Vagrant Cell #4, Cardigan Workhouse

.For a period of roughly one hundred years, vagrant cells like this one were used in Britain. They were part of the workhouse system. The way things worked was that a policeman would arrest a wandering homeless person (or "tramp") and take them to a local Poor Law Commissioner, who would sentence them to confinement in the county's work house until they had worked enough to earn their release. This was the part of the system that dealt with the poor who were passing through the area, while the larger workhouse served as a prison for local poor families. The vagrant would be expected to break the stones that he or she found in the cell, eat one serving of gruel, and leave the area in the morning.

Visiting the Cardigan Workhouse, which is in the village of St. Dogmaels (formerly part of Cardigan), we inspected a row of seven vagrant cells. If I was confined in one, I could not quite lie down on the floor, assuming the floor was even clear. To the side of the door you see the outside of a chute. On the inside is an iron grate with holes about three inches in diameter, and the inmate had to break all the stones into pieces small enough to pass through the holes.

The workhouse was built in 1839-40. Several years ago I read up on the Great Hunger, or Famine of Ireland during the 1840s. The famine was caused by the same thing that has caused every single famine in human history: cruelty. Food shortages occur for natural reasons but nobody dies of starvation unless they are refused help. Reading about the famine had me going forward a few pages at a time, and then I had to put the book down, pace the floor, and yell curses. I cursed because the laisse faire philosophy of the British Government then has not disappeared. It is boiler plate, ordinary right-wing thinking today, all over the world.

This vagrant cell is the physical heart of Capitalism. The 1% knows that the system is dead hopeless for the poor. They know that everything is getting worse, and fast. They know that there is and will continue to be hunger and starvation on a mass scale. They know that the homeless guy can't and won't work to earn enough sustenance to keep him walking and breathing. And they don't care.

Our visit to the Cardigan Work House was very informative.

Here is Ceridwen's blip on our excursion.