Republicans Long for Children's Workhouses

When Ray Canterbury, member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, read Oliver Twist he thought the hero of the book was Mr. Bumble. Ray was outraged at the end of A Christmas Carol when the morally upstanding Ebenezer Scrooge was perverted into a squishy liberal. Ray thinks children should only be fed if they pay for their nourishment with hard labor.

19th century workhouse dining room.

It's not a new concept. Workhouses, or poorhouses, were government institutions for the poor where they were made to work long hours for starvation provisions. At the time is was thought better to be sent to prison than the workhouse. The notion was the same as Ray's, the poor should be made to work as slaves for any help they receive.