Key Arguments

• Existing asylums for the poor were too comfortable ('plentifully fed')
• An 'ideal workhouse' must be a place of terror to extirpate debauchery and lower the price of labor
• Inmates should work 14 hours a day, resulting in 12 hours of 'neat labour'

Source Quotes

To this end, and for ‘extirpating idleness, debauchery and excess’, promoting a spirit of industry, ‘lowering the price of labour in our manufactories, and easing the lands of the heavy burden of poor’s rates’, our ‘faithful Eckart’ of capital proposes the well-tried method of locking up workers who become dependent on public support (in one word, paupers) in ‘an ideal workhouse’. Such an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror’, and not an asylum for the poor ‘where they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work’. In this ‘House of Terror’, this ‘ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.’

Such an ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror’, and not an asylum for the poor ‘where they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work’. In this ‘House of Terror’, this ‘ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.’ Twelve working hours a day in the ‘Ideal Workhouse’, the ‘House of Terror’ of 1770!

Key Concepts

• ideal workhouse must be made a ‘House of Terror’
• where they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work
• work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour

Context

Marx detailing the 18th-century proposal to imprison paupers and force them to work 12 hours a day.