINGFIELD, ILL.
Poorhouse it was, this mid-western abode of unfortunates, regardless of the resolution of the Conference of Charities and Correction recommending that it and its host of fellows be known as "county homes."
This particular poorhouse was comfortably perched upon a hill, surrounded by elms and oaks and walnuts, overlooking a land of plenty--a "prosperous-looking" poorhouse it was with well-bred Holstein cows wading knee-deep in clover on land worth $250 an acre. The verdant pastures, the fields of grain, the white fences, the silo and the barns, the splendid old brick house, might have belonged to a delightful country estate so apparently did they bespeak good farm management. Good order and spick-and-spanness also characterized broad veranda and hall, the living rooms of the superintendent, and almost might the same terms have been applied to the dwelling place of the inmates.
This, seemingly, was no place to come for the ugly story of destitution--for the revolting facts which force us, almost against our wills, to paint our picture in glaring yellow. But the destitution was there. You could see it in the expression, the gait and the posture of the inmates; you could smell it in the unmistakable smell of poverty and you could feel it in the indefinable something which grips you and oppresses you in an institution of this kind.
It was a poorhouse and nothing but a poorhouse--a good poorhouse, if there is such a thing, but a poorhouse none the less. Like thousands of similar institutions, it stood ready to receive the individual when he strikes the very bottom of the toboggan slide of life, to house him and to feed him humanely enough, but with the saving of dimes and nickels regarded as the cardinal virtue of efficient management. It was an "asylum of poverty"--no more what such an institution might be than the lunatic asylum of twenty years ago is like the hospital for the insane of the present day. Like thousands of others, it was one of those places where we receive the unfortunate; where we label him a pauper; where we tolerate his presence until death reduces the county expense or until he goes out into the world again not a whit better off, physically, mentally or morally, on account of his association with us.