Ex J ibris 
 
 C. k OG Dl N 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE 
 
 LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 New Edition. Price 6s. 
 LETTERS FROM DOROTHY OSBORNE TO SIR 
 WILLIAM TEMPLE, 1652-54. Love Letters of a Bygone Age. 
 Edited by E. A. Parky. 
 
 Octavo, cloth, price £\. is. 
 
 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL LETTERS OF A LADY OF 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Edited by Emily F. D. Osborn. 
 The Correspondence of the Hon. Mrs. (Osborn between the years 1721 - 
 1771, -hows conspicuous ability and vigour of mind. Mrs. Osborn was 
 a -Teat-niece of Dorothy Osborne, who married Sir William 'lemple. 
 Being the only living near relation of the ill-fated Admiral Byng, she 
 touk a prominent part in pleading for a commutation of his sentence. 
 
 In 2 vols. 8vo. with numerous Illustrations, price £2. 2s. 
 THE DIARIES OF SIR MOSES MONTEFIORE AND 
 LADY MONTEFIORE. Comprising their Life and Work as recorded 
 therein, from 1812 to 1883. Edited by the late Dr. L. Loewe. 
 
 Crown 8vo. cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 LAY SERMONS FOR PRACTICAL PEOPLE. Edited by 
 the Rev. Freeman Wills. 
 
 By the Rt. Hon. Sir John Lubbock, 
 
 Baity M.P. 
 By the Rev. Canon Barker, Rector 
 
 of Marylebon--, &c. 
 By Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson. 
 By kev. Freeman Wills, M.A. 
 By Edward Terry, Esq. 
 By Herbert Gladstone, Esq., M.P. 
 By William Lant Carpenter, Esq. 
 
 By Arnold WHiTE.'Esq. 
 
 By Rev. Arthur Mursell. 
 
 By Miss Patteson. 
 
 By Henry Arthur Jones, Esq. 
 
 By Rev. R. Cynon Lewis. 
 
 By Dr. Danford Thomas. 
 
 By Rev. H. C. Shuttleworth. 
 
 By Percy Crosse, Esq. 
 
 GRIFFITH, FARRAN, OKEDEN & WELSH, 
 London and Sydney.
 
 V-t^ U^-^
 
 THE LETTERS OF 
 
 S. G. O. 
 
 A SERIES OF LETTERS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS 
 
 WRITTEN BY THE REV. LORD SIDNEY GODOLPHIN OSBORNE 
 
 AND PUBLISHED IN 'THE TIMES' 1844-1888 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ARNOLD WHITE 
 
 • Goodness, as that which makes men prefer their duty and their promise 
 before their passions or their interest, and is properly the object of trust, in 
 our language goes rather by the name of honesty ; though what we call an 
 honest man the Romans called a good man ; and honesty in their language, 
 as well as in French, rather signifies a composition of those qualities which 
 generally acquire honour and esteem.' — Sir W. Temple 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES— VOLUME I. 
 
 TOiffl a fjorfraif 
 
 GRIFFITH, FARRAN, OKEDEN & WELSH 
 
 NEWBERY HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON 
 AND AT SYDNEY
 
 ( The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved)
 
 
 7'6> 
 
 BARON FERDINAND ROTHSCHILD, MP. 
 
 My dear Rothschild, 
 
 If the stilted Dedication of the Georgian era has rightly 
 
 disappeared, the wish to associate the name of a man one likes 
 
 and admires with literary zvork — even so simple as my share in 
 
 these volumes — will never be old-fashioned. When that man is 
 
 such a friend as yourself it is a source of unfeigned regret that the 
 
 inscription of his name on this page is not an offering less unworthy 
 
 his acceptance. 
 
 I am, my dear Rothschild, 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 ARNOLD WHITE. 
 
 I 170 !
 
 NOTE, 
 
 In preparing these Letters for publication I have received from 
 . Mr. Sidney Godolphin Osborne aid and counsel the value of which I 
 gratefully acknowledge. I have also to express my thanks to the Earl 
 of Northbrook, Viscount Portman, Baron Ferdinand de Roths- 
 child, M.P., Mr. J. A. Froude, the Rev. A. S. Littlewood, and to 
 Mr. Arthur Walter, for assistance in various matters relating to 
 the contents of these volumes. 
 
 Since the whole of S. G. O.'s Letters have already been printed, 
 it may seem that their reproduction is a task free from difficulty. This 
 is not the case. Some of the controversies in which S. G. O. was a 
 disputant, if revived, would cause pain to the living. I have sought to ex- 
 clude from these volumes all that could be justly distasteful to survivors, 
 or would reflect on those societies or institutions that enjoyed in their 
 younger days the advantage of S. G. O.'s vigorous and uncompromising 
 criticism. At the same time, nothing has been omitted that will show 
 the writer of these Letters as he really was— the strong, able, determined 
 and conscientious advocate of the masses unable or afraid to speak for 
 themselves.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Sidney Godolphin Osborne was born in 1808. He was the 
 third son of the first Lord Godolphin. His direct descent from 
 Godolphin, the Minister of Anne, and Walpole's predecessor, 
 mingled his blood with that of the Churchills. The founder of 
 the House of Leeds was young Edward Osborne, who saved his 
 master's daughter from drowning, and who shared with her, as 
 his well-won wife, the then appreciable glories of the London 
 Mayoralty. He was Lord Mayor in 1585, and died in 1591. 
 Edward Osborne's descendant, Thomas, fourth Duke of Leeds, 
 married, in 1740, Mary, the second daughter of Francis, Earl 
 of Godolphin. Her mother was Henrietta, eldest daughter 
 of John Churchill the great Duke of Marlborough. On his 
 death the Countess of Godolphin, the great-great-grand- 
 mother of Sidney Godolphin Osborne, was created by Act of 
 Parliament Duchess of Marlborough. At her death the title 
 and estates devolved on her nephew the Earl of Sunderland, 
 who was the son of her younger sister Anne. On the accession 
 of Osborne's eldest brother to the dukedom of Leeds, in 1859, 
 he obtained the rank of a Duke's son. He took his Bachelor's 
 degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1830, and having taken 
 orders, he was appointed in due time to the Rectory of Stoke 
 Pogis, the scene of Gray's * Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' In 
 1 841 he was offered, and accepted, the living of Durweston, 
 Dorsetshire, in the gift of the late Lord Portman, and occupied
 
 x LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 the incumbency until 1875, when he resigned his living and 
 settled at Lewes, where he died on May 9, 1889. He married 
 in 1834 a daughter of Mr. Pascoe Grenfell, of Taplow Court, 
 and thus stood in the relation of brother-in-law to Charles 
 Kingsley, and to Mr. James Anthony Froude. 
 
 A life passed in retirement, uneventful, and marked by the 
 production of sound reflections rather than by the execution of 
 striking deeds, affords scant material for biography. Like Swilt 
 and Sydney Smith, Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne was in 
 the Church of England rather than of it. His mind was not 
 clerical ; he had no bent towards theological achievements. He 
 never sought admission to the Church of which, as a contro- 
 versial genius, he was so conspicuous a member. His tastes lay 
 in the direction of surgery, medicine, and microscopic investiga- 
 tion. Had he remained a layman, his claims to originality as 
 pioneer of the Germ Theory of Disease would probably have been 
 more generally conceded. As a clergyman, his investigations 
 were regarded as the amusements of a dilettante. Osborne en- 
 tered the Church of England, as many young men of good family 
 have entered it, without either inclination or repugnance. Lord 
 Godolphin's decision as to his son's career was communicated to 
 him suddenly when young Osborne was out shooting. The latter 
 accepted his lot without repining, but without enthusiasm. Later 
 on, when the indelibility of Orders became the subject of his 
 riper thoughts, he protested, with the force derived from reason 
 and conviction, against the tie that then irrevocably bound the 
 clergy to the Church. His satire and his logic contributed in 
 no small measure to the subsequent release of unwilling priests 
 from service in the temple of God. With family traditions of a 
 line of manly and upright Englishmen, he set himself to do his 
 duty. Pent in the narrow sphere of a rural parish in an agricul- 
 tural county, Osborne so ordered his life by the use of one great 
 and original talent as to impress on the public, for the period of 
 forty-three years, right views on the current affairs of the nation. 
 From the pulpit of the Times he delivered a long series of lay
 
 IATRODUCTION xi 
 
 sermons on topics some of which are now of merely historic 
 interest, while others are still being ground between the stones 
 of controversy. 
 
 It may be that Osborne felt the region of his influence was too 
 restricted ; he may have fretted under the knowledge of possess- 
 ing powers that found no scope in the cure of ploughboys' souls. 
 However this may have been, throughout his life he flamed with 
 indignation at wrong, at oppression, at insincerity, and his heart 
 glowed with sympathy for the desolate and oppressed wherever 
 they were to be found. His books were many, but they are 
 forgotten. His letters alone deserve a more permanent place in 
 literature. He wrote ' Gleanings in the West of Ireland ' (1850); 
 'Lady Eva: Her Last Days,' a tale, in 185 1 ; 'Scutari and its 
 Hospitals,' in 1855; ' Hints to the Charitable,' and 'Hints for 
 the Amelioration of the Moral Condition of a Village,' in 1856 ; 
 Letters on the Education of Young Children in 1866 ; and many 
 pamphlets urging on the public the improvement of the dwellings 
 of the labouring classes. None of these books are remembered. 
 They lacked the suggestiveness, the humour, the originality, the 
 stimulation and the wit of his letters. Of these latter the 
 materials are ample. They are to be numbered in hundreds, 
 and the collection now printed includes the best of them. 
 
 Sidney Godolphin Osborne was a fighting man. Conscience 
 and relish for the contest constrained him to hew and hack at 
 sin, neglect, and cruelty wherever he found them. It is no 
 marvel that some of the blows he dealt so shrewdly were 
 returned with vigour equal to his own. It has been observed 
 that in the sorrows of the multitude there is a subtle property 
 that imparts to those who brood over them acerbity and asser- 
 tiveness of manner. Philanthropists are not seldom morose. 
 They are persuaded of their own freedom from errors to which 
 other men are prone. Incessant contemplation of the sins and 
 sorrows of others seems in some natures to dim the sunlight of 
 a genial manner, and to surround even tender and sympathetic 
 characters with an armour of reserve.
 
 xii LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 If Sidney Godolphin Osborne were ever unpopular among 
 his contemporaries, his honesty and his love of right and justice 
 were the direct causes. In lashing vice he roused the enmity of 
 the vicious. The extravagance and luxury of the upper classes 
 presented to his mind so vivid a contrast to the squalor and 
 suffering of the submerged stratum of society, his consequent 
 warnings and denunciations necessarily roused the antipathy of 
 dissolute and luxurious persons. Abuses are never uprooted 
 without exciting the antagonism of vested interests. To bring 
 home to men's bosoms the consciousness of wrong, and their 
 own responsibility for righting that wrong, is a thankless and 
 discouraging enterprise. The rewards of success in such a task 
 are almost invariably conferred by posterity after appeal from 
 the verdict of contemporary criticism. Lord Shaftesbury, 
 Wilberforce, Cobden, William Lloyd Garrison, Livesey, and 
 Howard, at the outset of their respective labours were all con- 
 strained to enter the shadow of misrepresentation and abuse. It 
 is not surprising that Sidney Godolphin Osborne, in the long 
 period of his active life, and with the wide range of his lively 
 sympathies, received the shafts of hatred, calumny, and aspersion 
 from all sorts and conditions of men. At the outset of his 
 campaign against the foul dwellings provided for agricultural 
 labourers, his clients neither understood nor appreciated him. The 
 farmers regarded him with suspicion, and even with hostility 
 His relations with some of the landowners of Dorset were for a 
 time strained by the unfaltering sincerity with which he pointed 
 out their shortcomings, and the costly nature of the measures he 
 insisted on their adopting. Labourers, farmers, landowners alike 
 regarded his action as pestilent interference ; and thus he 
 encountered a storm of his own raising none the easier to bear 
 on account of its origin. The vindication of his motives and the 
 justification of his action arrived in course of time. Long before 
 his death he saw the question of the Housing of the Poor rise 
 into the first rank of importance. No man acquainted with the 
 history of the subject can withhold from Sidney Godolphin
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 Osborne a large share of the credit for achieving so desirable a 
 result. The present generation is ignorant of the obloquy- 
 directed at Osborne and at Chadwick. If their motives in 
 seeking the welfare of the poor were bitterly aspersed, the final 
 judgment on their aims and intentions is purified from passion ; 
 appreciation and respect are now by universal consent fully 
 accorded to them. 
 
 Spread over a period of more than forty years, the solidity 
 and good sense of Osborne's lay sermons never failed to com- 
 mand the attention of thinking men. In most subjects on which 
 he wrote he adopted that view of the case which later on 
 received the sanction of history. In matters so diverse as Free 
 Trade, the treatment of Ireland, the Expansion and Government 
 of the Church of England, Education, Sanitation, the Crimean 
 War, Hospitals, Women's Rights, Cattle plague, and Cholera — he 
 presented to the public those principles of action and of policy 
 now generally accepted. Indeed, his accurate judgment and 
 clear visions of the future were sometimes amazing. His fore- 
 cast of the social and political results of the emancipation of 
 the agricultural labourers was so exact as to excite wonder 
 among those of his contemporaries who were sufficiently in- 
 terested and sufficiently intimate to watch the correspondence 
 between prophecy and fulfilment. 
 
 His clerical life, as I have said, came to him unsought. 
 Allied with no party, and belonging to no special school of 
 thought within the Church of England, he early conceived and 
 consistently maintained an aversion to ritualistic observances. 
 Antipathy to the teachings and ceremonial of Rome, expressed 
 with the frank directness of his outspoken nature, brought him 
 into collision with earnest and able Churchmen. He resented 
 the sacerdotal claims of the High Church party. Regarding 
 the claim of special authority and the spiritual ambitions of the 
 priesthood as impudent and unfounded, his cynical treatment 
 of these pretensions sometimes led to misunderstanding with 
 those whose aversion to Protestantism was the key-note of
 
 xiv LETTERS OF S. C. O. 
 
 their creed. With Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, Osborne was 
 deeply antipathetic, and the expression of his dislike was seldom 
 limited in quality or degree. He had, however, no love for 
 things that were not done decently and in order. A striking 
 preacher, he seldom used in the pulpit either notes or manu- 
 script. His style was vigorous and incisive : his language plain, 
 direct, and earnest. With infinite forbearance towards the 
 sinner, especially the poor sinner, in his sermons he lashed vice 
 and cruelty with whips of scorn. Repugnance to Tractarian 
 dogma rendered him negatively Evangelical. The sympathy 
 and persuasiveness characteristic of Evangelicalism marked his 
 teaching, and he always dwelt fully on the practical appli- 
 cation to daily life of the doctrines he taught. On words, 
 phrases, sentiments, and ideals, unaccompanied by the living 
 eloquence of a noble life, he looked down with contempt. For 
 he himself was rich in the possession of a working creed, and 
 his life translated into practice the doctrines he taught to others. 
 Early tastes assiduously trained enabled him to understand 
 disease, and to sympathise with pain in a way seldom attained 
 by men not brought up to medicine. His insight and resource 
 enlarged the scope of his sympathies, and thus adorned a fine 
 character with the most loveable of human virtues. The 
 solemnity of his bearing when engaged in ministering to the 
 dying is spoken of as remarkable. That matter which most 
 unites and most divides mankind was to Sidney Godolphin 
 Osborne a living reality. It is not seemly to probe the inner 
 life of one who has so recently passed away. His religion was 
 carried into his public life, for it bound him over to be better 
 than himself. If a sobriety of tone and reserve of manner some- 
 times repelled his casual acquaintance, the cause was to be found 
 in the extent to which he was made the recipient of grief from 
 far and wide. Strangers from distant places besought him to 
 right their wrongs. They credited him with superhuman power 
 to straighten the crookedness of their lot. His study drawers 
 were full of the troubled histories of maimed lives. The weight
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 of care thus thrust upon him left its mark. He could not always 
 shake off the recollection of evil things, and sometimes took 
 refuge in periods of silence which repelled the debonair advances 
 of strangers. At other times, when in company, he became the 
 life and soul of the party. Naturally he was a great talker. 
 Like Macaulay and Dr. Johnson, he loved a good listener, and 
 when he found listeners to his mind he would liberate the 
 current of his thoughts with a wealth of allusion and exuberance 
 of language that charmed and astonished his hearers. Full of 
 information of a quaint and uncommon kind, he could be most 
 entertaining. When he chose to exert his great powers he 
 enchained the attention and enchanted the imagination of those 
 who understood and appreciated his conversational skill. 
 
 His plan of life was simple. It varied but little from day to 
 day. The Rectory at Durweston, where he passed the active 
 period of his life, is one of those fair and quiet spots, surrounded 
 with elms, old lawns, and quaintly cut yews, which give a grace- 
 ful setting to the leisure and the occupations of so many English 
 clergy. It will be an evil day when political changes obliterate 
 from thousands of English villages these centres of refinement 
 and religion. They have grown into the fabric of our national 
 life, and have given to innumerable learned and holy men the 
 opportunity of presenting an example of simple and consistent 
 piety to their humbler neighbours. The union of culture and 
 simplicity spreads the contagion of refinement. The family 
 life of our parsonages is one of the features of the Church of 
 England least easily spared and the most unlikely to be re- 
 placed. 
 
 Sidney Godolphin Osborne was a good type of an English 
 clergyman. His days were passed in his parish work, in 
 correspondence, and in reading and thinking on the great social 
 problems of the day. His recreations were those of a man in 
 e isy circumstances. He rode well, and knew the points of a 
 horse. When at Oxford he was known as « Galloping Osborne.' 
 Microscopic and scientific researches occupied much of his 
 
 VOL. I. a
 
 xvi LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 time. To them he brought the daring originality, the toil, 
 and the industry, which made him, as a thinker, a leader of 
 thought. The event of the day was the arrival of the Times 
 newspaper. Keenly interested in current topics, and constantly 
 offering to the public, through the columns of the Times, his 
 views on social and political matters, his heart and his intellect 
 were always engaged in the development and display of truth in 
 relation to public affairs, especially those relative to the welfare 
 of the poorer classes. He seldom visited his neighbours, and 
 although glad and ready to see and entertain his friends, the 
 formality of dinner giving was repugnant to him. To those 
 friends whose intimacy he valued, the Rectory at Durweston was 
 the scene of more enjoyment, real and intellectual, than is often 
 the case with more pretentious establishments. To the charm of 
 the host was added the genial and unaffected kindness of Lady 
 Sidney Osborne and her daughters. Those who experienced 
 the charm and enjoyed the welcome of the Rectory in those 
 days, speak of the peculiar fascination then to be found within 
 its walls. 
 
 The rarity of Osborne's absences from home has already 
 been spoken of. His chief friends were Mr. Sturt, father of Lord 
 Alington, Lord Northbrook, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Lord Rivers, 
 and Mr. Walter. With a large acquaintance, and a very large 
 correspondence, he seldom went anywhere but to Crichel, Wilton, 
 or Rushmore. As years went on, the comparative isolation in 
 which he lived, with incessant rumination on sin, misery and op- 
 pression, increased the sombre tone of his mind, and robbed it of 
 the graces of less solid natures. Pessimistic he was not. But from 
 those who knew him but slightly, his real and better self was 
 masked by an atmosphere of silence and dejection. His kindness 
 of heart and ready hand to help the needy and the suffering were 
 fully known to those who were with him continually and alone. 
 To all appearance he bore adverse criticism with indifference. 
 He stood four-square to the winds of contumely and misrepresen- 
 tation. But deep down, hidden from the world outside, he
 
 INTRODUCTION xv ji 
 
 suffered acutely from unjust attack. When Lord Melbourne 
 publicly taunted him with being a ' popularity-hunting parson,' 
 the dignity of his reply showed no sensitiveness to the cruelty of 
 the unfounded charge. He left disproof to the demonstration of 
 his life, and suffered the calumny to die a natural death. Many 
 years afterwards the charge was revived, with more zeal than 
 wisdom, by a clerical henchman of Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, 
 but by that time he was impregnable to attack founded on per- 
 version of the known facts of his life. 
 
 His classical and mathematical attainments were slender. 
 In such pursuits he had no interest. He said of himself: ' I 
 have not the slightest pretence to be called learned.' His 
 somewhat unequal style was the result of deep thought, dislike 
 of sentimental phrases, and knowing precisely what idea he 
 wished to express. He wrote easily, and, as a rule, bestowed 
 but little care on his literary work. The quality of the letters 
 is variable. The best of them are models of clear, nervous 
 English. Others are faulty, involved, and obscure, and show 
 signs of careless work. The probability is that when he took 
 pains he wrote well ; and when he dashed off his manuscript 
 without deliberation or revision, he provided for his readers the 
 usual result of easy writing. But whether he wrote well or ill, 
 his writings are alive with sincerity and the love of truth. No 
 one can rise from the reading of Osborne's letters and not feel 
 that he is a better man for what he has read. Osborne was 
 not, until later years, fond of reading, and then novels and 
 current literature were the staple of his mental diet. But he pos- 
 sessed rare intuition, and an extraordinary power of generalisa- 
 tion. Vivid imagination and the habit of deep and original 
 thought quickly convinced those with whom he was brought in 
 contact that his was no ordinary mind. Restlessly active, and 
 with a due sense of his own worth, he was free from personal 
 ambition. As years gave weight to his opinions, he remained 
 steadily aloof from political parties, although constantly in com- 
 munication with Ministers on either side.
 
 Will 
 
 LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 As will be seen from his letters on Ireland, he was a strong 
 Unionist. He distrusted the capacity of the Irish for self- 
 government, and his private letters show his rooted antipathy 
 to the whole range of recent remedial legislation on Irish 
 affairs. His aversion to the policy Mr. Gladstone adopted in 
 his old age arose from no indifference to the misery of the Irish 
 peasantry, nor from ignorance of Irish problems. He knew as 
 few men knew the causes of the trouble, and he assessed at its 
 proper value the contributions to the dilemma made by some of 
 the Irish landlords. Their jointure deeds, their marriage settle- 
 ments, and their establishments he condemned alike. Potato- 
 o-round and peasant-breeding had their limit, and the effects of 
 incessant subdivision of land were predicted by him with signal 
 accuracy. In his visits to Ireland he travelled at his own 
 expense, and he states that he never received a farthing or a 
 favour from the Editor of the Times beyond the simple favour 
 of making public that which he wished published. When he 
 went to Ireland in the famine of 1849, the cases of starvation, 
 the number, dress, and food of the paupers, especially the 
 females, were subjects specially investigated by him with care, 
 vigour, and discrimination. Of Protestants protestantissimus, he 
 never failed to do justice to the Irish Roman Catholic priest- 
 hood. He deplored, in the ripeness of his old age, that England 
 should give impunity to the class that is banished from all other 
 countries for political causes. He regarded with sorrow the 
 hospitality extended to a large body of desperate men, ripe for 
 any crime, and adepts in criminal intrigue. In the Irish troubles 
 of 1882-6 he was strangely conversant with the designs of the 
 Irish- American desperadoes who sought the injury of England 
 by means of dynamite and crime. Anarchy is a disease not 
 easily cured when once it has got hold of the patient. Osborne 
 disbelieved in the efficacy of Mr. Gladstone's treatment, and 
 stoutly held to the older methods of upholding law and main- 
 taining order. He regarded the state of Ireland in the latest 
 years of his life as philanthropic anarchy. 'The nation,' he
 
 INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 wrote, ' has been made drunk by oratory, and kept drunk by 
 newspapers.' He disbelieved in the existence of desire for 
 Home Rule except as a stage to the confiscation of the land, 
 and he described the Home Rule cry as the surface froth of 
 agrarian mud. It is, perhaps, needless to say that with these 
 views he never entered the magnetic field of Mr. Gladstone's 
 marvellous personality. 
 
 Although he himself placed the higher value on his Irish 
 letters, it is with the English agricultural peasantry that 
 Osborne's name will be indelibly associated. It has been de- 
 scribed how he stood their friend at a time when the price of 
 such advocacy was the hostility of his own class. He observed 
 with grim satisfaction during the General Election of 1885 the 
 part played by the later partisans of Hodge. Speeches were 
 then made over the length and breadth of England, and ac- 
 cepted by the public as true statements of proven facts, for which 
 Lord Sidney Osborne thirty years before had been placed 
 under a social ban, and had been threatened with being haled to 
 the bar of the House of Commons. The value of his services to 
 the farm labourers before household suffrage gave them a voice 
 in parliamentary elections exceeded that of any of his contem- 
 poraries. His counsel to them was always temperate. Unflag- 
 ging zeal and dogged persistence in claiming for them better 
 houses, higher wages, and more humane treatment, mark him 
 as a man of iron will and lofty sense of duty to his fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 On Free Trade and Protection, Sidney Osborne, as might 
 be expected, supported Peel. His letter in reply to Mr. Paul 
 Foskett is a humorous and brilliant statement in small compass 
 of the folly of class legislation. It is difficult in these days, 
 when the shibboleth of Free Trade is on every lip, to understand 
 the rooted prejudice rife throughout the country for a decade 
 after Peel had recanted the opinions of a lifetime. To the 
 stigma of his unwelcome alliance with the farm hands, Osborne 
 added the then unfashionable creed of untaxed food. His
 
 xx LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 thoughts tended to the welfare of the home, for the home is 
 the unit of the nation. He loved England, believed in her 
 future, and was proud of the history of his countrymen. The 
 touchstone by which he tried new laws was their effect on the 
 happiness of the poor man's home. If they withstood this test, 
 he supported such measures with all the force of his nature. 
 Failure to comply with this standard instantly produced the 
 fighting attitude and the weapons he understood so well. 
 Sidney Osborne was a fighting man. The zest of controversy 
 gave a noticeable increase to the happiness of his existence. 
 
 On Education he was a reformer before the need of reform 
 was even dreamt of. Living in days when little or no public 
 provision was made for education, he was one of the first to 
 strike light in the universal darkness. He gained his experience 
 and formed his opinions at a time when the name of education 
 was regarded with suspicion and dislike.. Strikes were attributed 
 to the levelling influence of the new training. The breaking up 
 of privilege, obnoxious to the upper classes, was assisted by 
 every impulse given to the process of lifting the proletariat from 
 the ignorance in which they existed. To destroy privilege and 
 to throw open to the people opportunities for decent life, harm- 
 less enjoyments, and intellectual training, was to Osborne the 
 highest pleasure of his life. For he knew that the squalor and 
 the misery that touched his heart could only be attacked by 
 secondary causes, and he knew that among those causes there 
 was none more efficacious than to instil into the children the 
 elements of a sound education. He never formed extravagant 
 forecasts of the results of giving to the masses such education 
 as might be within the power of the State to confer ; but such 
 anticipations as he allowed himself to form have been fulfilled 
 almost to the letter. 
 
 On women's questions he was original and courageous. 
 But for him it is improbable that the Contagious Diseases Acts 
 would ever have been passed. His experience, sound sense, and 
 high character gave a sanction to measures which have been
 
 INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 denounced with unexampled force, not only by a stream of weak 
 and prudish sentiment, but also by men and women of high 
 character and profound convictions. This is no place to determine 
 whether the State, by recognising, sanctions the existence of 
 evil. But it may be said that in all human probability the 
 practical question will again have to be faced, thus proving that 
 ignoring danger by no means averts it, or that the avoidance of 
 one set of difficulties does not involve the creation of another set 
 more difficult still. In all civilized nations— for the Zulus and the 
 Bedaween Arabs are free from this social ulcer — in all times, in 
 all climates, and throughout all history, men have sinned, sin, and 
 will continue to sin. If the function of statesmen be to accept 
 facts and not to ignore them, the welfare of posterity is no less 
 entrusted to the care and wisdom of our rulers than the welfare 
 of living people. If the physical deterioration of posterity be 
 caused by the present policy, it is impossible to avoid the con- 
 clusion that Osborne was right and his opponents were wrong on 
 this unsavoury and difficult subject. In these times when to shout 
 with the crowd is the easiest path to legislative or municipal 
 office, the brave and far-sighted counsel of Sidney Osborne is as 
 rare as it is valuable. When, after twenty years of existence, 
 the Contagious Diseases Act was finally repealed, he predicted 
 that it would have to be re-enacted. But the strong opposition 
 of a host of good women makes too strong a stream of public 
 opinion, and at present it seems unlikely that Osborne's predic- 
 tion will be fulfilled, however desirable it may be in the interests 
 of the country that the Act should be revived. 
 
 Throughout the whole of his long life S. G. O. had a taste 
 for criminal investigation which he himself described humour- 
 ously as ' almost depraved.' The Ticket-of-leave System, Garot- 
 ting, Children's Offences, Capital Punishment, and Prominent 
 Murderers were some of the subjects that engaged his thoughts 
 and on which he wrote at length. With his granite nature it is 
 surprising that he was an opponent of capital punishment. 
 Current opinion seems to be trending in the same direction.
 
 xxii LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 The abolition of death sentences is one of his predictions yet to 
 be accomplished. With the enthusiasm for humanity that now 
 extends to criminals, it is not unlikely that our children, if not 
 we ourselves, will see the end of the system. 
 
 On Emigration Lord Sidney Osborne wrote with all the 
 good sense possible to a man whose knowledge is necessarily 
 restricted to a portion of the subject. There are few social 
 questions on which easy generalisations are more abundant, and 
 there are few on which practical success is more difficult of 
 attainment. The fact is that the needy persons fit for colonial 
 life are so few that the organisation of a colonising system to 
 embrace them all would contribute but little to the solution of 
 the social problems of our time. The fact that emigration is 
 not the panacea it is sometimes believed to be, makes it no less 
 remedial, and of no less permanent value, in such cases as those 
 with which it is fit to cope. To those who would learn the 
 common sense of emigration, S. G. O.'s letters on this subject 
 may be commended as models of sterling sense. 
 
 Osborne's love of controversy was conspicuous in his dealings 
 with matters relating to public charities. He was engaged in 
 several encounters with missionary and philanthropic societies 
 on the subject of their loose finance. It is needless to revive 
 the memory of these struggles, for the societies that still exist 
 are engaged in good work which might possibly be injured by 
 the display of faults corrected long ago. When in the thick of 
 the fight, S. G. O. was confronted by the flower of the army of 
 philanthropic administrators. But throughout the whole series 
 of controversies I cannot discover a single case of Osborne's 
 failing to make good his public charges and allegations ; nor was 
 he worsted in any of the literary battles on this subject in which 
 he bore arms. Some of the evils he pointed out still live. 
 Great names adorn doubtfully managed schemes. The finance 
 of philanthropy and the finance of commerce still differ as 
 charity differs from usury. As compared with the days when 
 S. G. O. smote hip and thigh at committees, treasurers and
 
 INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 secretaries, the systems on which the larger charitable and 
 religious enterprises are conducted have improved, and it is 
 among the newer and less known societies that the need for 
 rigorous audit and improved management are still conspicuously 
 required. 
 
 The opportunity given to Osborne by the Times, for a 
 period of nearly half a century, of speaking to educated English- 
 men of every creed and all forms of political faith, is an instance 
 of the discrimination and generosity traditional in the conduct 
 of the leading journal. In well-known periods Kinglake has 
 described the power and depravity of the Times. In later days 
 men have rejoiced over heavy losses the Times has borne rather 
 than suffer the enemies of our country to pursue in stealth their 
 disloyal aims. The policy of the Times, since it possessed a 
 policy at all, has been to stand firm for England, to denounce 
 fraud, cant, and pretence, to protect the poor, defend just rights, 
 and to redress real grievances. In following this policy the 
 Times has often allied itself with the weaker side. It was in 
 the pursuit of this policy that it created for Lord Sidney Osborne 
 opportunities and a name which but for the Times he might 
 never have acquired. Throughout the campaign on behalf of the 
 Dorset labourers the Times steadily supported its correspondent. 
 Leading articles again and again pronounced for measures of 
 justice and of prudence, at that time supported by few men of 
 station. The partnership of the Times in Osborne's good work 
 was by no means confined to his earlier efforts. Throughout 
 the series of letters by which posterity will know him, he received 
 all the assistance the world-wide influence of the Times could 
 confer. As a general rule the Editor bestowed on him the 
 distinction of large type ; and the frequent complement of a 
 leading article commenting on the views of the outspoken 
 correspondent testified to the esteem in which S. G. O. was held 
 at Printing House Square. The alliance between' Osborne and 
 the Times was honourable to both. But for the paper, Osborne 
 was unlikely to have become a recognised public authority on
 
 xxiv LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 social questions ; and but for Osborne, the paper would have lost 
 a striking series of contributions on the social problems of the 
 new era. The period of Osborne's greatest influence was the 
 period when intellectual darkness and philistinism were most 
 prevalent. The multitudinous wants of a nation but recently 
 articulate were expressed by Osborne from the quiet standpoint 
 of a man whose position in life enabled him to guide his fellow 
 countrymen without the prejudice and bias of the politician, and 
 to whom the vulgar arts of the demagogue were repugnant. 
 Detachment from party was incontestably an element of strength. 
 Perfect devotion to truth, continuity of purpose, hardness of 
 fibre, electrical rapidity of thought, may not be qualities sufficient 
 to constitute genius. Osborne had these qualities, and having 
 regard to the use he made of them, and to the simplicity and 
 retirement of his life, the unselfishness of his aims, and the just 
 influence he acquired in the counsels of public opinion, he may 
 fairly be described as a greater man than many of those who 
 occupy a larger space in the annals of our time.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE FIRST VOLUME 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE DORSETSHIRE POOR I 
 
 II. FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 45 
 
 III. FAMINE IN INDIA 6l 
 
 IV. EDUCATION 70 
 
 V. LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 130 
 
 VI. EMIGRATION 1 58 
 
 VII. DISEASE 184 
 
 VIII. IRELAND 223 
 
 IX. WARS 283 
 
 X. CORN LAWS 294 
 
 XL SANITATION 303 
 
 XII. CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 314 
 
 XIII. RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 374
 
 THE 
 
 LETTERS OF S. G. O. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR. 
 
 The earliest efforts of S. G. 0. to arouse the public conscience in regard 
 to the deplorable condition of agricultural labourers were undertaken on 
 behalf of the poor in Dorsetshire. A statement made by him as to the 
 low wages given by farmers there excited the ire of Mr. G. Bankes, 
 Member of Parliament for the County, and the latter attempted to esta- 
 blish a charge of breach of privilege. The matter was brought before 
 the House of Commons. Mr. Bankes was so moved to indignation at 
 the course taken by S. G. O. that he threatened to bring in a motion 
 for Mr. Osborne to appear at the Bar of the House. Mr. Bankes in his 
 place in Parliament expressed the desire that the bishop of the diocese 
 should signify to the rector of Blandford his condign displeasure at the 
 outspoken nature of Mr. Osborne's plea for the Dorsetshire labourers. 
 
 The following letters were written as a rejoinder to the attack of Mr. 
 Bankes made in the House of Commons, being the second attack he 
 had publicly made on Mr. Osborne. At the time Mr. Bankes made the 
 attack, Mr. Osborne was suffering from domestic calamity, a brother 
 having died the previous week. 
 
 To Mr. Bankes. 
 
 March 31, 1844. 
 
 I have lately seen the report of a speech you are said to 
 have made, in which, whilst you speak of me as an honourable 
 and excellent personage, of whose motives you wish to say 
 nothing derogatory, you at the same time impute to me the 
 baseness of hiding party spirit under an appearance of philan- 
 thropy. You choose my politics for me, and then make me the 
 slave of them ; you say they do not differ from those of your 
 political opponents, and then you argue, that on that account, 
 
 VOL. I. l*
 
 2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 31 
 
 I kept back my sympathy for the poor until the Whigs were out 
 of office. Now, my dear Sir, I could easily prove the grounds 
 on which you found this imputation to be false, but it is not 
 worth my while to do so ; those who know me know you to be 
 wrong in this matter ; those who know you can find in the very 
 nature of your forensic displays that which will in a great 
 measure account for your making this kind of attack. You are 
 known to be a strong party man, you evidently aspire in this 
 county to the first place amongst the honoured of the market- 
 table ; far be it from me to find fault with your politics, or to 
 wish to see you one step further than you are from the great 
 object of your county ambition ; but I must, with others who 
 esteem you in private life, regret to see the influence old pre- 
 judices have still over you. Every one who does not agree with 
 you is a witness to be browbeaten ; looking on your audi- 
 ence as a jury, you stick at nothing to carry them with you. I 
 really wish your manner was less artificial, because I am sure 
 that then the matter of your speeches would come more from 
 your heart, which I believe to be a good and kind one ; how-* 
 ever, I quite forgive you your present attack upon myself, and 
 I am sincerely thankful for your two admissions ; that the 
 cottage question is a landlord's question, and that the poor 
 law needs considerable alteration before it can be adapted to 
 the county you represent. 
 
 But there are a few observations I must make upon another 
 part of your speech ; I do not think one man in this neighbour- 
 hood who reads it can fail of being amused at your coyness in 
 putting the average of wages at I is., exclusive of miscellaneous 
 advantages. The truth is, the landlords are most of them paying 
 gs., the farmers, some of them 8s., but many only ?s. ; doubtless, 
 in many cases the men have more or less of the advantages you 
 allude to ; but I can get you the names of scores of labourers 
 who get only ys., without any any advantages whatever. There 
 is a good deal of piece-work ; but yet you will find on inquiry 
 that such is the general condition of the labourer, that we are 
 obliged to assist many out of the rates who are in full work on 
 full pay ; we have to keep all who fall sick, with scarce an 
 exception, and to bury all who die at the expense of the rate-
 
 1844 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 3 
 
 payers. As to the cottages, it is not, as you would have it 
 inferred, merely the parish houses and small leaseholds that are 
 indecently crowded and in a ruinous condition ; the cottages of 
 many large proprietors are in the same condition ; if you wish 
 it, I will publish a well-authenticated list of cottages that have 
 been destroyed by large proprietors within these thirty years, 
 over a large tract of country, and the number that have been 
 built ; and I think I shall prove to your satisfaction, that if the 
 parish houses and the cottages of small needy proprietors are inde- 
 cently crowded, it is owing in a great measure to the large pro- 
 prietors having caused the great scarcity of dwellings, by pulling 
 down so many and putting up so few. 
 
 The man of wealth and pride 
 Takes up a space that many poor supplied ; 
 
 His seat, where solitary sports are seen, 
 Indignant spurns the cottage from the green ; 
 Where then, ah ! where, shall poverty reside, 
 To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride ? 
 If to some common's fenceless limits stray'd, 
 He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade, 
 Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, 
 And e'en the bare-worn common is denied. 
 
 If I did not think the public almost surfeited with the many 
 proofs of the miserable condition of the poor which have been 
 lately given, I would still add to the list, and I would prove to 
 you, that if I have as yet, which I deny, given an inaccurate 
 view of the labourers' condition, I have still facts at my disposal 
 which cannot be disputed, enough to fill a volume, and scarce 
 a day passes but I am furnished with more. Believe me, as I 
 am not urged on by any party spirit, so I will not be hindered 
 by any such imputation. As to the great vexata questio of the 
 corn laws, I do not sufficiently understand it to have formed an 
 opinion or attached myself to either party ; but I do know enough 
 of the condition of the agricultural labourer to make me feel it 
 my duty to use my every effort to draw public attention to it. 
 
 The evils I deplore and seek to expose are, in my opinion, 
 the results of a most mistaken policy ; to persevere in it, I firmly 
 believe, will at last be the utter destruction of all that makes 
 landed property desirable ; let the present rising generation of 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. May 28 
 
 labourers grow up under all the evil influence of their present 
 condition, and it needs not the spirit of prophecy to foretell the 
 curse they will become to the country. It is not too late to 
 rescue them from a great deal of impending evil. We are all 
 to blame, landlords, tenants, and clergy ; the former for their 
 indifference to the growing misery around them, the latter for 
 not having taken a bolder line in demanding for the poor of a 
 Christian country the sympathy that is their due. 
 
 We must in future legislate for, and deal with the poor x on 
 higher principles than those which have as yet actuated us, or 
 all our efforts will be in vain. Let us not quarrel in the cause 
 of charity, but rather let us each, in our own sphere, do our 
 utmost to promote amongst the poor of our land everything that 
 can attach them to us, and to our common religion, our common 
 country. 
 
 To the Editor of the Times. 
 
 May 28, 1846. 
 
 I was first informed of the attack of Mr. Bankes upon me 
 at a time when a severe domestic affliction precluded my taking 
 that immediate notice of it which it deserved. I now take the 
 earliest moment decency will allow to reply to it. I am not 
 aware, Sir, of having in any way acted so ill as to deserve Mr. 
 Bankes's praise, or so well as to merit his censure. I was not 
 aware that it was an offence against him, personally, to make 
 reference to the words of young members, uttered in their 
 maiden speeches. I wrote in ignorance that Mr. Bankes was a 
 sort of Parliamentary duenna, whose duty it is to report on any 
 familiarities taken out of doors with the young of the house. I 
 can assure you, Sir, that I had not the most remote idea but 
 that either of Mr. Bankes's colleagues could have taken good 
 care of himself. I shall wait, yet, to be fully persuaded by 
 experience of the fact, that his interference on their behalf is 
 either necessary or beneficial. 
 
 Had I not heard Mr. Bankes speak, — had it not fallen to my 
 lot, on more than one occasion, to sit exposed to all the force of 
 the pitiless pelting of his pompous declamation, when he has 
 chosen to make me 1 the object of one of those commonplace 
 
 1 Agricultural dinner, 1843. Ditto, 1845.
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 5 
 
 appeals to the prejudices of a country audience, which minister 
 to little minds, by eliciting the shouts and laughter of those 
 who, for the pure fun of the thing, enjoy such exhibitions, with- 
 out regard to the real lowering effect they have on the exhibitor, 
 I might have felt his late attack upon me more than I did ; but, 
 knowing that even if the matter of his accusation had been of 
 any importance, his manner of making it would have rendered 
 it harmless, could anything at the time I heard of it have given 
 me real amusement, it would have done so. I shall yet hope 
 some future day to reap some amusement from it. 
 
 I am not in any way ambitious of a bubble reputation won 
 at the ' prison's mouth ; ' for I am perhaps more than most men 
 partial to my home and my country pursuits ; but if I thought 
 that my incarceration would elicit, through my friends, petitions 
 for my release, signed only by all the Dorset Js. a-week labourers, 
 I should not much object to this mode of ascertaining their 
 numbers, and thus proving the truth of my assertions ; it would 
 be a novel, but I think rather effectual, way of doing so. I can 
 hardly, however, find it in my heart to be angry with the hon. 
 gentleman. There is something quite touching in the way in 
 which he waited to rush to his young relative's rescue. Again, 
 how great his devotion to his country's good, deferring, as he 
 did, his natural indignation, hoarding his own wrongs, until 
 their development would not interfere with the passing of a bill 
 for which he knew the country waited with impatience. My 
 regard for him, however, makes me regret that the gallantry he 
 showed in defence of the young member should be at once so 
 seriously damaged by the way in which he flies to my bishop 
 for protection for himself. Now, Sir, he really much overrates 
 my power and my will to injure him, by any assaults of my 
 poor pen ; had I the wish and the power to do so, it would be a 
 work of supererogation ; his own party have saved me from all 
 temptation to make so impertinent and vain an attempt. He 
 is lost already in the political horizon ; he has his place only 
 amongst the nebidce of his party ; he scarcely admits of defi- 
 nition in the presence of Lord G. Bentinck, Mr. Disraeli, Mr. 
 Colquhoun, Mr. Seymer, and many others. Mr. Seymer, the 
 new member for the county Mr. Bankes represents, is already
 
 6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. May 28 
 
 obtaining a position in the estimation of the yeomanry of that 
 county and in the House of Commons higher than any Mr. 
 Bankes can now ever hope to attain. 
 
 Mr. Bankes says, my unhappy love for notoriety is much to 
 be pitied. I am sure he thinks so ; I know no one who ought 
 to be more disposed to pity such a failing than the hon. member ; 
 those who have for many years known gout, if they have any 
 charity, feel even at the presence of a list-shoe in the room of a 
 fellow-creature. I trust I am sufficiently grateful for his sym- 
 pathy ; I hope it may be of use to me yet. I would, however, 
 have him remember, that I have never yet been so fed on the 
 food of the ' popularity hunter ' as to be in clanger of much suffer- 
 ing when I reach the contemptible end that ever awaits that 
 animal. It has never been my lot to have so timed my entrance 
 into market-places and market dinners, agricultural or protection 
 meetings, that the assembled yeomanry, recognising the step 
 that would seem to avoid observation, the cast-down, modest (?), 
 hurried countenance that would appear to deprecate the cheers 
 it really loves to court, have thumped and shouted their applause 
 of the popular member or the farmer's friend (?). I have never 
 known the sweets of that happy provincial popularity which 
 enables the hero of the hour to speak and act patronisingly to 
 men as much his superiors in ability as in rank. I have never, 
 by extravagant but well-timed flattery, so won the favour of any 
 one particular class of my fellow-creatures that I could, assured 
 of their noisy applause, venture attacks on the objects of my 
 private spite, which in their cooler moments they have declared 
 to be as unjust as unprovoked. I have never known the proud 
 position of that provincial honour which, according to my friend 
 Seymer, gives in its prospect a fictitious value to landed pro- 
 perty, even in the eyes of Lombard-street millionaires, — the 
 sitting on the quarter sessional bench to try and to sentence 
 petty larcenists. 
 
 My morbid desire for notoriety has chosen a humbler walk ; 
 its appetite has sought food less abundant, not less gratifying, 
 but much less easily attained ; he accuses me, I say not how 
 justly, of unhappily seeking the applause of a class that he 
 knows dares not openly applaud me, — of the poor, who have
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 7 
 
 nothing on earth but the thanks they dare not express to offer 
 me. I have no dinners to attend at which I can meet my self- 
 adopted clients, to boast to them of what I have told the 
 country, with what I have threatened the Minister. They don't 
 read the ' Times.' I have no accessible means of obtaining even 
 that poor annual offering — the faint cheers of a potato-fed 
 meeting of agricultural labourers, doing their best to honour 
 their friend. Really, Sir, unhonoured by the squirearchy, held 
 up to the enmity of the tenantry, denounced by the Secretary 
 for the Home Department, threatened with pains Parliamentary 
 and ecclesiastical by my county's representative, gaining no one 
 thing that can minister to my comfort or my vanity from those 
 whose cause I advocate, I cannot deny but that the desire for 
 notoriety, which brings all this on me, must be of all unhappy 
 things the most unhappy. 
 
 Yet, Sir, I am not ashamed to own my desire that my name 
 should be coupled with the cause of the agricultural labourer. 
 I wish to make that cause as notorious as possible : it has been 
 a work in which I have been engaged without ceasing for many 
 years. I do think it an honourable ambition, to be known as 
 an untiring advocate of a class who, until lately, have had their 
 sad condition treated with neglect. The barrister looks for 
 honour in his profession by an energetic, painstaking attention 
 to the cause of the clients who fee him ; an honourable name is 
 to be gained in the medical profession by those who devote 
 their abilities to minister to the health of the patients who pay 
 them ; glory and honour are to be won in the army and navy 
 by those who perform duties, for which they receive pay, with 
 courage and skill ; the divine looks to a deanery or a diocese as 
 he writes the works he sells, or does the duties for which he 
 receives his tithe ; the courtier gains honour at court in propor- 
 tion as he there plays his part well, — he too has his salary ; 
 the politician looks to the patronage and pay of the office 
 at which he aims, as well as at the distinction it may confer 
 on him ; even the county member seeks pay in the cheers 
 of his constituents, or in a ' place ' or peerage from the 
 Minister, — is ambition in these healthy, and is mine only mor- 
 bid ? Is it a proof of a healthy moral tone, to aim only at
 
 8 THE LETTERS OF S. G. May 28 
 
 good, where good is paid in coin of the realm, in rank, or in 
 the popular applause ; and is it a proof of moral disease, to seek 
 distinction as the advocate of those whose wrongs cannot be 
 denied, when that distinction gives no pay beyond that of an 
 approving conscience — confers only such a title as that which 
 Sir J. Graham was pleased to honour me with ? Admit that I 
 am, as Mr. Bankes would make me out to be, a vain, weak, 
 troublesome man, toiling for popular applause, a parson so mor- 
 bidly offensive to certain members of the House of Commons 
 that it is advisable that that house should commit me, or my 
 bishop reprimand me— what has this to do with the real facts 
 of the question at issue ? I may be an improper channel for 
 communicating to the public, that the poor of these counties 
 are sheltered with no more regard, nay, with less regard, to 
 decency than farm beasts ; that they are paid wages that keep 
 them in a condition of scarcely intermittent pauperism ; that 
 their village greens and common rights are fast being taken 
 from them ; that every ingenuity that can avail is employed to 
 drive them from the villages into the towns ; that they are being 
 deprived of the right of gleaning the fields, or have to scramble 
 with the pigs for that which Scripture and ancient usage have 
 long given them a right to ; that to hide the effect of the 
 scantiness of the wages paid to the labourers the boards of 
 guardians are obliged, by a system of fraud on the law, to eke 
 out their wages in the shape of relief to infants at the breast, or 
 to imaginary ails of the mother, so that that nice line which 
 ■divides a stinted from a starving diet shall not be passed ; but 
 the question, as Lord Ashley said at Sturminster, is— Is it so ? 
 not — Who says it is ? 
 
 Did I not offer to Mr. Bankes, at a public dinner, statements 
 to confirm my assertions, saying that he and the other county 
 members might go, and I would go with them, from village to 
 village, to prove my case ? Has not the member for Dorchester 
 declared that he ' defied anything to make the case of the Dor- 
 setshire labourers worse'? Did not Mr. Sidney Herbert tell 
 the country that it was the unanimous opinion of the whole 
 Cabinet ' that nothing could make the condition of the labourers 
 worse ' ? Is not Mr. Sheridan a member for a Dorsetshire
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 9 
 
 borough, a Dorset justice, a Dorset landlord ? Did Mr. Bankes 
 read the noble sentiments expressed on this subject by Lord De 
 Mauley, when he took leave of the Canford estate, in Dorset ? 
 What says Lord Mount-Edgecumbe to his tenantry? — 'The 
 misfortune that has tended the most to cripple the efforts of 
 your friends (which, like most so-called misfortunes, arises from 
 a great fault) is, that the agricultural labourers have not, and do 
 not, enjoy the comforts they, in reward for their services, are justly 
 entitled to. Our duty as Christians, to society and to ourselves, 
 calls upon us, each i?i our station, to remedy to the utmost of our 
 power that disgraceful evil.' Did Mr. Bankes never hear of a 
 meeting of landowners held some years ago, at the time of the 
 riots, at one of the landowners' l houses in this neighbourhood, 
 at which one - who was present informed me it was resolved to 
 so adjust matters with the tenants that the wages might be at 
 once raised ? I believe they were so raised for a time, and it is 
 yet, I understand, a disputed point as to who was first instru- 
 mental in breaking the agreement. But, Sir, enough of this very 
 injudicious gentleman ; it is his fault more than mine that the 
 public are to be again surfeited and disgusted with details of the 
 condition of the Dorsetshire labourers ; let him admit at once 
 that as proved which he knows is proved, and take the poor 
 comfort I can give him, — that there are many counties not much 
 better, some worse. If he is so very thin-skinned as to find it 
 necessary to seek protection from the Speaker or the bishop 
 from any criticisms of mine on his public conduct, will he be 
 kind enough to inform me to whom I am to apply for pro- 
 tection against his repeated personal attacks on myself? Really, 
 Sir, there is as much modesty in his complaining of personality 
 as there would be in a cuckoo talking of monotony. 
 
 I, Sir, have long since decided on my course. I know my 
 own infirmity of temper, I know my liability to err ; but I feel 
 the cause I would uphold to be a just and holy cause. The 
 tenantry have those who are ever ready to fight for their in- 
 terests, — the landowners can fight their own battle, — the poor 
 labourer has few who care to run the gauntlet of the wrath of 
 those from whom he simply asks justice. I know well enough 
 
 1 Sir J. Smith's. * Lord Portman.
 
 io THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. May 28, 1846 
 
 that if I was content to attack the farmer only, to lay all blame 
 at his door in this matter, I should long since have disarmed 
 many an opponent. But, Sir, knowing the uncertainty of the 
 tenant-farmer's tenure, the rent he has paid of late to be, in 
 comparison with what he paid in the day of high prices, a very 
 high one ; knowing the local burdens he has to meet, beyond 
 the expenses of his actual farming business, — looking at all the 
 difficulties and uncertainties of his position ; knowing also that 
 his whole treatment of the labourer has been very much in 
 accordance with the understanding on which he took his farm, 
 I do, in spite of my friend Sheridan's cases, as proved against 
 one or two of this class, firmly believe that the origin of the 
 evil is to be found where the remedy is to be looked for, viz., in 
 the landowners. 
 
 I am sanguine enough to think I see symptoms of amend- 
 ment in the management of landed property, which, giving to 
 the skilful farmer of capital a sounder and better position, will 
 also so alter the condition of the labourer that there will not 
 exist much further ground for trespass on your good nature or 
 the patience of your readers on the part of your obedient servant. 
 
 A few weeks after the publication of the above letter the ' Times ' 
 sent Mr. Lovesy, a barrister, as their commissioner, to investigate the 
 actual state of the poor in Dorsetshire. He was accredited to Mr. 
 Osborne by a letter from the editor of the ' Times,' and was furnished 
 with all the assistance possible. Mr. Lovesy's chief instructions were 
 to prove by personal inquiry whether Mr. Osborne or Mr. Bankes was 
 right in their conflicting statements as to the wages paid and the con- 
 ditions in which the poor of Dorset were living. 
 
 Sir James Graham, Home Secretary in Peel's second Administration, 
 had sneered at Mr. Osborne as a 'popularity-hunting parson.' This 
 epithet was revived by S. G. O.'s enemies towards the end of his life. 
 He did not rest silent under the accusation, but in a manly reply points 
 out that the popularity alleged against him led to no tangible benefit, but 
 involved the sacrifice of friendship with his country neighbours, and 
 castigation by Ministers of the Crown. 
 
 July 23, 1844. 
 
 Personal public attacks on individuals should, I think, in the 
 first instance at least, be left as matters to be settled between
 
 July 23, 1844 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 11 
 
 the parties themselves ; so far, therefore, as the truth, justice, or 
 good taste of the expression ' popularity-hunting parson ' as 
 applied to myself is concerned, I shall say nothing ; but as I am 
 not the only parson who is taking a part in the painful task of 
 exposing the wrongs of one of the largest classes in the com- 
 munity, I shall not shrink from giving my humble opinion upon 
 the justice of the treatment it seems we are now to expect. It 
 is the fashion to use very strong terms against what is called 
 ' popularity-hunting ' : if a man, or any party of men, should be 
 found striving to obtain the good-will of their fellow creatures 
 generally, or of any particular class of them, by discreditable 
 means, or for discreditable purposes, all right-thinking men would 
 view the attempt with contempt. But because it may be true 
 that many men do agitate the public mind as redressors of 
 grievances, who yet really care nothing for ' the aggrieved,' and 
 only do so that they may obtain public influence, public appoint- 
 ments, or places in the Government — because agitation is often 
 used to further party interests, or to gratify private spite — is this 
 any reason why every man who may come forward in favour of 
 any class he believes to be oppressed is to be branded as one 
 who does so, not that they may be relieved, but that he himself 
 may gain some object of his desire ? Has all the agitation of 
 the last thirty years on different public questions proceeded from 
 motives purely patriotic on the part of the chief leaders in the 
 various movements? Have none sought popularity only that 
 they might gain ' place ' ? Have none changed their opinions on 
 the public questions that gave them place, that they might retain 
 it ? And yet shall we say that there are no honourable men 
 amongst the leaders of the public parties and interests which 
 exist in such perpetual conflict with each other ? 
 
 Now, Sir, look at the cause of the agricultural labourers, and 
 suppose some ' parson ' (not myself) to have become satisfied 
 that that class are becoming daily more pauperised, that their 
 means of obtaining support are daily diminishing, that their 
 dwellings are generally so few in number and so limited in space 
 that they are indecently crowded, and that they are thus ever 
 exposed to direct evil, moral and physical ; suppose this 'parson' 
 (not myself) to be at the same time well aware that land has
 
 12 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 23 
 
 risen, is rising in value, that vast public associations exist, formed 
 for the encouragement of all that skill and science can accomplish, 
 to produce more corn from the earth, to improve every farming 
 implement, every appurtenance of the farm for the shelter and 
 the breeding of its live stock — suppose this purely imaginary 
 parson to be a looker-on at all this, and at the same time from 
 some years' experience of the real condition of the agricultural 
 labourer, some years' connection with the execution of the laws 
 that affect his condition, to have become satisfied that the said 
 labourer has not merely not had his due share of attention, but 
 has by law and by custom been so hardly dealt with that he is 
 fast losing that position which becomes him in a Christian 
 country — the ' rev. gentleman ' joins with many others, some 
 reverend, some noble, some untitled, in the attempt to make the 
 labourer's real condition public, but in doing this, it now appears 
 he is in danger — of what ? why, of gaining popularity from the 
 labourers : this he must avoid, it is disgraceful, and therefore 
 unchristian to gain the poor man's love by any open proclama- 
 tion of his wrongs. Popularity bred on this soil is unwhole- 
 some ; the love of the hobnailed is pregnant with mischief, 
 the blessing of the fustian-clad is a curse. Seek honour, if you 
 will, from princes, peers, or placemen ; hunt popularity in the 
 palace, in the abodes of the coroneted, in Downing Street, at 
 the offices of the League, or Anti-League, at the Carlton, or at 
 Brooks's, but beware of praise from a peasant's lips — be not 
 well spoken of over a meal of bread and potatoes. Now, in 
 what does the poison of this species of popularity consist — doth 
 it lead to any one tangible, pocketable benefit ? Let this phantom 
 parson have gained it to the full, what use is it to him ? Can 
 any amount of it — say he is a rector — make him even a rural 
 dean, much less an archdeacon or bishop ? Would the whole 
 paupcr-gained-blessing power of the whole country at this 
 moment avail to the raising of one single curate to a benefice ? 
 
 But I shall be told he will gain a character for philanthropy'; 
 this is no evil in itself, but it may be convertible into one ; what 
 can he convert it into ? Jack Cade was not in orders ; besides, 
 the only riband of this order the Government has to bestow, its 
 chief officer has nobly given to Lord Ashley for his exertions in
 
 1844 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 13 
 
 favour of the factory children. I, Sir, really cannot discover 
 any one market to which my supposed brother could take his 
 popularity, to make any earthly gain of it. I may be wrong, 
 but I think, though he may not gain anything pleasant or profit- 
 able from his country for all his pains, he may be subjected for 
 them to some evils. If he has lived on familiar friendly terms 
 with country squires and the yeomanry about him, don't let him 
 be surprised if he should meet with bare civility instead of 
 cordiality ; behind his back he may be abused as an impertinent 
 disturber of the neighbourhood ; every annoyance short of per- 
 sonal insult he may not unlikely meet with. If he is thought 
 of sufficient importance county members may call him an 
 4 incendiary/ — Home Secretaries castigate him as a mere 
 1 popularity-hunting parson.' 
 
 Now, Sir, one word in all sober seriousness. When a clergy- 
 man is found seeking popularity by prostituting any one prin- 
 ciple to its attainment, let him meet with the contempt that he 
 deserves. If any one of those who are now contending for 
 better treatment for the labourer is found to be a man who, in 
 his own sphere of duty, withholds his lips, his pen, his personal 
 efforts in any one thing he ought to do, lest the doing of it 
 should make him unpopular, let that man be viewed with 
 contempt, his labour in the cause be taken at its real value. But 
 do not let us out of any fear of false imputations be checked in 
 that plain course of duty which calls on us to come forth as far 
 as may be as protectors of those with whom our profession so 
 connects us from their infancy to their death. As a profession 
 we have had our share of abuse, we may have it again, but I am 
 convinced we shall never have deserved it less than when it 
 comes upon us for firmly, fairly, without reference to any gain 
 to ourselves, from no political motive, doing our best to force 
 on those who can do much to amend it, the present sad condition 
 of large masses of our fellow-creatures. 
 
 Mr. Osborne's somewhat impetuous advocacy brought him into con- 
 flict not only with the squires, but with the farmers. The following 
 letter, dated August 24, 1846, elicited a letter of abuse from the farmers 
 at Ryme denying the truth of Mr. Osborne's statements, and challenging 
 him to meet them there. He accepted the challenge, and remarks, ' I
 
 I 4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 24 
 
 went down there and proved my case to their teeth quite to my own 
 satisfaction. The county press most abusive, and formers as insulting 
 as they dare to be, but magna est Veritas et prevalebit? For evidence 
 as to the justice of his claim for victory over these abusive farmers, he 
 refers to the ' Times ' Commission Book. 
 
 Mr. Osborne took great pains in the collection of his facts, the 
 sifting of evidence, and statement of his conclusions. In visiting Ryme 
 for the purpose of establishing the case set forth in the following letter, 
 Mr. Blennerhassett of Iwerne, his brother the Rector of Ryme, Mr. 
 Bower of Closworth, Mr. Williams a surgeon of Yetminster, the school- 
 master, shopkeepers, and some dozen or so farmer's labourers gave him 
 all the information he needed. 
 
 S. G. O. adds in a characteristic note in reference to the oppression 
 prevailing at Ryme : ' It is difficult to get at the truth in this sort of 
 inquiry, but I have in the above letter erred probably on the side of 
 under-statement ; the Duchy have done so much in the way of building 
 that I wished to spare them any possible abuse I could.' 
 
 August 24, 1846. 
 
 In London, I believe, there are persons appointed to inspect 
 the markets, and see that unwholesome food is not offered for 
 sale. Newgate has one or more officials whose duty it is to take 
 care that the meat of diseased or improperly killed animals is 
 not sold as food for anything above the grade of a dog or pig. 
 There is a clerk of the fish market, whose nose is supposed to be 
 ever ready and keen to hunt out fish unfit for human food. It 
 may then be fairly assumed, that our laws contemplate the pro- 
 tection of the people's health, so far at least as they establish the 
 principle that the sale of unwholesome food is illegal. 
 
 The Act of Parliament known as the ' Vagrant Act,' makes 
 the lodging in the open air, without ' visible means of subsistence,' 
 penal ; here I think we may assume that the law considers every 
 subject of the realm to have shelter and subsistence honestly 
 within reach. There are certain laws in existence directed 
 against the practice of master manufacturers being retailers of 
 goods to their workmen ; the evident aim of the law being to 
 secure to the workman liberty of choice in the market at which 
 he purchases the necessaries of life, to protect him from anything 
 like a compulsion to buy where he would be afraid to question 
 the quality or price of the things he needs. Surely, Sir, if it is 
 illccral to offer for sale unwholesome meat in London, to act the
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 15 
 
 truckmaster in Lancashire, although there may be no express 
 enactments to that effect, it is no unfair presumption to say- 
 that the animus of the law is against such practices wherever 
 practised. 
 
 I am this day returned from a visit to a neighbourhood, in 
 which I found meat which would be condemned in Newgate 
 Market, sold to the labouring poor — in which whole families are 
 living in unroofed houses, without any but invisible means of 
 subsistence ; the wages of at least nine out of ten of the labourers 
 in husbandry being paid to them in the shape of goods sold to 
 them by their masters, including meat of the above character. 
 
 The parish of Ryme is situated in Dorsetshire, but only 
 divided from Somerset by a brook ; it belongs almost entirely 
 to the Duchy of Cornwall ; its population is about 200 ; accord- 
 ing to the poor-rate of 1840, its acreage was 978, rented at the 
 sum of 1,108/. ; about rather more than a third of the parish is 
 arable. Two or three years ago a report was made to the union 
 board of the wretched state of the cottages in this parish ; a 
 friend favoured me with a copy of it, and means were found to 
 bring it before the council of the Duchy. To their credit be it 
 said, steps have been taken to in some measure mitigate the 
 disgraceful state of the dwellings on their property ; six or eight 
 new cottages are either built or are in progress, and some of the 
 old hovels have been destroyed. Though I cannot say much 
 for the substantial nature of the new buildings, they are worthy 
 of all praise, as planned to favour the observation of the common 
 customs of decent life ; they have good garden grounds, and are 
 let at a moderate rent. I cannot but hope that in a few years' 
 time the few shameful specimens of dwellings that still exist may 
 also be destroyed, and new ones, fit for human beings, erected 
 in their stead. It is painful, Sir, to see, that where the pro- 
 prietary of an estate do thus, however late, endeavour to do their 
 duty to those who till the ground on it, their tenantry should be 
 allowed to go on in a course of treatment of the labourer which 
 I can only characterise as most wicked and unjust. I was not 
 content to inquire of the labourers themselves as to their con- 
 dition, but I took no common pains to trace out the truth of 
 their assertions, by obtaining the statements of educated persons
 
 id THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 24 
 
 \\\ the higher grades of life, who, living on the spot, were, by 
 their professions or business, brought into a thorough acquaint- 
 ance with the system to which I would now draw attention. 
 
 In the parish of Ryme, with one or two exceptions, the 
 wages of able-bodied married men arc 7 s. a week ; those of single 
 men and lads, from sixteen to twenty-five or more years of age, 
 are from 2S. 6d. to 6s. The mowing and harvest afford about 
 two months of task work, at which about 10s. a week is earned, 
 besides the allowance of a gallon of cider a day, but the hours 
 then worked are from five in the morning to seven in the even- 
 ing. The pay for mowing barley is is. 6d. an acre ; for reaping 
 and binding wheat 6s. an acre, the men finding their own tools. 
 When doing day work the men get about two pints of cider a 
 day ; but this is stuff of an inferior quality ; it is made on the 
 farms, and costs the farmer but little. At day work they are 
 expected to be on the farm, if the light will permit, at least 
 twelve hours a day. There are no privileges of any kind what- 
 ever, that I could discover, afforded by the masters to the men. 
 Thus far, Sir, I have only told of men working for the tenantry 
 of the Prince of Wales for ten months of the year at Js. a week, 
 having to pay is. out of it for the rent of a cottage, and there- 
 fore, as it would appear, having only 6s. to bring home to buy 
 food and clothing ; for the cider drunk in the field may spur 
 them on to work harder, but it is of no use to their families at 
 home. But now comes the worst part of my story ; they are 
 paid almost entirely on the truck system ; for a bushel of best 
 wheat they pay Js. the bushel, which is $6s. the quarter; for 
 first tailings they pay 6s. the bushel, i.e. 48^. the quarter ; for 
 second tailings $s. the bushel, i.e. 40X the quarter. If wished 
 for, I shall be happy to supply a sample of this grist, when any 
 judge will at once say it is charged at least is. a bushel too 
 much. Now, Sir, I would have you bear in mind, that, having 
 to pay is. rent, the labourer needing a bushel of grist a week, 
 and having to pay 6s. for it, his wages being only Js., he is left 
 wholly without money to buy anything else. In justice to the 
 farmer, I will put the is. overcharge for the grist against the 
 cider he gives in the field. But the farmer makes butter and 
 cheese ; there are of these articles inferior qualities, for which
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 17 
 
 there would be no market did not the labourer prove a customer. 
 These, then, are taken by such men as may have children or 
 wives at work on the farm, in lieu of their wages. The cheese is 
 made of skim-milk, is of the colour and hardness of chalk, smells 
 perfectly sour, but is charged for at ^\d. a pound. The butter 
 is charged at \od. a pound, is on the average good, but it does 
 again and again occur, that firkins returned by the salesmen as 
 unfit for the market are sold to the men at a price above the 
 market price of good butter. In the neighbouring parish of 
 Yetminster, a tradesman informed me of one farmer who sold 
 his labourers soap and candles ; and here let me say I am 
 speaking of large and apparently well-to-do farmers, renting, 
 some of them, 400/. a year. 
 
 We have found, Sir, that there is a ' tailing ' as it were of 
 cheese and butter ; but what will the public think of a tailing of 
 meat ? Three days before I was at Ryme a sheep with the 
 staggers was killed, ' just afore he died,' and sold to the labourers 
 of one of the principal farmers at ^.d. the pound. When ewes 
 die in lambing, or as the men express it ' are killed afore 
 they are cold dead,' the men are sold the meat at 2\d. One 
 woman, who had some of a giddy sheep at A^d. the pound, a few 
 days ago, said she would have no more of this ' breeding ewe 
 mutton,' for it made her husband ill. It will happen on a dairy 
 farm that a cow will die diseased. There is a complaint called the 
 ' quarter evil,' which seems to me the only purveyor of beef to 
 the poor in these parts. When an animal has time, in dying of 
 this disease, to have its throat cut, it is retailed at 2 \d. the pound 
 to the labourers. In one instance we had the positive evidence 
 of the man who found it dead, that a sheep's throat was then 
 cut ; it was not quite cold, and the meat sold as above. It may 
 be said, are the men compelled to take these things ? They 
 answer this question in various ways, but one, I think, will give 
 the sense of all the rest: — 'They just tell us they can't afford 
 the money to pay us, and therefore axes of us to take the gristing 
 and the cheese of them ; many of us must soon get in debt to 
 them, and then you sec, Sir, we must go on. As to the dead 
 animals, they just says, " We can't be expected to take the whole 
 loss ;" and they then tells us as we should take some of it off 
 VOL. I. C
 
 1 8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. 0. Aug. 24 
 
 their hands. There may be from twelve to a score of such sheep 
 in the year on my master's farm. Tis the only meat we ever 
 sees.' Knowing that there was a most respectable and humane 
 man farming largely a few miles off, and that he is rather a 
 fancy sheep breeder, I asked of a man what Mr. P. did with his 
 animals that were so diseased ? The answer was, ' They be 
 given to the dogs and pigs.' As to wages paid in money, I 
 think you would be puzzled to find anyone man who had drawn 
 2/. in any one year ; by the help of clothing clubs, and an 
 occasional job at draining out of the parish, they are alone 
 enabled to get clothes. As a specimen of what life still is in 
 some instances, and was generally for many years, I went into 
 the cottage of a man who it was found had stolen some of his 
 master's wheat. I found the woman, with two of the children, 
 eating a few unwholesome potatoes and some bread ; a child, of 
 nine years of age, dead, in a coffin close to them ; the only 
 ascent to the bedroom by a broken ladder ; the roof so dilapi- 
 dated that it rains down on the bed. They had five children, 
 all young ; she was close to her confinement ; the husband 
 earning ys., paying 6s. for a grist of tailings, of which I procured 
 a sample, and defy any one to say it is worth $s. ; the whole 
 building unfit for any human being to live in. Who can wonder 
 that they steal their master's corn ? As to drunkenness, the 
 whole system of payment in cider encourages it. 
 
 On one side of Ryme is Yetminster, on the other side is 
 Closworth, in Somersetshire ; in the former the cottages belong, 
 for the most part, to the parish or to small proprietors. In 
 the latter they are, with the whole parish, the property of a 
 nobleman of known large landed possessions. 1 Your Com- 
 missioner made a faint attempt to describe one place in 
 Yetminster in. which sixty souls dwell. I went all over it. It 
 is in all truth the very cesspool of everything in which anything 
 human can be recognised — whole families wallowing together at 
 night on filthy rags, in rooms in which they are so packed, and 
 yet so little sheltered, that one's wonder is that the physical 
 existence can survive, as it does, the necessary speedy destruc- 
 tion of all existing moral principle. What matters it that they 
 
 1 Lord Portman.
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 19 
 
 are the refuse of the parish ? It is a refuse pregnant with an 
 eternal life, that requires a care and a preparation for its future 
 birth, which the circumstances of such a place utterly forbid. In 
 a Christian land, divided by law into districts and parishes, pro- 
 fessedly each charged with the expense of a moral apparatus, 
 calculated to protect the bodies of the people from the assaults 
 of hunger or violence, their souls from ignorance and heathenism, 
 a vast — almost roofless — manufactory of misery, and nursery for 
 vice is allowed to rear its smoke-blackened walls in the very 
 midst of a landscape in which the eye may trace the existence 
 of the mansions and parks of the wealthy, charged to see justice 
 done the body ; churches, telling of the existence of an order of 
 men whose duty it is to preach the plain truth boldly, that God 
 will not have the poor oppressed in body or in soul. 
 
 If Closworth, the other parish of which I have spoken, is, as 
 I am informed, no worse than two-thirds of the Somerset villages, 
 I can only say that Dorset, bad as it is, I am convinced can 
 show few such specimens of miserable existence. It is no argu- 
 ment to say that most of these wretched, damp, decaying, con- 
 fined, glassless hovels are the property of little lifeholders. I 
 admit it to be a very general case, though not true in this 
 instance. No one can travel through these districts and not see 
 how every atom of waste ground is seized on for the erection of 
 these dens ; but you may go for miles, you may make what 
 inquiry you will, and you will find that those who draw incomes 
 from the soil not only will not, and have not, until lately in a 
 few instances, built any cottages, but they have perseveringly 
 pursued the system of cottage destruction. Hence it is, the 
 the dwellings of the peasantry must be thus planted by them- 
 selves on the wastes, or they must become the prey of those 
 who, having little lifeholds, built cabins on them to let at 
 exorbitant rents. 
 
 The potato crop is a failure throughout the whole district ; I 
 do not believe a third will be fit for food. This is of no small 
 importance, for the only money the poor man can draw to 
 purchase clothing is from the potatoes, either by their sale, or 
 by their consumption enabling him to make shift with a grist 
 once in two instead of every week. 
 
 c 2
 
 20 THE LETTERS OF S. G O. Sept. 10 
 
 I am well aware, Sir, that the assertions I have made above, 
 of the treatment of the labourers on the Prince of Wales's pro- 
 perty, will, as usual, be treated by the parties accused as gross 
 exaggerations. I am, Sir, prepared, at any convenient notice, 
 to meet the agent of the Duchy on the spot, and from my notes, 
 and in the presence of the same witnesses, prove their truth. 
 From what I have learned of the council of the Duchy's pro- 
 ceedings, I believe them to be disposed to act most humanely 
 and to set a most excellent example to their neighbours. I 
 think a very little inquiry, and a very little effort on their part, 
 may put a stop to a state of things disgraceful to so important 
 a proprietary, though common in the case of individual pro- 
 prietors. For my own part, I can only say that I will shrink 
 from no inquiry into facts I assert in your columns, on 1 y claim- 
 ing, in my own defence, an opportunity to investigate the truth 
 of what my accusers may state. I expect no length of years, I 
 care little how much of them I expend in this cause. 
 
 Lord John Russell's first Administration was formed on the resigna- 
 tion of Sir Robert Peel, in July 1846. On September 10, S. G. O. 
 addresses him through the ' Times ' on behalf of the poor. 
 
 September 10, 1S46. 
 Your Lordship's position at the present moment is one 
 calculated to excite the deepest interest in every real well-wisher 
 to his country. Your untiring energy in any cause you may 
 think fit to adopt is a matter of history ; your courage in 
 attempting at any given moment whatever at that moment you 
 may think it expedient to attempt, without any very particular 
 regard to the consequences of a failure, has become so well 
 known, that the public have ceased to regard anything in the 
 w r hole range of political possibility as beyond your daring. The 
 general uprightness of your character has borne you through 
 many years of political strife, and left you yet one against whom 
 the bitterest and basest of political opponents have never found 
 ground for the imputation of one unworthy, dishonourable 
 motive. It is well known, also, to no limited a circle, that the 
 experience of years of public trial, of public action, has been no 
 hindrance to the acquirement, in your case, of an increasing deep 
 sense of responsibility to a higher Power than that of any
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 21 
 
 earthly Sovereign. There are good grounds for belief in the 
 breasts of many that your principles of government, however 
 bold they may be in their attempts at good, however startling 
 they may be from their novelty, will be the attempts of one who 
 has a higher ambition than that which only seeks to gild the 
 name of the head of a party, or to add renown to the reign of a 
 Sovereign. 
 
 Seldom, if ever, has a Minister stepped into power under 
 circumstances that leave him so much freedom of action as you 
 now possess. Your greatness has indeed been thrust upon you ; 
 your political opponents have had more to do with your call to 
 office than your political adherents. You have scarce any op- 
 position arrayed against you ; the so-called country party are for 
 ever betraying that their bond of union is not so much opposi- 
 tion to the views you hold from their dislike of those views, 
 but because they have been adopted and carried out by one 
 whose seeming betrayal of them they will neither forget nor 
 forgive. 
 
 It is declared that the grave consideration of your Lordship's 
 Government will be first given to the degraded social and 
 physical condition of the working classes ; you have made a 
 public admission of the existence of certain physical and moral 
 evils, pressing on that class of the community, calling for the 
 prompt and serious attention of the Legislature. When things 
 are at their worst, according to the proverb, there is hope of 
 amendment. If this be true, your Lordship has taken the 
 responsibility of Government at a moment of great social re- 
 action ; for to those who are acquainted with things below the 
 surface of society, it is well known things could not be much 
 worse. 
 
 I am not one of those who are ever on the look-out for 
 instances of the direct interference of Providence in the every- 
 day affairs of mankind ; but I cannot deny my conviction that 
 the hand of God is at the present moment clearly manifested, 
 working specially towards one great object — the forcing on the 
 attention of the rulers, and the great of the earth, that there is a 
 point beyond which He will not suffer their neglect of the wants, 
 moral and physical, of the mass of the governed and the poor. 
 We live in an age in which every class — but that which by its
 
 22 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 10 
 
 labour provides the food of all the rest — are in possession of 
 
 comforts and luxuries their forefathers scarcely dreamed of. 
 
 There is not one single source of amusement, by day or night, 
 
 to the wealthy and great, for which the most lavish expenditure 
 
 of money can provide, which is not at once provided. There is 
 
 no one mere sense of the body, let it be refined how it may, to 
 
 meet the refined taste of which the enterprise and wealth of 
 
 those whose business it is to cater for such tastes have not sought 
 
 at home and abroad for food of the choicest, costliest character, 
 
 and been repaid for the effort. I lately saw certain statistics 
 
 concerning the cost for one year of the chaste pleasures of the 
 
 Opera House, and the sums expended on the healthy moral 
 
 pursuits of the turf. I fear to be accused of exaggeration, but 
 
 I think in either case the gross sum exceeded the whole cost of 
 
 the education of the people ;— united, there would have been 
 
 sufficient to have also supported every provincial hospital in the 
 
 United Kingdom. Turning from a meditation on the cost of 
 
 Her Majesty's Theatre, Her Majesty's ' plates and cups,' I looked 
 
 to the costly nature of the food of tens of thousands of Her 
 
 Majesty's subjects. Here I felt at home ; I needed no statistics ; 
 
 I could walk or ride for miles and miles, and see the truth with 
 
 my own eyes. It is a lesson I have, however, not now to learn 
 
 — I should have been a dunce indeed, if, with years of misery's 
 
 worst pages ever open before me, I had not read and learned 
 
 but too much of the details of the existence of the miserable. 
 
 If your Lordship was to see a powerful man, armed with a 
 bludgeon, beating to the ground one whom nature had formed 
 physically as strong as himself— if a third party, stronger than 
 either, were to wrench from the hand of the assailant his weapon, 
 you would see in this interposition of power on the side of the 
 powerless an act of interference praiseworthy in itself, and 
 therefore characteristic of one deserving every good man's 
 respect. Go through those wide districts of this land in which 
 the labourer, by the force of oppression, has been degraded to a 
 condition in which he is less cared for in many respects than the 
 beast of the field, in which he passes through life a hireling, at 
 wages that afford him the worst of bread to eke out his meal of 
 potatoes ; see him from his birth surrounded with every possible
 
 1846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 23 
 
 circumstance which can tend to rear him careless of the decencies, 
 ignorant of the common comforts of civilised life ; see the pos- 
 sessors of miles of land, the purveyors to the markets of the 
 country of the good corn and good meat which the sweat of the 
 labourer's brow prepares for those markets, looking coldly on 
 that patient race to whom they owe their wealth, for whom they 
 will afford no home much better than a hovel, no food much 
 better than a potato. They say he is so weak or so idle that he 
 barely earns them the ys. or 8s. they pay him for six days' hire. 
 How came he so weak ? Is it the character of the English to 
 work feebly or idly ? No, my Lord, you know it is not. Potato 
 food has been the weapon which has struck him down ; and 
 now comes in a third pozver, and blights the potato. Is it not the 
 voice of God, saying, ' He that tills the ground and tends your 
 flocks is worthy of the food which shall support his frame in its 
 fullest strength ' ? 
 
 I believe it is undisputed that low, unwholesome diet does 
 tend to produce a condition of mind, as well as body, directly 
 degrading both. The potato-fed peasantry of these districts not 
 only are unfit for hard work — this would only be what we might 
 expect — but they are so socially degraded, that they have been 
 for years, and are for the most part still, content to go through 
 life on terms implying a want of all sense of the value of customs 
 and feelings without the existence of which man becomes a 
 mere reproducer of his race, working to live, but content to buy 
 life at its very cheapest price. There is a great cry for extended 
 measures of education ; for my own part, I think it somewhat 
 fortunate for the proprietors of estates on which the poor are 
 treated as above that this cry did not come before. The Govern- 
 ment will hardly vote public money for such a purpose without 
 a searching inquiry into the circumstances which surround those 
 it seeks to educate ; they have now some little time in which 
 they may prepare for the ordeal of that examination into the 
 condition of those who labour on their estates. Even Dr. Hook 
 would hardly wish that his plan should be as a pearl cast before 
 swine. His scheme is professedly adapted to meet the wants of 
 all classes ; but even his inventive faculties have not shown how 
 those who are content to live on the food of the pig, adopting
 
 24 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 10 
 
 many of that animal's habits, are to be made sensible of the 
 value of the Government instruction in all knowledge but that 
 one knowledge which teaches the elevation hereafter of the 
 patient Lazari of the earth, giving the poor man hopes of a 
 home where even he shall never know pain and sorrow again. 
 
 If your Lordship has come into power at a moment when 
 the hand of Providence is hurrying the solution of the problem 
 how a poor man is to earn bread instead of potatoes, you have 
 also before you unmistakeable evidence of the necessity of 
 leaning more to divine than to human principles in legislating 
 for the poor. The cold-blooded dogmas of that school which 
 founded the New Poor Law system have received the fullest and 
 most open refutation. We were told that wages would rise, the 
 labourer would be intellectually elevated ; that the new work- 
 houses would be schools for morality, as well as well-regulated 
 refuges for the destitute ; that all jobbing would cease ; that 
 charity would receive a fresh impulse, and industry be excited 
 to seek fresh rewards ; chapter and verse were quoted to prove 
 the soundness of the new theory ; but these quotations were 
 from authors who, to say the least of them, professed no great 
 respect for the only book from which chapter and verse about 
 the treatment of the poor have much authority, The New Poor 
 Law has only worked well where it has worked in opposition to 
 the chief principles of its founders, in defiance of the rules of the 
 Commissioners. In Somerset House, we have seen that those 
 who were to direct and counsel all the other boards were them- 
 selves for ever engaged in unseemly wrangling with each other 
 — a body divided in opinion wherever union was valuable, but 
 united in the one common purpose of degrading those of their 
 officials in private in whom, in public, they professed all con- 
 fidence. Your Lordship knows now but too well, that the dis- 
 closures which have already been made of the condition of the 
 poor in many of the union-houses have only gone to prove what 
 the original opponents of the bill foretold — that the working in 
 the detail of a measure advocated by arguments cruel and 
 selfish would only be so much evidence of cruelty and oppres- 
 sion. 
 
 We have now, my Lord, to look to you and your Govern-
 
 1S46 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 25 
 
 ment for that change in the treatment of the poor which can 
 with safety no longer be delayed. It will need all your wilful- 
 ness of purpose to boldly urge those reforms, social and political, 
 which shall recognise and exact a more liberal and Christian 
 treatment of the poor. It is no longer safe to leave to the press 
 the daily work of proving that while gaols profess and attempt 
 the reformation of the criminal, workhouses imprison to con- 
 taminate the destitute. The public mind is getting restless 
 under the almost daily exposure of the moral and physical 
 degradation of the labourers in many of the purely agricultural 
 counties. Wrongs exposed, but unredressed, betray weakness 
 in the law or negligence in those whose duty it is to enforce it ; 
 there is danger to the State in either assumption. By a speedy 
 redress of the wrongs of the poor may your Lordship prove 
 worthy of your high office in this Christian country. 
 
 On December 23 Mr. Osborne returns to the charge against Mr. 
 
 Bankes. The strength of his indignation is blended with kindly 
 
 humour. 
 
 December 23, 1846. 
 
 Within these few weeks your columns contained the report 
 of a speech of Mr. G. Bankes, made at the Sturminster Agricul- 
 tural meeting, in which he compared the lot of the English with 
 that of the Irish landlord : the latter, he said, were shot at 
 from behind stone walls ; the former, from behind the columns 
 of a newspaper. He seemed inclined to argue that the attempted 
 assassination was equally criminal in either case. I presume, Sir, 
 he had not himself altogether escaped from wounds inflicted by 
 the instrumentality of some paper-hidden adversary ; I can 
 conceive it possible that he had been rather badly hit more than 
 once ; and yet, was he not full of life and vigour ? — was he not 
 worth in value, for all county purposes, a hundred marked Irish 
 landlords ? Paddy in his way either kills outright or drives 
 right out of the country the landlord who gives him offence. 
 Lead frightens or destroys ; paper bullets seem really to have 
 the effect of giving more life, more local activity. Mr. Bankes 
 was pleased to say that the ' Times ' honoured the county of 
 Dorset with two commissioners — one itinerant, and only an 
 occasional visitant ; the other, a resident. Disdaining to attack
 
 26 THE LETTERS OF S. G O. Dec. 22 
 
 cither in their absence, he only gave his audience to understand 
 that if either had been present, he should have had something to 
 say to than. The admiring yeomanry roared their applause ; 
 they felt, they knew, indeed, the crushing power of their tool's 
 eloquence ; they only wished either commissioner had been 
 present. O, how they would have cheered their learned ban-dog 
 to grapple with and munch and crunch his prey ! — themselves 
 had boasted all they had intended to have done ; it was hard, 
 very hard, they they should have no opportunity to prove their 
 hate of the power that had exposed their own misdeeds, had 
 ventured to attack the leader of that gentle but yet very simple 
 class who so kindly call them annually ' the gallant ' — ' the noble 
 yeomanry.' Your humble servant, Sir, was duly informed, that 
 he was the individual pointed out as the resident commissioner 
 connected with your journal. He was congratulated on the 
 perils, by blanket, by staircase, by window, and by Bankes, 
 which he had escaped by his non-attendance at Sturminster. 
 
 The wrath of great men, we know, is terrible : great amongst 
 the Coverleys of Dorset is G. Bankes ; all mobs are dangerous, 
 the yeomanry seemed most mobbishly inclined ; certain leading 
 articles in your columns had only added fuel to the flame ; to 
 own to the taking in your paper had become offensive; to 
 occasionally contribute to it was still more so ; to be suspected 
 of any positive connection with it was cause sufficient to place 
 the individual in all the jeopardy to peace of life, if not to 
 personal safety, to which the worst traitor in society could 
 become obnoxious. Blandford Agricultural Society was about to 
 have its annual dinner ; a member— nay, I confess to it, hitherto 
 an annual giver of premiums, an annual speaker at the said 
 dinner, what was I to do ? The shop windows at this season 
 are full of blankets, we dine up two pair of stairs, I have 
 usually sat close to a window ; it was said that Bankes was 
 coming in full appetite ; he had been kept for a whole fortnight 
 from attacking the smallest living thing ; they had even, it is 
 said, kept the ' Times ' from him, lest he should have expended 
 one grain of wrath on that paper when there was the chance 
 of his meeting with an individual stamped by his own veracious 
 tongue as a commissioner of that journal. My friends felt for
 
 ,846 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 27 
 
 me, and advised me to get behind my influenza, and thus escape 
 the impending storm. This I did not choose to do ; I am not 
 ashamed to own my obligation to you for the kindness with 
 which you have allowed me so much space in which I could 
 plead for the poor, denounce those who oppressed them, and 
 expose the evils that weigh them down. Whilst I was ready to 
 give the lie direct to the insinuation conveyed in the use of the 
 term 'commissioner,' I was prepared to defend my right to 
 avail myself of the opportunities you have ever so readily 
 afforded me of conveying to the public facts I thought it 
 expedient to make public. I had ascertained that Mr. Bankes 
 did not pretend to say that I was a paid writer, but I knew that 
 it was broadly asserted by many that this was the case, and that 
 his use of the term ' commissioner ' would be gladly laid hold of 
 as a sort of proof of the fact. 
 
 This letter put Mr. Bankes on his mettle. He accordingly published 
 a pamphlet, written evidently for the farmers. This pamphlet consisted 
 of speeches made by him at agricultural dinners in Dorsetshire, with 
 certain remarks prefixed, professing to be a rejoinder to an article in 
 the 'Times,' and to S. G. O.'s letter of December 23. Mr. Osborne 
 characterises the pamphlet as 'vulgar, false, and pompous,' and he 
 quietly adds, ' But that was natural to the writer.' 
 
 The Potato crop failed throughout Ireland in 1846. The sufferings 
 of the people attracted much public attention, and the first parliamentary 
 grant in relief of the Irish people was made in that year. Like many 
 people since 1846, S. G. O. considered that undue attention was devoted 
 by Parliament and the public to Irish distress and to Irish affairs. On 
 February 3, 1847, he writes to ask when the turn is coming for the 
 English labourers, and what particular point of famine is to be reached 
 before public attention is given to the English question. As in farmer 
 letters, he takes the Dorsetshire labourer for his text. 
 
 February 3, 1847. 
 
 I had hoped to see no occasion to trespass on your indul- 
 gence by any further reference to the condition of the Dorset- 
 shire labourers. I have been told that there is that in their 
 present condition which makes it somewhat dangerous to say 
 anything about it. I admit this to be the case ; but I am con- 
 vinced that there is more danger in being silent. What is being
 
 2S THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 3 
 
 done for Ireland is very notorious ; and, to make it more so, 
 every congregation in the country is to be formally informed 
 from the pulpit that more money is yet wanted, — that the 
 people there must be helped, for they are starving. Our poor 
 are most charitable, — they will scarce turn a beggar from their 
 door unhelped, though a halfpenny to them is as a crown to 
 many of us ; they will grudge no help to the Irish, — they will 
 give freely, if they have anything to give. But, Sir, there is 
 some reason to expect that by the time they know what Govern- 
 ment has voted, the Church collected, and the charitable sub- 
 scribed for the starving Irish, they may find themselves in a 
 condition forcing on them the questions : ' When is our turn to 
 come ? At what particular point of famine is help to be offered 
 us labouring English ? We have not begun, perhaps, to die for 
 want of food ; our strong men have not yet been brought so 
 low that they stagger in their walk ; our children as yet get fed 
 once at least every day ; but, if we are wanting in these first 
 features of the work of actual famine, will any deny that we so 
 closely border on them that the insufficiency and bad nature of 
 our food are so lowering us, that we are, as it were, in the natural 
 and almost inevitable path which leads to diseases, certain to 
 hurry many of us to the grave ? ' I do not expect, Sir, that 
 many of our poor will starve to death, because we have a 
 machinery with funds and officials for the purpose of stepping 
 in between them and actual death from want of food ; there is 
 an eleventh hour of suffering, at which the law's charity relents 
 and feeds ; our paupers don't die because they have no food ; 
 but, without being, I hope, a rash alarmist, I think I can see 
 cause of apprehension that thousands, if things go on as at 
 present, will sicken to eventual death, from a too long struggle 
 with life on an insufficiency of food. 
 
 I do not want any one reader of this letter to forget the 
 Irish, but I want to cause a moment's thought on the state of 
 some of the English. A Dorsetshire farmer of some notoriety, 1 
 a great local authority, gave it in evidence before a Poor Law 
 Commissioner : ' We generally reckon a busJiel of wheat, with is. 
 added to it, the wages of a labourer." 1 Accordingly, I have 
 1 Jem Burgess. 2 Austin's Report.
 
 1 847 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 29 
 
 again and again found that where a labourer has been so far 
 blessed as to have a master who pays 8s. a week, he has, if that 
 master retailed him wheat, paid Js. a bushel for it ; where not 
 so blessed, but only receiving the common Js. a week wages, I 
 have found him sometimes favoured with a grist at 6s. Labour- 
 ing men are apt to have wives and families — a bushel of wheat 
 won't feed a very large family — is. won't go far in soap and 
 candles, fuel, tea, &c. How then do they live, get clothed, and 
 housed ? Occasional jobs at ' tut-work ' — i.e. opportunity to 
 sweat a little more and a little longer in the week for a little 
 extra pay ; extra earnings at harvest, the earnings of the wife 
 and children— these are sources of extra industrial revenue. 
 To these add union assistance in and after births, union medi- 
 cine before and coffins after deaths, union allowance in sicKness, 
 and a bread allowance to the fortunate possessor of any crippled 
 or sufficiently ailing to be medically-attended child ; these, with 
 the additional computation of what is called ' help from gentle- 
 folk,' constitute their accidental sources of revenue ; still, no 
 possible calculating power could ever yet so reckon up all these 
 incomings as to find a return giving a bare sufficiency of food 
 and clothing to the family of a labourer, — such a sufficiency as 
 would be allotted to convicts by the Government, or to paupers 
 in union-houses by the Poor Law Commissioners. The most 
 skilful physiologist, aided by the most accurate of political 
 economists, could not, out of all these earnings, with all these 
 ' helps,' purchase a sufficient substance of food, of the quality 
 that would sustain in health the lives of a family of five members, 
 leaving sufficient means to clothe them to be decent, to pay the 
 rent of any place that would be fit for human habitation : and 
 yet they do live and work, and actually worked the soil, sowed, 
 reaped, and placed in the rickyard the wheat now fetching some 
 20/. a load ! How is this riddle of life to be solved ? With one 
 word — potato. Potato food has formed near three-fifths of their' 
 subsistence ; the farmers let them ground, some at reasonable, 
 some at extortionate rents, to grow this food. Many of them 
 arc tenants of allotment ground, at least half of which has 
 hitherto been allotted to the growth of the potato. All who 
 had no opportunity to grow bought, as the staple of their food,
 
 3o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 3 
 
 potatoes, at, on an average of the last few years, about $s. the 
 bag. They are no longer to be bought, scarcely at any price ; 
 those that were grown last year for the most part rotted ; at 
 this moment there are few to be found in any cottage ; a few 
 weeks more, and there will be none. 
 
 Even, then, if the wages continued as a bushel of wheat 
 and is. per week, the subtraction of three-fifths of the food of 
 the family by this dispensation of Providence would bring them 
 to the verge of starvation ; but, Sir, to our shame be it said, 
 when we know this, — when we know, also, that every other 
 article of domestic cottage consumption has risen in a serious 
 degree, the ' We,' that is the ruling powers of this county, the 
 yeomanry, as the farmers are called, are in many places paying 
 the same wages they paid when wheat was ys. the bushel — i.e. 
 8s., or ys. a week ; nozv it is 10s. the bushel, in few places have 
 they risen more than one shilling. When pressed by their land- 
 lords, some of them certainly did agree to continue to sell the 
 wheat at the old price ; however, I fear this is coming to an 
 end, and I now hear of many who have raised wages one shil- 
 ling; and stopped selling by retail, so that the ' We's ' law of a 
 bushel of wheat and a shilling, starving in principle at all times, 
 is thus shelved at the only time when it could benefit the 
 labourer in the least degree — a time when the farmer could best 
 afford to benefit him — a time of high prices on very moderate 
 rents. 
 
 It is my firm belief that even were wages raised half-a- 
 crown a week, and wheat could be had at gs. the bushel, the loss 
 of the potato and the present rise in value in such articles as 
 candles, soap, tea, salt, &c, would leave the Dorsetshire labourer 
 now even worse off than he was at ys. a week, with his grist at 6s. 
 We were puzzled to know how he lived then ; it was a ' battle 
 of life ' with him then ; potato-armed, he won an existence ; 
 without this poor weapon, if left unhelped, want will beat him, 
 if not to the grave, to a condition of irretrievable pauperism, 
 begetting, naturally enough, a spirit of dangerous sullen dis- 
 content. I fear we should find it a hopeless task to try and 
 make him believe that the ' We ' had so felt for him, that mem- 
 bers of that body had been known (' We's ' county member says
 
 1 847 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 31 
 
 he knows it to be the fact *) to bring their corn to the market at 
 a sacrifice for the good of the poor : he would still growl out his 
 discontent that the food he worked to produce had been sent 
 to feed the distant starving, purchased by the national funds, or 
 the national charity ; whilst he was left on the spot by his 
 fortunate employer to struggle for existence, enabled to support 
 it only on the bitter-won bread of the union. 
 
 Now, Sir, let us look forward. In the first place, suppose it 
 were advisable that the ground hitherto cultivated for a potato 
 crop should be again this year so cultivated ; is it not notorious 
 than in hundreds of parishes there is no stock for seed left ? 
 Supposing each family to be possessed of seed, their credit 
 is come to an end at the shops ; even gs. a week, with wheat 
 at 10s. a bushel, cannot support them ; they will be compelled 
 to cook what they would otherwise plant. It is then come to 
 this : the source of income which has been reckoned in as 
 making up wages — i.e. the potato-ground or allotment — is lost 
 to them. There is no probability, that I can see, of their re- 
 gaining this element of subsistence for years to come ; I see it 
 already announced that the forced potatoes of this year are 
 diseased worse than they were last year. I am thankful to say 
 that there is yet in this county a good deal of corn unthrashed ; 
 but let us remember we are near more than one port, easy of 
 access to Government steamers. The almsholders for Ireland 
 have large funds, — who is to compete with them in the market ? 
 Their business is to arrest death ; the very urgency of their 
 purpose holds them out to the corndealers as customers who 
 can and will give the highest price. Other countries will com- 
 pete with us for our foreign importations ; it is my firm belief 
 that the great draught on our home stocks will be for shipping 
 to the Irish ; in six weeks from the present time our peasantry 
 will have exhausted every possible shift ; turnips and horse- 
 beans will have failed them ; they will have nothing to sell, 
 nothing to pawn ; the rates will rise, to the utter restriction of 
 much local charity now at work ; the ablebodied must be 
 relieved, the workhouses will not hold them. If we have kept 
 our stock of corn from the clutches of the jobbers, buying to send 
 
 1 Vide Bankes's speech.
 
 3^ THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. .3 
 
 it away from us, the demand will be so great that the price will 
 be beyond the power of the labourer to buy enough to sustain life. 
 One of the first steps will be the discharge of the single men, 
 because, forsooth, it is said they can make a shift or go to the 
 1 house.' Then will come an attempt to give bread allowance to 
 cvcr\ r child beyond three. One union has tried to get some- 
 thing like this permitted where the wages paid are 8s. and more, 
 stating that where the wages are only js. they will only give the 
 offer of the ' house.' What a confession, by the by, of the real 
 state of things ! I say nothing of the chances of what the next 
 harvest may be ; let it be the best in prospect ever known, I 
 assert, that unless wages are raised considerably, and very gene- 
 rally, — unless some precautions are taken to secure the holding 
 a certain amount of corn within the county for the supply of 
 our own poor, in not many weeks hence our difficulties will be 
 most serious, and they will be of a nature to force on us that 
 official investigation we deserve, as to why, with excellent soil, 
 excellent markets, no excess of population, every evidence of 
 wealth in our owners, of active enjoyment of the pleasures of 
 life amongst the tenantry, we have reduced our poor to live for 
 the most part on potatoes ; have housed them, till of late years, 
 in many places in hovels, and in very many do so now ; have 
 given an understood sanction, at the time corn was low, to the 
 rule that is. and a bushel of wheat were fair wages ; have, when 
 it rose in price, not given even the value of a bushel of wheat 
 without the shilling. 
 
 Your correspondent from Shaftesbury, signing ' Rector,' has 
 borne his testimony to the commencement of the sad drama. 
 Within these last ten days I have received from many quarters 
 proof of the same extensive misery ; our poor are patient in 
 suffering, but patience has its bounds. I entreat, Sir, through 
 your indulgence, the attention of all concerned to this warning 
 of coming evil. That it will bring on me more odium than 
 ever, I expect, — that my motives will be questioned, my asser- 
 tions denied, I have little doubt. So let it be ; I am content 
 to be condemned as an officious, dangerous meddler with the 
 peace of this county, — I am content to have my statements set 
 down as exaggerations ; my conscience is at case, and will find
 
 1847 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 33 
 
 its relief in the comforting assurance that I have from many 
 that I have done good, and that I should be wrong indeed if I 
 now hesitated to make one more attempt to ward off evils I 
 have long prophesied ; and, alas ! now see the too near accom- 
 plishment of. 
 
 My Maker knows I feel for and would do all I could for the 
 Irish ; but I have a duty at my own door to perform. I admit 
 the danger of giving a premature alarm, but I believe there is 
 instant cause for the alarm I would give. Many noble acts of 
 private charity are being done around me, but there are many 
 parishes where poverty pines unknown to the rich. There is 
 neither justice nor policy in forcing on the rates or on the rich 
 the gratuitous support of those whose wages have been advanced 
 perhaps in the best of cases 2s., while their expenses have risen 
 in the proportion of 4s., — who are yet threatened with the sight 
 of the food they helped to harvest sold at an enormous price to 
 feed others, worse off, it is true, than themselves, but whose fate 
 they have cause to fear, and feel, as they fear it, that they have 
 in no degree deserved it. 
 
 On January 1, 1849, Mr. Bankes appears once more. S. G. O. treats 
 him as a butt. His raillery, however, sparkles with the humour we do 
 not now find in the 'Times' correspondence, and is too characteristic 
 to omit. 
 
 January 1, 1849. 
 
 It has been said of the late celebrated comic actor Liston, 
 that when he was silent and serious it was next to impossible to 
 look at him and not feel disposed to laugh ; that whenever he 
 spoke, the most hypochondriacal of Puritans must have laughed. 
 At our late annual Blandford agricultural diversions we have had 
 proof that the wonderful serio-comic power possessed by that 
 eminent comedian is a property not lost to the world. I have 
 just perused the speech or part spoken by our great county actor 
 Mr. Bankes, with its accompanying and oft-repeated ' Laughter,' 
 'Much laughter,' 'Prolonged laughter:' the performance must 
 really have been one of the highest character in its own way. 
 
 When Grimaldi used to come on the stage as acanarybird in 
 full plumage, well can I recollect the ecstasy of every schoolboy 
 who looked upon him. When he shook his wings, there was 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. r 
 
 laughter ; when he began to clean his breast-feathers with his 
 beak, there was much laughter ; when he took up the gigantic piece 
 of groundsel in his claw, and then began to peck it with true 
 canary relish, the laughter was tremendous and prolonged. It 
 might have been the day before the dreaded annual visit to the 
 dentist ; it might have been the very last night of the holidays ; 
 all of the future or the present was merged in the one delicious 
 sense of schoolboy enjoyment of fun, adapted to schoolboy age. 
 
 Corn is very low in the market ; there are floating visions of 
 large expected imports ; even potato failure has failed to keep 
 up high prices ; there had been a large failure of a much-trusted 
 corn-dealer — the dividend expected very small — the chief suf- 
 ferers were some of the chief supporters of the annual agricul- 
 tural diversions, in which the county members are expected to act 
 the pleasing parts of the Christmas drama ; — yet, in spite of all 
 this, as soon as the county members were on, and the funny one 
 at his part, all was forgotten ; tailings might have sunk to best 
 wheat price, and that only have been 10/. the load ; the whole 
 millerarchy of the neighbourhood might have been that day in 
 the ' Gazette ' — all was forgotten. The man who knew how to 
 please them best was on the stage — this year it was not mere 
 empty applause, the result of habit, strong port, and a love of 
 hard words ; no, it was one continued stage of scarcely inter- 
 mittent merriment ; had they suddenly awoke from a dream and 
 found that protection still existed, and Peel had been a mere 
 phantom, it is scarcely conceivable that this audience could have 
 laughed more. 
 
 What was it all about ? They were men, not children — 
 grown-up men, men of business. Where did the actor manage 
 to hit their risible organism ? It must have been his manner, 
 not the matter of his part, which had this wonderful effect. I 
 will venture to say that you might read the part spoken by this 
 fortunate performer to a very poor man of the most jovial dis- 
 position within five minutes of his hearing that he had been left 
 a large legacy ; you might read it to a young barrister with a 
 real brief before him, endorsed to him ; you might place it 
 before a working London curate within an hour of his appoint- 
 ment to a valuable rectory ; the Pope might read it the day after
 
 1 849 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 35 
 
 he gets back to Rome in safety — I do not believe one soul amongst 
 them would be able to force a laugh at any one point contained 
 in it, and yet the whole room, I am told, shook with the sound 
 of laughter. I say again he must have looked his fun — it must 
 have been his manner. 
 
 To tell farmers that they may hope to compete with milder 
 climates because the electric light had been invented — that they 
 had only to get a sun of 10-acre or 100-acre power — is, I 
 admit, a sort of fun ; but it is rather akin to that of the school- 
 boy who recommended chilblain ointment to the legless Green- 
 wich pensioner. Old Tarpaulin cursed his impudence, but did 
 not laugh. Then he talked of Noah's system of agriculture and 
 coprolites ; even those who believed that the ark was illuminated 
 by a stuff called copro-light laughed, and perhaps not more 
 foolishly than those who understood him and did the same thing ; 
 but surely this must have been the effect of the wine, or some- 
 thing in his style of acting. The idea was hardly brilliant 
 enough in itself to have so excited an audience, naturally in no 
 risible mood. 
 
 At last I found a point for the effect of which I can in some 
 degree account. He ridiculed the Sanitary Commission, and 
 fired a sneer at certain new buildings recommended by that 
 commission as necessary accompaniments to labourers' cottages. 
 The funny man called them ' sentry-boxes.' I can quite account 
 for the triumph of this clever sally. An electric light of 
 100-acre power, a real living Noachian lizard, would hardly be 
 greater curiosities than these ' sentry-boxes ' were till the last 
 few years in many of our villages, and are still in some of them. 
 The Christmas pantomimes always consider new inventions as 
 fair game for caricature. We have a story current here, which 
 runs thus : — Two well-to-do yeomen were riding through a cer- 
 tain village in which the proprietor has thought fit to erect as 
 many of these ' sentry-boxes ' as appeared to him were wanted. 
 The friends pulled up their horses to look at the bricklayers at 
 their novel work. One then thus spoke to the other — ' I tell you 
 what it is, J — ■ — ; they will be giving them horses to ride to 
 work on next.' What trousers and petticoats were to the New 
 Zealanders, when the first missionaries introduced those novelties 
 
 >) 2
 
 36 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Jan. I 
 
 these new buildings, introduced, as it would appear, by the 
 Sanitary Commission, are to the audience at the Blandford 
 agricultural diversions. Something too good — decency run 
 mad. Electric light for ripening the crops ! Coprolite manure! 
 
 s for the labourers ! What next ? No wonder they laughed 
 
 at the moralmaniaof the Sanitary Commission ; and yet, strange 
 to say, they had that very day given coats to labourers they 
 thought worthy of honour ; really treated them as if they were 
 men as capable of decent ideas as themselves. With the excep- 
 tion of his jokes directed to yourself, Sir, at the conclusion of 
 his speech, I really cannot find one other point of attraction, 
 however faint, and yet he left the stage followed by ' prolonged 
 applause ! ' 
 
 That he is an able public actor I at once admit — that he has 
 great weight with a Dorset audience no one can deny ; but why 
 he should go out of his way only to prove with how small a 
 measure of wit he can convulse his admirers I cannot under- 
 stand ; nor can I understand an able and clever man, as he is, 
 taking a time like the present to ridicule the Sanitary Commis- 
 sion —to make statements calculated to check emigration. It is 
 true I have lately seen it gravely asserted in a report, the handi- 
 work of one of our county sages, ' that holes and chinks in a 
 very bad cottage floor in a measure cause wholesome ventilation, 
 and correct what otherwise would be objectionable in a low roof 
 going off at an acute angle from the flooring.' It is true that 
 this part of England is notorious for the filth of its parish 
 houses, the utter absence of decency in the way the poor are 
 sheltered, the utter absence of justice in the terms on which they 
 are employed. Most of the gentlemen of this county with whom 
 I have spoken lament these things, and are now doing much 
 to remedy them. All attempts to deny them have utterly failed. 
 Surely, then, the policy and the good taste are equally question- 
 able which would take the occasion of a meeting for the encou- 
 ragement of good labourers to turn into ridicule the attempts of 
 scientific men to improve the agriculture of the county, or the 
 attempts of a legal commission to compel common decency to be 
 observed towards the poor, and to give them power themselves 
 to be decent, or of philanthropic men to encourage emigration.
 
 1849 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 37 
 
 It is not that danger is feared on the passage for the 
 emigrants ; it is not that crowding on the voyage is deprecated ; 
 it is not that fears are felt lest the poor creatures should be 
 worse off there than they are here — it is none of these things 
 which has lately made the subject of emigration unpopular 
 amongst the class Mr. Bankes addressed ; no, but it is feared 
 that the price of labour may be raised in this part of the country ; 
 it is feared lest gs. a week shepherds, with optional (?) grists, 
 should be tempted to seek the 30^. a week and good food and 
 lodging of Australia ; it is feared lest the strong boys (?) of 
 eighteen and nineteen, paid at ic*/. a day, should be tempted to 
 seek a free passage to get 14s. a week, and really eat meat. 
 After Hilton filth and fever to talk of danger and crowding and 
 neglect is even too absurd for any of the supporters of that good 
 old state of things — innocent of ' sentry-boxes.' 
 
 One thing, Sir, appears to me most clear — that unless the 
 laughter which greeted this performance, and the applause which 
 followed it, were the result of a species of postprandial hysteria, 
 the audience must be as far wanting in that common gift of 
 appreciation of what is either witty or just, as the actor was in 
 knowledge of what was fitting in a man of his calibre, address- 
 ing a company assembled for the purpose they were. 
 
 There was a deal of talk and banter about ' the good time 
 which is coming ' : in my poor judgment, one of the first 
 symptoms of that good time will be when large landed 
 proprietors and county members use these public occasions of 
 meeting their tenantry and constituents, not to make them 
 laugh at poor jokes and sneers at things beyond their compre- 
 hension — not to win their cheers by shots fired at commissions 
 or individuals who are trying to promote common decency, and 
 the common use of well proved means of preserving health — 
 not to flatter them in their old prejudices and ignorance, but to 
 tell them plain and profitable truths, however unpalatable ; to 
 encourage them to take advantage of modern improvements ; 
 to warn them against adhering to those semi-barbarous customs 
 which have made the general condition of the class they meet 
 to reward a byword of reproach. I know no man who could 
 do this better than my worthy friend Mr. Bankes. He, with
 
 33 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Dec. 26 
 
 myself, is doubtless well acquainted with certain scarce- 
 traditionary proceedings in Corfe churchyard ; he therefore, I 
 am sure, could have borne a powerful testimony on the ' sentry- 
 box ' question ; he knows, even better than myself, that there 
 needs no encouragement to be given to an anti-emigration 
 spirit ; he knows, as well as any of us, that there is a class who 
 take his banter for real argument, and are glad to make his jokes 
 sponsors for their own folly. I still — I admit I am very sanguine 
 in disposition — shall hope to see the good time come when in 
 him, my old public opponent, I shall see an equally warm, a far 
 more clever, and a far more efficient agitator than myself in that 
 cause which seeks only that men of that class by whose labour 
 our property has been created shall be treated fairly, decently, 
 and kindly. 
 
 Mr. Osborne, in the following letter, lifts the veil hanging over the 
 private life of the agricultural labourer. In a recent work M. Zola has 
 drawn a picture of the French peasant, but his brush is used with a 
 heavier hand. 
 
 Though charged with agrarian treason, S. G. O. always wrote as a 
 gentleman to gentlemen, and he never lost the hearty sympathy that 
 led him to devote his whole life to the work of exposing the ills and 
 oppressions suffered by the agricultural labourer. 
 
 December 26, 1849. 
 
 The statement lately made at Sturminster with regard to the 
 amount of crime in the county of Dorset, gives but a partial 
 view of the real amount of crime which exists. The gaol re- 
 turns prove what crime has been detected ; the detections in this 
 county, I am satisfied, do not represent more than one-fourth ot 
 the crime actually perpetrated. I am prepared to assert, also, 
 that of crimes committed, the authors of which are discovered, 
 a very large proportion are allowed to go unnoticed, i.e. unpro- 
 secuted. The chief sufferers by the criminal disposition of the 
 peasantry are farmers ; the most common crimes being fuel 
 stealing, barn robbing, sheep and poultry stealing. A man whom 
 I think very likely to be an excellent judge on the matter has 
 assured me that nearly as much fuel in some districts is stolen 
 as bought. About two years since, on passing through some 
 large new enclosures, I saw the young ' quickset ' protected by a
 
 i8 4 9 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 39 
 
 wattle fencing, which was coloured with red or yellow ochre. I 
 asked the tenant what that was for ; his reply was, ' that it 
 might stain the women's dresses who came to steal it.' As to 
 sheep and lamb stealing, I speak within bounds when I say that 
 for years past not less than sixty or seventy sheep have been 
 annually stolen ; and this in so daring a manner as to prove to 
 me the thieves must be well known in their several localities. 
 The convictions for this crime have not been I per cent, for the 
 numbers known to have occurred. Officers have, within this 
 year, been had down specially from London, have lived for 
 weeks in disguise amongst the parties more than suspected, but 
 have failed to get any evidence on which they could arrest ; 
 they tell me ' that these crimes are so lightly regarded amongst 
 the peasantry, that no money will tempt them to give any infor- 
 mation.' In one case, where some eight or nine sheep were 
 taken from one fold in one night, one person was known to 
 possess information which could have led to a conviction of the 
 parties. She was of the poorest poor ; of known bad character. 
 A free passage to Australia was offered her, with advantages 
 which would have set her above want for life. She need not 
 have appeared at all in the matter in public. My informant told 
 me she refused all offers with this only reply, ' I am not going 
 to stop my neighbours getting food.' So many have been the 
 robberies of fowls and ducks, that many persons who once made 
 a good profit by them have altogether given up keeping them. 
 There are occasional committals and convictions for these 
 crimes, but they are, however, few indeed compared only with 
 the number of handbills offering rewards for their discovery. 
 
 A farmer may readily detect a loss from his fold or poultry 
 yard ; it is not so easy to discover all of which he is robbed from 
 his barns and granary : this work is done in general by small 
 quantities at a time ; but, if I can believe two working millers 
 in different parts of the county, a very large amount of grain is 
 annually stolen ; grists brought to the mills bear with them 
 plain evidence that they consist of grain taken from different 
 growths, of different quality, and often of very different kinds. 
 There are some convictions for grain stealing, but in general 
 these are where a large amount — a bushel or two— has been
 
 40 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 26 
 
 taken at a time ; the robbery of the barn and manger in detail 
 is rarely, if discovered, prosecuted to conviction. Poaching, 
 wherever there is a field for it, is very common, and on the whole 
 very often detected, and when detected a conviction generally 
 follows. It is not often that it is accompanied with any dispo- 
 sition to violence ; but there have been two cases within my 
 own knowledge of savage attacks on keepers. In one case a 
 sergeant of the London police, with an agent, was brought down, 
 and the parties were all taken and convicted ; in another case, 
 where a keeper was brutally attacked and beaten, if I am not 
 misinformed, 100/. reward was offered. I have no doubt in my 
 own mind there were many who could have obtained that re- 
 ward who were living a life of wretched want ; not one, however, 
 would come forward to give evidence. 
 
 Assaults and robberies of the person, burglaries, and such 
 like serious crimes are rare, as detected in the case of our own 
 peasantry. My own belief is, that the crimes of this nature 
 which are committed are for the most part the work of rogues 
 on the tramp — a class with which our towns and villages are 
 sadly infested ; nor do I think our peasantry much given to that 
 spirit of contention which breeds assaults upon each other, 
 though, of course, there are yearly some convictions for such 
 crimes. 
 
 Let me now speak of the general moral character of our 
 people. My greatest opponent will not, I think, contradict me 
 when I say, that for the most part the ceremony of marriage is 
 not thought of until grounds exist for the preparation of baby 
 linen. I always think Portland is unfairly dealt with in this 
 matter ; what is said to be an ancient custom there is at least a 
 very general habit in the rest of the country. There is a great 
 deal of bastardy ; I do not know whether it is on the increase, 
 nor do I think it important to inquire, as it is well known to 
 many that there now exists a class of ' female practitioners,' 
 whose practice and whose charges are so well understood, that, 
 as an emigrant observed to me, ' It was now the girl's own fault 
 if she got into trouble by having a child.' These ' cunning 
 women ' are a great and growing curse to the country. As yet, 
 all efforts to get evidence which could bring a legal charge home
 
 1 849 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 41 
 
 against them, in the provinces, has failed, although I know no 
 little effort has been made to do so. I need hardly add, that the 
 promiscuous way in which all ages, and sexes, and relationships 
 pig together in the sleeping rooms of crowded villages leads but 
 too often to suspicion, if not proof, of crimes better left to be 
 inferred than described. The cases of incendiarism which have 
 occurred of late years have been few, though there have been 
 some symptoms lately of a disposition to display discontent by 
 this means. 
 
 It has been given in evidence by one of our local authorities 
 in these matters, that a bushel of wheat and a shilling is the 
 customary wages of the county. When corn is low I admit that 
 this is very near the scale adopted ; though even then I have 
 found that whilst the market returns are made the standard of 
 value of corn quoad wages, the tailings sold to the men as part 
 of wages, are sold at a higher average ; when corn is high no such 
 scale is adhered to. I have before me evidence as far back as 
 1795 that the Dorset wages were then from 6s. to js. a week. 
 In the year 1822 a Committee of the House of Commons sat 
 upon the subject of labourers' wages ; in their report tables are 
 given of the wages in various counties ; I find Dorset alone 
 paying no higher than ys., going as low as 6s. I shall be told 
 that, let this be the case, crime was not then as common as it 
 now is. I assert the contrary to be the fact ; I assert that from 
 the year 1790 to the year 1829 there was more real crime than 
 now exists, though of a different character ; it was crime against 
 the Crown, and against a party whose rights were then as little 
 esteemed — the owner of the rights of Cranbourn Chase. At 
 times more than 18,000 deer ran wild on the Chase, to the great 
 annoyance of all the border proprietors, but to the great enjoy- 
 ment and pecuniary profit of the peasantry. Aged persons in 
 very many villages have confessed to me that they then could 
 always have meat ; ' the masters ' cared little how many deer 
 they stole ; nay, some made no objection to a haunch found 
 under the kitchen table. 
 
 The disfranchisement of the Chase, in 1830, took not less 
 than the value of is. a week from the receipts of the labouring 
 class in very many villages. Smuggling was, again, a very large
 
 42 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 26 
 
 source of emolument to the peasantry. One of the oldest and 
 best informed smugglers of his day is lately gone to his rest. 
 From what he again and again told me, I am satisfied that for 
 very many years up to perhaps thirty years ago, smuggling gave 
 a very large amount of employment to the peasantry of this 
 county, and, directly and indirectly, put a great deal of money 
 in their way. The measures taken to protect the coast cut away 
 this source of gain. Again, until the passing of the Poor Law, 
 the low wages were only an admitted part of a man's lawful 
 earnings ; bread allowances, &c, from the poor, the church, and 
 way rates made them up to the point which gave — existence. 
 Until within these few years very many thousands of pounds 
 were expended annually, in the thread button trade, from Bland- 
 ford alone ; large sums in some other of the county towns ; the 
 women and children made large earnings at this work. This 
 source of income is almost altogether gone, the earnings at it 
 scarce pay the poor return of is. 6d. for the best workers' entire 
 week's work. 
 
 In addition, Sir, to the loss to the peasant of aids, legal and 
 illegal, to his wages, the temptation to commit crime has of late 
 years doubled at his door. Schools for moral contamination 
 exist unchecked in numbers, and wholly uncontrolled, in the 
 beershops, which abound in every locality. The rise of the 
 tenant class has drawn so broad a line between them and their 
 labourers, that they have little, if any, control over their move- 
 ments when not actually at work. So crowded and so wretched 
 had the old dwellings become, that the heads of a family, if not 
 glad themselves to get anywhere of an evening where there was 
 warmth and comfort, were too glad to rid the one close living 
 room of the cottage of its young adult members. The beershop 
 has its good fire, its comfortable settle ; it has just the company 
 a peasant in these district likes — i.e. those only whose sufferings 
 and feelings are as his own. It is usually kept by a man whose 
 position in life makes his presence anything but a restraint on 
 his customers. Whether these houses are or are not licensed to 
 sell beer on the premises, it is notorious they nearly all do so ; 
 and, under one name or another, there are very few which do 
 not sell spirits ; they keep what hours they like, without respect
 
 1849 THE DORSETSHIRE POOR 43 
 
 of days ; the amount of customers which frequent them is very- 
 great. These are the council chambers in which rural crime is 
 concocted, as they are the marts in which the result of crime 
 finds its ready market. I will not soil my paper again by de- 
 scribing in detail what I know to be the immoral practices 
 carried on in these houses ; I did it once for all in your columns 
 not very long since. The man who deals unlazvfully in an article 
 so often abused as beer will not be particular as to the way he 
 attracts customers. Some are ' safe houses ' — i.e., anything may 
 be talked, planned, and brought to them ; others are ' women 
 jerrys,' offering another species of attraction. This is all just as 
 well known to the Excise and the magistrates as it is to the 
 clergy, who have to contend against its consequences. The 
 justices say they can do nothing unless the Excise will inform ; 
 the Excise say they cannot get information — the real fact being 
 they get no encouragement from head-quarters to do so ; parish 
 constables will do nothing. 
 
 Wages, Sir, having, then, continued almost stationary, except 
 when high prices having risen them a little still left the labourer 
 no better off; auxiliary assistance to them, by fair or foul 
 means, of old-established character, having failed ; pleasant 
 hedge taverns, congenial company, and sin made easy therein, 
 being established far and wide, in as great a number as the mar- 
 ket of the idle and profligate causes a demand for ; are we to 
 wonder that crime has taken that gaol providing form which is 
 now complained of? that pauperism is on the increase? and 
 that paupers do become more and more unruly ? The foul 
 misery of the peasant's home in many a village drives him to 
 the ill-conducted beershop. He there hears each man's trials 
 discussed ; he tells his own ; the character of the different 
 masters, the stacks they possess, the pleasures they follow, the 
 wages they pay, and in what they pay them, — these are the 
 common topics of a beershop evening. Then follow stones of 
 the 'justice meeting ' and the gaol ; the cleverness of the crimi- 
 nals' pet attorney is eulogised, and the fare and treatment of the 
 prison compared with home fare and union-house discipline. 
 By degrees the warm fire and the warmed ale begin to tell, and 
 the more adventurous spirits then relate their tales of successful
 
 44 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 26, 1849 
 
 pillage ; show how they get the money with which they pay for 
 their drink. According as there may be any not quite 'safe' 
 customer present, will their conversation stop here. If all is 
 'safe,' where fowls or ducks might be taken, and who would buy 
 them — or where a sheep would not be missed, and how it could 
 be disposed of— will then be told. Plans are laid over beer paid 
 for from dishonest earnings to obtain more money for more beer 
 at the same moral cost. 
 
 We are told that the rewards given to the labourers at the 
 annual political gatherings are given as acknowledgments of 
 their worth, not as any remuneration for it. Why is it that re- 
 wards are never given to skilful bricklayers, carpenters, harness 
 makers, &c. ? Why is it that we have no society to reward 
 other servants than farm servants? Is not this system of the 
 nature of an admission that long service in farm service is a 
 proof of more than ordinary endurance ? Is not the stimulating 
 of the peasant's skill in this special manner indicative of a belief 
 on our part that neither the wages we pay, nor attachment to our 
 service, nor hope of bettering his condition, will, unaided, call 
 forth the full exercise of that skill ? Far be it from me to wish 
 to check the distribution of coats, cloaks, money, or framed 
 testimonials amongst our labourers ; if those rewarded really 
 deserve what is said of them, the acknowledgment of their worth 
 certainly is not excessive ; but I could wish to see the general 
 conduct of the year a little more consistent with the puffing 
 and rewarding which annually greets allusions to our ' worthy 
 peasantry.' Oh, how I wish the labourer's fair treatment was in 
 some way, only for a year or two, bound up with the success of 
 fox-hunting. 
 
 Nearly twenty years later the condition of Dorsetshire had but slightly 
 improved. Lord Shaftesbury wrote to the 'Times' painting the condition 
 of the agricultural poor of the county in colours considered by S. G. O. 
 as too rosy. That two such men as Lord Shaftesbury and S. G. O. 
 should be brought into collision on matters of fact, is an example of the 
 truth of the statements made by the latter many years before as to the 
 difficulty of ascertaining the truth on any subject.
 
 45 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION. 
 
 It is necessary to insert the following letter from Mr. Paul Foskett, 
 an ardent Protectionist, in order to explain the letter from S. G. O. in 
 reply. The Corn Laws, abolished in 1S46, still found many avowed 
 friends. 
 
 To the Editor of the ' Morning Herald' 
 
 Durham House, Brighton : September 19, 1851. 
 
 I have read with much pain some remarks in your leading 
 article of this day on the speech recently delivered in Bucking- 
 hamshire by Mr. Disraeli. It is right that your readers should 
 know that there are men who do not ' look upon the restoration 
 of Protection as a distant remedy ' for evils of daily increasing 
 and insupportable magnitude. 
 
 It shall not be supposed that, because men who are accus- 
 tomed to mere Parliamentary ' hide and seek ' appear unwilling 
 to lead to victory the advocates of a cause of justice, that, 
 therefore, such a course must indefinitely be postponed. No, 
 Sir, the British people will yet have leaders to vindicate the 
 cause of truth, and to procure for it a triumphant issue. 
 
 We are determined to regain for every British interest full 
 and effectual protection from foreign competition. This is no 
 idle assertion. We have means at our command legally and 
 constitutionally to accomplish this resolve — means with which 
 you will shortly be made acquainted. 
 
 A suffering and oppressed people have, in the eleventh 
 hour, learnt a lesson by which they can profit ; and it is not in 
 the power of either eloquent yet time-serving ambiguity, Parlia- 
 mentary chicanery, or political cowardice, to betray them a third 
 time.
 
 46 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 23 
 
 I make no apology for requesting the immediate publication 
 of a letter which is, perhaps, not precisely in accordance with 
 your views. You are not implicated in any way. I desire the 
 responsibility to rest solely with myself. 
 
 I remain, Sir, 
 
 Your obedient Servant, 
 
 Paul Foskett. 
 
 The Threat of Paul Foskett. 
 
 Stubble Minster : September 23, 1851. 
 
 I am not habitually a nervous man, but the letter of ' Paul 
 Foskett,' of Durham House, has painfully affected me. It is 
 the letter of a man marked out for a ' leader.' It savours of all 
 the courage of the British lion ; there is no disguise about it. 
 I wish I knew Paul ; I have, in common with Mrs. Baskett, a 
 love of great men. 
 
 Every line of this letter, already I have no doubt cut out for 
 framing by the Foskett family, breathes a spirit of eloquent 
 defiance ; future Fosketts will point to it as it hangs beneath a 
 picture of Richmond, and say, ' The Goodwood Duke could say 
 strong things, but what did he ever say equal in the sublimity of 
 protective heroism to this ? ' Oh for the key of Foskett's desk, 
 or one glimpse into the overboiling crater of his great mind ! 
 
 Legally and constitutionally is the great resolve to which 
 this great man is privy to be accomplished. Shortly shall we 
 all know the means. Twice have a suffering and oppressed 
 people been betrayed, but there is now an end to treason. 
 Protective truth is to rise phcenix-like from the ashes of Protec- 
 tionist deceit. 
 
 Then, observe the modesty of this truly great man. He 
 makes no apology for asking the immediate publication of his 
 cheering news. Let me tell him, cruel as he appears in keeping 
 us one moment in suspense, he would have been false to his 
 country had he not at once in some degree prepared us for the 
 astounding event he knows to be so very near. It was wise, per- 
 haps, to wait to see the egg was not an addled one, but there would 
 have been no excuse if in the eleventh hour of assured incubation 
 he had still held his peace. It can be no marc's nest ; no, his is
 
 1851 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 47 
 
 a glorious cackle or hiss ; there is nothing of the neigh in it. I 
 wish, however, he had told us where the suffering and oppressed 
 people are. The good folks of Australia are doubtless gaping 
 for the golden food which has so suddenly sprung up at their 
 feet. Paul Foskett, of Durham House, has the manna all ready, 
 but we are left in the dark as to where it is to fall ; where and 
 for whom it is to be dispersed is a matter still hidden within the 
 Foskett breast. Alas ! I fear it will not fall in any of the purely 
 rural districts. He is the herald to a suffering and oppressed 
 people. Where are they in England at this moment ? Where 
 are the masses so suffering from want of work, food, clothing, 
 that they are driven to the madness of asking for their bread to 
 be less cheap ? 
 
 The scarcity of labour in the district from which I write is 
 an undisputed fact ; not a man is to be got for money — at least, 
 a man whose work is worth the smallest coin. Bread at A,\d. 
 a loaf, of most excellent quality ; articles of clothing very cheap ; 
 the wages cannot fall lower, for the demand for labour tends 
 directly the other way ; they have not fallen on an average 
 is. 6d. per week, and I have seen bread range in the last ten 
 years from is. to jd. the loaf. The rates are falling fast ; I pay 
 6d. where I used to pay gd. to is. ; the boards of guardians have 
 scarcely anything to do. Hundreds of acres are being yearly 
 broken up for cultivation as arable. Locomotive steam engines 
 are for ever seen at work in the yards of tenant-farmers ; the 
 tall chimneys of fixed engines are getting very common. So 
 far from farms being hard to let, I know Sir John Shortstubble, 
 a great friend of my own and a very large proprietor, is pestered 
 daily by would-be tenants ; and when he ventured to give a few 
 weed-growing occupiers, of the very old school, notice to quit, 
 he was at once accused as a hard-hearted man who did not care 
 about ruining his neighbour. I speak within my own knowledge 
 of one of his tenants, whose land was in a condition which 
 would have puzzled Foskett to say how, even with wheat at 1 8/. 
 a load, he could have paid his rent, who now is very sore, because 
 he is to be saved, against his will, from the ruinous effect of free 
 trade ; gladly would he still grow couch and thistles at the old 
 rent.
 
 4 S THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 5 
 
 Do tell us, dear Foskett, where the seat of this disease is, 
 for which this mysterious all-healing medicine is still under cork. 
 The thing to be cured is, as yet, as great a mystery as the 
 means of cure. Is the Durham House Revalenta some happy 
 discovery of the simple Foskett brain, and as yet from some 
 dire necessity skull-bound ? No, he says — zve ; he speaks as of 
 Foskett and Co. Derby, Richmond, Disraeli are clearly not of 
 the firm. Where are the other partners ? Let him at least take 
 into his confidence Arabica Du Barry, Ointment Holloway, and 
 Pillulus Cockle ; the hour in which the shell is broken must 
 come : then, even a Foskett will have enough to do to wield the 
 mighty instrument which is to do all he promises ; he will want 
 such colleagues to trumpet with practised pens its successes ; 
 they will tell us who suffered, who took the dose, who were 
 cured, who gratefully wrote to Durham House for more of the 
 true, all-protective, anti-importation, price-giving drops. 
 Your obedient Servant, 
 
 Barnabas Baskett. 
 
 April 5, 1852. 
 
 Really, Sir, it is time that Lord Derby should tell the country 
 in plain terms what is to be the policy of his Government. He 
 was raised to the political position which gave him the offer of 
 the State reins, when Lord John's hand dropped them, by the 
 Protectionist party. With no small amount of special pleading 
 did he at once evade any clear declaration, whether his was, or 
 was not, to be a Protectionist Government. He said he could 
 not reverse the present policy without the general concurrence 
 of the community ; certainly he could not make the attempt 
 with any small majority in the House of Commons. He plainly 
 declared that as soon as certain necessary measures were got 
 through he would dissolve Parliament. 
 
 I am afraid this gallant, able, and bold man is, after all, 
 about to show himself tainted with but too common official 
 duplicity. His late fencing with the Duke of Newcastle has 
 already done him much injury. As to ' Protection,' no one for 
 one moment doubts but that he has thrown that altogether 
 overboard, and yet he has not hitherto found courage to say so.
 
 1852 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 49 
 
 The real truth is, the Ministry is to fight simply as the ' Con- 
 servative Government.' It is to be a Government open to 
 conviction on every measure calculated to secure the good of 
 every class, &c, with no intention of offending any large class 
 by any unpopular measure, &c. 
 
 Allow me, Sir, here to quote from a document now before 
 me, signed by that old stager, Mr. Bankes, and his two Pro- 
 tectionist (?) colleagues : — 
 
 ' A Government is now formed, having a nobleman of 
 acknowledged talent and integrity at its head, whose avowed 
 desire to place all classes in the country on a footing equally 
 prosperous is accompanied by the announcement that he will 
 attain this object by such means as shall occasion neither strife 
 nor contention, and, above all, which shall secure to the humbler 
 classes every comfort that is now within their reach.' 
 
 This is the declaration of the Right Hon. the Judge- Advocate, 
 endorsed by, I am sure, his humbled followers — to whom ? 
 Why, to the freeholders of the county of Dorset, who have been 
 quite nauseated of late years by the unblushing way in which 
 the strength of what is called ' Protectionist principle ' has been 
 nurtured by these very men. The tenant farmers have been 
 sedulously taught to hate the Manchester and loom school ; they 
 have been flattered, toadied, humbugged to their very hearts' 
 content, with the fine prospect of a js. duty ' when we once get 
 Stanley in.' If they are not now utterly disgusted they are 
 more easily gulled than even I ever believed. All Manchester 
 could not have produced a more glaring pattern of political 
 evasion, for a present purpose, of all past profession. Were 
 Lord G. Bentinck alive it would have turned his honest heart 
 with disgust. 
 
 I know, Sir, that unhappy class, the tenant farmers, well ; 
 often do I hear from their lips, ' You are right ; we are hum- 
 bugged.' But still do I see them return to drink at the same 
 stream. Three or four lead a market. There are many ways 
 of managing those three or four. The whip and the sop are 
 alternately used ; and I must say hitherto with great effect. I 
 have now, however, some hope the farce is nearly played out ; 
 it has of late been too coarsely acted even for a market audience. 
 
 vol. 1. E
 
 50 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. April 20 
 
 Agricultural dinners have been at a discount ; the sense of the 
 auditory outgrew that of the orators. It may be said now, on 
 such occasions, of the speakers, in the words of Benjamin 
 Disraeli, in his ' Life of Bentinck ' (page 289), when speaking of 
 the efforts of the same gemis in the House of Commons, ' The 
 House would not listen to, and the reporters would not re- 
 cord, these prim philippics, elaborately prepared and precisely 
 delivered, with all the solemn conceit of a Quarter Sessions 
 
 pedant' 
 
 April 20, 1852. 
 
 Will you allow me to call your attention to some facts and 
 figures, which seem to me in danger of being overlooked in the 
 Free Trade controversy ? The facts I will adduce shall be 
 patent to any and every ordinary observer of things around him. 
 My figures are no mere dry numerals, no collection of statistical 
 enigmas, such as the Quarter Sessions pedants of Disraeli gather 
 from the Bond Street primer, to astonish and edify the bored 
 and gaping audience of a rural meeting. My figures are ani- 
 mate, they are moving, bieathing units ; you can feel their pulse ; 
 handle them as they handle beasts, they will bear it, and yet 
 prove my story. 
 
 Peers, baronets, squires, rectors, curates, tenant-farmers, 
 labourers, stand forth ; let us look at you ; we are told free 
 trade has ruined you — is it so ? 
 
 I pen these lines in Dorsetshire, the very land of ' Coverleys ; ' 
 we possess, I believe, almost the sole remaining pattern 
 ' Squire ; ' we have owners of property of every rank ; we call 
 our county agricultural to the very backbone ; hitherto many 
 have dreamt that for a real, living freetrader to hold any 
 position of respectability among us — to walk undespised — would 
 be as likely as the enlistment of a Quaker in the Guards. 
 
 Of the peers, baronets, squires, in Dorset, who can show me 
 one ruined by free trade ? Will they deny that their rents are 
 paid punctually, their land generally well farmed ? Will they 
 hesitate to challenge all England to show a tenantry in the more 
 general possession of every comfort of their class ? I have 
 means of knowing well the condition of very many Dorset 
 estates. I cannot find that even the most popular squires have
 
 1852 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 51 
 
 been compelled to sacrifice rent on the altar of free trade ; they 
 have mostly found it sufficient to return some 10 per cent, not 
 to reduce their rental to that amount. This and civil speeches, 
 expressed hopes of better times, and a regular hunting of the 
 county, has hitherto answered the purpose of the owning interest. 
 It is true some few have fairly reduced their rents and readjusted 
 the agreements with their tenants ; but, as I find in these cases 
 that no popularity has been won over those who don't readjust, 
 but who court esteem by donations and civil talk, I can't think 
 the pressure has ever reached a ruin point. 
 
 Let any man get on his horse and ride over the different 
 estates of our great holders,— will he see evidence that free trade 
 has ruined agriculture ? On the contrary, in every direction he 
 will see large sums of money being expended on farm buildings 
 on a scale and of a construction at once proving that the owners 
 of property, however they may talk despair, do not act it. 
 Within an area of twenty miles round where I now write, I will 
 venture to say more money has been expended within these six 
 years in building new farm premises and improving existing 
 buildings than was spent in forty years previous to the repeal of 
 the corn laws. 
 
 Ten years ago I was told there was not a steam-engine in 
 Dorsetshire. I believe this was not quite the fact. Within the 
 area I have spoken of above I now know myself of five in con- 
 nection with farm homesteads. As to land going out of cultiva- 
 tion, why, Sir, there will very soon scarcely be left a yard of our 
 famed downs. Year by year I have known hundreds of acres 
 broken up ; I never saw more activity displayed in this direction 
 than at this very moment ; I can find scarce one instance of 
 land which has been so broken up being allowed to return again 
 to mere pasture. Is the price of land in the market any criterion 
 of the prosperity of agriculture ? I only know of one estate 
 which has been sold in these parts of late, and I defy all denial 
 of the fact that it brought a very J ligJi fancy price. 
 
 But, I may be told, that with all this, the owners of land are 
 much pinched, and have reduced their establishments and 
 personal expenses. I do not believe it ; I cannot detect a 
 symptom of it ; on the contrary, nearly all of them add the
 
 52 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. April 20 
 
 luxury of high, fancy, amateur farming to their other costly 
 sources of enjoyment. The assessed tax returns will prove no 
 diminution in the enjoyments of our landowners ; they arc as 
 hospitable and happy as they ever were. 
 
 I shall be told the Church has suffered ; that rectors, holders 
 of commuted tithe, are suffering: it is quite true they are 
 receiving less income than formerly, and, if any men have a 
 right to get up a growl, they have ; but I cannot, as a body, 
 hear them complain ; I know many of them feel a gain in the 
 present state of things. The pressing calls on their charity 
 from the sufferings of their people are as nothing to what they 
 used to be. In very many respects housekeeping expenses are 
 lowered ; and they see daily the blessing of no longer having to 
 wrangle for their property with their parishioners. Were the 
 clergy (owners of tithe) polled by ballot throughout the land, I 
 believe there would be ten to one of white balls in favour of free 
 trade, even though they may be in some degree sufferers. I 
 need hardly say how much further the ioo/. of the curate now 
 goes than it used to do. I have it on the authority of one who 
 has every opportunity of knowing the fact, that the claims on 
 the clergy, in the shape of religious societies, and church and 
 school building, never were at any time more numerous ; they 
 never were more cheerfully and liberally met. 
 
 My next figure is that sturdy, well-dressed, healthy, respect- 
 able-looking man, of that species which fills our weekly markets 
 —the tenant-farmer. It is so stoutly asserted of this very stout 
 class that they are altogether ruined, that it requires great 
 moral courage to deny the fact. I do, however, altogether deny 
 it. An extensive owner of land trades with it ; he lets it as he 
 best may ; he is as much a trader in occupations as a liveryman 
 is in horse-hire. When the liveryman can't get customers he 
 must give up his trade ; so long as he can get them he gets the 
 best hire he can out of them, and makes more or less profit, as 
 there is more or less disposition in the public to ride and drive. 
 When he finds a steady pressure on the stable for horses, he 
 calls it a good season. He would then laugh at you if you told 
 him the hirers of horses were all ruined. I defy denial of the 
 fact that farms will let at this moment in this county at as good
 
 1852 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 53 
 
 a rent, and to as good tenants, as they ever did ; with the 
 exception of cases in which much game is preserved, I believe 
 few agents or landlords ever knew a greater demand for farms, 
 or a better class of candidates. On what reasoning can we for 
 one moment entertain the supposition that there is one particular 
 class of tradesmen, they who deal in the seed of wheat, oats, 
 and barley, in sheep and bullocks, who are ever anxious to enter 
 a business they declare to be ruinous ? I can understand an inn 
 on the great northern road remaining vacant, now the posting 
 and coaching are transferred to the rail. I could easily imagine 
 the man to be mad who took the great inn at Hartford Bridge 
 to carry on a posting and coaching business. But I cannot 
 understand why no farm remains vacant, if farming under free 
 trade is ruinous. 
 
 Now, I do happen to know that farms in this county have 
 been lately let at an increased rental to existing tenants, and I fully 
 believe the credit of the said tenants to be as good as ever at 
 their banker's, and their friends treat them as sane. That there 
 are men unfortunate as farmers is only to be expected, for what 
 trade or profession is there in which all can command success ? 
 but that fewer farmers fail than any other class of tradesmen I 
 hold to be a fact as honourable to them as a class as it is 
 declaratory of the wholesome nature of farming business. There 
 is one curious fact relative to this figure — the farmer : that the 
 chief complainers of the ' ruin ' are just those who, for years, 
 have cried ' wolf as they have chased the fox. It is consolatory 
 to hear a good-humoured lot of well-mounted men talking year 
 by year of their ruin, and yet to find that they are the first and 
 most constant in the field. Long may they be so, for so long 
 shall I believe their ruin is a mere market phantom — the crafty 
 creation of those who, for political purposes, like to keep up the 
 cry. 
 
 Now, John Styles, stand forth, honest ploughman, with 
 horned hand and good-humoured red face : — has cheap bread 
 been thy ruin ? You may well laugh ; you and Susan and the 
 children never were so well off ; and you knozv the reason why. 
 The wages have in some instances fallen since 1846, but in most 
 cases the demand for labour, from the improved system of
 
 54 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 20 
 
 farming and the amount of additional land brought under the 
 plough, has kept them up. Where even only 6s. a week is 
 received, the labourer is still better off now than I ever knew 
 him. There is not a thing he eats or wears he cannot get at a 
 less price. At the boards of guardians the work is infinitely 
 less than it used to be ; the rates have much decreased. Take 
 the children at school, or the congregations at their places of 
 worship, and who is there who will deny that, in our generation, 
 we never knew the poor so well, so respectably clad ? The rent 
 of their cottages, the contributions to their clubs, are now 
 scarcely ever in arrear. For my own part, I can say, after more 
 than twenty years' active interest in their condition, I never saw 
 them so comfortable as I have known them to be the last five 
 years. That which is the result of my own observation is 
 corroborated to me by their own evidence, cheerfully given me. 
 They have no need now to purchase dirty foul ' tailings ' at 6s. 
 the bushel. They do not take it as a favour to buy the meat of 
 animals which die in the field at 4^. the pound. They can get 
 good cheap bread, enough of it, and now and then can buy a 
 bit of real butcher's meat. I know you will be told this is all 
 untrue ; that they prefer dear bread and higher wages, &c. I 
 should like this test applied :■ — Let a day be appointed on which 
 every man who is for cheap bread shall give himself a holiday, 
 i.e. lose the day's wages. I doubt whether a hundred men 
 would go to work in Dorset on that day. 
 
 A mechanic puts it to me thus : — ' You should not talk only 
 of your labourers. Look at me and my class. If I have a sick 
 wife, or crippled child, it is in vain for me to go to the board for 
 relief, or even for the doctor ; — look, then, at what cheap food and 
 clothing are to us folk, who have to find all out of our earnings. 
 We gain tenfold more than the labourer.' He is right ; and 
 since the cheap loaf the building societies of this class have 
 thriven, and hundreds of the members, year by year, are 
 becoming freeholders. 
 
 Once more — a fact, not a figure. Will any auctioneer deny 
 that farming implements and farm stock are, and have been for 
 some time, fetching a price astonishing under any circumstances, 
 but almost miraculous in the days of ruin ?
 
 1852 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 55 
 
 For the present, Sir, I have done. I will only express my 
 firm conviction, on the above hastily sketched data and an 
 abundance more of which I am possessed, that the country will 
 not give up one hair of free trade in food, that the Protectionists 
 themselves know it, and have not the least intention of further 
 exposing themselves by making the attempt. 
 
 Lord Derby is for the time being their ' idol,' Cobdcn their 
 ' evil one.' They affect an affection for the former to disguise 
 their hate of the latter. The chief worshippers are those who 
 are intoxicated with the idea of a Quarter Sessions Ministry ; it 
 is a tribute to their order. They just at present can command 
 the voices and some of the votes of their market Janissaries. 
 The said Janissaries are, however, well aware they have been 
 •used, not honoured, in the service. Six months hence, when 
 Protection will be corrupt in the tomb, there will be a just cry 
 for an adjustment of rent — I mean just as regards those land- 
 lords who have taught their tenantry the ruin cry. I think I 
 know what will be the upshot of that demand. Why take the 
 farm, why hold it, if you are losing ? I asked lately the best 
 judge in this county whether we were likely to have many 
 appeals against the income-tax from tenants who could swear 
 their profits had not realised their rents ; he smiled at my 
 ignorance. 
 
 April 26, 1852. 
 
 There are those who think that Lord Derby is postponing 
 the dissolution of Parliament — his appeal to the intelligence of 
 the country — in order that the party disposed to support him 
 may gain strength. I am one of those who believe his policy to 
 be simply this, — he wishes to see the cause of Protection die its 
 natural death before his supporters, the so-called Protectionists, 
 appear on the hustings. Protection is very sick indeed ; like 
 the end of a rushlight, there will be some wavering, some 
 sputtering — a hiss or two, then quiet, a nasty smell, and all will 
 be over. 
 
 But, Sir, there is some danger in this policy. Already in 
 some counties cool-headed men begin to regard the days of the 
 coming strife with apprehension. It cannot be denied but that 
 the working classes of this country are determined the bread tax
 
 56 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. April 26 
 
 shall never be again imposed. We have had many great 
 agitating questions, but they were such as appealed to the classes 
 who live on bread, meat, wine, and beer. They were questions 
 affecting men's political feelings, coming home to the powers of 
 mind which deal with objects of mental ambition, which touched 
 on hereditary or class prejudices. The boundary of the agita- 
 tion was as to its depth— to the men who could just spell a 
 political tract, or who had a taste for democratic oratory. Men 
 who had only leisure for three operations — working, feeding, 
 sleeping — took no real interest in such questions ; they might 
 lend a hand in a disturbance, but it was from the love of mis- 
 chief or for hire. 
 
 The cheap bread question comes home to every labouring 
 man, to every wife, to every child who can remember the slices 
 cut when the loaf cost \od., and can compare them with its 
 present slice. Not only is there a voice, at least three times a 
 day, speaking to the working man in every syllable of his every 
 meal, telling him how free trade has blessed him, but he sees 
 it in his furniture, in the new clock, the extra chair, the extra 
 saucepan or fryingpan. Nay, he folds the truth to him at 
 night ; he wraps his children in it — it speaks from the lately 
 purchased blankets. He and they carry it to God's worship 
 with them, in new and good clothing. 
 
 Is it wise, Sir, to keep these millions talking and thinking of 
 the most remote chance of their being robbed of this ever 
 speaking blessing? Are there any men more capable of judging 
 accurately of the prosperity of the landowner and the farmer, 
 the capability of land, than the agricultural labourers ? Con- 
 versant with the business which forms their life's toil, they are 
 close observers of their employers. They are quick to mark 
 any symptom of ruin as they are to note every proof of extrava- 
 gance. None know better than they do that there is no one 
 thing under heaven so generally beyond their reach as the hire 
 of an acre of ground ; that nothing is so grudged them — for 
 nothing is more coveted by those above them — than land, land 
 to hire, by the very men who say to till land with a view to 
 profit is now madness. These men are now witnesses of pre- 
 paration for a struggle between two parties — one, a party which
 
 1S52 FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 57 
 
 fought its utmost to keep a tax on food, which when beaten in 
 that fight has ever held the language of a furious determination 
 at some future day to retrieve its defeat and again have food 
 taxed ; the other party that which, whatever its former opinions, 
 has now come to the conviction that free trade has been a 
 general blessing, and, therefore, that it shall be maintained. 
 
 The party which would tax the poor man's loaf has now a 
 man as Minister whom it regards as their great champion — a man 
 who, unruly and unruled, has failed to hold an abiding place in 
 any one pure political party. He lent himself to their purpose ; 
 brought eloquence, a great name, and exaggerated zeal to their 
 selfish cause ; they paid his price, gave him all an English party 
 can give of hero-worship, lifted him to the position which placed 
 the Government in his hands. Lord Derby is reputed to be a 
 man of great courage, but even he shrinks from a contest with 
 the defenders of cheap bread. For once the people uplift a 
 banner on which the boldest Minister who ever breathed dares 
 not to lay a finger. It has been their special lot to earn bread, 
 not to inherit it — to give the sweat of their brow as its purchase 
 money ; they have not yet spoken out, for they don't believe 
 the power exists which dares again to tax their food. But, let 
 the contest come ; I know them well, and well I know they will 
 speak with a voice, and act with an energy, which for quiet's sake 
 the country might well be spared. 
 
 I, Sir, am one of those openly accused of assisting to make 
 this a class question. Where is the power which can make it 
 anything else ? I will do all so poor an instrument can to pro- 
 test against a tax which bears the hardest on the class whose 
 lot, under every aspect, is ever one most hard. Tax luxury, 
 tax extravagance, nay, tax the comforts of life, but let the very 
 staff of existence at least go free. Is the contentment which 
 has of late so blessed the poor man's home, founded on any sur- 
 plusage of either ease or food ? Is there any margin to the 
 labourer's page of life from which you may take a portion to aid 
 any other class ? I can conceive no more debasing an occupa- 
 tion than that of going from house to house, from village to 
 village, to ask for votes for Protection to the owner and occupier 
 of land at the cost of the man by whose muscles it is tilled.
 
 5 S THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. April 26 
 
 With lips dewed with the squire's wine or the tenant's good 
 strong ale, gently but bountifully dropped on good repasts of 
 earth's best things, home grown and imported, on they go — the 
 hired lawyer, the sturdy farmer, the Protectionist members — 
 nay, shame ! sometimes the ministers of peace — passing cottage 
 after cottage in which wine is never tasted but at the cost of 
 medicine, i.e. sickness, in which meat is seldom known and bread 
 hardly earned ; on they go, a merry, triumphing party, seeking 
 aid in scenes of poverty to have the poor made still poorer, 
 asking votes for Lord Derby's Government, power for the party 
 who, to keep up rents, would keep down the condition of the 
 class on whose patient toil all rent depends. 
 
 God be thanked, very many of the great landowners, the 
 ennobled and the untitled, are now on the poor man's side, and 
 the poor know it. I say that to send the question for decision to 
 the hustings is to provoke something little short of a revolution. 
 The poor are loyal ; they will never believe it is the Queen's 
 wish their food should again be taxed. But when masses are 
 moved without justice, it is not a contest in which reason will 
 rule ; when the movement enlists all of every age and sex of 
 that class which is the least educated, who shall say where the 
 contest shall end ? 
 
 S. G. O. preceded Mr. Bright in his agitation for a free breakfast 
 table. At the date of this letter tea was taxed at the rate of 2s. 2\d. 
 per pound, and was gradually reduced, first to is., and finally, in June 
 1865, to 6d. per pound. The letter was alluded to in the House of Com- 
 mons by Mr. Walpole, and was generally attributed to Mr. Haliburton. 
 
 Pity the Teapot of the Poor. 
 
 April 26, 1 86 1. 
 We want to say a word for ourselves. We are only common 
 labouring men. Our work takes us out in all weathers, and is 
 done all day at no little cost in shoe-leather. Shoes are very 
 dear. We eat hearty ; our children, like rooks after plough, are 
 always looking for grub when the cupboard door is open ; loaves 
 are very dear, and among us we consume many ; the potatoes 
 were digged few, small, and the most of them rotten. The 
 single ones of us may get a drop of beer a day ; many of us
 
 iS6i FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION 59 
 
 scarce ever tastes it, and somehow we never knows beer to get 
 cheaper, let barley be up or down ; brewer's clerk tell us it is 
 the malt-tax. Butter and milk ain't within our reach at all. 
 The masters all are down o' the mouth, and true enough they 
 have had bad times lately ; we see no hope of better wages. 
 As to a morsel of meat, it's seldom now we can see a bit of it, 
 were it but to make a bit of broth for a wife down or ailing 
 child. We don't ask the Parliament gentlemen for cheap sugar— 
 we've learned to do without it ; our children don't ask for sweets. 
 We live on bread ; we wipe it over with a bit of lard, when 
 we can get it ; we wash it dozen with tea ; at all our meals this 
 is our drink ; we tell no lie about it,— tea is a more to us than 
 all the wines and beers is to the gentlefolk. We pays very dear 
 for it ; shop folk tell us it is the tax upon it as makes it come 
 so high. We has to buy it, little enough at a time ; it don't 
 stand us in less than 4s. 6d. the pound. It ain't, neither, what 
 it used to be ; it makes the water very dark, but such as we gets 
 now, the women tells us, is half hedge-robbings. However, as 
 poor folk, we don't expect the best of anything. We men work 
 on it, wives wash on it, children gets bigger on it. When the 
 bread was cheaper we miss'd the potatoes less. Bread is now so 
 up that six days' sweat don't fill the three shelves ; two or three 
 year agone it filled five of them, and there was a bit of bacon 
 besides, and there were a good heap of potatoes in the back 
 place. 
 
 Folk do say that Parliament is going to give us paper cheaper, 
 and, though we have licked the Chinaman into selling us plenty 
 of tea, the tax upon it ain't to be meddled with. Do, Sir, say a 
 word for us down on your big paper (my boy carries it up to 
 parson from post every day). We poor folk use little paper any 
 way ; it ain't either meat, drink, or lodging to us. What we 
 finds to use up at all is a poked into our doors by the quack 
 doctors, cheap Johns, and such folk ; it don't come much in our 
 way a wrapping up parcels. As for the books, well, we has 
 some ; we now and then buy one at the door, and the children 
 gets 'em through parson's daughters ; they are just astonishing 
 cheap, pictures and all. The value of three quartern loaves will 
 2ive us two or three of the best of books, and as for tracts and
 
 60 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 26, 1861 
 
 such like, they are nearly gived away. Many of our single folk 
 of the farm get the ' Ramfold Express,' our newspaper, for a penny 
 a-week ; they club to take it in. 'Twas there we saw the gentle- 
 folk were a-going to leave us to bad tea and dear, and give us 
 cheaper paper. 
 
 We don't say as knowledge ain't a good thing. Our parsons 
 and chapel preachers gets it out of books as are made of paper ; 
 were there no paper they could not teach us much ; because 
 paper is so cheap they takes in the learning easy, and then give 
 it us poor folk. This be all right. If times get very good again, 
 and taxes were less upon our tea drink, we should not grudge 
 paper being ever so cheap, that we poor could use it after our 
 way just as gentlefolks. But we don't put the wrapper of our 
 ounce into teapot ; we can't turn it to no profit. We've been 
 and turned the matter over, as we sat in barn eating our bread 
 and drinking the cold tea. We wanted parson to write to 
 Chancellor of the Chequers about it, but he ain't a interfering 
 man. One of us minds a man down here who wrote to ' Times,' 
 and spoke up for us, so we got up this, and sends it, hoping you 
 will let us have our say, down on your paper. 
 
 We respectfully asks the gentlemen to give us cheaper tea 
 anyhow ; if they can do this and make the paper cheaper too, 
 we are most agreeable, but tea is the inside of the nut ; it won't 
 help us that the wrapper be made cheaper if the stuff in it is 
 left dear. We are very quiet, hard-working folk ; there be few 
 to speak up for us about taxes, because we don't often care to 
 speak up for ourselves, even if we know'd how. We ain't town 
 folk ; they can talk out and get helped. Do, Sir, say a word for 
 us about the teapot ; it is always a-brewing, and there isn't 
 nothing which makes a greater cry in our houses than when the 
 teas are not to be had by all, young and old. 
 Put this in, we will bless you. 
 
 Seven Dorset Labourers at Midday Tea. 
 
 Rushbottom Barn.
 
 6i 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 FAMINE IN INDIA. 
 
 Twenty-five million persons were affected by the Bengal famine of 
 1873-4. An expenditure of 6,500,000/. was made before the close of 
 the famine. The Earl of Northbrook, an old friend of S. G. 0., was 
 Governor-General, and, with Sir Richard Temple, fought the famine 
 with singular skill, determination, and success. Abundance of rain fell 
 in September 1874, and the crisis was surmounted with a comparatively 
 small loss of life, contrasting in this respect with the appalling loss of 
 life in the famine of 1877, when Lord Northbrook had relinquished the 
 Viceroyalty. S. G. O.'s experience in Ireland in 1847, and in Lancashire 
 in 1862, had charged his mind with the principles to be followed in 
 dealing with a famine-stricken people, and his love for medical science 
 increased the weight of his authority. 
 
 March 11, 1S74. 
 
 Will you kindly permit your old correspondent to say a few 
 words on the above subject, being led to do so by your own 
 leading article in yesterday's issue, and the letter of Lord Law- 
 rence ? The Bishop of Manchester seems to me to view this 
 awful Indian crisis as one the burden of which, so far as England 
 is to help to meet it, should be laid on the entire public ; that 
 the expenditure should be, pure and simple, that of the Govern- 
 ment, to be recouped by drawing from national funds ; and 
 thus, I presume, he would argue, every taxpayer would have his 
 share, let it be what it may, of proportional contribution to meet 
 this call on our common humanity. 
 
 At first sight, I am free to confess, I was inclined to favour 
 this view of Dr. Fraser's. I am now, however, fully persuaded 
 that such a course is one of, if I may use the expression, too 
 cold-blooded a nature to be consistent with our national cha- 
 racter. It may be very right to throw on the Government the 
 utmost responsibility in such a crisis. We have a right to
 
 62 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March II 
 
 demand that no one life should be lost which the action of the 
 Government, as such, can save. It is, however, indisputable 
 that departmental vigilance, zeal, and expenditure must inevit- 
 ably be subject to so much official regulation that, grapple as 
 it may with such a crisis, it can only deal with its effects within 
 certain more or less defined limits. Outside such limits there 
 will be full margin for the utmost exercise of private benevo- 
 lence. Along the broad road of food destitution it will be for 
 the ruling powers to meet — to save — those who stagger famine- 
 stricken on it ; I have every confidence this will be done, but I 
 feel well assured there will yet be gleanings for mercy, as well 
 on that road as on hundreds of by-ways where charity, purely 
 official, would scarcely recognise a field for its exercise. 
 
 Those who have had any experience in the work of official 
 action and private benevolence among a people famine- stricken, 
 know full well the value of the latter, not to supersede, but to 
 supplement, the former. The Government may have a large 
 staff of inspectors and other officials ; districts may be mapped 
 out and brought under the most minute official inspection ; 
 reams of paper may be daily used for ' reports,' ' depots ' may 
 be established ; well supplied works may be set on foot to be 
 well overlooked, yet, with all the will and the utmost power to 
 save, thousands, alas ! may yet perish. 
 
 There is a listless apathy begotten of famine that seems to 
 paralyse brain and limb. There is a stage when the heart cares 
 not to seek the food to save the life, panic-stricken to a degree 
 which almost courts death. It is a disease, this unfed hunger, 
 which comes gradually on a whole household ; they waste in 
 common, and as they waste the fate which is on all seems to 
 lose any terror for any one. 
 
 Official work leaves little margin for sentiment ; it is not, 
 perhaps, a hard and fast line of benevolent action, but it must 
 in its very nature be so far hard, so far limited, in that it has to 
 guard, as a trustee of national funds, against anything and 
 everything which may either foster imposition or lead to extra- 
 vagant expenditure. 
 
 Christian benevolence stops not to inquire whether famine 
 or pestilence came on the sufferer through his own negligence
 
 1 874 FAMINE IN INDIA 63 
 
 or imprudence ; it asks not how he came to be travelling the 
 road which led to either ; it finds him in want of bread or heal- 
 ing, it cannot let him die if it has bread or medicine to give 
 him. He who for Christ's sake becomes an alms-bearer is not 
 content to know there are ' depots ' where food may be pur- 
 chased cheap or given ; works where food may be lightly earned ; 
 he is glad these exist, but his work is to seek out those who can 
 reach no depot, who may have not yet reached the depth of 
 destitution to obtain such help — those who could not do the 
 work to earn the food to save life, who are as yet not so utterly 
 ruined as to have claim for its gift. 
 
 I believe that what any man as Viceroy can do Lord 
 Northbrook will do to meet the awful strife with this famine on 
 which he has entered. A man of long official experience, cool 
 in action, warm of heart, of great personal activity, one who 
 would leave no stone unturned to get the best information, 
 possessed of it, has all the ability to turn it to the best account — 
 we may rest assured none will sorrow more than he will over 
 any lives lost he has been powerless to save. I trust, then, 
 English sympathy may now rouse itself to the high and holy 
 task of seeking to aid his efforts by supplementing the means 
 he officially has to take to save life. Let us bear in mind how 
 nobly India poured her voluntary subscriptions into our Lanca- 
 shire relief fund in the days ot the cotton famine. Let there be 
 no hesitation as to how the money subscribed may be best 
 applied. Famine waits not on deliberation of details of help ; 
 we must trust those who in India know best how to deal with 
 our alms. It is well to pray that they may be wisely directed ; 
 our first and pressing work is to send the supply, that what they 
 see best to do be quickly done. 
 
 August 23, 1874. 
 
 In common, I hope, with a very large proportion of your 
 readers, I have read your able article on the famine in India, 
 appealing, as it does, to our common Christian humanity to aid 
 the Indian Famine Fund. 
 
 There can be no shadow of doubt that this famine has 
 assumed features already awful to contemplate ; alas ! in all 
 cases of famine-stricken lands the worst is not when first the
 
 C-4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. August 23 
 
 pressure for food is felt. It is not simply the case of a large 
 population at the moment dying for want of food ; this in itself 
 is sufficiently appalling to those whose duty it is to seek all 
 possible means of food supply at any and every cost ; it has, 
 however, to be done under the day by day conviction that while 
 tens of thousands are actually starved to death from want of 
 food, double — nay, treble — the number have arrived at a con- 
 dition in which no supply of food, no care, no medical aid can 
 save them. The women, the children, the constitutionally weak 
 at once succumb under the pressure of the first wave of want. 
 The stronger sex, the more healthy, the adults, are, on bad food, 
 and this in insufficient supply, breaking up to die after a manner 
 easily recognised, and, when so, seen to be hopeless of remedy. 
 It is, in fact — all experience has proved it — in the rear of the 
 actual starvation field that the famine foe is most to be dreaded ; 
 here help comes too late, food fails, for the assimilating power 
 necessary for its sustaining aid is absolutely gone. 
 
 Those whose sad duty or whose inclination has led them to 
 action in a famine district know also that panic arising from 
 the sense that what they now suffer from some want is but the 
 foretaste of what they must come to from want of all, works to 
 produce an apathy of mind, which, casting aside all hope, de- 
 pressing all mental energy, becomes in itself a disease, as an 
 auxiliary of death most powerful. 
 
 I would say, then, let not the English public judge of the 
 real call for sympathy by the deaths recorded, but let it bear in 
 mind that to arrest mortality means must be found to meet it at 
 the very threshold of the field it seeks to occupy ; those who 
 have not yet begun to starve may be saved ; I wish I could 
 believe that any amount of food and money could do more than 
 try to save some of these. Of those actually stricken few, alas ! 
 can be saved. 
 
 To myself, now stricken in years, having had some little 
 personal means of observation in scenes where war and famine 
 have dealt thousands to death, the daily pictures of my daily 
 papers appear in somewhat different lights from those in which 
 many regard them. War at best, let it come, as from time to 
 time it must come, from causes held to be necessary, is, and
 
 1874 FAMINE IN INDIA 6} 
 
 ever must be, simply the use of all that science can produce to 
 kill, maim, lacerate the beings whom in days of peace ordinary 
 civilisation assumes the power to defend and preserve from 
 death and injury. We are fascinated by the perusal of the 
 courage shown by the belligerents ; their respective movements 
 are watched as some champion match of chess may be ; we read 
 the one or other may have lost 10,000 men killed, and left 
 thousands wounded on the field ; we wait to read— what next ; 
 and so on to the bitter end — it always is most bitter ; day by 
 day we read the bloody chronicle, until our humanity seems 
 shunted by our curiosity, this again the more intense as we may 
 have strong feeling for one or other of the parties to the strife. 
 
 The present war adds fresh features to the ghastliness of all 
 wars. God alone knows how much is true of what we have 
 now to read. ' Atrocity ' before the war had become an almost 
 household word ; what is it now? If there is in all told but a 
 tithe of truth, the present war land must be a sort of hell on 
 earth ; no army can, as I believe, carry with it anything like 
 proper provision for its own wounded ; their treatment at bett 
 must, and will ever, let extern charity do its utmost, be far short 
 of what is needed to secure them the help their cases demand. 
 I do not believe that in the present war, from the nature of the 
 country and the nature of the people invaded, anything the least 
 like proper hospital and ambulance appliances can be found ; I 
 feel equally well assured that the invaders, from causes most 
 obvious, can do no more than make but poor provision in the 
 same direction ; outside the killed list we have then an immense 
 margin of suffering, much of it worse than death, most of it lead- 
 ing to it. We have all the horrors of ordinary war, devastation 
 of homes, the crushing out from countless numbers of both sexes 
 and all ages of home life. We have the worst features of insur- 
 rection aiding war invasion. Revenge rules, and brutal lust 
 works in vengeance, after a fashion so disgusting, so degrading 
 to all humanity, that, with reverence be it said, it courts fire 
 from heaven. 
 
 I shall not wonder, Sir, if for a time this awful scene does 
 so fascinate us, so absorb our interest, so call upon our com- 
 passion even as it excites our disgust, that the calmer wave of 
 
 VOL. 1. F
 
 66 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. u 
 
 famine destruction may not carry the appeal to our hearts it 
 ought to do. All that gilds over war — its reports of brave 
 deeds and bold strategy — is here wanting ; a people dies in 
 silence save for the children's cry, who see not why they hunger. 
 The victims fall here and there. Scarce sheltered by the home 
 in ruin, they, like it, decay and fall ; mere framework of the fed 
 life, they faint to death ; unwounded by the weapons of other 
 war, want has poisoned the fountain of their life ; yet these, 
 thus fated in their tens of thousands — albeit not of our colour 
 or our creed — have the claim of countrymen on us, for they 
 are fellow-subjects ; yes, and in all the dominions over which 
 the British Queen rules, no subjects are to be found who more 
 patiently have fought the battle of life under her rule. 
 
 Let us then look to it, and that at once, that the compassion 
 which can beget the charity which takes English alms to the 
 victims of war, forget not that there is urgent need for its in- 
 stant exercise, to the fullest, to aid that fund now raising, by 
 which we may hope, with God's blessing, yet to snatch thou- 
 sands of our kind from a fate, begotten not of national ambition 
 or political intrigue, but simply from a visitation of Providence, 
 to which we ourselves any year may be liable. 
 
 September II, 1877. 
 
 We are all well read in war slaughter, and have had for many 
 years, from time to time, such an abundance of testimony from 
 war fields of all the horror and suffering war begets, that 
 Christian civilisation has long since organised, and held ready 
 for use, means for help on battle-fields. We have been content 
 to arrive at the conclusion, when two or more nations deliber- 
 ately set armies in motion to destroy life, to maim and lacerate, 
 to spread far and wide around the scenes of bloodshed, misery, 
 and ruin, the disruption of all that made social life that of 
 peace and comfort — that then, as fire-engines rush to burning 
 houses, the Red Cross banner should be hoisted, and our alms 
 freely given to subsidise the miserable deficiency of the pro- 
 vision for wounded found to exist in almost every war. The 
 real fact is — we all well know it — no country on the face of the 
 earth can furnish anything like the provisions necessary to meet
 
 1877 FAMINE IN INDIA 67 
 
 the real call for ambulance and hospital efficiency in any pro- 
 longed war. The conveyance of the munitions of war, its live 
 fighting plant, the commissariat, the vast amount of supple- 
 mentary impedimenta, forbid anything but a very meagre pro- 
 vision for field hospitals, staff of skilled surgeons, or even 
 stretcher-bearers to glean the bloody fields. On paper, at the 
 first move of an army, there may appear a large amount of such 
 provision ; but once on the field, and for ever changing that 
 field, pursuing or pursued, advancing or retreating, paper pro- 
 vision has rapidly to be discounted, and is found to be utterly 
 unequal to the demand made upon it. 
 
 I, Sir, ever welcome as an honour to our land that at least 
 English men and women have come forth with money, gone 
 forth in person, to try and alleviate the sufferings of the wounded, 
 with no one question, whether they are thus found on one side 
 or the other ; but, Sir, I know well the different aspect of work 
 among wounded to that done among the famine-stricken. With 
 the former, they have bravely done the work for which they 
 have been carefully trained ; what they suffer is in the nature of 
 a contingency they have been also trained to expect. They have 
 met their fate with the existing consolation, it came on them in 
 the path of duty. As with the rank and file, so with their 
 officers ; all alike share the same danger, alike meet the same 
 fate ; they have the pension and medal in view ; as they lie, all 
 broken as they may be, they are yet ever cheered more or less 
 by the sense that what has come on them has been for their 
 nation. This community of sentiment lends no little power of 
 support in their suffering. 
 
 I do rejoice that England is not found wanting in her 
 endeavours to help those war victims ; I would not be the 
 advocate of any course which should seem to turn aside this 
 outlet for our common humanity. I am satisfied there is wealth 
 enough, Christian compassion sufficient, for the Red Cross 
 cause, and yet ample margin for appeal in favour of famine 
 succour. What I do feel is the difficulty of bringing home to 
 the hearts and minds of my fellow-countrymen the real features 
 of a famine-stricken people. No pen, I know, is really equal to 
 the task. There is a deadly sameness in the tale to be told that
 
 68 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Sept. n 
 
 shuts out that fresh and fresh sensational appeal which war 
 scenes afford. Here we have had no previous education teach- 
 ing what a fate it is to starve. There has been no foreboding 
 of a time when, houseless and wanderers, tens of thousands 
 must stagger forth from homes fallen, whole families too 
 weakened to walk at all, to walk, for very life's sake, anywhere 
 where one atom of food can be found. In this battle of life for 
 life itself there is altogether wanting one single element of all 
 that goes to support the combatant in war. It is one ghastly 
 crowd joining other such increasing crowds. They need tell no 
 tale as they mingle ; want is stamped on all alike ; and, as one 
 after another falls, none can feel hope their own fall can be long 
 deferred. 
 
 There is little wailing in that death march ; the home that 
 sheltered is no more ; but one home, not on earth, but below it, 
 is the sole prospect of family reunion. Men with some strength 
 yet aim at reaching where they have heard of ' relief food.' See 
 the wretched, sinking mothers still struggling to nestle at the 
 breast, which has no support to give, the infant, fieshless, too far 
 crone to cry. The crew of some sinking vessel have been fed to 
 the moment in which, in despair, they rushed to the boats, which 
 seem to give some chance of life. In them starvation has in- 
 duced mania ; it has come suddenly on them — found them in 
 health, left them ' the locked out ' from food. The madness of 
 their hunger has driven them, we know, to food abhorrent to 
 contemplate. Such cases, thank God ! have been rare ; but 
 how have they stricken every reader of them with horror ! The 
 sufferers might have been counted on our fingers. Not so is it 
 with the famished on whom starvation has crept, not rushed ; 
 here day by day they have still, as men will do, yet hoped for 
 life, even as they felt and saw around them its staff rotting in 
 their grasp. That slow, creeping apathy, so well known an 
 element in this visitation, has gradually starved down brain 
 power ; there is no mania, no fierce struggle for food abhorrent ; 
 they will grope the soil for root food, pluck anything that may 
 seem to feed, and, as they thus weaken and waste, become hope- 
 less of their own lives, scarce roused to feel the death of those
 
 1 877 FAMINE IN INDIA 69 
 
 they love. And all this not the fate of a few, but of tens of 
 
 thousands. 
 
 I, Sir, have no shadow of doubt but that the Indian Govern 
 
 ment, the Indian people, will do their utmost to breast this 
 
 death stream and save where possible. It would be a shame tc 
 
 doubt the determination of the Home Government to do its 
 
 duty. But, Sir, I hold this visitation of Providence to be a 
 
 knocking at the door of Compassion's chamber in every English 
 
 heart, as it is also at the door of the Nation's Government to 
 
 j 
 read the present lesson as a warning not to neglect all possible 
 
 means of future safeguard against future recurrence of such a 
 
 crisis.
 
 ;o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 24 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Until quite recently there was no public provision for education in 
 England. It is difficult for those who have lived in the era of School 
 Boards to conceive the darkness and ignorance that formerly prevailed 
 throughout England and Ireland, and the widespread antipathy towards 
 any measures for enlightening the minds of the labouring population. In 
 1834 the Government began the system of annual grants (the first was 
 20,000/.) which continued until the Committee of the Privy Council on 
 Education was constituted for the distribution of the money. In 1846, 
 and later, the subject of education began to occupy a large share of public 
 and parliamentary attention. Disappointment at the results of what had 
 hitherto been done pervaded the country. The very name of ' educa- 
 tion ' had passed into a by-word. The clergy were discontented with 
 the then state of things ; for the poor remained aloof from the Church. 
 The moral and religious condition of the English peasantry was such 
 as to display the negligence with which their rulers had dealt with 
 the education of the masses. S. G. O., with the use of home truths 
 forcibly expressed, compares the formal education with the real educa- 
 tion of the country — the name with the thing. His capacity for dealing 
 with the realities of life was never more clearly exhibited than when 
 dealing with the educational question. 
 
 November 24, 1846. 
 
 What is education ? There is a great talk about it, and it is 
 
 said that we are about to have it made accessible to the nation 
 
 1 
 at large ; the word itself is linked in our imagination to certain 
 
 unpicturesque brick buildings with whitewashed interiors, fitted 
 
 up with deal benches, slates, maps, books, and a master for 
 
 boys ; with a mistress, and the additional accompaniment of 
 
 certain masses of calico and linen, scissors, tapes, and needles, 
 
 for girls ; the benefit of such instruction being offered to the 
 
 rising generation at weekly sums varying from 2d. to \d. ; the 
 
 chief superintending power either the parochial clergyman or 
 
 some appointed committee, assisted by a minister of some of
 
 1846 EDUCATION 71 
 
 the denominations ; the expenses, over and above the sums re- 
 ceived from the pupils, being defrayed by local subscription, 
 aided in many cases by grants from the National, British and 
 Foreign, or other educational society. I presume, Sir, the intended 
 national scheme of education will cither increase the number of 
 those existing establishments, under certain conditions requiring 
 the application of the modern improvements in the art of educa- 
 tion, or it will establish additional schools on some new and so- 
 called comprehensive plan, by which the authors of it hope to 
 make education come-at-able and palatable to persons of all 
 those particular creeds or no creeds whose religious scruples at 
 present shut them out from the benefits of existing schools. 
 
 Far be it from me at the present moment to say one word 
 for or against the idea of a national all and no creed-including 
 system of education. It may be a possibility ; this is an age 
 of wonders ; and not the least wonderful feature of the age 
 is its malleability of opinion. Some bold theorist may strike 
 out some method of imparting all useful knowledge without 
 endangering the existence of the one absolutely needful know- 
 ledge. Whilst we wait patiently for the development of the 
 new plan for schools, I think we may, with some profit, proceed 
 to consider how much schools, as yet, have had to do with the 
 education of the people. Hitherto we seem to have acted as 
 though to instruct a population merely meant to submit it, 
 when young, to a certain course of instruction within the above- 
 mentioned buildings for some four or five years, more or less, 
 with the accompaniment of a regular attendance on the Sabbath 
 at some place of public worship. We have tried, or rather we 
 arc now trying, to bring this course of instruction to the highest 
 perfection. Modern ingenuity and modern zeal have, by care- 
 fully training masters and mistresses, enabled them to train boys 
 and girls into really wonderful feats of memory, to bring them 
 under a most marvellous subjection to the word of command ; 
 if we are to trust in the truth of modern reports of school 
 inspection, there is every hope that the next generation will be 
 a most learned one. It doubtless will ; but I fear, if things 
 continue as at present, it will be a very wicked and troublesome 
 one. Let these intellect factories be brought to the highest pos-
 
 72 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 24 
 
 siblc state of perfection — let them become so scattered through 
 the land, and so accessible to all people, that none need live to 
 the age of twelve or thirteen without having been forced into 
 the highest state of intellectual and moral perfection which their 
 individual capacities will admit of; — I assert, that there will 
 be, if other matters remain as they now exist, a school yet to be 
 passed through, not merely calculated to counteract all that is 
 valuable which may have been learned, but directly constituted 
 for the destruction of all the moral training which may have 
 been acquired, the perversion of the intellectual to the very 
 worst of purposes. 
 
 A nation highly civilised will surely seek, as the result 
 of her people's education at her expense, that they shall be 
 reared in honest, decent, and orderly habits of life ; this is 
 the very lowest return which she will expect for her capital 
 when invested for such a purpose. The man who wishes to 
 grow one particular crop in any one particular field, is not con- 
 tent with merely taking the necessary steps, however costly they 
 may be, to fit the soil for the seed, so that that seed shall 
 find in it all that it needs from the soil to secure its healthy 
 growth ; he does something more— he takes especial pains that 
 no noxious weeds shall grow up with the crop, or grow so near 
 to it as to in any way injure it. So should a nation act, in seek- 
 ing to rear a population in honest, decent, and orderly habits ; 
 but not so does our nation act ; on the contrary, whilst for 
 years past we have talked of, and sought for, every possible 
 thing which could make the school a field for honest, decent, 
 and orderly training, we have allowed the scholar to grow up 
 exposed to all that can tempt to dishonesty, obliterate decency, 
 and nurture a spirit of lawless discontent. Our national refuges 
 for the indigent have become schools of contamination, horri- 
 fying even the chaplains of our gaols ; the records of those 
 gaols form thick folio volumes, proving the existence of an 
 immense amount of petty crime, clearly traceable to poverty, 
 undeserved, exposed to temptation that cannot be justified. As 
 to loyalty, which in the masses means attachment to, and respect 
 for, the authorities amongst them who represent and execute 
 the laws, of which the Sovereign is the real head, who can
 
 1846 EDUCATION 73 
 
 doubt but that we have, as it were, by Act of Parliament, done 
 our best to weaken that attachment, to turn respect for the law 
 into a scarcely concealed hate of it and all connected with its 
 administration ? 
 
 In the school we teach honesty, — 'Thou shalt not steal' is 
 our text. We press on our young the value of industry ; that, 
 earning honestly all that they need, they may not be tempted to 
 transgress this law of God and man. Loss of character, the 
 gaol, the tread-wheel, and a future judgment, each and all are 
 held up to fright and control the evil disposition ; the scholar, 
 with these lessons of wisdom still fresh in his mind, goes to his 
 home to learn how his parents and brothers and sisters are 
 to be kept in food and fuel on ys. a week, with the hope of 
 earning enough to pay for rent and clothing out of the extra 
 wages of the extra toil of harvest. The father sees his family 
 wanting food ; he sees game on his master's farm, which he 
 hears that master curse as a nuisance ; he becomes a poacher, 
 first to get food for those at home, but soon to purchase that 
 warmth and mirth at the beershop which his home knows not. 
 The mother will not see her very little ones cry from cold, when 
 her bigger ones can slip out at dusk, just to get a stick or two 
 out of a hedge or a slip or two from some neighbouring railing. 
 Father, mother, and children were all taught not to steal — told 
 its consequence here and hereafter — taught to pray at least 
 twice a day ' that they might not be led into temptation.' The 
 poacher is caught and sent to gaol, the little wood thief is 
 caught and sent there too ; both now learn that the school 
 lesson, with its warning, was all right enough. Those who know 
 their history are apt to argue that those who find schools for 
 the poor should have some regard to the amount of trial in after- 
 life to which the school-learned lesson is to be exposed. Pharaoh's 
 exaction of the tale of bricks without straw was hardly greater 
 tyranny than that which gives a little teaching in the school to 
 fight against overwhelming temptation in the home. 
 
 As to rearing our population in the common decent ways of 
 civilised life, I do not know how the new system is to set about 
 the task ; but I do know what all systems have hitherto had to 
 contend against. Let their worst enemies say their worst of the
 
 74 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 24 
 
 worst of our existing schools ; I yet believe they have taken all 
 common care to rear their scholars in those early habits of 
 personal decency which are as the alphabet of that modesty and 
 decorum so valuable in after-life. No man commonly observant 
 of human nature can doubt but that there is no one clement of 
 civilisation more valuable than that moral restraint established 
 between the sexes, which, acting with more than the force of 
 law, exacts a decency which no law could enforce. 
 
 In the absence of this restraint, we lose the one great cha- 
 racteristic which distinguishes mankind from the brute kind. 
 Within the walls of a school the age of those we teach limits 
 our efforts in this matter to a certain point ; we cannot make 
 the seventh commandment our text, but we endeavour to secure 
 a chastity of conversation, and a habit of decency in minor 
 matters, to which we look as the foundation of that modesty of 
 character in after-life which we hope will come without especial 
 teaching on the subject. Now, follow the child home ; in how 
 many of our villages and towns will you find it placed under a 
 force of circumstances that, unless it be blind and deaf, must 
 force on it a knowledge, by ear and by eye, of evil, destructive 
 of every decency of habit or purity of thought. Not only in 
 the cottage and the lodging is this the case, but go to the 
 national refuges for the indigent, the union-houses, and you will 
 find in them a system pursued, that the highest pressure of the 
 world's worst contamination could hardly exceed anywhere in 
 the world's worst abodes of vice. So herded together are the 
 abandoned in these establishments, that all degrees of vice are 
 soon lost ; the woman the victim of a seducer, the mother of 
 one child, is made to keep company with the oldest and worst 
 sinners of the streets ; girls, as soon as they are too old for the 
 schoolroom, are placed amongst just that species of adult com- 
 pany which at their age must most surely contaminate them. 
 Respectable women, who have been forced for a time to mingle 
 with this herd, have told me of horrors in word and deed which 
 defy all description. The head of a very large union-house 
 lately told me such things of the female wards in it as would 
 disgrace the worst den in St. Giles's. Are these things un- 
 known ? No, they are for ever quoted to prove the shameless-
 
 1846 EDUCATION 75 
 
 ness of the lower orders. Let us go to the villages from which 
 these houses are filled, and let us see how things are there. 
 
 Is it not notorious that, very generally, the cottages in which 
 the poor dwell are so constructed that anything like a separa- 
 tion of the sexes at night is next to impossible ? Is it not the 
 fact that in ten thousand cases, father, mother, brothers, and 
 sisters are forced to undress and lie down to rest in one and the 
 same room ? So common is this state of things, that I am 
 satisfied it has affected the whole tone of feeling of the upper 
 towards the lower classes ; we have got into a way of thinking 
 depravity, like rags and broken windows, to be the regular, if 
 not the natural accompaniment of poverty. Within these few 
 years I was shown a sort of hovel, the back of which was in the 
 churchyard of a village of considerable size ; it had no window, 
 only a remnant of a door. The parties who showed it me 
 entreated me not to enter it, so great was the filth and depravity 
 of the inmates, and the actual danger from the insecurity of the 
 roof; I, however, did go in, and saw a brood of human beings 
 whose very look at once seemed to prove the probability of the 
 disgusting tales I was told of them ; here and thus they lived 
 until the house fell down over them ; it was a parish house ; 
 they are now lodged in a neighbouring town, by a private rate. 
 A short distance from the same spot a woman, the mother of 
 a family, but a lunatic, had lately existed for more than eighteen 
 months — I heard it proved before a magistrate — in a certain 
 building in the garden, with no door to it, her clothing simply a 
 bit of blanket, or an old shift ; at times, I am credibly informed, 
 if not wholly naked, she might have been seen by any one who 
 took the trouble in a state of indecency and filth as great as if 
 the straw she lay on had been her only covering. In another 
 village of large population, with which I am well acquainted, in 
 which every cottage almost is crammed, to the suffocation of all 
 decency, the consequence of this comparatively private con- 
 tamination publishes itself under circumstances hardly to be 
 believed in this age and country. For years past it is known, it 
 is undisputed, that at certain gay village festivities it has been 
 the custom, and still is, to get some poor wretch of a woman, 
 and, having made her intoxicated to insensibility, or nearly so,
 
 76 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Nov. 24- 
 
 to place her in the midst of a crowded room on a table, in a 
 
 public-house or beer-shop, in such a condition of dress that one 
 
 could almost lament any dress was left on her at all, as then the 
 
 wretched object of the jests and cruelty of the assembly might 
 
 have escaped the suspicion of being a human being ; this being 
 
 only the prelude on two occasions to acts of foul cruelty that 
 
 the orgies of the worst heathen nation never surpassed. Do not 
 
 think, Sir, that this is done unknown to the authorities of the 
 
 village. I enclose you proof that it is well known, and yet it 
 
 may continue the custom for years to come ; and so for years 
 
 to come will the school, and the church, and the parochial 
 
 officers continue their existence and nominal office : what a 
 
 mockery ! A very short time ago I myself heard a man, who 
 
 is said to be half an idiot, state that he had lived, where he 
 
 then and I believe now lives, in a stable, for more than twenty 
 
 years ; that he went there first because he had nowhere else 
 
 to go to. The parish support him, and a woman has 6d. for 
 
 cleaning him once a week ; I did not see much insanity in him ; 
 
 I am, however, told, that nothing could persuade him, though 
 
 he has been trodden on by the horses, to live like other people 
 
 or sleep in a bed. He might in the same number of years have 
 
 been taught to do without clothes. What can any national 
 
 system of education, which confines itself to teaching what man 
 
 and woman should be and should know in the school, do in the 
 
 face of a state of things that holds so light the common respect 
 
 due to decency in both in after-life ? I could multiply proof on 
 
 proof of this awful state of things. I have information in my 
 
 possession, from those whose profession causes them to live 
 
 amongst the poor, that would bear me out in alleging far worse, 
 
 far more awfully criminal effects, as directly proceeding from 
 
 the indecent crowding of the poor in their homes. But I have 
 
 said enough on this disgusting subject. I may be told, if the 
 
 possessors of the land can get tillers of it who are content to 
 
 live as beasts, and to receive pay that will not find them any but 
 
 the scantiest amount of the coarsest food, that there is no reason 
 
 why they should pay them more, feed or house them better ; 
 
 just as I have lately been told that if a man's labourers will 
 
 give him 2d. a pound for the carcass of a bullock found dead
 
 1846 EDUCATION 77 
 
 from disease in a ditch, there is no reason why he should not 
 sell it them. Let a man give one farthing more to a labourer 
 than that labourer's wants and horror of a workhouse would 
 drive him to accept ; let a man forgo even the small advantage 
 he can get from the sale of carrion to men, to whom such food 
 by necessity has become a treat, and he may say ' It is corban.' 
 If, Sir, this is so, if a certain dogma of political economy is to 
 be thus forced into practical exercise, it is time that those who 
 would defend the rights of the poor should indeed look about 
 them ; and they need not look far for authority to prove that 
 the producing have claims on the possessing classes, which, 
 if urged to the letter, might somewhat inconveniently interfere 
 with their assumed position of possessors in fee of the soil, 
 claiming all the privileges, but repudiating the duties of that 
 possession. 
 
 At a meeting for the repeal of the malt-tax, reported in one 
 of your last week's papers, I see one of the leading speakers, a 
 farmer, said, ' The farmers are trustees for the labourers, who 
 would be otherwise unrepresented.' Great applause followed 
 this announcement. If it is true, I can only say the labourers 
 have enjoyed a very long minority ; the trustees have, indeed, 
 husbanded the resources of their trust — are they at last going to 
 pass their accounts and surrender to their wards ? Has poverty 
 at last come of age ? If so, may we presume that the immense 
 capital these trustees have amassed in the long day of poverty's 
 minority is now to be disgorged and dispersed in works of love 
 and mercy to the poor ? If the accounts were rendered at that 
 chancery where none can deceive, and all that is the poor man's 
 due was now to be returned to him by those whose lands he 
 has tilled, I cannot but think that thousands of those who now 
 claim to limit his hire according to the meed of his necessity, 
 would have to take the place he now fills, and taste themselves 
 of a poverty and misery they would richly deserve. 
 
 Let the nation educate its every child, if it is so disposed, 
 but let it beware of sinking deep into the mind of another 
 generation any real knowledge of the value of justice, the 
 beauty of charity, the importance of honesty, decency, and 
 loyalty, until it has given without the walls of the school some
 
 78 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. 1853 
 
 proof that its justice is more accessible, its charity less repul- 
 sive that honesty shall be less wantonly tempted, decency 
 more valued, and loyalty more cherished than is now the case. 
 
 The fatuity of providing mental training for children when the home 
 influences continue to poison the moral sense, was a point on which 
 S. G. O. felt very deeply. To the end of his life he maintained that 
 the proper housing of labourers and artizans, where the decencies of life 
 could be secured, was essential to any effective dealing with the social 
 problem. 
 
 1853. 
 
 The great demand for space for mansions, large shops, ware- 
 houses, and broad thoroughfares, drives the working man into 
 localities so crammed with buildings as to defy purity of atmo- 
 sphere—so crammed with life as to contract its lease into that 
 short compass which is engrossed in the absence of every 
 decency, the abundant presence of every destructive nuisance. 
 I admit there is a class, living in their thousands as beasts, who 
 do not care to live otherwise ; but it cannot be denied that there 
 are tens of thousands of mechanics and others possessed of a 
 sense of decency who cannot by any possibility secure it to 
 themselves and families. There are men working for some of 
 the largest houses, skilled in hand, and prized for their intelli- 
 gence and cultivated taste in their own line of work — men deal- 
 ing with delicate materials, employed about the abodes of the 
 wealthiest — who each night go to what they call home — to 
 lodgings which defy cleanliness, and are imperatively exempted 
 from all attention to decency— the staircase common to many, 
 and ever dirty ; the rooms small, inconvenient, and overcrowded ; 
 water scarce and foul ; ventilation confined to a fouled atmo- 
 sphere, admitted by narrow apertures ; men, women, and chil- 
 dren having in common a most restricted — if any — share of 
 conveniences which are as public, as from their nature they 
 should be private, in construction as opposed to every physical 
 and moral sense. 
 
 To such dwellings, to such degradation, is the mechanic to 
 return as to a home from his work, from any place of education 
 open to him, as the chief scene in which he is to enjoy and 
 cany out the result of the increasing cultivation of his mind.
 
 1 853 EDUCATION 79 
 
 The boy or girl skilfully and faithfully taught at any of the 
 many valuable schools open to the children of this class comes 
 back each day to such a home (?) there to con over the next 
 day's lessons in purity and holiness — lessons in all that can train 
 the mind to see beauty in the God-given wonders of the world, 
 the God-promised treasures of the world to come. Here, to 
 these reeking scenes of disorganised decency and morality, such 
 boy or girl is hoped to go — the best of missionaries— to spread 
 knowledge of good by telling to those at home the lessons learnt 
 at school. 
 
 What a mockery is it to expect that a plant so comparatively 
 pure as a well-disposed and well-taught child could hold its 
 purity in such an atmosphere ! Go into one of these schools : 
 you will hear branches of learning ably taught, to which, until 
 of late years, none but the wealthy and the specially-favoured 
 had access. You will hear with astonishment children answer- 
 ing questions correctly and promptly which a few years back 
 would have puzzled many a professor. You will find, on in- 
 quiry, that the deepest interest is felt in the training of the 
 scholars by many of the greatest men of our day. Foreigners 
 are taken to see the children examined by a Government in- 
 spector, or, perhaps, a bishop. Some of the most scientific 
 professors of the age write works adapted to make, through 
 these schools, science, its beauties, its glorious truths, accessible 
 to the million. 
 
 On all this devotion to the education of the children are 
 further built schemes for advancing the taste and intellectual 
 acquirements of the adult mechanics. Schools of design, exhi- 
 bitions, literary and scientific institutions, all aid the work ; and 
 yet we are left to wonder at the statistics of intemperance, and 
 the daily proof afforded us that, as a class, this class, with all 
 its intelligence, becomes too often the easy prey of designing 
 demagogues and trading advocates of its so-called rights ; that 
 they prefer those emanations from the cheap press which deal 
 only in the topics that excite them to discontent and evil to the 
 many works equally cheap, equally accessible to them, in which 
 they can study wholesome truths, useful to them in their calling, 
 affording instructive amusement, and tending to foster all those
 
 So THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. 1853 
 
 higher feelings which do so lighten any life, but, above all, the 
 life of those who toil. 
 
 Do not our police reports prove to us that man now is for 
 ever found to be the savage brute who dares himself to assault 
 with the greatest brutality the mother of his own children— the 
 woman whom above all he is bound to defend ? Go with the 
 police to the ' homes ' in which these crimes are enacted — go 
 and study the mode of life born there of its scene — study there 
 the nature of the retreat in which the father of a family has to 
 meet them — and then cease to wonder that he returns to it him- 
 self only when he has destroyed feeling each day in drink, to 
 find those belonging to him seeking in drink that character 
 which would seem to most befit the stage of their daily life. 
 The magistrate properly tells the brute he is one, and gives him 
 the full share of the law's sentence. He will leave the orderly 
 cleanliness of the gaol, the decent deportment there enforced 
 around him, to return to the old scene of filth and disquiet. 
 Can we wonder he drinks, and is again the brute to strike or 
 kick his wife ; and that some begin to argue, for such bestial- 
 ised beings, we must revive the beast's chief terror — the lash ? 
 
 There are those who need to be taught the degradation in 
 which they live. This is the class which, reared beyond the pale 
 of decency, and having no connection in word or deed with the 
 decent, live contented in the scene of their foul existence. We 
 have to make them see the evil of their lot — to teach them what 
 they are, and something, at least, of what they should desire to 
 be. Their children know little of any school, except, perchance, 
 they may have attended a ' ragged ' one. With these life is pri- 
 vation of all that is good and decent, but not felt as such, because 
 goodness and decency never had any appreciable worth. But 
 there is another very large class, who know well all they lose in 
 the life they are compelled to live at home, but yet see no means 
 of mending the matter. They have to earn their bread where 
 they can well do it ; but they have to seek the decency and 
 comfort of a home in localities where it is not permitted them. 
 They are not an untaught class ; the nature of their employ- 
 ment required that they should have had a certain amount of 
 education ; they are, many of them, most persevering readers ;
 
 18,3 EDUCATION gi 
 
 any one who at the present day comes much in contact with 
 mechanics will readily admit that they are on very many sub- 
 jects well informed. It is, I fear, but too true that, as a body, 
 they are much tainted with scepticism. I believe them to be 
 loyal to the Sovereign ; they are close observers of the manners 
 of the ' great ' ; however free in their observations to each other, 
 and however free the tone of their ' press,' it cannot be denied 
 that they are respectful in communication with the upper classes. 
 It is my firm belief that the inevitable moral defilement of their 
 ' homes ' has worked great social mischief to this class. Their 
 work takes them much into communication with those who value 
 and luxuriate in domestic comfort and decency. Alas ! they 
 are thus only acquiring at zvork a taste for all that is denied 
 them when at rest. Can we wonder that they spend so much 
 time at their club rooms, imbibing there so much which injures 
 the whole tone of their life ? 
 
 In this letter he again returns to the subject of the schools' real 
 difficulty. 
 
 January I, 1S57. 
 
 The dregs of most matters which afford them are of a nasty, 
 disagreeable nature ; the dregs of human society ever have been, 
 and will prove to be so. It is at this time the popular idea that 
 our refuse population is our criminal population ; that if we 
 could reduce its amount, in the same proportion should we 
 purge ourselves of crime. It is argued that education will act 
 upon the lowest scouring of social life as peat charcoal and 
 lime do upon the contents of our cesspools and drains. 
 
 I am one of those who put little faith in the operation of 
 education per se as a purifier of our worst classes of fellow- 
 creatures, even of education in which the very best secular and 
 religious instruction should be combined. I should as soon 
 expect to find the lenses of the best microscope doing their 
 work properly in a damp cellar, or in a building set aside for the 
 sifting of cinders. 
 
 Englishmen boast of their love of fair play, and yet they send 
 tens of thousands of children daily home from school to fight 
 a foe at home, or rather a host of foes, with no better weapons 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. i 
 
 than a little book and pen knowledge, with no better armour 
 than that amount of religious and moral principle which can be 
 given each day to young children in crowded schools. Speeches 
 on education are, as I well know, very easily made ; it is a 'stock 
 subject ; ' even a clumsy handling of it will ever elicit the cheers 
 of crowded audiences. Most men give something or do some- 
 thing to aid one or more schools, and they receive as grateful 
 tribute to their own charity in so doing every allusion to the 
 value of education. Every man at a meeting to promote 
 education takes to himself, within himself, a sort of pleasurable 
 sensation arising from the conviction that he is one of ' the 
 blessed.' The speakers panegyrise when they declaim on the 
 glorious fields opened to the educated classes, and the true 
 blessings they hourly derive in those fields. 
 
 Call a meeting in a county town to consider the ' glorious 
 fields' to which the children of agricultural labourers too often 
 daily return from school ; call a meeting in a manufacturing 
 district to consider the nature of the dwellings in which, at high 
 rents, the mechanics are condemned to rear their children ; and 
 then mark the attendance and the reception you will receive. It 
 is wonderful to many — not to me — how comparatively easy it 
 is to get up heavy subscription lists for the building of schools, 
 the erection and decoration of churches and chapels, while it is 
 next to impossible to push the ' dwelling question ' beyond that 
 point which consists in a simple acknowledgment of the difficul- 
 ties which beset it, and pious ejaculations with regard to the 
 horrors it embodies. We are ready to wage any amount of 
 paper war upon the question whether a gentleman holding 
 heretical views as to the moon's motion is a fitting person to be 
 an inspector of schools ; we forget that three-fourths of the 
 children in any school which his peculiar form of lunacy can 
 corrupt will go home to sleep, eat, &c, in common with many of 
 both sexes, in a space in which the rotatory motion popularly 
 known as the ' swinging of a cat ' could not, for want of space, 
 be accomplished. Even a Chadwick would shrink from such a 
 cup of Tantalus as a cesspool that filled at the rate of hogsheads 
 of filth to his drams of ' disinfecting fluid,' and yet England 
 sets the schoolmaster, and, above all, the schoolmistress, to do a
 
 1857 EDUCATION 8 3 
 
 harder, more hopeless task. They have to teach truth, purity, 
 honesty, industry, religion to children who return each day to 
 homes in which life itself — human life — is almost a lie, purity 
 barred out by necessity, honesty too often an exotic which can- 
 not in health survive the climate ; industry interpreted to mean 
 simply the principle of 'getting,' no matter how ; as to religion — 
 the wheat is dibbled, but the tares are sown broadcast, and that 
 in a climate so physically impure that the leaves of the charity- 
 given Bibles turn damp beneath the touch, and their familiar 
 binding has its white spots of fungoid growth. 
 
 It is true, Sir, for I and many others have done it ; men of 
 ' the upper ten thousand ' will go and look at how the labourer 
 is lodged in many villages, how he is lodged in almost every 
 town, as a matter of curious investigation, and then return and 
 talk and write about what they saw, as if they had gone into 
 the habitations of the offscourings of some foreign barbarian 
 land. I shall be told that out of those dwellings have come 
 some of our very best mechanics ; that there are thousands of 
 honest, high-principled labourers who have been bred in the one 
 room ; that many a soul goes to its Maker strong in faith in its 
 Redeemer from these filthy, crowded abodes. I don't deny it. 
 I know how light does pierce into darkness in many an extra- 
 ordinary way. An ardent naturalist will scarcely find one thing 
 on earth, however foul in itself, that will not generate some- 
 thing, vegetable or animal, in which the glorious wonders of 
 Providence are most manifest ; but we do not seek to hoard 
 fever-breeding matters in tons because in a drop of such the 
 microscopist can find the germs of strange, beautiful organ- 
 isms. 
 
 I would not be thought to undervalue the great efforts ever 
 making by pious individuals and religious societies to penetrate 
 these dark and foul abodes of ' the dregs ' of our population ; 
 they are about a great work, and deserve all honour ; but I am 
 satisfied that the evil is an increasing evil. We improve our 
 great thoroughfares at the cost of a still further foul crowding of 
 our alleys and back streets. Model lodging-houses are texts 
 from which to preach ; hitherto little has been done to expound 
 practically the truths they teach. I do not say that all the deeds
 
 S4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O July 2 
 
 of violence against which there is now so just an outcry are the 
 works of men made what they are by the existence of the 
 dwellings in which they have been bred ; but I do say that it is 
 folly to expect the criminal's reform when these are to be the 
 scenes in which alone he could hope to work it out. So long as 
 the mind of this great nation can think of no other panacea for 
 vice than education, no preventive of crime but the dread of 
 punishment, no reformation of the criminal but by a course 
 which, prompting to hypocrisy, makes the acting out of a lie 
 the shortest road to a remission of punishment, we shall go from 
 bad to worse. 
 
 There will still be blue-books full of astonishing examinations 
 of very wonderful schoolboys, and lengthy statistics to prove the 
 triumphs of penitential penal discipline ; meetings will still be 
 ably addressed by men of high degree on the value of educa- 
 tion ; but, with all this, savage criminal attempts upon life and 
 property will increase until the yoke of daring, unbridled guilt 
 will be beyond bearing. At last it may strike the nation that 
 when the great multitude of its lower classes are forced to dwell 
 where decency and comfort cannot exist, and honesty only 
 under fearful trial, they must be as ' dregs,' the precipitate of a 
 process of moral chemistry which, eliminating all that is poorest, 
 all that is of the worst of our kind, keeps it closely confined 
 to ferment and breed and harbour and become still . more 
 obnoxious. 
 
 The School and the Cupboard. 
 
 July 2, 1857. 
 
 In a late leading article on the Education Conference you 
 brought Mrs. Hubbard and her son Bill forward in aid of your 
 most true arguments on the subject. There is no one historical 
 character whose name you could have more properly used for 
 your purpose. The period at which village boys will be removed 
 from the village school is simply a matter of cupboard ; Mother 
 Hubbard in her family economy will only allow Bill to draw 
 rations from her cupboard free up to that period of life at which 
 he can begin to earn, or to learn how to earn, bread to put into 
 it. She has each week to count the mouths which consume 
 against the hands which can produce ; she will seize the earliest
 
 1857 EDUCAT10X 85 
 
 moment to convert a consumer into a producer. The very 
 poorest of dogs plead to her for a bone in vain ; but little meat 
 ever finds its way into her cupboard, and of that the ' Bills ' 
 have the bones. 
 
 Mrs. H. will tell the parson or his wife, with much truth 
 ' that boys get soft like when kept too long at laming ; the pen 
 and the book be all right for the poor things, but they hands of 
 Bill's must get a bit hard afore he can hold plough or handle 
 fork. She don't hold to keeping children too long in-doors who 
 have to get their bread in the fields.' 
 
 I confess, Sir, I agree with Mrs. Hubbard. I feel that the 
 necessity laid upon a labourer's child to earn his own bread at 
 the earliest moment is one which I cannot contest. I know that 
 in order to stand exposure to all kinds of weather — the lot of 
 out-door labour — it is well for a boy to be early inured to it. I 
 am quite convinced he will be no happier in the particular field 
 of labour which is his destiny for that amount of schooling I 
 see so many desirous to give him. 
 
 In any good school a child can be taught to read with ease, 
 to write a fair, legible hand, and to do all the arithmetic neces- 
 sary for the common purposes of life by the time he is ten years 
 of age ; in addition to this he can by that time have been well 
 grounded in the truths of revealed religion, and should have 
 acquired habits of obedience and propriety which will go far to 
 form his future character. 
 
 The use of machinery in agriculture has supplanted in a 
 great degree the call for adult human muscle and sinew ; it has 
 at the same time created a demand for the labour of the very 
 young. Where large families used to be considered as objection- 
 able parochial burdens, I now see them regarded as valuable 
 auxiliaries to the employers of the parish. Emigration has given 
 the call for more mechanical appliance, each successive mechan- 
 ical invention calls more of early life to early labour. I cannot 
 regret this, for I see the people living better, better clothed, 
 more constantly employed, and somewhat better housed than 
 they were ten years ago. I never knew them more patient and 
 contented with their lot, and it is often a hard one. I know 
 there is a great call among them for cheap but good books, and
 
 86 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 2 
 
 that they read them. I know the dull monotony of the field 
 of labour to which they are destined. I have grave doubts 
 as to whether much intellectual training would not discon- 
 tent them with that field. I am sure it would not conduce 
 to their contentment, and therefore must be opposed to their 
 happiness. 
 
 As to the ' crime ' question, it is not a year or two's more 
 schooling which will affect that in any appreciable degree. The 
 poor are more often detected in crime than the rich, because 
 they are more constantly watched, and the crimes to which they 
 are tempted are just those easiest to detect. But this I say in 
 justice to them as a class, compare those who can read, write, 
 and sum but a little with those who have had the greatest 
 educational privileges, and I believe you would find that in this 
 our day, before God, the former are the purest in life, the most 
 honest, the most tempted, the most loyal — yes, and the most 
 Christian. 
 
 The number of acquaintances and friends I have had 
 through life probably may have been in amount about the same 
 as the population of the village in which I have now lived nearly 
 sixteen years. I think through life I have been most fortunate 
 as to the society I have enjoyed ; and yet, I say it without one 
 shadow of doubt I cannot on the whole claim a higher moral 
 status for the friends of past and present life than I can for my 
 villagers, few of whom remained at school after they could earn 
 the smallest amount of bread. I must further be understood as 
 including under the head of ' friends and acquaintances' men of 
 every rank and profession, some few Cabinet Ministers, and a 
 fair proportion of bishops. 
 
 There is an evil of too prolonged schooling to which I have 
 as yet seen no allusion — viz., its tendency to relieve the parents 
 too much of their proper share in the rearing of their children. 
 Who has not heard the excuse from the parent for a child's sin 
 — ' I can't tell how it is, I can't ; I sent her to school as soon as 
 she could walk, and kept her there till she went to service.' 
 What say the aged women ? ' Ah, Sir, to see how the young 
 married folk carry on ; the infant school takes them when amost 
 babies ; t'other school takes all the rest ; 'tis but the getting
 
 1 857 EDUCATION 87 
 
 them up, putting them to bed, and the putting out the vittles ; 
 they ha'n't the trouble with a family as we had in our day.' 
 
 In my poor opinion we run some risk of making our schools 
 mere nurseries for young mothers, who never at home saw any- 
 thing of a mother's real duty. I am quite sure we are making 
 marriage very easy, the road to single, useful ' service ' very 
 difficult. People complain they cannot get female servants. 
 Do they think years passed in an educational machine, the 
 cramming the head, and fitting the hand to nothing but pen, 
 pencil, and needlework, a promising process for the production 
 of ' maids ' of any work ? Where, where has common sense 
 fled to ? 
 
 Of the discontent bred by a certain class of education he writes : — 
 
 July 16, 1857. 
 
 The expediency of an industrial training of the children of 
 the working classes as a great national object is at last receiving 
 that share of attention it so well deserves. We are arriving at 
 the conviction that the education of any class of our fellow- 
 creatures should, to be really valuable, be of a nature to qualify 
 them to perform the practical duties of the station in life to 
 which, under God, they have been called. 
 
 I have long foreseen that the endeavour to create a race of 
 village ' prodigies ' could only end as it has done. Out of a 
 certain number of young brains submitted to the process a very 
 small number attain that measure of intellectual excellence 
 which qualifies them to rise — if opportunity offers — above the 
 station in life to which they were born. The rest remain on 
 hand, with heads crammed with an amount and variety of teach- 
 ing, which they have neither the disposition nor the time to turn 
 to any profitable account, the direct tendency of which, how- 
 ever, has had this effect — it has rendered head and hand little 
 fitted for the monotonous, unintellectual work by which alone, in 
 their peculiar station of life, they can earn life's support. 
 
 On a somewhat similar mistaken principle I have seen 
 money misspent by landlords in building dwellings for the 
 labourers. There is a great expenditure in making the ' new 
 cottages ' picturesque, and so constructing them that they
 
 83 THE LETTERS OE S. G. 0. July 1 6 
 
 abound in ingenious contrivances for a most overstrained pro- 
 vision for all that can conduce to morality and decency ; the in- 
 mates feel, from the constant intrusion of ' company from the 
 house ' that they are ' on show,' and therefore live in an enforced 
 tidiness, scarcely made palatable by the ' tips ' and praises of the 
 inquisitive visitors who form the landlord's audience, as he points 
 out with his stick, above, and below, and about the dwelling, all 
 the happy contrivances he has employed to compass the ' moral ' 
 and the ' sanitary ' of cottage life. Of course, small families of 
 wonderful habits are chosen for these dwellings, for they must 
 live a Sunday life every day, while the lord or the squire ' be 
 down home.' In the meantime, such has been the cost of these 
 hotbeds of tidy economy that the same estate will very likely, 
 for twenty such, have further off from the mansion forty or fifty 
 dwellings in which human life is simply pig life glazed and 
 staircased. 
 
 Just so with schools, you are shown their walls furnished 
 with diagrams explanatory of the rudiments of the severest 
 science ; the class-room has its large wooden model of the 
 steam-engine, an orrery, a large collection of ' objects ' in aid of 
 lessons combining amusement with instruction in the several 
 ologics. The master and mistress are most superior people, 
 quite equal to the tutorial and schoolroom requirements in any 
 private family of rank. The first class is called into the class- 
 room ; the master in an easy off-hand way knocks at the brains 
 of the ten or twelve boys in turn ; these brains open at the 
 knock, and out comes without hesitation a stream of knowledge 
 monotoned, which the same master might knock in vain for at 
 the brain-doors of half the House of Peers — two-thirds of the 
 House of Commons. You are probably too glad to plead a 
 pressing engagement to escape the offer kindly made to your- 
 self to examine the class. 
 
 Now, Sir, I admit it to be very wonderful that what we hear 
 on these occasions should flow as it does through teeth that mas- 
 ticate bacon as the rule, butcher's meat as the rare exception. 
 But I question the real value of these pearls to those who ex- 
 pectorate them. Bill Hubbard cannot serve two masters — a 
 brain craving to revel in the paths of science, a stomach desirous
 
 1 85 7 EDUCATION 89 
 
 of food only to be obtained behind the plough. He will either 
 have taken in knowledge that he will soon forget, as a mere 
 school lesson belonging only to school days ; or, if he has really 
 acquired a taste for all the mental refinement to which he has 
 been introduced, he will be very unhappy and discontented when 
 the call of a hard working life shuts him out from its indul- 
 gence. 
 
 But I am told ' these boys will rise above their station ; they 
 must, their intelligence will command a market.' Is it not a 
 fact that at this very moment there is a supply of educated 
 youths in the land far above the demand for them ; that even 
 professional men who have voted for bankers, merchants, and 
 even ' Ministers,' cannot get an opening found at the smallest 
 salary for ' a well-educated youth, the son of most respectable 
 parents ' ? I do not dispute that many great men have worked 
 their way to eminence from a very low origin, and so may it 
 ever be, as it surely will be. The mistake I see made is the 
 attempt to put the seeds of greatness perforce into the brains of 
 a whole class. I don't want to have forty boys spoilt for plain, 
 honest, perspiratory labour that some five may become possibly 
 eminent in literature, or comparatively wealthy at the desk of a 
 Government office. 
 
 Success is the great sweetener of toil ; for a village boy to 
 succeed in his destined path of labour, heart and hand must 
 work together ; practice alone will give skill ; it is skill in work 
 that makes it really grateful to hand and heart. Ploughing, 
 hedging, draining, turnip hoeing, even turnip topping, may be 
 ill or well done ; in each perfection is the result of practice ; it 
 has its reward, not simply in money value, but in that feeling of 
 our nature which sees and feels a triumph in success. 
 
 For the sake of the true happiness of the children of the 
 agricultural labourers, I pray to see a day when industrial train- 
 ing may be considered of more value than it is at present ; but 
 I am not blind to the great difficulty of obtaining it. There is, 
 I fear, no way by which outdoor labour can be taught with any 
 real great result by any modification of mere schooling. I know 
 it has been tried, and with some little success, but in practice 
 the farm field, the stable, and the barn must be the real school.
 
 go THE LETTERS OE S. C. O. July 16, 1857 
 
 To make a good servant you want a disposition to serve as 
 well as the power to do so. Boys or girls working at industrial 
 pursuits in classes, under teachers, get ' handy ; ' but more than 
 this is wanted. A master watchmaker could make twenty boys 
 expert in a good deal of the manipulation of his trade in a 
 school, but there is a something which can only be got in the 
 shop required to make any one of these a valuable apprentice. 
 Temper has to be formed for service, and can only be formed in 
 service. Girls may be taught in masses to wash, iron, work, and 
 cook, and yet make bad servants if kept too long from actual 
 service. The ' ways ' of a kitchen, a laundry, housemaids' 
 ' ways,' can only be acquired at the real scene of action. 
 
 I am satisfied that the greatest charity the rich can bestow 
 on the working classes of their several neighbourhoods is to 
 make their own households, stables, and gardens, schools of in- 
 dustry. Let them take a young girl into the kitchen, the 
 laundry, under the housemaid ; encouraging cook, Martha, and 
 Mary to aid in the wcrk of training them in their several depart- 
 ments ; let it be understood that this is schooling for service — 
 not service — their food the sole wages for the first year ; give 
 the ruling powers of the kitchen, laundry, and bedrooms a small 
 bonus for every child so trained for a year ; let these, if possible, 
 still attend the Sunday school ; thus, at an expense which would 
 scarcely be felt, there would be real and abiding benefit done. 
 If gardener and groom had also their scholastic apprentice, here, 
 too, good would be achieved. In some cases it might be advis- 
 able to have two girls in each department, taking week by week 
 in turn ; the week at home to be given, half each day to the 
 school, the other half to home duty. 
 
 As to that overstrained prudery which says it would expose 
 the morals of these young girls to unfair trial by sending them 
 into large establishments, my answer is, look at all to which 
 they are exposed at home ; and, further, I am satisfied that 
 wherever a master or mistress of a household is of a dis- 
 position thus to help the poor around them, their servants 
 will themselves be too well chosen not to be trusted to ab- 
 stain from injuring by word or deed those their employers would 
 benefit.
 
 April 28, 1862 EDUCATION 91 
 
 On female education S. G. O. held the view that the mental equip- 
 ment provided in schools for girls was too obviously devoted to the 
 capture of husbands. In single life he found great gain. He looked 
 on women who do not marry as the direct instruments of God, fit for 
 work from which those who marry and bear children are, as a rule, 
 
 excluded. 
 
 April 28, 1862. 
 
 Women, in that class where education begins to be given 
 wholly at the cost of the parents, have not, as yet, had the same 
 chance in life as the men of the same class. Parents have little 
 choice of schools ; where the expense is high, but too often, 
 accomplishments — so called — are the staple of the education ; 
 at the cheaper schools growing girls eat out two-thirds of what 
 is paid for them ; for the other third they get all overworked, 
 ill-paid, and badly qualified teachers can give in the way of 
 teaching— writing, reading, geography, arithmetic, with a slight 
 seasoning of weak French, stronger piano ; they are taught to 
 walk with what is called a ' genteel carriage,' perhaps to dance, 
 with catechism and Scripture included. They grow up fine 
 young women, amiable, and all that ; do ' puss in boots,' in 
 scarlet on crinoline and Balmorals, as well as those who are far 
 above them in life ; the day comes when the realities of a life, 
 with bread to be earned, are thrown on them, and for what are 
 they then found qualified ? 
 
 There are excellent endowed grammar schools for boys, 
 where yeomen, tradesmen, poor professional men, get them well 
 taught for all future purposes at a small expense. At present 
 there are very few such chances for the girls of the family. 
 
 Very many parents, for economy and from higher motives, 
 prefer having a governess to teach their girls at home. There 
 is a great demand for such teachers ; there is a great supply, but 
 it is found that a very large proportion have little to offer beyond 
 good character, amiable temper, and a desire to teach. The con- 
 sequence is they rear up young women as they themselves were 
 reared, but leave them at last as unfit to really be governesses as 
 they are themselves ; and yet but too many of their pupils must 
 come at last to a choice between ' service ' in some form or 
 seeking the situation of nursery governess. 
 
 The remedy must rest with the parents ; they must learn the
 
 92 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 28 
 
 wise lesson that no man or woman is lowered before God and 
 the good who has been fitted by education, from the first, {or the 
 chance of that reverse in life which may throw her or him on 
 their own resources. 
 
 The mistakes of the day are the notion that education is to 
 raise every one in life, instead of being the great aid of life in 
 every position of it ; and that women are sure to marry, and, 
 therefore, they need not be fitted for the special struggles of the 
 single life. From the Belgravian mother to the matron of the 
 village shop the rage is to raise daughters for the matrimonial 
 market ; how to attract attention is the one seeming object. 
 I only wish the little dames knew the sores of ' the great dames ;' 
 how hard to obtain and how rare is success ; how bitter dis- 
 appointment ; how often, after all, in the race in life, a sensibly 
 educated woman, with no outward advertisement, carries off the 
 possession of a home of comfort, where the mere artificial man- 
 bait has to either live out a life of sullen, disappointed spinstership, 
 or to share a home, in which she soon finds that, having nothing 
 in her to make it happy, she has to suffer neglect and misery. 
 
 Let us all echo the desire of Miss Faithfull, that parents may 
 turn their minds to the giving their daughters a thorough educa- 
 cation, making them useful and wise as well as accomplished, 
 fitted to meet, single-handed, an evil day as to enjoy a day of 
 married prosperity. So far from thinking woman's noblest 
 sphere that of the matron and mother, I hold that the greater 
 proportion of really noble, self-denying work must be done by 
 single women. These must be, to a very great degree, the 
 teachers, the mind-formers, of the yet to be mother race. What 
 mothers would do without nurses, governesses, maids, I cannot 
 see. They have for many a year the almost perpetual infant, 
 that continued claimant on night and day care ; to this is added 
 household economy, and the real task of all, the home to be 
 made pleasant to the husband ; if married to professional men, 
 men in business, they have to share no small portion of the 
 husband's cares, if not his actual work. 
 
 The wife who can rule her household in all honour, and quiet, 
 and love, is a noble creature, for she is fulfilling by force of a 
 pure affection that which requires of her, day by day, the most
 
 1 862 EDUCATION 93 
 
 active exercise of the highest virtue. But I confess I must 
 claim, as only just, that the spinster, who in her station does 
 her duty on the same principle, is as noble a creature. 
 
 Molly who, as maid-of-all-work, cheerfully drudges on poor, 
 year to year, loving the butcher's youth she is too poor to 
 marry — content to think he loves and is true, like her is working 
 and waiting — is to my eye as noble a creature as her mistress, 
 who took to master and a life of miserable and struggling penury 
 on the strength of the proverb that ' if we do find mouths, God 
 will find the food.' 
 
 I hate to think of women as destined only to share the 
 honour after their kind which the white mice and rabbits of 
 one's children share after their kind. So long as ' increase and 
 multiply ' implies matrimony, I can see many a noble field for 
 those who prefer the ' individual ' life, or from prudence are 
 forbidden to change it. It is my firm belief that a very large 
 proportion of the great merciful works of English philanthropy 
 is done by single women, as the funds for them are also in a 
 very great measure found by that sisterhood. I look on them 
 as God's direct instruments, appointed by His Providence to 
 certain works in His world — works from which those whose lot 
 it is to marry and bear children must, as the rule, be excluded. 
 
 I am not sorry to hear of a colonist marrying a governess ; 
 I always hope he and she may have chosen each other wisely ; 
 but I hope never to live to see the day when any inducement 
 may be given to ladies to go out to the colonies professedly as 
 teachers, but in reality to seek husbands. I never think of a 
 woman as nearer to real degradation than when I see her 
 passively offered for marriage to the first comer of sufficient 
 value in a mother's eye, or herself openly giving reason to believe 
 that she is so scheming on her own account. 
 
 Mr. Lowe's Revised Code had come into operation in 1862. It 
 
 decreed regular examinations of the pupils, payment by results, evening 
 
 schools for adults, and other changes which raised a storm of opposition 
 
 from the clergy and schoolmasters. S. G. O. was one of those who 
 
 expressed his dislike. 
 
 October 10, 1864. 
 
 The subject of the education of the poorer classes has of late
 
 94 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 10 
 
 received a good deal of attention. There is evidently a feeling 
 of disappointment abroad that the results are not what might be 
 expected from the ' improved systems ' which have prevailed 
 now for some years in so many schools. I think I see a disposi- 
 tion to ask for what is called a still more energetic diffusion of 
 knowledge, by means of the existing schools. 
 
 For my own part, as a mere looker-on, I think the managers 
 of schools on what is called the improved system are already 
 but too energetic in their endeavours to push the education of 
 the poor to its highest attainable point ; it appears to me they 
 already have rather overdone their work ; that the failure to 
 make the rising generation so wise as was expected has arisen 
 from overcharging it with wisdom. 
 
 You can only deal with the labourer's male child, as the rule, 
 from the age of four to, at the furthest, the age of twelve. I 
 accept as the definition of education that it is the general culti- 
 vation of the understanding, that instruction is the special direc- 
 tion of it, with reference to a future particular course of life. 
 The sound education, then, of a labourer's son demands that, 
 between the ages of five years and twelve, he should become 
 well advanced in general knowledge, combining with this as 
 much teaching as it is possible to give him in matters specially 
 connected with his future bread-earning condition. 
 
 Young Jobus is the son of a carter in a country village. 
 When he is twelve years of age he must go to work, farm work, 
 for his bread ; at five years of age he enters the schoolroom ; it 
 will require at least two years to give him a ready command 
 over ordinary words in print, and over the formation of very 
 simple words on slate or paper. He will have proved himself 
 of more than average ability if by his seventh birthday he has 
 attained power to read with accuracy, straight ahead, any plain, 
 easy book, and can also, with pen or pencil, write legibly from 
 such book. I assume that he has acquired the amount of know- 
 ledge in arithmetic which enables him to do easy sums accu- 
 rately in its early rules. 
 
 In the remaining years of his school life he will have been 
 employed in an advance in all these accomplishments, and while 
 thus improving in the mere mechanics of knowledge, will have
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 95 
 
 stored his brain with a great many read and told facts, having 
 been strongly exercised in the study of such facts, and in reason- 
 ing upon them. Of what nature these facts may be, to what 
 extent, in reference to them, his reasoning powers may have 
 been exercised, will depend upon the books of the school, his 
 own special industry and ability, and the ability and industry of 
 his teachers. 
 
 Such a boy may be expected to leave school able to read 
 and write with ease, to do fairly a good deal of arithmetic ; he 
 will, from maps and books, have acquired a certain amount of 
 geographical knowledge, a good deal of that miscellaneous 
 ' useful ' information which is to be found in modern school 
 books ; he will have been made to read and commit to memory 
 a great amount of Bible knowledge — i.e. its chief historical 
 features, and the deductions drawn from it as a whole, as the 
 grounds of that religious belief in which he is being educated. 
 
 A boy who has profited thus much from a school, at the 
 age of eleven or twelve, will have done well ; he will be a very 
 favourable specimen of an educated labourer's son. He is book- 
 coloured to a point as high as we could expect ; whether the 
 colours are fast, will stand the wear and tear of life, remains to 
 be proved. He is turned out to order from the intellect mill, 
 a schoolboy knowledged up to the highest mark the material 
 and the system of mental-facture would admit. He now passes 
 to the purely labour mill, his transition state, as a future bread- 
 earning man. 
 
 I for ever hear the complaint that school learning is very 
 soon almost altogether lost, in the active business of early labour 
 life ; that green fields and fallow fields, barns, pigsties, and cow- 
 sheds, act to develop muscle and make the cheeks ruddy, but 
 seem, at the same time, to rust out the largest proportion of all 
 the teaching so laboriously acquired at school. 
 
 You go with a friend or two into a first-rate village school ; 
 you listen with astonishment, not only to the reading, as reading, 
 of the upper classes, but to the answers made to questions on 
 lessons in history, political economy, geography, and natural 
 history. You hear the master read from some essay on one of 
 these subjects, the work of a well-known author. Passing behind
 
 96 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 10 
 
 the class, you behold with wonder the accuracy with which, as 
 he reads, the boys write down each sentence ; a skeleton map 
 on a slate is filled in without hesitation as he calls out the 
 different counties and towns. Then there is a lesson given in 
 mental arithmetic — you are too thankful that neither yourself 
 nor friends — one of them, perhaps, a Cabinet Minister and great 
 educational authority — are called on to prove whether Joe 
 Jobus with the sore ears has really done all his figures right — 
 right out of his head. Now follows a Scripture lesson ; could 
 any bishop or examining chaplain, could any living Cruden so 
 quickly and accurately reply to the pelting storm of questions 
 which extracts Scriptural matter, historical, prophetical, etymo- 
 logical, and doctrinal ? Jobus takes it all easy ; so do some 
 dozen Jobuses. You are too happy when it is over, and you 
 and your friends, left unexposed as to your ignorance, are per- 
 mitted to escape, having written your names to a declaration 
 how gratified you have been with this wonderful proof of the 
 industry of the master and ability of his scholars ; and the more 
 so, as you may be told he can get no help from Government, as 
 he declines to be himself examined to prove whether he is 
 qualified to teach a village school. 
 
 If we follow these boys into farm-labour life, take them in 
 hand two years hence, I believe we should find that a very great 
 deal of this power of intellectual exhibition has gone from them. 
 Reading will have been preserved, although some of its facility 
 will have been lost ; writing will not have been lost, but much 
 of its accuracy will be wanting ; the ability to work out com- 
 plicated exercises in arithmetic will have vanished, probably 
 degenerated into a mere power to apply enough of arithmetic 
 for very ordinary purposes ; I doubt whether history, secular or 
 religious, will have left a trace of its former accurate character ; 
 and so with all that remaining high intellectual matter with 
 which the brain had been inoculated — it may still have its 
 shadow upon Jobus's mind ; it was schoolwork — like the smell 
 of the school stove, it formed a part of school-life : it gave him 
 no real pleasure then ; the loss of it now produces in him no 
 mortification. 
 
 Is it then all loss ? Certainly not ; it has been years of brain
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 
 
 07 
 
 exercise, years of learning how to learn. The boy has been so 
 fardisanimalled that his reasoning powers have been roused into 
 full vitality ; he has been introduced into a new world, one very 
 different from that which might have left him to believe that life 
 was a mere matter of labour as its business ; beer, skittles, and 
 coarse indulgence as its recreation ; he has found out at school 
 that he has a mind capable of getting at strange fields of infor- 
 mation, a soul offered very high privileges. The intelligence 
 which remains to him may appear to but poorly represent the 
 process by which he obtained it, still from that process he has 
 derived it. The thing remains, in its degree powerful for good 
 or evil, although a great deal of the tool work that created it is 
 obliterated in the wear and tear of active life. 
 
 It appears to me that we are too apt to regard the village 
 schoolboy at school as so much raw material, capable of being 
 worked up to one uniform pattern. It is very curious to observe 
 how cleverly boys of very different natural ability are made to 
 play out the same school tunes, under the hand of a skilful 
 master, and with very little apparent variation. Is it that the 
 dull head is driven up to the mark the brighter intellect attains 
 without driving ? or, is it that the clever boy is held back in his 
 work to pace with the natural dunce ? or, again, is it not the 
 fact that the system pursued is so mechanical, the material sub- 
 mitted to it is so young, that dull and lively brains early forced 
 into the same groove must, as they run in it, give forth nearly 
 identical lesson sounds ? Are we dealing with brain material as 
 the acrobat deals with the muscles and ligaments of the children 
 he is training for future astonishing contortion, making the 
 whole frame, when immature, obedient by the very force of 
 continued exercise, to perform feats which no skill could, at 
 maturity, get out of a human being who had not been thus made 
 subject to this early power of muscular distortion ? 
 
 I admit that where there is an early opening for the profit- 
 able use of what a boy has thus learnt at school, he, being now 
 an adult, docs very often turn it to account ; he goes for a few 
 years to farm work. Having overcome by open air and labour 
 the depressing effect of the years of schooling on his frame, he 
 is in full strength of constitution. Such an adult will be eligible 
 
 VOL. I. h
 
 9 8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Oct. 10 
 
 for many a position in life higher than that of ordinary farm 
 labour ; he goes into the railway or police service, or into some 
 other avocation in which his scholarship, what remains of it, 
 acting in aid of his physical power, will give him good earnings 
 and fair prospect of rising in life. Here the system may be said 
 to reap its fruit, but the majority of these successful cases are 
 those of boys who may have done no more in school than all 
 the rest, but, having better ability, they had done it with more 
 ease ; the process of being taught having been less painful to 
 them they retained, better than duller boys, what was put into 
 them. 
 
 Wlw should we wonder that many a boy, no worse in the 
 utterance of lessons than another at school, should, as an adult, 
 very soon become dull, stupid, devoid of any the least taste for 
 anything intellectual ? By nature dull, with brain power heredi- 
 tarily of low average, he had for seven years, for some six hours 
 a day, been subject to a hard brain drill ; in the school ranks he 
 passed muster ; he is now out of them ; it is a positive constitu- 
 tional advantage to shake off the mental stiffening to which he 
 had been subject ; he is not the utterly uncultivated being he 
 would have been without schooling ; but he is in a healthier, 
 more mentally wholesome condition in the forgetfulness of a 
 very great part of what had been forcibly crammed into him. 
 We should always bear in mind that the child of educated 
 parents returns from school to a home in harmony with the 
 work of his school teacher ; all around him speaks to the value 
 of knowledge, the misfortune of ignorance. Not so is it with 
 Jobus. His home is the place of his meals and his sleep, rarely 
 of his play, more rarely still of anything likely to bring out his 
 school lore ; tired himself, he rejoins parents toil-worn, needing 
 what rest and quiet they can snatch in early evening and at 
 night to refit them for the next clay's early toil. Let us be con- 
 tent that we yet have a very large and increasing number of the 
 labouring poor, who are able to read, with some power of writing, 
 who have not forgotten all their summing, and have retained 
 enough of school theology to find and hold their way in a simple, 
 unambitious Christian life ; they may not do all credit as pupils 
 of a master of high qualification, but for their calling in life they
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 99 
 
 have all they need for their happiness. I question whether a 
 less ambitious style of education, less forcing of dull brains, would 
 not have left a great many of them really wiser men — men more 
 likely in after life to seek more wisdom from books. I think 
 many a boyhood has been so book and Bible and slate poisoned 
 from over school work that the mind, nauseated from over- 
 feeding, has passed into a reaction, making all knowledge, sacred 
 or profane, repulsive. 
 
 As to special instruction, I do not see how much is to be 
 done at school. Sums in sacks and hurdles, lessons on soils, the 
 treatment of farm beasts, and the nature of farm implements, 
 may have their value, but I am not aware that in practice there 
 has been any real result from them ; still I feel that many an 
 object lesson might be made more agreeable and could not be 
 less useful if it did direct attention to the commoner objects with 
 which the boy's future will be so connected. 
 
 I will not trust myself to say what I think of the effect of 
 making the Bible an every-day hard lesson-book — a practice far 
 too common ; that it is utterly destructive of reverence for God's 
 word I cannot doubt, nor do I for one moment doubt but that it 
 is as injurious to the teachers as to the taught. 
 
 The connection between education and strikes is not obvious. A 
 prevalent idea among employers of labour a quarter of a century ago 
 was that education led to combination and strikes. Subscriptions in 
 aid of education were largely withheld by the large employers, many of 
 whom held this view. S. G. O. discussed the bearing of education on 
 disputes between capital and labour. 
 
 October 24, 1864. 
 
 There is a very wide difference between the action of education 
 of a high standard upon the operative of a manufactory and its 
 action in the case of an agricultural labourer. In the latter the 
 work upon which he enters when he leaves school is of the 
 simplest character, requiring little from him beyond ordinary in- 
 telligence, health, and proper attention to the orders given to 
 him by his master. Not so is it with the mechanics in any large 
 branch of manufacture ; these men have to deal with a great 
 variety of tools, to perfect their share of a great variety of work 
 executed on material at one time of the finest and most delicate
 
 ioo THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Oct. 24 
 
 texture, at another of coarse and intractable quality, only to be 
 dealt with by great force of hand, as well as skill of hand and 
 brain. The machinery in co-operation with which they have to 
 work is of the most complicated character, requiring consider- 
 able intelligence to direct its power to properly deal with the 
 material submitted to it. 
 
 In every factory, in every mining operation, it is of the first 
 importance that the majority of the employed should have at 
 least that share of intelligence which will secure habits of caution 
 in regard to the risks the property of the employer and the lives 
 of the employed must be exposed to, where so much depends on 
 the accidental disarrangement of the machinery and those many 
 elements of danger which are inevitable where the work sought 
 to be done can only be safely attempted with great watchfulness, 
 lest any disturbance of the vast power used, any avertible mis- 
 chief from the nature of the material or the scene of work, 
 should, for want of this caution, have been left unguarded 
 against. 
 
 It requires a well-exercised brain in boyhood to prepare the 
 man for the incessant demand on his judgment and nicety of 
 calculation that the great proportion of skilled labour now re- 
 quires. Those who have to be trusted as ' the hands ' to perfect 
 by their labour the wonderful productions of the manufactories 
 of the present day, need not simply the intelligence and skilled 
 manipulation which to-day's inventions may demand, but power 
 to follow in the steps of each day's fresh inventions. If, on the 
 one hand, we are told that the brain of the engineer can know 
 no rest, but must ever be on the watch to push further the won- 
 derful achievements of machinery, will they who tell us so dis- 
 pute that there is with each novel application of machinery a 
 new demand for increased skill and intelligence in the work- 
 man ? 
 
 It is just with this class that the education I think overdone 
 in the case of the children of the farm labourer can scarcely with 
 their children be so. Born of parents of a higher intellectual 
 type, bred in homes where from their earliest days they are 
 brought into contact with so much that concerns mechanical 
 power, the skill of mechanics, they are brain-fitted and home-
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 101 
 
 fostered in a more intellectual atmosphere, and are thus, when 
 very young, led to value the school's teaching, as leading up to 
 much on which the home's comfort so greatly depends. 
 
 At the very commencement of the battle of life, when first 
 they enlist in the array of our skilled operative force, they find 
 all they have to do easier done by the use of knowledge gained 
 at school ; growing up among men of intelligence, their faculties, 
 so far from being depressed by the nature of their labour, are 
 quickened by it ; they continue to improve in knowledge by the 
 use of the power to improve they first obtained at school ; their 
 worldly interest, the field of their labour, is no village-bounded 
 field ; they work, and they know it, as it were, for the world at 
 large, and soon take more or less interest in all those world 
 changes which directly affect their own particular branch of 
 trade. War and peace, national prosperity or adversity, the in- 
 terruption from any cause of the progress of trade, are things 
 which come home to them with peculiar force. No wonder they 
 do read newspapers, have their reading rooms, clubs, &c, have 
 ears to hearken to and eyes to study matters which affect the 
 condition of their own class — the operative hands by whom the 
 great commercial community work out their wealth ; those to 
 whom large ' demand ' is the harbinger of good, for it is from 
 their labour the ' supply ' must proceed, to whom a dull market 
 is prophetical of short time and diminished earnings. 
 
 It is true some portion of what they learnt at school is for- 
 gotten, but it is not the case with them as with farm labourers, 
 that what they have preserved is found to decrease. No, the 
 reading, writing, arithmetic, that training in how to learn they 
 had received, all very soon proves its own value to them, it is 
 for ever more or less available in their work ; as they advance in 
 skill and are promoted to a higher class of work, they still find 
 more profit in mental cultivation. As their business in life calls 
 for the exercise of all their knowledge and encourages them to 
 seek more, so, with this value for it in life's toil, they find also it 
 has its value in life's recreation. They are inevitably led into 
 tastes for extraneous matters; the appetite for news seeks its 
 food in newspapers ; those they will naturally like the best re- 
 lating the news of the day, and commenting on it in the interest
 
 io2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 24 
 
 of their own class. Cheap literature gives them a great variety 
 of reading — some purely instructive, some combining a little 
 instruction with much amusement, with about the same amount 
 of good and evil miscellaneous compositions as fall to the lot of 
 other classes of readers. 
 
 Should we ever have had the co-operative movement and all 
 those various institutions which prove the growing providence of 
 the operative class had they been less educated ? Are not these 
 good evidence of intellectual progress developing in a sound and 
 wholesome direction ? Should we have had that noble scene of 
 patient submission to ruin and suffering shown in the time of 
 the distress in the cotton districts — that noble exhibition of 
 patient loyalty — had not the operatives of our day become far 
 wiser than their forefathers ? 
 
 We owe our commerce to our national industry, the skilled 
 use of capital, and the labour of those to whom it gives employ- 
 ment. Neither would avail to increase our home wealth and 
 foster our foreign trade, were we not a people at peace among 
 ourselves. It is not because we have coal and iron at our feet 
 that we have outrun so many in the race, in which the power of 
 these has made us so strong and swift, but because, having them, 
 using them with such industry, property, the result of that in- 
 dustry, is respected and protected to a degree unknown to other 
 nations. There is ever the great inducement to seek its posses- 
 sion in the fact that it can be peacefully and in all safety en- 
 joyed. I can well remember the days when any great distress 
 among the operatives ever led to the cropping up of political 
 and social sedition, and this to such an amount as to threaten 
 the safety of our whole social fabric, begetting a degree of ill-will 
 between the employers and the employed, most disastrous to the 
 interest of both ; for ever bringing large masses of ignorant, 
 misguided men into direct conflict with the strong arm of the 
 civil power. The coolest heads among the statesmen of those 
 days viewed with the deepest apprehension a condition of things 
 which, if left undealt with, would lead to the wildest anarchy, 
 only at last to be put down by bringing the English soldier, on 
 English ground, into direct collision with his fellow-countrymen. 
 Is it so now? If it is not, is it that the operatives are men
 
 1 864 ED UCA TION \ 03 
 
 of another race, or that education has made them wiser men, 
 men who know the value of good government, who know it as a 
 protector to themselves, who may yet be sometimes led to seek 
 their ends unwisely, but who are yet too wise to seek them by 
 direct open violence ? 
 
 It is in vain to protest against trade unions ; these are days 
 of ' interest.' Do we not see it in the House of Commons ? 
 Who can dispute but that ' interests ' do there combine, and 
 bring pressure upon every Government to legislate in the direc- 
 tion they believe to be the best for their own particular selves ? 
 We may regret that the interests of the master and the servant, 
 the employer and the employed, are not made so identical in 
 practice as we make them to be in theory. It is, however, folly 
 to expect that each will not in this world seek his own first. 
 The labour of the operative is as much his own to deal with as 
 is the capital of his employer ; both are put out to usury ; no 
 legal pressure, no force of human reasoning will convince either 
 party that they may not choose their own market. Or, if they 
 so please, let capital and labour, the one or the other, be for a 
 time at rest, if they think it likely to promote their interest. 
 
 A ' strike,' in nine cases out of ten, is a most disastrous, un- 
 wise stroke of policy on the part of the operatives. It is a 
 deliberate casting on the savings of past days and the present 
 earnings of others the support of masses who were just now pro- 
 ducers as well as consumers, but who thus become, in their own 
 case, consumers of a store for which they have now ceased to 
 produce anything, and also a burden for their support upon 
 those who are still producers of that which they should, after 
 supporting themselves, store or put out to profit fcr their own 
 benefit. 
 
 Of all the curses which afflict humanity, civil war is one of 
 the worst, and yet out of such a war good has been known to 
 arise ; nations have thrown off the yoke of the tyranny which 
 oppressed their consciences or ground down their liberty ; thus 
 have they regained the freedom of thought and action which was 
 denied them. A ' strike ' is of the nature of a civil war. To 
 produce wealth, capital must combine with labour ; to secure its 
 daily support and any improvement in its condition, labour must
 
 io4 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Oct. 24 
 
 league with capital ; in alliance they have wrought out the great 
 commercial triumphs of the day ; acting as opponents they have 
 again and again arrested the progress of the national welfare, 
 brought the wealthy to ruin, and reduced to penury and despair 
 thousands of the dwellers in humble homes, who had yet so 
 dwelt in comparative comfort. Still, I hold it cannot be denied 
 that just as civil war is, and must ever be, in itself a curse, but 
 yet even as such may by some great force of circumstances be- 
 come the only remedy for a state of things which has become 
 morally and physically insupportable, and thus is a last, most 
 grave, but still justifiable resort, so there may be exceptional 
 circumstances under which— however deplorable in its action, 
 however opposed to all ordinary rule of right — a strike may be 
 justified. So that no law is broken, no illegal or unjust compul- 
 sion is used on others to compel them to leave work, it cannot 
 be denied that those who choose to do so infringe no law, as far 
 as I know, human or Divine, in withholding their labour from 
 the market. 
 
 To arrest men in the path of folly, surely you would not rear 
 them when young without wisdom, to make the operatives as a 
 class see that the weapon they now so rashly use has become 
 the bane of all good feeling between themselves and their em- 
 ployers, is one the very last to which they should ever resort, to 
 cause them to perceive its manifest cruelty and injustice when 
 forced into the hands of those who only under threats and com- 
 pulsion would take it. It will scarcely be argued that we should 
 limit early in life the exercise of their intellectual powers, be 
 content to have them artificers of a lower standard for our own 
 purposes, lest they should ever turn a higher standard of intellect 
 to bad purpose in their own interest. In my opinion, the true 
 policy lies quite in another direction. We should seek to draw 
 wiser fruit by the promotion of a wiser and more advanced 
 method of instruction. Already we have reaped the fruit of a 
 sound loyalty to the Sovereign and a general submission to all 
 constituted authority. We know it to be the fact, all strange as 
 it is, that no increase of crime came of that late period of dis- 
 tress to which the operatives in the North were subject ; educa- 
 tion had given them the power to reason on its causes ; they saw
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 105 
 
 clearly they were such as no power of Government, no commer- 
 cial foresight, no prudence on their own part, could have averted. 
 I say this was a great educational triumph. Had those hun- 
 dreds of thousands of starving, ruined men and women been 
 such as I can recollect in their scene of labour, I fear it would 
 have been a very different state of things. Why, then, should 
 we despair that this class, still thoroughly well taught in youth, 
 may yet in advanced life be led to see with truer judgment the 
 interest they have in any possible rational adjustment of trade 
 disputes as preferable to the ' strike ' ? 
 
 It may be yet some well-judging sound man, with a heart to 
 feel interest in the welfare of the operative class, may write the 
 history of past ' strikes,' stating impartially their real origin, the 
 exact nature of the matter in dispute, and the eventual result to 
 employer and employed ; the fault has not always been on one 
 side, and it would be a blessing to both to have the whole truth 
 put calmly on record. In my opinion, the great majority of 
 workmen in all trades are, even now, sufficiently well educated 
 to be open to the teaching such a narrative would offer ; if it is 
 not so, I accept the fact as a call for more, not less, education. 
 
 Let the law, the strong arm of the civil power, boldly and 
 firmly administered, put down all exercise of force, direct or in- 
 direct, by combinations of workmen to compel others to join 
 them in a ' strike.' The law can do this ; but no legal power 
 can make men deeply reason upon those many causes which, 
 for ever disturbing commerce, act alike on the welfare of the 
 master and the servant. The experience gathered from the past 
 has to be brought to bear on the exigency of the present hour. 
 This is the work of cultivated intellect ; the capitalist must do 
 it, or he will have no safe guide for his investments ; the opera- 
 tive must do it, or he will have no safe rule by which, at any 
 given moment, to value the worth of his labour. Is the former 
 to have all the education his parents can obtain for him to fit 
 him to bring matured reasoning power to his business, and yet 
 are we to give the operative a scant allowance of education ? 
 With all the bitter lessons which may be read in the records of 
 mercantile ruin, do not capitalists for ever rush into transactions 
 which prove that although they have had high moral and intel-
 
 io6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Oct. 24 
 
 lcctual teaching, they yet act the part of folly, tainted with all 
 the spirit of the worst of mere gamblers ; and yet who says it is 
 because they have had too much education ? 
 
 The demagogue who reaps his harvest wheresoever there is 
 discontent, coupled with ignorance to see whether it has just 
 grounds, would wish only for that much education among the 
 operatives which would give them a taste for reading and for 
 oratory without the discriminating power to discover the fallacies 
 which may exist in print, or the cunning falsehoods which may 
 be clothed in eloquence. Turn over the files of the provincial 
 papers in the days of riots in the northern districts in bygone 
 days ; examine the fly-sheets, placards, ballads of those days ; 
 study the speeches of the orators who then led, or rather, I 
 should say, stirred the men, — would such trash go down now ? 
 No ! it would not take in the boy who oils the machinery of any 
 workshop in the kingdom. There are ever on the outskirts of 
 every community a large mass of individuals whose idle habits 
 and profligate lives have kept them in its lowest condition ; but 
 too often the pressure of their numerical strength may be too 
 much for the calm reason of the more industrious and better 
 class ; it is these who but too often prolong a strike beyond the 
 time when those who began it would desire to see its end. They 
 may have gained as much as they now see to be reasonable, or 
 they may have seen they had no real grounds of complaint. 
 Alas ! they find that the vis inertia they have set in motion, the 
 mass of idleness they have made industrious for mischief, now 
 holds them to a course they deplore ; this may be an argument 
 to spread education over a larger surface,— it can hardly be one 
 to lower its quality. 
 
 We must, Sir, rest content to see year by year education 
 produce more independence of opinion, yes, and of manner. 
 The working classes will think more and more for themselves, 
 they will hold themselves as higher men. So be it ; so it must 
 be. Let us be prepared for the consequence, and try and feed 
 growing intelligence with sound food, meet and greet increasing 
 self-respect with the respect to which it is entitled. Let us not 
 seek to dam back the intelligence of this great and important 
 class by blocking it at its early source, but rather let us give the
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 107 
 
 stream all due space, seeking only to keep it within the banks of 
 just reason. 
 
 Middle Class Schools. 
 
 December 9, 1864. 
 
 The attention of the public is now much excited on the 
 question of middle-class education ; it is understood that a Com- 
 mission will inquire into the subject. Without presuming to 
 anticipate the result of this inquiry, will you kindly permit me 
 to discuss one or two features of the case as they strike my own 
 mind ? 
 
 It has been found difficult by the speakers and writers on 
 this subject to define strictly what is meant by the term ' middle 
 class.' We are told sometimes that it is the class whose means 
 do not allow them the advantages of the recognised public 
 schools — Eton, Harrow, Rugby, &c. ; who yet are in a position 
 in life which would forbid them -sending their children to the 
 National and British schools- -those assisted by the State. 
 Again, another definition of a middle-class school is, that it is 
 one from which the pupils go direct into the trades or profes- 
 sions in which the parents hope they will get their livelihood. I 
 confess I think this latter is the best definition, although it 
 would be easy to point out where it fails of the exact object 
 sought. In real fact, we all understand what we mean when we 
 talk of middle-class education, however difficult or impossible it 
 may be exactly to define where the class in question merges 
 into the upper or fines off into the lower. 
 
 I shall, therefore, assume that these schools are known in 
 their character as institutions for the education of the children 
 of what we call the middle classes ; and that there is a very 
 large number of such schools professedly educating the boys 
 who will form in future life the staple of the most valuable of 
 all the classes of our people which we can in any way, in any 
 degree, separate from the rest, as a class. I think some injustice 
 has been done to the masters of these schools. Admitting that 
 the actual work of education is very often scamped ; that very 
 often a ' prospectus ' is like the pictures outside a ' show,' a great 
 exaggeration of what you pay for at the door ; and further 
 admitting that the master and staff are not in many cases equal
 
 10S THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Dec. 9 
 
 to teach what they profess to do, and in some cases, when they 
 have the ability, do not put it forth ; not denying that the proofs 
 of what the boys have learnt, as shown in certain copies, themes, 
 and prize-book testimonials to industry and ability, are some- 
 times so many artful dodges to deceive parents who are either 
 too ignorant to detect them or too vain to question them, — I 
 still believe the masters of these schools in our day have done a 
 great work. No one who has watched the changed man the 
 tradesman, the tenant-farmer, the professional man of small 
 means now is, and compared what he is now with what 
 he was no such very great number of years since, can doubt but 
 that the school of his class has done for it as a class quite as 
 much as higher schools have done for the highest class, if not 
 more. I am inclined to think, if the word ' stationary ' is to be 
 used in the matter, it cannot be applied in the case of the 
 intelligence of the middle class ; that, in fact, this has visibly 
 advanced, while in the case of the class above it matters are 
 very much what they were. 
 
 Looking at the education of a boy as an investment, so far 
 as regards its cost, I believe Mr. Cornfield, of the Grange Farm, 
 has got more for his money at Mr. Dickinson Desk's academy, 
 in the town of Oxmarket, than his noble landlord has got for 
 the money he paid to Dr. Bellowstone, of Cricketfield College. 
 Knowing, as I do, that Mr. C. got his boy done intellectually 
 and fed tolerably for 35/. a year, and no extras, with short holi 
 days, I think Dick C. brought away at sixteen more for his 
 
 money than young Lord did at a year older ; his father 
 
 paying at least 70/. a year unavoidable, with some 20/. more 
 incidental, and having the pleasure of his son's company at 
 home with the gamekeepers and grooms for a far greater portion 
 of the year. 
 
 We should bear in mind that by far the greater proportion 
 of the purely commercial class, as well as almost the whole of 
 the tradesmen of England, have been educated at these schools, 
 and to these we may add the great body of tenant-farmers. 
 Now, I think it impossible to deny, not only the great intelli- 
 gence of these classes, but that it is an intelligence which has of 
 late rapidly increased, and year by year we see no one symptom
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 109 
 
 of its decline, but the reverse. I am inclined to argue that this 
 is proof that these middle schools have given fully money's 
 worth for the money they have received for their work ; and the 
 more so, as I am satisfied that the masters of these schools 
 seldom retire from business, having amassed anything beyond a 
 very modest competence from it. 
 
 I am quite ready to admit that many of these schools may 
 be kept by men of low acquirement, but then it is but fair to 
 ask, what in their case are the terms on which they receive 
 pupils ? I believe the answer would be, ' Very low terms indeed.' 
 If the curriculum is to be more ambitious, the cost of the educa- 
 tion of the master will have been greater, and so with his 
 assistants ; he must raise his terms accordingly. Are the parents 
 who are his customers, as the rule, either willing or able to accede 
 to this ? I doubt it. There is no class in the land which has 
 to make greater sacrifice to secure education for their children 
 than the middle class. They very rarely have fixed incomes ; 
 the returns of one year give no security for that of the next. It 
 is easy to point to blots on the economy they profess to pursue 
 by sneering at the hunter of the farmer or the dress of a trades- 
 man's wife and daughters. I have long been satisfied that, at 
 all events, we see and know all that can be thus proved against 
 them, for there is no concealment about it ; but we neither see 
 nor know how these harmless indulgences are obtained, by a 
 self-denying thrift, a narrow daily economy in many other 
 matters. Nothing is more easy than to pick out grounds for 
 taunting others with extravagance, by dealing only with par- 
 ticular features of their lives. What homilies we could preach 
 on their economy if we saw those lives in their entirety ! If a 
 well-to-do tradesman or tenant-farmer can find yearly in hard 
 cash, say, only 100/. a year for the education of his children, he 
 does not do this as the rule with an ease which would enable 
 him to add some 20/. more for a higher class of teaching ; his 
 money is on his shelves, or in his flocks and fields ; he may 
 turn it often, but the result of each separate application is ever a 
 matter very uncertain, rarely leaving a large margin for the 
 children's education. 
 
 Boys at school are hearty feeders, and should be well fed ;
 
 no THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 9 
 
 the masters of these schools know to their cost that, though the 
 fathers may be pleased most with the half-yearly report of pro- 
 gress, the mothers look to the well-filled waistcoat far more than 
 to the well-stocked brain. The old lady of Strawberry Farm, 
 who said of the schooling of her children, ' I like to see the girls 
 home with good manners, my boys well muttoned,' was not far 
 behind the opinions of the present generation of mothers of her 
 class. To mutton growing boys is expensive. You won't get 
 much into their heads without a good deal of fresh air and 
 exercise. The more they have of these, the more mutton they 
 consume. I hope the new Commission will have some regard 
 to the question, ' Can these boys be fed and lodged as they are 
 for the sum charged to their parents, and have further claim, for 
 that sum, for education of a higher stamp ? ' It is not just to 
 point to what is done in many National schools. Mr. Dickinson 
 Desk has no capitation money, no certificated Government-paid 
 teachers to aid him. His own education may have been obtained 
 at a low cost, but, such as it is, the nation paid nothing towards 
 it. Before boys are sent to public schools, such as Eton or 
 Harrow, they have had careful home-teaching up to a certain 
 point by means of governesses or tutors, or they were sent early 
 to a preparatory school, where the foundation was laid, or 
 supposed to be laid, for the future work of the public school. It 
 is rare with middle-class parents to send their children to any 
 but one school from first to last. I need hardly say the family 
 at home are far too much engaged to have much time for the 
 preparation of the boys for school. The master receives in the 
 middle-class school material very raw indeed, and on this he has 
 to go to work to do the best he can. It must be well boarded ; 
 it has all eating and sleeping power — powers pretty sure to 
 develop more and more. The power of acquiring knowledge 
 has as yet arrived only at a very early stage ; it has to be now 
 developed to its utmost extent, and then led on and on until the 
 boy can be returned to his father, educated — i.e. possessed of 
 all that amount of useful knowledge which the school undertook 
 to give for the money, with a habit of gathering knowledge 
 which, if it be still kept up, gives every promise to the parent 
 that the youth may now enter some business, and, being once in
 
 1 864 EDUCATION ur 
 
 it, by means of the education he has received make his way to a 
 good position. 
 
 I have no doubt there may be many a school professing a 
 great deal in the matters of morals and letters, the master of 
 which may be a wretched sot, a taproom authority, with just 
 that species of ability which wins taproom applause. That he 
 is a knave as well as a sot is very probable. But this is not the 
 master of a school to which any decent tradesman would send 
 his boy. There is a certain class of small struggling farmer or 
 tradesman, who, scarce ever out of debt, still fights life, adhering 
 to the business which makes it a bitter life, because it is business, 
 not labour, who would yet be happier in the meanest labour 
 which would return an honest support. Such a man won't send 
 a boy to the National school ; it would, as he thinks, proclaim 
 his poverty, and at once lower him among those with whom he 
 still aims to live on an equality. A cheap but pretentious school 
 takes his boys off his hands ; he wants them taught certain 
 things, made sharp ; he knows he must be blind to the faults of 
 the master, so long as he gets out of him all the teaching he can 
 expect for the money. I cannot admit that such schools are 
 middle-class schools ; they assume to be superior to the National 
 schools, as the parents of the pupils assume to be classed above 
 the mechanic or labourer, but it is in both cases a sham. 
 
 It is to me a moral certainty that the real middle-class 
 schools will improve ; they must do so, for the intellectua 
 appetite of all classes is a matter of incessant growth. It will 
 yet be found that although for the money paid a wider field of 
 knowledge can hardly be expected, yet that what is taught can 
 be taught better, that more pains can be given and better methods 
 pursued to thoroughly and accurately ground the pupils in those 
 branches of knowledge it is professed to teach them. There can 
 be no doubt but that a well-devised system of inspection by com- 
 petent and impartial men would be a most valuable thing ; but 
 to make the submission to this compulsory is out of the question. 
 The Oxford and Cambridge examinations offer to those who 
 seek it a means of proving their ability — give to the successful 
 candidates a certificate valuable as an honourable distinction, 
 but carrying with it its own value as proof of competence to
 
 II2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 9 
 
 undertake profitable occupation. Thus the offering to the 
 middle-class schoolmaster the means of having his system and 
 its success tested and certified will tender him a certain honour- 
 able distinction, having also a clear money value to him, inas- 
 much as it proves to parents which of these schools are certainly 
 good. Other schools may be as good, but are not thus proved 
 to be so. 
 
 It seems to me the success of such a proffered system of 
 examination would depend much on the tact and skill of the 
 examiners, and their common-sense view of what they under- 
 take ; they should deal simply with what it is professed to teach, 
 not with what they may think it desirable to teach. The 
 masters, for their own sake, will give to the parents as much as 
 can be expected for their money, for there is plenty of competi- 
 tion ; but you have no right to expect more than this, even if 
 you assume some sort of right to see that in the branches of 
 knowledge offered the best means are used to obtain the highest 
 result. 
 
 That there are many endowed schools which are not only 
 ill conducted, but which also are so conducted as to give the 
 scholars received under the endowment scant measure of what 
 is their right, while those who pay higher, the private scholars, 
 are better dealt with, I have no doubt. Here the law is quite 
 justified in direct interference. It is the case of an abused 
 public charity. By all means, then, deal with these schools so 
 as to secure, as far as may be, the original intentions of those 
 who gave the endowments, but giving those intentions a liberal 
 translation, in accordance with the spirit of our own age. 
 
 I am, Sir, quite aware these observations of mine take a 
 somewhat different view of the existing state of middle-class 
 schools from that which has as yet been taken in your columns, 
 but I feel that the masters of these schools are not as the rule 
 open to the severe strictures which have been made upon them. 
 I believe in their case, as in the case of masters of schools of the 
 highest position, if they criticised the treatment of pupils at 
 home, the habits allowed there, the example there set, if they 
 divulged all their difficulties with parents, it would be seen that 
 if they are no better than men of other occupations, they have
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 113 
 
 been made what they are, and kept as they are, by a force of 
 circumstances against which they were well-nigh powerless. 
 
 The publication of the following letter attracted much attention, and 
 among others who wrote to him was Mr. Walter. S. G. O. says : — - 
 ' Walter wrote to me at once, on reading this, a highly complimentary 
 letter begging me to publish a second, which I did.' 
 
 December 13, 1864. 
 
 We are all but too much disposed to regard education as a 
 mere matter of book work, the agencies by which this work is 
 to be set in motion being parents, governesses, tutors, or school- 
 masters. We rely on these, the educating operatives, to take 
 the brains of our children in hand and bring the brain power 
 under subjection to book power. There appears to me to be 
 one element in education which has not received the considera- 
 tion due to it, and that is the necessity to watch over, control, 
 and direct the knowledge the brains of our children obtain from 
 other sources than the books from which they learn lessons, 
 other lips than those of parents and salaried teachers. 
 
 It is my belief that a child's brain at a very early age becomes 
 a receptacle of facts and ideas to which at the time it attaches 
 no importance — in reality, is scarcely aware that it has received 
 them into the storehouse of its intellect ; but, being there stored, 
 I believe such facts and ideas are not lost to it, may remain 
 apparently dormant, but still have that life which waits only its 
 season for a rapid and sometimes very inconvenient develop- 
 ment. I hold that an idea thus received, although at the time 
 the age of the child would forbid anything like a reasonable 
 acceptance of its meaning, does have a future influence upon it 
 — at least thus far, that at a more advanced age it can then 
 develop it for good or evil, as it may be, and does often do so. 
 This opinion may be held to assume that the brain is, after a 
 fashion, a material on which facts and ideas, coming through the 
 eye or car, engrave themselves, and so remain as written matter, 
 awaiting a time when the advanced condition of the child's 
 understanding gives it power to read and apply them. To many 
 this may appear a very weak assumption on my part, and yet 
 vol. 1. I
 
 ii 4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 13 
 
 long observation and some study have brought me to the con- 
 viction it is in a degree true. 
 
 I hold further, that what is true of the child is, after its 
 degree, true through every stage of life up to far advanced man- 
 hood ; things we see, things we hear, we often see and hear yet 
 taking no heed that we do so ; some event in after time, having 
 some connection with them, at once brings before us the fact 
 that we had so seen or heard, and yet been thus heedless of the 
 fact. There is, however, this great difference between the young 
 brain and the older one, the latter could have comprehended the 
 impression received, had that knowledge of the world about it 
 which could interpret the impression ; the young brain — yes, 
 and a very young brain, — according to my theory, receives im- 
 pressions which would be as algebra to it, preserves them, and 
 only falls back upon their proper interpretation when, advancing 
 in years, it has gathered a much further advance in its powers 
 of comprehension. 
 
 Whether I am right or wrong in my theory, I am quite 
 satisfied of this, that if one half the pains were taken to secure 
 a moral atmosphere in the nursery which is taken in the case of 
 the schoolroom, or in the choice of a school, children would be 
 wiser and better, and grow into men and women with more of 
 wisdom and of virtue. 
 
 ' Little pitchers have long ears,' says Mrs. Careful, as pre- 
 paratory to a half-hour's gossip with a neighbour she sends 
 Master Johnny or Miss Lucy, age six, out of the room. Where 
 does Johnny or Miss L. retire to ? To the nursery. Nursemaids 
 and nurses have their gossip, not so refined as that of the drawing- 
 room. Do they send children out of hearing ? Are the ears of 
 a little pitcher, whatever they may be, so constructed that they 
 are dull of hearing upstairs, although so terribly acute down- 
 stairs ? 
 
 Would that parents could be brought to see that no cost, no 
 pains, are too great to bestow to obtain nurses and nursemaids 
 not only thoroughly respectable in life and conversation, but 
 thoroughly aware how they may morally injure or preserve the 
 children intrusted to them by their own evil or good ways and 
 words. There is far more mischief done in many families before
 
 i86 4 EDUCATION 115 
 
 the children reach the schoolroom than the best of governesses 
 or tutors have power to eradicate ; they may hinder its exhibi- 
 tion, may give the child a sort of shame regarding it ; but early 
 immoral taint is a very fast-set colour ; the attrition of many 
 years' better principles may at last erase it ; it but too often, 
 however, is only put to sleep in the boy or girl to break out with 
 sad force in the man or woman. 
 
 An early nursery lesson, one far too common, is 'never to 
 tell tales ; ' it is often enforced by dark, mysterious threats of a 
 character likely most seriously to impress the child ; little Missy 
 has a very perplexing question of allegiance to solve ; early 
 taught duty to papa and mamma, still earlier has she learned 
 what may be the penalty if she is not loyal to the sovereign 
 powers of the nursery. No doubt, an infant spy may grow into 
 a sly and treacherous boy or girl, but there is, on the other 
 hand, no little danger that this training of children to allow evil 
 to be done and spoken before them, making it honourable in 
 them to conceal it from their parents, highly penal not to do so, 
 will in the end make them deceitful and false to suit their own 
 childish purposes. 
 
 Children are very curious in the matter of everything made 
 mysterious to them. If, in addition to being commanded not to 
 tell what they hear or see, they also are made curious as to why 
 they are to be silent, their minds will be set upon the watch that 
 they may find out what it is that may be thus said or done 
 before them but not told to any one ; they will ask questions 
 inconvenient to answer. If thought too suspicious they will 
 then be bribed by forbidden indulgences to be quiet. It is thus 
 many a promising child of parents who are themselves upright 
 and truthful has become a source of life-long grief to them ; 
 made false, sly, prematurely knowing in the nursery, it has 
 grown up according to this training, become one of those cha- 
 racters so utterly despicable — the man or woman taught what is 
 good, but wearing the good taught as a mere cloak to conceal a 
 heart false to the outer life, and only wanting opportunity to 
 betray itself in all its impurity and deceit. 
 
 I have heard parents and medical men of high standing 
 express astonishment at those most painful exhibitions of moral
 
 ,i6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 13 
 
 distortion, which sometimes occur under attacks of the brain in 
 young persons. The patient may have been most carefully 
 brought up and lived in the strictest consistency with such an 
 education, and yet the lips have poured forth language so vulgar, 
 so depraved in its nature, as to baffle all conception whence 
 either the ideas or their form of utterance could have been 
 derived. In the cases I have myself known I have felt satisfied 
 that there was a clear indication that it was the development of 
 what had long lain dormant in the brain, a confused delivery of 
 detached sentences and sentiments, just such as might have been 
 carelessly from time to time used in the hearing of children, 
 thought far too young to heed them, or, if they did, to attach 
 any meaning to them. I could trace just such low, coarse talk 
 as could easily be conceived to be that of servants of the lowest 
 caste of mind. It was to me simply the effect of fever exciting 
 the brain under some, to us, still mysterious fashion, and rousing 
 up into expression matters once, and long since, received as in a 
 dream, of which in a sane state there had been no recollection. 
 I believe it is always found to be the rule that, on the abatement 
 of this physical disturbance and the return of calm reason, no 
 vestige of the moral distemper has remained, nor the slightest 
 knowledge that it has even existed ; nor in the future life could 
 the closest watchfulness discover that this latent evil had any 
 action on the character ; in fact, it had risen as a shadow of 
 something belonging to years long past, every recollection of 
 which had been by time erased — it had returned to that oblivion 
 from which the fever of the brain had reproduced it. 
 
 When a child leaves the nursery for the schoolroom it is not 
 only transplanted into a more refined companionship, but in the 
 more refined atmosphere it has the whole power of the mind 
 steadily and progressively led to the attainment, day by day, of 
 fresh and wholesome objects of interest. I can then quite under- 
 stand that the low, coarse ideas it may almost insensibly have 
 received may thus be gradually driven into oblivion — become so 
 overlaid by healthy moral matter as to be in effect harmless ; 
 and thus I can easily believe these maniacal developments of 
 evil to be external to the acquired character, and only forced 
 into view by the disease of the moment, for the moment. Not
 
 1 864 ED UCA TION 1 1 7 
 
 so with the cunning, vulgar, false habits such as I have above 
 alluded to ; these education may eradicate, or may only restrain, 
 I consider, then, that of the two evils the teaching children to 
 deceive and be in any way false to their parents is even worse 
 than the actual exposure of them to verbal vulgarity and 
 indecency at an age when, though they may and must receive it 
 by the ear, they cannot in any way understand it. The pursu- 
 ance of a bad habit is making evil a principle of daily life ; the 
 evil is understood, and wilfully done. There are, as it were, two 
 lives given the child — the one the life the parent knows and sees, 
 while much of the other is of that nursery order of life of which 
 no tales are to be told, because it permits and does what no 
 parent would allow. I can quite understand that good children 
 are as a kind of police in the nursery so long as they retain full 
 truthfulness with their parents ; to bad nurses and maids their 
 little eyes and ears, and natural tendency to prattle about what 
 they notice, must be most inconvenient ; they must corrupt 
 them into silence, or they must terrify them into it — make their 
 life a false life, or one that wilfully conceals truth out of 
 pure fear. Let parents look to it ; let them rest assured it were 
 far better to lower schoolroom accomplishments, and pay high 
 for a superior class for the nursery staff, than to do the one 
 cheaply and badly, that the other, at higher expense, may aim 
 at higher results. These are days when good female servants 
 command good wages ; they are ever worth them, nowhere more 
 so than in the nursery. 
 
 The days are, I hope, nearly passed when children are made 
 obedient by terror, the being threatened with all those old 
 nursery bugbears by which even parents have -sometimes tried 
 to subdue a child ; still, it is well that every parent should do all 
 that is possible to prevent any action on a child's brain by means 
 of these threats of evil coming on it from agencies other than 
 those it can see and apprehend. It must take the — to it — 
 mystery of duty to the unseen God on the authority of its 
 parents and teachers ; it is as false as dangerous to set before it 
 a fear of other mysterious powers, awful to a child's mind, in 
 which we do not believe ourselves ; it may be spared to discover 
 the deceit, but very often a certain amount of painful nervous
 
 n8 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 13 
 
 disturbance will remain for life. When we regard the pressure 
 that, first and last, the human brain is subjected to in these 
 exciting days, we cannot be too careful how we treat it, in 
 the early days of its growth, it being then most susceptible of 
 mischief. 
 
 How often are medical men called in to advise in the cases 
 of young children who are restless in their sleep, fearful to seek 
 sleep, uneasy when left alone at night, lying watchful for fear 
 they should be so left, with symptoms clearly indicative of brains 
 overworked, over excited. Nurses and mothers attribute the 
 mischief to causes which are the effect, not the origin of it. 
 Were the real truth known, it would be often found that the 
 sufferers are victims to the folly that has day by day exacted 
 from the brain too much, or to the wickedness which has worked 
 upon it by threats of some mysterious punishment ; very, very 
 often, from allowing the patients to become absorbed in a species 
 of reading which, keeping the mind on the strain, has wrought 
 it up to an excitement from which it cannot calm down by any 
 power of its own. 
 
 It is quite true that there are many most excellent books 
 for the amusement of young children. I have seen some I hold 
 to be most pernicious, which are yet considered quite harmless. 
 You may get a far worse kind of excitement for the physical 
 condition of a child from some of these than you do of evil 
 moral excitement for adults from the most sensational of senti- 
 mental novels, and this when the heroes and heroines of the tale 
 may be only domestic animals. I once took up and read in the 
 nursery of a friend a book which in you or me might only raise 
 a smile, but which I am satisfied might give the children for 
 whom it was written night after night of pure terror. It was 
 written something after this fashion : — It was the history of two 
 truant kittens, which in a fit of naughty disobedience had 
 absconded from home. Their adventures were many ; they 
 were cleverly told in child language ; they were such as must 
 interest a child deeply in the fate of the brother and sister 
 catlings ; there were beautifully executed pictures of such things 
 as awful owls with eyes of fire hovering over them at night, 
 murderous-looking dogs coming down on them by day, bulls
 
 1 86 4 ED UCA TIOA 1 1 9 
 
 breathing from their nostrils as if they were chimneys on fire, 
 bandit cats, giants awfully armed, seizing them to carry them to 
 dark caves, &c. Of course, the moral was, kittens and children 
 who are disobedient will be subject to such terrible tribulations. 
 It struck me that such a book was enough to scare sleep from 
 any young child allowed to pore over its pages ; many such 
 tales would make it subject to the dreams and screams which, 
 terrifying the parents, invoke the M.D. ; they then all say it is 
 stomach, and proceed to inflict all kinds of intestinal torture to 
 no purpose, for the child, confined to its bed, is given more and 
 more of such intoxicating literature. Weakened by the senna 
 and traditional gray powder, it gets worse and worse ; the M.D. 
 is puzzled, the mother alarmed ; more advice is called in ; the 
 child is sent to the sea, there gets well under the more novel 
 and natural fascination of shells and seaweed. Fortunately the 
 books are left behind ; it is forbidden to read at all, but not 
 because zvhat it read zvas bad reading for it. 
 
 When shall we learn that, just as prudence should dictate the 
 food a child should eat, so should it regulate the food afforded 
 to its brain ? There is no greater folly than this system of 
 rubbing off the natural angles of childishness by a course of 
 reading appealing to childish simplicity, but wrapping up amuse- 
 ment in clever mimicry of the most exciting of all literature, the 
 novel. Childish sentiment runs to dumb animals and their 
 young ; tales may be written on these to afford the utmost 
 amount of childlike, gleeful interest — may be made joyous as 
 well as instructive. I never fear sleeplessness from over laugh- 
 ing. Children are born to laugh a good deal ; it is time enough 
 to excite their tears by sentiment when that season has come 
 when sorrow must mix more or less with their joy. 
 
 The object of this letter may, Sir, be unsuited for your 
 columns. If it is not so, and you allow it to appear, let me 
 assure any parents who may read it I have no moiive in writing 
 it beyond a desire to warn them against evils I know to exist, 
 and, existing, to work out much misery. 
 
 The < headaches ' of early childhood are on the increase ; 
 medical men are more than ever alive to the fact that children 
 arc over-excited in the nursery, and, but too often, too early and
 
 120 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 13 
 
 far too hard worked in the schoolroom ; they are ' forced,' as 
 gardeners would say, for too early exhibition in the drawing- 
 room. They pass too much of their early life cramped into a 
 sort of orderly, by-drill-attained manners, utterly destructive of 
 the sweetest, most healthy characteristics of true children. For 
 ever, from the earliest moment they can be taught anything, 
 they are bidden ' not to be rude, but to behave pretty/ as if, in 
 real truth, the prettiest feature of child life was not a sort of 
 rudeness — the exuberance of real child nature. Martyrs to the 
 vanity of our day, they are limb-hampered by the folly which 
 makes them mere dolls for the exhibition of their dresses and 
 the ingenuity of their nurses in dressing their hair. Taught a 
 deportment in character with their costume, they become, but 
 too often, vain little puppet imitations of men and women, all 
 the winning artlessness proper to their age being thus forcibly 
 taken from them ; they strut about, pretty pictures, when they 
 had far better be tumbling about with the abandon natural to 
 their age, but which would at once destroy the claim to that 
 sort of prettiness their careful ' get up ' had given them. This 
 precocious training in the nursery has its fruit in that great 
 amount of butterflyism of which we see so much in after-life, in 
 those stately, artificial, variegated specimens of young-lady life 
 of which every watering-place gives such a cloud. Much real 
 goodness is there in some of them, but there is the same sad 
 sense of ' out to be looked at ' stamped upon their gait and 
 adorning, only of an older kind, as that with which at from four 
 to seven years of age they entered the drawing-room to visitors 
 or the dining-room to dessert. These do not grieve me ; they 
 have weathered the perils of child life, live, are to all appearance 
 happy, may yet make others so ; but how many a young child 
 has sunk under the hotbed forcing which these have managed 
 to pass through unhurt ? 
 
 I wish the physicians and surgeons who have to prescribe 
 for the headaches, sleeplessness, brain fevers, spine complaints, 
 now so common in the nurseries and schoolrooms of the land 
 would boldly tell the parents the wholesome truths they could 
 tell with such authority. I know, however, this will not be the 
 case ; they will continue to be called in when the mischief is
 
 1 864 EDUCATION 121 
 
 done, and must rest content with the best endeavours to modify 
 its consequences. They are fee'd as medicine-men, will not be 
 hearkened to if they prescribe common-sense instead of hyd. c. 
 cretd. We shall, I fear, preserve our race of little ladies and 
 gentlemen to the sacrifice of many a child life, or the rendering 
 it miserable. 
 
 Education of Children. 
 
 January 5, 1865. 
 
 In a former letter on the above subject I touched chiefly 
 upon things to be guarded against — on evils in the early manage- 
 ment of young children which by prudent care could be 
 avoided. The kind and flattering way in which the advice I 
 gave has been received in quarters entitled to my highest re- 
 spect induces me to follow up the subject, by endeavouring to 
 point out certain principles of action which I think important, 
 as leading to that result we all desire — an early training of 
 children in the way they should go. 
 
 In every child born in healthy condition there is a moral life 
 capable of developing certain moral emotions, as there is also, 
 in combination with it, a physical life formed for the future 
 development of certain physical powers. Sight, touch, hearing, 
 taste, the power of utterance, are in the early days of life in a 
 condition in which each separate faculty only exists in certain 
 machinery, itself as yet in a very partial condition of develop- 
 ment ; the will and power to apply the mechanism of our senses 
 have yet to be put forth, to be called into action, by the succeed- 
 ing necessities of advancing life. As the exigencies and at- 
 tractions of the world around the child make calls upon the use 
 of these senses, as yet in a very passive state, they will answer 
 to the call, and increase in power as they are submitted to 
 increased exercise. These, the forces by which the mind is to 
 act and be acted on, if not early abused, will quite keep pace 
 with any demand the mind may make upon them. 
 
 How pleased are the nurse and the mother when the infant 
 evinces the first symptoms of what is called ' taking notice ' ! 
 The hammering the bottom of the snuffer tray with the back of 
 the snuffers was the process in the olden time by which this, 
 the first exercise of pleased attention to sound, was usually
 
 122 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 5 
 
 discovered. Cheering to the ear of an orator is the sound of the 
 applause which welcomes the appeals of his eloquence ; scarcely- 
 less so that felt silence of the audience which will at times offer 
 a tribute to his power in an attention which seems almost to 
 suspend the very breath. Here, after all, is only the develop- 
 ment of that sense of attention in the speaker and the audience 
 which, perhaps, in early life was first shown as pleasingly excited 
 by the snuffers-and-tray music of the nursery. 
 
 An infant will take to its food from the first ; this may be 
 called instinct. It is some time before it acquires that dis- 
 crimination of taste which makes one food more pleasant than 
 another. A great authority has laid it down that early knavery 
 and early sense of taste are often traceable to that very early 
 period when certain infant troubles are cured by the administra- 
 tion of brown sugar ; it is said the little animal feigns the hic- 
 cough to obtain the sweet taste of the antidote. So, again, with 
 the sense of touch, and that use of sight which, combining with 
 it, gives power to guide the hand to feel some object it seeks to 
 reach. For some considerable time it is doubtful whether any 
 understood sensation follows the early efforts to reach and touch 
 the things to which the infant puts out its hand ; by degrees 
 eye and hand act together, and although the result may be 
 simply the childish glee, that half-wondering expression of 
 countenance, which accompanies the successful poking of a 
 finger into the eye of a little sister, yet even this is proof that the 
 great business of preparation for active human life has com- 
 menced — the eye directs, the brain wills, the hand obeys. 
 
 I hold it to be true, and to be a truth deserving all attention, 
 that a child is born to love ; it has to learn to fear. I argue, 
 therefore, that we should in the very early stages of their 
 existence seek, by looks of love, by gentle tones, to lead our 
 children to yield to our wishes, rather than by a harsh tone and 
 frowning aspect try to terrify them into obedience. It is very 
 questionable in what way they feel the fear we thus try to 
 produce — whether we do not act prematurely on a sense scarcely 
 as yet developed, and simply confuse and annoy with no good 
 result — whereas we do know that at the earliest moment of any 
 exercise of reasoning power a child does answer to the tone and
 
 1865 EDUCATION 123 
 
 look of affection with the smile which indicates its return, and 
 by sounds which show pleasure. We are apt to laugh at the 
 nonsense of the nursery dialect, that utterance of perverted 
 English with lisping accent which, by common usage, is sup- 
 posed to be best suited to the comprehension of a small child ; 
 it is only, after its fashion, a lesson from the book of nature. If 
 we watch Juno with her puppy family, we shall see that when 
 they tease her into utterance, or please her into it, with their 
 fondling play, she has a very modified growl of reproof to 
 repress whelpine excess, and a soft whine of affectionate en- 
 couragement in return for proper exhibition of whelpine affec- 
 tion, very different from the out-growled menace or the out- 
 barked applause with which she greets or menaces the more 
 advanced in life of her species. It is the tone and look com- 
 bined which makes the nonsense uttered to children attractive 
 to them. Sense and nonsense are to them otherwise much 
 alike. We do not in using it make fools of ourselves ; on the 
 contrary, we show wisdom by this attempt to become as chil- 
 dren, that children may understand us after their own fashion. 
 We give a rag doll of bright colours, hideous and unshapely ; 
 the child likes it for its bright hues ; it may or may not see in it 
 a caricature of its own species ; the waxen, curly-headed, well- 
 clad Dolla, so prized by Miss in walking boots, would be a 
 meaningless thing to Miss scarcely out of socks. 
 
 The two cardinal virtues of nursery life are obedience and. 
 love. These are the rudiments of life's moral grammar, and in 
 them should all human life be very early well grounded. Obe- 
 dience should be won from a child by evidence given to it which 
 it can comprehend of the pleasure it thus affords to those it 
 loves, of the pain its self-will gives them. It will then give 
 more willing obedience, just in proportion to the love it has for 
 those who ask it. There can be no doubt that to win the 
 affectionate confidence of a young child we must stoop to enter 
 into the joys and sorrows which directly affect its, at present, 
 small sphere of life. The pater or mater familias who, as the 
 unthinking say, play the fool to a child of three or four years of 
 age, accommodating themselves to its small follies and caprices, 
 becoming for the occasion as children to gain more readily the
 
 124 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 5 
 
 child's love, in my opinion, act a rational part. Going for a 
 season into childland, they are no more to be ridiculed than the 
 traveller who tries to win the confidence of the natives of a land 
 strange to him by doing his best to join in their pursuits and 
 make their language his own. He may do it imperfectly, 
 grotesquely, if you will ; but in the attempt they see and accept 
 the endeavour to give them pleasure. 
 
 I can remember seeing a statesman, who for a short time 
 was Premier, whose ordinary life was given up to the study of 
 all the mysteries of national finance, who was one of the most 
 confirmed red-tapists I ever knew, to please his child, made, 
 willingly enough, to go on all fours about the room, covered 
 from the nape of the neck to the extreme spinal boundaiy with 
 his wife's shawl. What animal he was meant to represent I 
 know not ; but this I know, that his own laughter was as loud 
 and thoroughly natural as that of his child ; in after years, and 
 not many of them, that child was lost to him, loving him dearly 
 to the last ; I have no doubt that among the recollections of 
 that short life that man of serious, thoughtful character, of 
 whom the public thought as drawing his every inspiration from 
 Blue-books, cherished above all the memory of those seasons 
 when Downing Street and its lore had been so heartily set aside, 
 and he, the statesman, had become as a child to please one. 
 
 I may be told it is confessedly easy to win a child's love by 
 becoming after a sort its playfellow, but it is not so easy to 
 bring the love thus won to bear upon its will by the occasional 
 withholding of it, to gain some point of conduct to which the 
 child is opposed. I admit the difficulty, but I think it quite 
 capable of being overcome. By alternations of pleasure and 
 pain a child has to teach itself a great deal, which no one else 
 could teach ; the pain from falling is the check to too early 
 indulgence in the wish to stand ; a burnt child does dread fire, 
 but it does not forsake the warmth of the fireside, although it- 
 will fear to touch a fender, which, having been touched, had 
 given it pain. Children study countenances before they study, 
 with equal observation, anything else ; take a very young child 
 into a toy shop, the chances are it will still look up more to 
 your face than it will look at the nursery wealth which sur-
 
 1 865 EDUCATION 125 
 
 rounds it ; it has learnt to love face, kind mother, it has yet to 
 learn the charm of toys ; this latter is an acquired taste ; natural 
 instinct, all early association, has given to your countenance, its 
 change from grave to gay, its speaking smiles, or its look of 
 pain, a sense and meaning, which at present is as omnipotent as 
 anything can be over that ever-changing thing a child's mind. 
 
 I assert, then, that you can play into a child's confidence so 
 as to ensure pleasure to it from your looks of pleasure, pain to it 
 when your face tells of pain. In the early days of its life's 
 journey thus leading it by the light and checking it by the 
 cloud, seen where it loves best to look. 
 
 A time must come — and all a mother's judgment is needed 
 to determine when it has come — when advancing reason will 
 ally itself to that growing spirit of independence which is a part 
 of our nature, — well trained, the basis of life's success ; ill regu- 
 lated, the bane. Little duties are heavy laws on little folk ; 
 things are to be done which are distasteful, others left undone 
 which are very pleasant to a child. Too young to understand 
 the wherefore of a command, as yet untaught in any severe 
 penalty following on disobedience, we must expect rebellion ; 
 but let us not forget what is yet due to the ignorance of the 
 little rebel. To be angry with a child of tender years because it 
 cannot see as we see is folly. No less foolish is it to expect to 
 convince it of evil before it has yet learnt to distinguish what 
 makes right or wrong. I believe the sound principle is ever to 
 claim obedience to the parent as a duty not to be questioned, 
 and never to yield for one moment that position of command 
 which should reign all powerful to the age when advanced 
 reason can be taught, that parents govern children on principles 
 derived from authority by which they themselves are governed. 
 
 We must punish ; the discretion with which we do it will 
 greatly govern the amount which will be necessary. It should 
 ever be a work seen to be one of sorrow ; it should never be 
 done hastily or angrily. The dispositions of children vary 
 greatly. Their sensitiveness to shame or pain do not vary more 
 than do their dispositions to break out into degrees of open 
 rebellion, or to offer a more or less sullen ar.d more determined 
 exhibition of self-will. As is the disease so should the remedy
 
 126 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 5 
 
 be adapted to it ; there are children so constitutionally violent 
 that they are easily made defiant of all the ordinary means of 
 punishment ; there are some so sensitive, and yet so self-willed, 
 that although they need strong control, what would be as a 
 feather against others is to them as the rending of their little 
 hearts ; others are there of that strange sullen temper which 
 seems deaf to all reproof, as it is proof against the effect of any 
 mere bodily pain. To treat all alike is as foolish as cruel, the 
 character of each has to be studied, and the symptoms of the 
 individual firmly dealt with according to that prudent judgment 
 which may best apply itself to their particular features. 
 
 There are those who say that a parent should never let a 
 child gain the mastery for an hour ; I . say there are children, 
 with whom to contend at the time, beyond a certain limit, is 
 only to do them physical harm and to gain no real moral 
 advantage ; it is better to let them see you retire with sorrow 
 from the contest, to leave them for awhile to the disturbance of 
 their better nature, and watch the moment when the storm has 
 passed to win them to a sense of shame at their defiance of your 
 authority, their affront to your love. Then, to let the punish- 
 ment be one which they shall see painful to yourself as to them — 
 such as the withdrawing from them for a time some of the 
 evidence of your affectionate care for their pleasures ; thus 
 many a little proud, violent heart maybe tamed to an obedience 
 that no rod could have commanded. Nature dealing with the 
 child makes bodily pain a part of the discipline by which it is 
 made careful in the use of its bodily powers. A broken nose 
 from a fall on the nursery floor seems a hard measure dealt to 
 the weakness of the child who chose to try and walk before it 
 had scarcely learned to stand, and yet that bruising of the face 
 will have taught a caution which may save it a worse fall from 
 a too adventurous use of its early powers of locomotion. I 
 would follow nature thus far ; I would far rather make the flesh 
 smart for a moment than seek to terrify the mind by a pro- 
 longed punishment of some other character, directed solely to 
 affect some inward sense. The smart of the rod speaks to the 
 occasion and then is silent ; solitude in the corner, with en- 
 forced silence, too long prolonged, breeds but too often a sullen
 
 1 865 EDUCATIOA 127 
 
 temper ; the dark closet begets a state of mind often sorely 
 afflicting the criminal long after the crime has been pardoned 
 and forgotten. 
 
 In my opinion, with children, at least up to three or four 
 years of age, toys, those bones of nursery contention, should be 
 the property of the nursery commonwealth. As such they may 
 be made instrumental in the production of harmony, whereas if 
 they are the property of individuals they are sure to beget dis- 
 cord at this early age. I think we err greatly in expecting the 
 exercise of those virtues which proceed from a sense that 
 property has its duties as well as its rights. To give a sense of 
 possession, to the exclusion of all others, even in a toy, is to me 
 questionable, when it is from the age of the possessor likely only 
 to beget selfishness ; the toy is coveted .and cried for, perhaps 
 attempts are made to take it by a still younger child, who is 
 then punished or scolded for his larcenious disposition ; the pro- 
 prietor is thus often made selfish on a principle he cannot 
 understand ; his brother made angry, still left covetous, by a 
 process equally unintelligible to him. Once establish an amiable 
 feeling among all the members of the nursedom by a judicious 
 use of a few toys in common, and you have gained a great step 
 towards the amiable use of this kind of property, when the time 
 comes for each having his own to deal with as he will. And 
 here let me say it is not wise to be very liberal in toys ; the 
 gifts, often repeated, of these artificial contrivances for the pro- 
 duction of childish pleasure are too apt to create an unhealthy 
 appetite for artificial amusement ; they contract the powers of 
 observation within an area in which little is real or useful ; the 
 old-fashioned wooden bricks encourage thought, the building 
 which tumbles down gives impulse to contrivance to make it 
 stand ; the generality of toys for the very young are good of 
 their kind if used with moderation ; they help out the child's 
 long days, but they should aid his efforts to find his own amuse- 
 ment, not supplant them. 
 
 The habit of kind relations of for ever giving toys is not, 
 however, so hurtful as that detestable habit of seeking to please 
 children by for ever giving them things to gratify simply the 
 sense of taste. The lump of sugar after the dose is excusable
 
 128 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Jan. 5 
 
 enough ; it has a specific purpose to fulfil, in which it would fail 
 did it not please by its taste ; but this is no justification of that 
 foolish custom which makes a bun or an orange the reward of 
 virtue, but too often the bribe to cease rebellion. I admit that 
 there is too much reason to believe that by nature we have a 
 very strong predisposition toward confectionery, as we have 
 also a certain amount of pleasure in destruction ; we do not, 
 however, encourage children to wantonly smash toys or cruelly 
 put their fingers out to maim flies. It seems to me that in the 
 matter of sugar and all things to which it is an accompaniment, 
 or in which it is an element, we make it a sort of ' Child's Guide ' 
 to pleasure. I believe we thus not only create a depraved taste, 
 making children averse to really wholesome food, with ' the 
 sweet ' in proper amount, but we pervert the sense of taste, and, 
 by its abuse, make it morally injurious. I always think it a 
 poor compliment to the children and their parents when those 
 they visit at once storm them with cake. 
 
 With these hints on the discipline of a nursery, I would at 
 once end my task — one, I confess, I think any prudent mother 
 of experience would have far better performed ; but I know I 
 shall be accused of having evaded the most important topic — 
 the religious teaching. It is with some reluctance I proceed to 
 give a few opinions in this direction, for I fear my view will not 
 be a popular one. Our great Divine Example and Teacher 
 invited young children to come to Him, lifted them, blessed 
 them. I do not read anywhere that He expected great religious 
 knowledge from them ; but I do read that He commanded all to 
 become, in matters of faith, as a little child. I cannot believe 
 that He ever meant that very young children should have His 
 religion ever before them as a hard lesson. My own view is 
 this, — children's first feelings of reverence should be obtained as 
 towards the earthly parents ; as early as may be it should be 
 instilled into their minds that these parents, to them so wise and 
 powerful— and, it is to be hoped, good— daily serve and pray 
 to an unseen Power, infinitely wiser, more powerful, and better 
 than themselves. Invitation may then cautiously be given to 
 the child to kneel as its parents kneel, and to offer some very 
 short, most simple, prayer to God - the Being the parents worship.
 
 1 865 EDUCATION 129 
 
 The child's prayer should be strictly childish — a simple request 
 for blessing on itself and those it loves. By degrees, and only so, 
 should a pious mother give more and more light as to the duty 
 of prayer and the reverence it demands, unfolding gradually the 
 connection of man with his Maker, thus lifting the love and 
 the principle of obedience in the child beyond the seen to the 
 Unseen Parent — not diminishing it as regards the former, but 
 showing that this carries out the law of the latter. With equal 
 caution — not as a hard lesson, but as one reverently and wisely 
 given, and in all possible simplicity of language — the child may 
 have such points of the Redeemer's history impressed upon it as 
 are the most likely to arrest its attention, avoiding that which, 
 from its age, it cannot in anywise comprehend, displaying all — 
 and how much is there ? — it may well love to learn. I would 
 ever avoid at this early age all religious teaching, which, becoming 
 wearisome as a mere lesson, is likely to set the heart against it 
 as such. I would never seek to terrify by dwelling on those 
 features of revelation, which, to a mere child, must be full of 
 dread ; just tasting life, every physical and moral agency as yet 
 scarce breaking through life's soil, I would not bring up the 
 grave and judgment to awe and to perplex, where from the 
 same book in which both are written there is child's food far 
 more congenial and appropriate to a child's understanding. 
 
 Obtain reverence for the Unseen, fortified by your example 
 as well as by your teaching ; tell of the beauty and love and 
 mercy of the Redeemer, as shown in the passages you select 
 from His life ; teach these holy things with reverence as if your- 
 self felt them. A very young child will soon own their influence ; 
 you will have prepared the soil for seed requiring greater strength 
 in it ; the deeper mysteries of our common faith, the fuller after- 
 teaching direct from the Scripture lessons, will be the more 
 efficient for good in that they have not been taught until the 
 child's heart has been won to Him from whose blessing on 
 them all our hope depends. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 l 3° 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. May 2 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF. 
 
 The first year of the American war closed with the destruction of the 
 Federal vessels Cumberland and Congress, in Hampton Roads, by the 
 Confederate iron-plated ship Merrimac. The pinch of want had already 
 desolated thousands of Lancashire homes. Men and women suffered 
 in silence, as Lancashire folk are wont to do. But the intensity of the 
 distress was now rousing active sympathy where hitherto it had merely 
 excited apprehension. The International Exhibition was about to be 
 opened in London. Misery contrasted with splendour always gave 
 pinions to the shafts of S. G. O.'s imagination and wit. 
 
 May 2, 1862. 
 
 I think the general public is little aware what manner of 
 men those are whose present suffering, and worse prospective 
 suffering, is exciting some sympathy and a good deal of appre- 
 hension. The American civil war has already starved industry 
 in the weaving districts to a degree begetting wide-spread and 
 deep want— want of food, of clothing, of all the necessaries of 
 daily life. A peculiar class of working man, with peculiar habits 
 of life, finds himself deprived of the power to exercise his skill 
 in his own craft, not from any fault of his own, any infirmity ; 
 not from any reluctance on the part of employers to find a field 
 for his industry, but because a civil war in America has closed 
 up the source of supply of that particular material on which 
 millowners and workers in mills are alike dependent — the one 
 for the profitable investment of his capital, the other for the 
 profitable exercise of his labour. 
 
 Not only are the working males of the great hives of national 
 industry thus starved out of work for want of that material in 
 which work finds its food ; but the females, who do so very
 
 i£62 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 131 
 
 large a proportion of mill-work — ' cotton-work,' — are in the same 
 predicament. 
 
 This is no senseless strike, seeking to force up wages by- 
 making masters stand still, that scant savings may be turned 
 into weapons of social war, and capital be assaulted in its tens 
 of thousands by a few months' expenditure, in wilful idleness, of 
 the little means they who would bind ' capital ' to their own 
 terms have at their disposal. 
 
 Employer and employed, the machines of iron and of flesh — 
 the noblest inventions of the greatest minds, and the brave- 
 hearted men, women, children, who, with their patient skilled 
 labour, turn those inventions to an account — are alike partially 
 paralysed by a train of circumstances which could not have been 
 foreseen, and therefore could not be provided against. 
 
 Yet all is quiet in the manufacturing districts. Vast crowds 
 of suffering, acutely suffering men and women, young and old 
 ' workpeople,' give hours to hear, with all the evidence of mental 
 enjoyment, written on wan and weary faces, the Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer dilate with matchless eloquence on the mill- 
 work of mind, the mind-facture of ideas, lifting human reason 
 to that elevation which, according to its degree, gives to man 
 and woman, still handworkers, the full enjoyment of the widest 
 views of all those God-given wonders the educated are able to 
 appreciate. 
 
 We have here not only a picture of ' want ' borne with 
 patience, but of a ruling passion reigning, in the passing hours 
 of daily life, of a happier time. I admit the world-wide reputa- 
 tion for eloquence of the orator would draw a crowd anywhere ; 
 but how rare in history is it found that any eloquence could, 
 hour after hour, charm away the sense of suffering, subdue its 
 murmurs ? Mr. Gladstone did more than this, — he rioted in his 
 own happiest vein on the value of education, self-culture, self- 
 help ; spoke as admitting and sympathising with physical suffer- 
 ing, but made the burden of his oration still the work of the 
 mind ; and men whose homes' happiness wastes for want o 
 cotton he told of their achievements in literature. 
 
 Wherever, and for whatever, men could combine to act for 
 each other to further their mutual welfare, to provide against 
 
 K 2
 
 132 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. May 2, 1862 
 
 life's casualties, and to increase life's rational enjoyments, labour's 
 honest gains, it has been found that the good sense of this class 
 has worked out a way with success. 
 
 They could not calculate on a day when mills should work 
 half-time, or stop altogether, because there was a lack of raw 
 material. Still they act together, for each other ; but no fru- 
 gality, no foresight, no system of ' co-operation,' can long hold 
 out under this trial. 
 
 They are wise to see it is no ' enemy that hath done this ; ' 
 that their suffering has no one ingredient in it they can lay at 
 the door of any living soul. It is begotten in a field where it is 
 carrying worse suffering than theirs. They — thank God for it! — 
 have not become wiser than their forefathers in vain. They, in 
 their patient suffering, are a noble spectacle of the right use of 
 the institute, the lecture-room, the school. They are in want, 
 yet peaceful. They suffer, but reason well why it is so. 
 
 Self-helpers, they will, I am satisfied, work out mutual aid 
 to its last penny ; and yet, Sir, it is to me the saddest part of 
 all, this draining to ruin of all the machinery for social aid to 
 each other, which has cost them so much, has so much raised 
 them as a class. 
 
 Can nothing be done ? I like not to think of the two pictures 
 in one British frame — London, in all its splendour ; men of all 
 nations there meeting to see the trophies and triumphs of the 
 arts in all lands ; Lancashire, the soil of the greatest mechanical 
 triumphs, the birthplace of many of the greatest names, sacred 
 in the history of art and commerce, a scene to call pity from the 
 coldest of hearts ; men's hearts, women's, children's hearts failing 
 them from fear of what may come, chilled already by what has 
 come. 
 
 At this period, before the National Fund was organised, S. G. O. was 
 in favour of restricting to Lancashire the relief of Lancashire distress, 
 with the common sense which many may confound with cruelty. He 
 laboured to divest the Poor Law of the dislike with which it was re- 
 garded by the sturdy workers in the cotton industry. In September 
 
 1862, 163,498 persons were receiving parish relief. 
 
 May 15, 1862. 
 
 The ' nobility and gentry ' of Lancashire are, I have reason 
 to believe, acting in a most kind and wise spirit towards the
 
 May 15, 1862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 133 
 
 suffering mill-hands. They are doing a good deal quietly, and 
 with judgment, in the way of private voluntary effort ; they are, 
 many of them, much in council with regard to what is best to be 
 done should the pressure upon the people thrown out of work 
 become, by its continuance, more disastrous. 
 
 There is an anti-pauperic feeling — pardon the word — as 
 well in the upper thousands of Lancashire as in the lower ten 
 thousands — a good, honourable, wholesome disposition to meet, 
 as far as possible, the cry from Lancashire suffering by the self- 
 help and self-means of Lancashire men. 
 
 The sums which were held by factory hands, in the savings 
 banks, in clubs, in those marvellous organisations, the co-operative 
 societies, at the commencement of the American war, if taken in 
 the aggregate, would show a total which, I think, would astonish 
 the whole nation. In addition to money so accumulated as 
 money capital employed for certain ends, this class have 
 supported a large system of educational machinery — schools, 
 libraries, reading-rooms. The result has been that a sense of 
 independence and a thirst for knowledge have produced not only 
 peculiar men and women, but peculiar homes. It is thrown in 
 my teeth that I call men suffering in whose houses are often to 
 be seen harmoniums, sometimes pianos, and shelves full of good, 
 well-bound books. I grant it all. I grant, further, to another 
 correspondent, ' they are sometimes too independent to be com- 
 monly respectful ; ' nay, I admit further, that their combination 
 in clubs and co-operative societies, &c, is giving them a ' rather 
 alarming political power.' 
 
 I, however, remember the days when men spoke with awe of 
 discontent — want of work in the manufacturing districts ; I have 
 some recollection of sad days of violence in those districts ; I 
 know what the factory hand was then ; he lived from hand to 
 mouth, he was rarely but barely educated at all ; none cared 
 what his dwelling was, what the cost of his food. His children 
 were worked from almost infancy, at a pace and for periods 
 which stunted them in growth, made them strangers to one taste 
 of real youth, soon brought them to know all the pain and 
 deformity of a premature decay of mind and body. Indepen- 
 dence, so called, often meant noisy Radicalism, often led to open
 
 i 3 4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. May 15 
 
 rebellion ; it was the resentful feeling of man uncared for, seeing 
 his own labour, in degradation, creating wealth for those whose 
 only value in him was in the work to be got out of his children 
 and himself. 
 
 Is it nothing to have seen all this so changed — to look on 
 Lancashire reasoning, not rebelling, in a day of deep trial ? Is 
 it nothing to behold men, working men, and girls, their children, 
 struggling, not for alms, but to be independent of them — willing 
 to pawn or to sell the books, the musical instruments, every stick 
 of that small store of luxuries hard industry and self-denial had 
 won, rather than be paupers ? 
 
 Sir, I can understand leaving it to Lancashire wealth, and 
 charity, and wisdom to tide over this time of Lancashire suffer- 
 ing ; I admit, at present, I see nothing better to be done than 
 to leave the executive of mercy to these men, justly proud of the 
 attitude of their brethren who suffer ; and yet, when I know how 
 many wish to help, I feel it hard to preach the cold, dry lesson 
 of a wisdom I still can hardly challenge. 
 
 What I want to see is this — some committee of Lancashire 
 men of note, who will, as such, receive contributions, not to save 
 the poor-rates, or to interfere with the jealous surveillance under 
 which all public money should be spent, but to supplement the 
 alms to which the destitute have a legal right, in peculiar cases 
 to prevent the necessity for application. At present none know- 
 to whom it is best to give what they are ready to give, wherever 
 good can be done, zuith judgment. 
 
 I would leave all at the discretion of such a machinery, ask 
 for 'no account' or 'report' until better times may come. I have 
 no words to express my sense of the importance of preserving 
 the independence of the mill hands as far as it is possible to do 
 so — the importance of saving, as far as practicable, their special 
 social, self-helping machinery from utter ruin. 
 
 One word, let me add, on ' pauperism.' I say to these men, 
 who would starve rather than receive help from the Boards of 
 Guardians, you are wrong ; this help is your right, when self- 
 help has failed — a right only claimed in shame when sought 
 by those who are content to eat bread their folly and sin have 
 brought them to, grudgingly given because it is known to be ill-
 
 i862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 135 
 
 deserved. It is no shame that you, who created wealth for 
 others, content to try only to get moderate possessions by indus- 
 try and sobriety for yourselves, should, at such a time as this, 
 when all employment fails you, take back in pay for your 
 support what the nation's law offers you ; if the aid-giver still 
 tests your necessity, think no ill of this ; it is not a libel upon 
 the one man who may be our servant that we lock our desk, but 
 simply an admission that in this world the good must suffer re- 
 striction and watching because the evil need it, and there ever 
 must be in every class too many such. 
 
 The international revel was now in full swing. The country had not 
 yet awoke to the tragical sufferings of the bone and sinew of the opera- 
 tive class. S. G. O. abandoned the attitude he had first assumed, and 
 pleaded with the general public in aid of the Lancashire homes. 
 
 July 17, 1862. 
 
 I trust I need no apology for again asking a little space to 
 plead for the victims to the American civil war in England. 
 There can be no shade of doubt but that the distress of the 
 mill hands has reached a point at which despair for the future 
 makes present acute suffering most difficult to bear. So long 
 as there was hope that things would mend, before all ' savings ' 
 were expended, all property pawned or sold, these men and 
 women were sure to fight the battle of life, if not cheerfully, at 
 least with a bravery and perseverance calculated to win our 
 admiration. They have done so. They have seen the little 
 capital that thrift, foresight, and self-denial had amassed gradu- 
 ally pass from them by pure misfortune. The societies they had 
 formed for mutual aid are on the verge of bankruptcy. 
 
 Willing to be industrious, they find no field for industry ; 
 having saved against all the probable mischances of disability 
 from sickness, age, or accident, they have for a long time been 
 subject to a drain upon every resource which no wisdom on their 
 part could have foreseen. 
 
 I wish again to appeal to the philanthropy of Englishmen to 
 help a mass of people who have hitherto borne extreme suffering 
 in a manner unequalled for the patient endurance and orderly 
 submission it has shown. I admit a great deal has been done
 
 136 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 17 
 
 by voluntary aid, local and general ; I believe it to be capable 
 of proof that amid this crowd of heart-breaking miserables 
 there has work been done by voluntary, personal agency, which 
 in the world yet to come shall reap the honour it is solemnly 
 promised ; it has been that of those who, having little of silver 
 and gold, have given days and nights to comfort the afflicted, 
 nurse the sick, to do innumerable acts of devoted affectionate 
 deeds of mercy, seeking, hoping for no return beyond the rich 
 one — it is their Master's work. 
 
 Hitherto these agents of the alms of others have toiled on 
 in hope ; they are now — I know it — staggered at the prospect 
 day by day opening to them ; increasing poor rates may draw 
 more money to feed and clothe, but inevitably must add to the 
 crowd of the hungry and naked. The trade of the small trades- 
 men depended upon the earnings of the very class who can 
 no longer deal with them ; the increasing poor-rate falls thus 
 on men who are compelled to feed those who, in fact, fed 
 themselves. 
 
 The capital of the great mill-owners must be disastrously 
 affected ; it is folly to reprove the ' society ' of the north with 
 the extravagance of their lives in the day of their prosperity ; 
 they were rich men, daily adding to their riches ; I ask, ad- 
 mitting all that can be said of their expenditure in ' luxury,' in 
 the days of this wealth, were they worse than other wealthy 
 folk ? In an age when sumptuary extravagance has been the 
 open and visible sign of the folly of all classes, what class has 
 any right to throw stones on the commercial classes if they too 
 went with the stream ? I have grave doubts myself whether 
 the hearts of some of the most opulent by report do not fail 
 them at the condition in which they now behold their own life's 
 hopes. 
 
 This is not a time for reviling, but for earnest thought. I 
 cannot but think, if Lancashire were nearer London, London 
 would take a different view of the present crisis. I say, not 
 that there would be less of international revel, less of incessant 
 sensation-seeking in the fields of mere pleasure. I am far from 
 thinking that even the wail of hundreds of thousands of fellow- 
 creatures would arrest the tide of levity and vanity, of mere
 
 1 862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 137 
 
 pleasure at any cost, which reigns now in the greater and lesser 
 worlds of 'society;' still I think the most thoughtless would 
 make a sort of duty of benevolence, would compound for their 
 folly and indulgence, by some self-imposed tax upon their 
 « means.' Could we have in the ' Great Exhibition ' a true dis- 
 solving view, showing Lancashire and the mill districts as they 
 are — as the workhouses, the stoneyards, the hospitals, the streets, 
 the unhomed homes are ; could we parade as in a glass the true 
 physical and mental condition of these many thousands ; could 
 we paint to be read off the heart mourning of parents, the be- 
 wildered suffering of children, the masses of honest, sober, and 
 chaste driven to the edge of that gulf into which despair plunges, 
 defying every good principle in the strife for bread and forget- 
 fulness — on what a scene should we gaze ! 
 
 Were it possible for the vast throngs of beings on whom 
 every power of adornment seems lavished — whose every feature 
 is lit up with the light of pleasure, who, careless of all else, seem 
 to have made these days, days of all the joy wealth can pur- 
 chase, science afford, wearing out life, not in struggle for bread 
 and clothing, but sumptuously clad and sumptuously fed — I say, 
 were it possible for these, then, to turn from the contemplation 
 of misery such as that of the ' north,' to see at once ' them- 
 selves,' their truly painted lives in public and private, I think if 
 the lesson read failed to teach any other moral good, it would 
 at least do this, — appeal to them to show some self-denial, where 
 there is room for so much, in aid of fellow-creatures, who have 
 nothing left in which to deny themselves, who have now long 
 lived but too thankful for the barest means of life. 
 
 I think the oldest among us can scarcely remember a time 
 when the non-suffering world so thoroughly made holiday as 
 it has this present season. I am not writing to rebuke, but to 
 supplicate. God knows, it would be as easy to do one as the 
 other ; I would earnestly beseech those who joy, to think once 
 more of those who weep. I have had reason to feel great faith 
 in any appeal to the purses even of the most worldly. I have 
 known continued deeds of anonymous — i.e. secret mercy — done 
 by even the ' Anonyma ' class. I have known men whose lives 
 knew no god but fashion, who neither care to profess or to deny
 
 138 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Nov. 4 
 
 Christianity, yet go forth and do works of the truest charity. I 
 am strong in the faith that ' good doing ' has a charm in itself 
 which will vindicate its truth, even in the heart of the most 
 world-hardened. 
 
 I appeal to all alike for these suffering operatives. I have 
 often thought, what a few known gentlemen and ladies could do, 
 were they permitted but for two days in the week to stand at the 
 door of the Exhibition to receive the smallest contributions for 
 the suffering ' mill hands.' I am sure the Exhibition would not 
 suffer. Was it not opened with prayer ? Can charity be out of 
 place at its gates ? 
 
 Help now began to flow in. Two days after the date of the previous 
 letter a meeting was held at Bridgewater House, under the presidency of 
 Lord Derby. Upwards of 10,000/. was subscribed. Between August 1862 
 and June 1865, a million sterling was subscribed and expended in relief. 
 S. G. O.'s appeals to the public conscience and to public charity acted as 
 a trumpet call to the patriotism of the nation. 
 
 November 4, 1862. 
 
 Will you again kindly indulge me with some little space for 
 a few observations on the above subject ? The sufferings of the 
 mill hands can now scarcely be exaggerated ; their patience well 
 merits all that can be said in admiration of it. English charity 
 has gallantly grappled with a call upon it, which has demanded, 
 as it has cheerfully obtained, the noblest efforts to stem that 
 awful flood of misery. A steady and increasing stream of 
 voluntary bounty has flowed, and still flows, northward. I have 
 no fear of any ebb in this tide of love so long as the cry of 
 Northern want appeals to Southern sympathy. 
 
 All, and more, than I anticipated in my former letters to you 
 has come to pass. Homes of the industrious, in which industry 
 and frugality had accumulated all that could make those homes 
 scenes of happy contentment, are now barren of even the com- 
 monest necessaries of life. Furniture, bedding, clothes, cherished 
 articles of artisan luxury, viewed with pride because earned by 
 honest toil, all these are gone. Savings — the cherished capital 
 looked to for the future days when age or infirmity was to draw, 
 in independence, on money stored for the purpose — these have 
 long since been expended. Clubs, associations, by which, acting
 
 1862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 139 
 
 in combination, these men sought to aid each other, as each 
 might need aid, from a common source, the produce of common 
 forethought, have failed and are still failing — must soon break 
 up altogether. 
 
 Wherever the fault may have been which made the mills 
 subject for a supply of material to that one source which has 
 now failed them, that fault cannot be brought home to the door 
 of the mill hands. 
 
 I know not how far it may or may not be true that the mill- 
 owners and landowners of these districts have not yet done, in 
 the way of charity, what they ought to have done ; but this I 
 know, that philanthropy would waste for want of exercise did 
 we all wait for that exercise until all who ought to do their duty 
 set about the work. It is my own poor belief that a great 
 deal of the assumed wealth of the mill-owning class had a very 
 insecure basis at the time the crisis came. For years past it was 
 notorious that the cotton-working business had become one of 
 almost reckless speculation ; large fortunes were made — in too 
 many instances a most extravagant style of life betrayed the 
 fact — but few really know how much of that rivalry in trade 
 was built up on borrowed capital. I have myself grave doubts 
 whether the appearance of wealth is not now often kept up to 
 hide the reality of a poverty to disclose which would be instant 
 ruin. That there are in the North wealthy, niggardly men may 
 be the fact ; but, Sir, is the combination of great power to do 
 good with a miserly reluctance to do it — out of pocket, a mere 
 Northern social disease ? 
 
 The question is now freely asked — Is the calamity pressing 
 on a few counties to be borne on the shoulders of the rest of 
 England ? Has the local demand exhausted the local means of 
 supply ? My answer to this is, that there is a limit to which the 
 pressure upon local charity, local Poor Law relief, should be 
 confined, on grounds of justice and sound policy. You have no 
 right to demand the utter ruin of the small ratepayers, their 
 conversion into paupers ; you have no right to so tax all the 
 local capital as to make it, under present sudden pressure, 
 powerless to meet the day when on its healthy application will 
 depend the resuscitation of the local manufacture.
 
 140 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 4 
 
 We are not at war as a nation with America, but the Amer- 
 ican war, in its indirect effect, is as an army which has attacked 
 and now beleaguers the chief seat of our national industry. 
 Charity from without may have broken the blockade to pour in 
 loaves, clothing, medicine, help of various kinds, to those whose 
 supplies have been cut off; the enemy, however, gains more force 
 daily — the garrison becomes daily more weak. Fever follows on 
 a very small degree of real want, where the destitute are confined 
 to a small space, and crowded in it ; real famine (I know its looks 
 well, for I saw it in Ireland in the dying and the dead there) 
 treads close upon the heels of that degree of want which begets 
 the low fever. 
 
 I say that it is folly to expect the people on the spot to meet 
 the whole brunt of the battle which the American civil war has 
 sent as the inroad of a powerful besieging force against them. 
 Southern England feels this, and is rendering noble help ; 
 Southern England will help to the last at any sacrifice ; it can- 
 not, however, bear this weight of misery except at the cost of an 
 exhaustion the effect of which it is wise to seriously consider. 
 
 Those who have studied the subject of English charity will, 
 I think, at once admit with me that all-glorious as it manifests 
 itself in the deeds it does — by hand and by the vast machinery 
 it keeps up in the form of societies, institutions, hospitals, re- 
 ligious missions, &c. — at least two-thirds of the amounts sub- 
 scribed to associated charity and personally distributed comes 
 from individuals whose clear incomes are under 1,000/. a year. 
 Every such call on the benevolent as this Lancashire crisis is 
 nobly met by a proportion of alms from the comparatively poor 
 which ought to shame that given by those of known great 
 wealth. 
 
 In my experience, I have ever found, in every great crisis, 
 the great mass of help was made up of contributions from 
 people of small incomes. What is the 1,000/. of the millionaire 
 in a crisis like the present, compared with the 2s. or 3^. weekly 
 put by for the purpose by the class who with difficulty, perhaps, 
 keep one maid-servant, and yet are ever found in their own 
 locality ready to give a half-crown to aid any case of local 
 misery?
 
 1 862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 141 
 
 We have a winter before us which may be a very severe one. 
 Charitable feeling may know no limit ; its exercise must be 
 limited by its available means. We may pity the want and 
 misery of the North ; we have the same pity for the cry which 
 may arise at our own doors, which we must meet. Let us bear 
 in mind the cruel, but yet true fact, that our means have a limit 
 to which our works of mercy must be confined. A really severe 
 winter is sure to beget a powerful appeal to the benevolent in 
 the South to aid their own immediate suffering neighbours. 
 
 I foresee clearly, if Northern want is left to the present 
 sources of supply, it will assume features too frightful to con- 
 template. English people have yet to learn what a real famine 
 is. As the cry gets loud, so will the answer be ready, and, 
 though powerless to arrest, English charity will put forth every 
 energy to delay the worst, but at what cost ? I admit there may 
 be a great margin of means for extra work of benevolence after 
 we have provided against all that we can foresee of evil which 
 may arise at our own doors ; but that margin has its limit. Is 
 it good policy, on the part of the Government, to suffer so great 
 a strain on optional benevolence as that which now threatens ? 
 I think it is not ; I dread that drain on the means of those to 
 whom so many thousands must look in a hard winter in the 
 South which the continued call from the North will entail. I 
 think a time is fast approaching when the aid of the charitable 
 should become auxiliary to national aid, not stand in its place. 
 The calamity becomes certainly a national one when all legiti- 
 mate local means are exhausted. 
 
 Few can know better than myself the evils that follow in the 
 train of aid by public ' grant ' to meet widespread destitution. 
 We are, however, wiser in these matters than we were ; we have 
 bought dearly a good deal of valuable experience. We have in 
 the action of the Poor Law, and other organised systems of 
 relief now in operation, a good basis for a sound system of 
 relief. There will be abundant room for the exercise of charity, 
 let aid by ' grant ' be what it may. There are classes, who 
 would not be legitimate objects for aid from the public funds, 
 whose acute distress will appeal, and not in vain, to the sym- 
 pathies of the charitable throughout the whole kingdom.
 
 iA 2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 4, 1862 
 
 If there is to be no grant, let us know the fact at once. I 
 have no misgiving as to the result of appeal after appeal to 
 voluntary aid, though I have no belief that more would thus be 
 done than a very slight alleviation of the awful misery which we 
 have yet to behold. It would then become the duty of every 
 household to at once determine how far it can help without 
 some deliberate system of retrenchment for the purpose. The 
 present income must be compared with the certain expenditure 
 our duty at home and in the North to our suffering fellow- 
 creatures is sure to entail. A sudden check to the aid to 
 Lancashire in the dead of winter, caused by distress nearer 
 home, would be cruel to contemplate ; and not less so would it 
 be to have to deny clothes, food, fuel to our nearer neighbours, 
 because we had tied ourselves to the work of supporting the 
 poor Lancashire ' hands.' 
 
 Your columns, Sir, have each winter borne honourable wit- 
 ness to the readiness of the charitable to meet appeals for help. 
 God knows, your kindness in permitting the appeals to be made 
 has proved year by year what a winter's cold can do to beget 
 widespread misery and want. What man living would wish to 
 check the flow of help in money and in clothing now going 
 from us northward ? I am not that man ; but, in the exercise 
 of what I believe to be true charity, I entreat the benevolent of 
 every class to calmly contemplate the possible exigencies of the 
 coming winter. A prudent, foreseeing economy in every house- 
 hold from which God in goodness has kept all knowledge of real 
 want, at once adopted, will find us prepared to do our duty to 
 North and South. Never shall we regret any sacrifice which 
 leaves to us the power of helping to the last of the crisis the 
 poor mill hands, and this with power still left to fulfil every 
 charitable duty nearer home. 
 
 November 5, 1862. 
 
 I have just carefully read the account given in your yester- 
 day's paper of the meeting of the Central Relief Committee at 
 Manchester. The general tone of the whole proceedings is to 
 me most satisfactory. It is evident the utmost care is taken not 
 only to show that the expenditure of the Relief Fund is wisely
 
 Nov. 5, 1862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 143 
 
 conducted, but also to show plainly the urgent nature of the 
 misery and want to meet which it is so prudently devoted. 
 
 Many persons, however, will, I have no doubt, assert that the 
 statements of Mr. Cobden as to the present amount of destitu- 
 tion, and that amount which is yet to be expected, are over- 
 drawn. I am not of that opinion. I feel satisfied myself that 
 no one can yet calculate the full amount of utter ruin which 
 must follow on the present state of things. So much destructive 
 element is yet in sure course of development, arising from the 
 disturbance of all the ordinary action of commercial industry ; 
 there are so many interests directly and indirectly involved in 
 this stoppage of the mills that the actual destitution of the mill 
 hands, all appalling in itself, forms but a part of what has yet 
 to be played out in this great domestic tragedy. 
 
 The dealers with the retail shops, by their insolvency, render 
 insolvent the retailing shop class ; on this class depends, again, 
 the life of the wholesale dealer. It may be true that men fed 
 are fed on food bought, and this represents money paid to local 
 trade. In a famine expenditure is restricted to the claims of 
 hard necessity, and to make the most of alms, voluntary or in- 
 voluntary, the purchasers of food and clothing are forced to 
 drive the hardest bargains they can ; thus, necessaries are pur- 
 chased at the lowest profit to the seller, and this at the time 
 there is an almost entire stoppage to the sale of anything else. 
 
 Trade is also necessarily driven out of its usual track ; there 
 is not only a disturbance of all trade, the result of the supply of 
 food and clothing being no longer purchased at the will of the 
 customer with his own money, paid over the counter by himself, 
 but by committees and boards, who are dealers, more or less, 
 with the wholesale tradesmen ; but there is this sad addition to 
 the evil, the pressure of the poor rate is fast driving into 
 pauperism that large class whose liability to be rated at all had 
 arisen from the profits they derived as the purveying class from 
 whom the ' hands ' purchased their food and clothing. 
 
 It is quite true that the chief figures in the picture of Lan- 
 cashire destitution are the mill hands, but, as they sink in their 
 destitution — none know it better than themselves — they draw 
 down with them to the verge of the same destitution an immense
 
 144 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 5 
 
 social mass of the industrious, who were altogether as much 
 dependent upon them as they were upon the ' mills.' 
 
 Whatever in general consumption, forming an element of 
 trade, is suddenly forced out of consumption, begets at once so 
 much positive loss to the dealers in it. In the course of the last 
 six months the mechanic families in Lancashire have, in their 
 way, had to undergo that kind of penal retrenchment, which 
 economy enforces in a struggle for independence, caused by in- 
 terruption to industry. To sell, or to pawn with no hope of 
 redemption, articles of so-called luxury — for many domestic 
 reasons articles, perhaps, of peculiar esteem — was the first item 
 of sacrifice ; to this followed the sale or pawn of the more use- 
 ful, but perhaps less sentimentally esteemed articles. But houses 
 became very bare indeed before any one of the family, as the 
 rule, entertained the question of any serious inroad upon the 
 meat and drink of the daily meals ; the season, however, came 
 when all saleable was sold, all that could be pledged was pawned, 
 and all that had been saved was spent. The last shifts of in- 
 dependence to hold its own, rely on it, were very painful. 
 Children are bad economists ; they were fed as usual, for who 
 could explain away their cry, or be deaf to it ? The drink, the 
 little meat, the tea, the sugar, every article had now to be 
 measured out, not by the rule of appetite, but by that of means, 
 all in vain. They are not paupers now, but distressed human 
 beings, utterly destitute. They have lost independence ; they 
 subsist on charity ; and yet, O how wonderful ! to this, through 
 this, have they come, and are peaceful, resigned, grateful — men 
 viewing their own misfortunes with a reasoning power that has 
 brought them to calm resignation ; and yet, Sir, in your memory 
 and mine, with what awe did statesmen regard any symptom of 
 distress in these very districts, so connected did they esteem it 
 with the danger of acts of open violence ! 
 
 It is quite consistent with all that we know of the distress to 
 find, from the report of the Registrar-General, that the actual 
 health of the people is above the average. The explanation of 
 this was so clearly given that I need not dwell upon it. I must, 
 however, speak a word or two of warning as to the future. 
 
 When famine destroys life, it may do so under two different
 
 1862 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 145 
 
 conditions. Stoppage of all food, such as that we have read of 
 in the case of the shipwrecked, brings on in a short time a train 
 of symptoms which quickly end in the most horrible of deaths. 
 The other condition is that, when food sufficient, if not in 
 abundance, gradually becomes diminished in quality, then in 
 quantity, passing to still another stage, where it is not only alto- 
 gether deficient in quantity, but also in the qualities necessary 
 each day to rebuild nature's waste, and thus provide for next 
 day's life. On this stinting of physical sustenance supervenes 
 mental depression, causing loss of appetite ; thus there is indis- 
 position to partake even of that measure of food which, itself 
 insufficient, is still necessary to keep up some existence. 
 
 Strange to say, at this stage of depression in mind and of 
 gradual waste of body the sufferer complains but little, if at all ; 
 there is tendency to sleep, rest, anyhow, anywhere, yet little 
 evidence of pain. There is, however, to the skilled eye a cast of 
 countenance unmistakable ; the children look aged beyond their 
 years ; adults move and speak with a gait and utterance which 
 seem to shun all effort. 
 
 All experience tells us that here is the exact cultivation ot 
 the human constitution fitted to invite and successfully develop 
 the worst species of low fever ; mind and body, the condition of 
 every organ, the condition of the blood, the depressed nervous 
 power, — all invite the fever which ever waits about those districts 
 where men congregate in masses, ready to deposit its poison 
 wherever there is the proper predisposition to receive it. 
 
 Failing fever, famine goes on to run its own well-marked 
 course. I write from what I and many others saw, watched, and 
 noted. With no real complaint developed, with little real pain, 
 there is an increase of lassitude in the adult, a want of all 
 childish energy in the young ; a species of patient, sullen, hope- 
 less despondency masters the whole man. You have atrophy 
 now showing itself in many ways ; the hair quits the head in 
 patches, the ankles swell, the skin is bloodless, the eye sunken ; 
 at this stage food fails, medicine fails, care cannot rescue. It 
 is a mere matter of time ; few, if any, recover — few seem to 
 wish it. 
 
 Now, Sir, why have I written this ? As a warning, because 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 5, 1862 
 
 I believe a warning is wanted. Those who manage the relief of 
 these distressed people must remember that on a diet in amount 
 and in quality sufficient to keep up their physical condition de- 
 pends the lives of many thousands of them. It is mad economy 
 to stint now, for at this season of the year the cold and the damp 
 will add to that depression of mind which, lowering in itself, 
 grows on itself, unless met at the onset with all proper physical 
 sustenance. Let this population get below a certain physical 
 condition, and, in my belief, the wealth of the world could not 
 then arrest destruction from tens of thousands of them. They 
 must have good and proper food, enough of it ; they ought to 
 have every possible means of such employment and recreation 
 as shall keep them, if not hopeful, at least free from over-depres- 
 sion ; for thus only, should cold come on them, can they be kept 
 from fever, or the atrophy from which there is no recovery. 
 
 I could desire to see instant preparation for hospital accommo- 
 dation, places taken and simply furnished, ready to receive fever 
 patients, should fever break out ; nothing is so expensive in the 
 end as an extemporised hospital. You may be prepared before- 
 hand at a cost which, even if your preparations are never needed, 
 will be but little ; for the unused furniture, &c, if taken care of, 
 is always available for some profitable purpose ; but, if you wait 
 the crisis of some epidemic, and then on the instant have to 
 meet it, you do it with less efficiency, and at a higher cost. In 
 the North, I presume, it is now easy to find large warehouses, or 
 buildings with large space, which could easily be adapted so as 
 to make excellent fever hospitals. I would urge, in every large 
 town, the wisdom of at once preparing some of these as fever 
 hospitals — at least, so far as to have them thoroughly available 
 at a short notice. Trusting that these observations may be re- 
 ceived in the spirit in which I offer them, I have only to thank 
 you for allowing me to lay them before those most interested in 
 them. 
 
 As the famine began to ebb, the tide of subscriptions ceased to 
 flow. Claims on the funds, proceeding in some cases from impostors, 
 exceeded the capacities of the treasury. It was soon clear that some 
 of the operatives must seek elsewhere the livelihood closed to them in 
 the cotton industry, and which could be but temporarily supplied from
 
 Feb. 4, 1863 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 147 
 
 charitable sources. Among the letters on Emigration will be found one 
 of April 9, 1863, in which S. G. O. urges the advantages of the colonies 
 as the destination of some of the operatives, all of whom cannot expect 
 re-employment in their old trade. 
 
 February 4, 1863. 
 
 The state of things in the North has now arrived at a con- 
 dition calling for very serious consideration. To meet the result 
 of a suspension of employment, entailing deep distress upon 
 a large mass of operatives, is one thing ; British benevolence 
 came to the rescue, found them food, clothing, and all that 
 was necessary for a support fully equal to that hardly earned 
 by very many thousands of equally industrious labourers in 
 other spheres of labour. It is another thing to expect that this 
 same benevolence shall continue still to feed and clothe, in 
 idleness, these same masses for a time that seems every day more 
 indefinite. 
 
 For very many reasons, it is neither kind to them nor politic 
 in a national point of view, to continue the present system, as if 
 the cause of which it was begotten had undergone no change. 
 It was quite impossible to secure that just separation, which was 
 most desirable, between those recipients of relief who were made 
 paupers by the force of the stoppage of the mills, and those who 
 were content to become paupers to share the relief given. The 
 public, under the action of deep sympathy for the former class, 
 would not have borne with any labour test of sufficient severity 
 to have separated the two classes ; the consequence has been, 
 that very large numbers have received relief, from the guardians 
 and from relief committees, whom under ordinary circumstances 
 a labour test would have driven to the industry they have thus 
 shirked. 
 
 Again, it cannot be disputed that every week's continuance 
 of that abnormal state of things which supports in idleness large 
 numbers of people, who were, when overtaken by this misfortune, 
 an industrious, and for their class a prosperous race, must be 
 morally most prejudicial ; it physically and mentally enervates 
 them. There is a muscular industry as there is a muscular 
 Christianity, a frame of mind and body which works with one 
 earnest will. Food and clothing fetched, not earned, may sup-
 
 \ 4 S THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 4 
 
 port the mere animal man, but it will not sustain the working 
 energy of industrious man. I am well assured from many 
 quarters that already this forced idleness is fast deteriorating the 
 character of the operative. 
 
 A taste for alms is a growing taste, increasing daily on the 
 charity by which it is fed. Give alms as you will, as the scale 
 of giving becomes increased the difficulty of regulating the gift 
 grows upon you. It is ever hard to avoid imposture, but more 
 hard than ever when the source of supply seems only restricted 
 by the demand. The national liberality has even gone ahead of 
 the cry for help ; the knowledge of the sums in hand, and yet to 
 come to hand, must of necessity act to slacken effort on the part 
 of the operatives to seek work for themselves. 
 
 Every effort to turn some portion of this large operative class 
 into a new sphere of labour has as yet been met with all possible 
 discouragement. We are told that every hand may yet be 
 wanted on the spot. I do not believe it. I do believe that be- 
 fore the crisis came there was an amount of mill work going on 
 that could not have gone on much longer ; in fact, that we have 
 been, in all proper kindness, supporting a mass of operatives a 
 large proportion of whom ought, on any sound principle of trade, 
 never to have been millworkers at all. Does any sane man for 
 one moment believe that the raw material of the mills will, for 
 years to come, reach the millowners at a price, in a quantity, and 
 of a quality to find work for three-fifths of the operatives now 
 on ' relief,' giving them and their families 2s. a week per head 
 wages ? Does any one really know the amount of cotton in 
 America that peace to-morrow could bring to Liverpool in the 
 next six months ? Who can tell us in whose hands the existing 
 cotton in the South now is, — how often it has changed and is 
 changing its owners ? I know not on what grounds any man 
 may calculate that this cotton will ever reach us at all, except in 
 small consignments. We have yet to learn the effect — the direct 
 mischief — of the great premium to insurrection held out in Lin- 
 coln's Emancipation Proclamation. For my own part, I can 
 only construe that document as a direct invitation to the 
 Southern slaves to rebel, and of course help and revenge them- 
 selves.
 
 iS62 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 149 
 
 When I hear of Northern men giving the whole black race 
 the freedom that shall place them on political and civil equality 
 with their fellow-creatures ; when I am told on good authority, 
 that the slaves of every Northern State are not only let out of 
 bond, but welcomed to every social equality the free Yankee 
 claims, — then, and only then, shall I believe that this proclama- 
 tion means anything but a wicked, cowardly effort to make a 
 war-tool out of a so-called pious principle. 
 
 Let this be as it may, 1 am quite sure that this ' proclama- 
 tion ' is in itself a heavy blow and discouragement inflicted on 
 our future prospect of a cotton supply from America. But it is 
 said, ' Look at India ; look to other sources of supply fast open- 
 ing to us.' I have no wish, I have not the ability, to write any- 
 thing worth reading on this phase of the question ; but I am 
 advised that as yet nothing in lieu of American cotton has been, 
 or is likely to be, produced, calculated to revive the cotton 
 manufacturing trade. Owners will not make expensive altera- 
 tions in their machinery to work up a material they hold to be 
 very inferior for their purpose, so long as there is the least hope 
 of their obtaining the material for which they constructed it. 
 The Surat cotton, to be worked at a profit to the millowner, and 
 to give in the working anything like the old wages to the opera- 
 tive, must, I am told, wait until the present stock of manufac- 
 tured goods is exhausted, and a demand at high prices for this 
 new manufacture has thus been created. 
 
 Is it wise, I ask — is it kind, to hoard up industrial power, 
 under depreciating influences, in its present full amount, until all 
 this is solved ? On what grounds of political economy — nay, 
 of real charity, are we justified in blinding ourselves to the 
 fact that a prolonged continuance of this unwholesome state of 
 things is unjustifiable, if it can by any means be shortened or 
 alleviated ? 
 
 I could easily dwell upon other evil features in the present 
 state of things. The clergy and ministers of all denominations 
 have now for many months become, after a sort, relieving 
 officers, but with none of the restraint and none of the real re- 
 sponsibility of such officials. It is admitted that there is but 
 too much of the sectarian element involved in the working of
 
 150 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 24 
 
 many of the plans for relief. The very success of impassioned 
 appeals to distant friends for help, in such a crisis, begets, 
 almost imperceptibly, a disposition to exaggerate the necessity 
 of the plea. I am not surprised to hear that some of the most 
 humane and able of those who have taken a leading part in the 
 deeds of mercy the crisis called forth are now seriously appre- 
 hensive that imposture is much on the increase. 
 
 The remedy seems to rest with those whom the country at 
 large has enabled to tide over the winter months without that 
 ruinous destruction of their property which must otherwise have 
 followed. A firm determination to wisely economise the pre- 
 sent funds in hand, to guard against and punish all attempts at 
 imposition, to watch closely the labour market and the relief 
 market, to see that the latter does not supplant the former — this 
 will do much ; but I feel satisfied it is well that the truth should 
 be not only spoken, but, when spoken, practically applied — viz., 
 the operative class should have every inducement put before 
 them, every reasonable aid afforded them, to diminish their own 
 numbers on the spot, by either seeking other fields of labour 
 at home, or taking their energy and industry to some of the 
 colonies, where a new hope of prosperous life would await 
 them. 
 
 The benevolence of England and her colonies towards these 
 poor victims of a ruin no care on their part could have avoided 
 is only equalled by the noble, submissive spirit they have shown 
 under it. I wish them from my heart a happier fate than the 
 being forced into lovers of idle dependence, by an unwise hold- 
 ing them to a spot where for years to come I see no hope that a 
 very large number of them can ever again eat the bread of free 
 industry. 
 
 March 24, 1863. 
 
 In the last letter I addressed to you on the subject of Lanca- 
 shire distress I intimated my belief that the continuance of the 
 present system of relief must inevitably work serious mischief, as 
 well to the operatives themselves as to those more immediately 
 connected with the distribution of that relief. 
 
 Permit me now to put my fears for the future, and their 
 grounds, in plainer language. I ask this indulgence, because I
 
 1 863 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 151 
 
 am quite satisfied that day by day very dangerous elements of 
 evil are at work in the distressed districts. 
 
 While there was any hope of a revival of the cotton manufac- 
 ture the operatives were regarded as sufferers, through no fault 
 of their own, by the temporary suspension of the trade of which 
 they were 'the hands.' They were objects of true, deserved 
 pity, and were treated as such, locally and throughout the whole 
 kingdom. A charitable enthusiasm, most honourable to the 
 whole country, paid the highest possible tribute to the character 
 of the suffering operative ; he heard of it, read of it, was justly 
 proud of it, and in return endured ruin with a calm patience 
 above all praise. 
 
 The relief committees caught the enthusiasm of the hour, 
 and gave valuable time and the severest tasking of personal 
 effort to aid the great national work of charity. Month after 
 month the distress grew in its proportions, and assumed in its 
 nature a still more piteous aspect. Subscriptions anticipated 
 any demand that arose ; the tide of benevolence out-ebbed that 
 of the rising distress ; there was no lack of money, nor was there 
 lack of voluntary service to secure its fair distribution. 
 
 But, Sir, even the charity of the most charitable will at last 
 grow cold when the work to be done not only grows in its pro- 
 portions, but appears to offer no probable limit to its duration, 
 and yet day by day begins to assume features more and more 
 trying to those who are employed in it. 
 
 Of all the ungrateful work to the performance of which we 
 are ever called by duty in this world, there is none which so 
 speedily becomes most ungrateful as that of distributing alms 
 from a very large subscribed fund over a large, craving field of 
 distress. That which is at first received cheerfully, and yet tear- 
 fully, as a gift, becomes so very soon a help claimed sullenly as 
 a right. Those who at first are blessed as kind almoners — who, 
 in pure charity, are giving time and effort to seek out and meet 
 the distressed, to help them — very soon come to be regarded as 
 men having some selfish interest in their work, inducing them 
 only to give grudgingly and of necessity. 
 
 This will be specially the case where it is no secret that 
 there arc very large funds in reserve. Can we wonder, then, if
 
 152 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 24 
 
 almoners at last flag in their work, sicken of it — sometimes meet 
 the ill-temper and ingratitude of the relieved by words and small 
 deeds indicative of weariness and disgust ? Let us bear in mind, 
 too, that they first offered themselves as temporary agents to 
 meet a passing crisis. They now find themselves enlisted in an 
 ungrateful service, with no prospect of relief from it ; the sup- 
 posed passing crisis has become a permanent situation of helpless 
 distress. 
 
 I am not surprised that for many weeks past close observers 
 have seen the tone and temper of the operatives fast changing 
 for the worse. Sewing classes, adult schools, all the expedients 
 for temporary dealing with the stoppage of the mills, may have 
 been good for that purpose ; they could not be good for any tiling 
 but a temporary purpose. No one class of existing workmen could 
 pass through what the ' hands ' of the mills have now undergone, 
 and not be seriously, morally, and physically degraded. There 
 never was yet in history a prolonged period, in which any one 
 class of industry found its ' hands ' sustained by alms in idleness, 
 which did not beget in those hands serious depreciation in mind 
 and body. 
 
 We are bound to look the present aspect of this question 
 boldly in the face. There are now bickerings, jealousies, and 
 worse, growing up out of the work of almsgiving, in the hearts 
 of those who are the direct givers ; there is something far worse 
 taking root in the dispositions of those who live on these alms ; 
 and yet, as yet, there is no stoppage for want of supplies. But 
 we all know where the paying out is in 40,000's, the comings in 
 in, say, 2,000's, the end cannot be very distant, as regards the 
 voluntary fund — just that distance which, in my opinion, under 
 the present system, will have allowed the partial evil spirit now 
 existing to have grown to an alarming amount. I own I dread 
 the day when the voluntary fund is declared spent, and the 
 whole question of relief must fall upon the boards of guardians. 
 
 Preaching agitators, I am told, tell the ' hands ' that when 
 the mills do open, wages will not be what they were. The older, 
 wiser, and more calm of the ' hands ' have long foreseen this. 
 They are reading, thinking men ; they know well enough that 
 were all the cotton of the Southern States in Liverpool to-
 
 1 863 LANCASHIRE Df STRESS AND RELIEF 153 
 
 morrow the amount of mill work could not find employment, at 
 the outside, for more than three-fourths of those who were em- 
 ployed before the crisis. They know that those who would start 
 their mills again have themselves much leeway to make up — 
 that they must push economy to its utmost stretch. These men 
 are well aware that when fifty men seek one place the value of 
 labour must fall ; they see, just as plainly as you and I, that 
 agitation for high wages in a trade just emerging from ruin must 
 retard its rise, and inevitably check employment. These men 
 see what you have written, what I have written, to be the real 
 merciful, wise course — i.e. to diminish on the spot the numbers 
 craving for work, which that spot has no reasonable prospect of 
 affording ; they make no secret that a very large emigration of 
 ' hands ' is absolutely necessary. 
 
 It is said that our subscriptions were never meant to aid the 
 emigration of the ' hands.' I assert they were given to be used 
 wholly at the discretion of Lord Derby's Committee and the 
 Mansion House Committee. I utterly deny that these vast 
 funds were raised to aid the cotton manufacture, by detaining 
 the hands on the spot until the masters wanted them again. 
 
 I say, Sir, it is insulting the charity of the kingdom to keep 
 one 'hand ' in distress, under all the horrid aggravation of a ruin 
 which has no hope, on the spot, if we can help him to work else- 
 where, at home or abroad. I say more than this, — it is in direct 
 opposition to every sound principle of political economy to sub- 
 sidise idleness for months, in the hope, the very faint hope, of 
 thus keeping labour material at hand for the use of one particular 
 branch of industry. 
 
 Before many weeks are over, I am satisfied public opinion 
 will be with me on this point. We shall not rest content to hear 
 of increasing suffering, entailing increasing degradation, at the 
 same time being told one great outlet of relief for thousands is 
 closed, for fear lest, they being only ' the men,' this mode of 
 relief may some day act to injure the masters. 
 
 S. G. O., towards the latter part of his life, was more acute in the 
 discovery, and skilled in the display, of evils, than instrumental in 
 remedying them. Of this habit of mind the following letter is an 
 instance : —
 
 154 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. March 28 
 
 March 28, 1863. 
 
 Now, Sir, here is a host of our fellow-creatures, once indus- 
 trious, prosperous, content to earn their bread by the patient 
 exercise of skill, acquired gradually, of a nature scarcely appli- 
 cable to any but one particular branch of manufacture. For 
 many months the field of their industry has been closed to them ; 
 they have tasted the fullest bitter of home ruin. Willing to work 
 and to save, their savings are gone ; they are hopelessly in debt ; 
 they have had to live — they are now living — wholly on a charit- 
 able dole, or on parish pay, or on this eked out by charity. 
 They, men and women, many of them advanced in years, have 
 had to accept all kinds of nominal employment, either in the 
 shape of work, strange, distasteful to themselves, and profitable 
 to no one, or in the form of schooling, sewing class work, &c, 
 which they must have been blind not to have seen as simply a 
 condition of restraint and so-called discipline, not really given as 
 a desirable means of good to themselves or profit to any one. I 
 hope I may be misinformed, but I had it before me that at one 
 time the learning the Lord's Prayer by grown-up men was paid 
 for by the hour ! 
 
 I know what some of the best hands, the most valued leaders 
 of the co-operative movement, felt a few weeks ago as to the 
 action upon their whole class of the present state of things. ' It 
 is forcing us into a race of beggars.' ' Tis clemming all heart 
 out of one.' ' Many on us has to be false before we can be fed.' 
 They say that for the last few months past ' no mortal man can 
 tell the lying shifts the workfolk are driven to to get a bit of 
 silver.' Here, let me say, I see plain enough that, as the rule, 
 there is great cruelty in paying all in kind, though I see great 
 prudence in paying the greatest proportion of relief so. It is 
 my firm conviction that the moral standard the loan is to pre- 
 serve has already been most cruelly lowered. There is yet, 
 however, a wonderful amount of real, stout, manly, northern in- 
 dependence which has resisted evil so far that it has not tasted 
 one drop or eaten one crumb obtained on false pretence ; it is 
 combined with a sober, yet heart-trying view of the real state of 
 things ; it is the last to deny the difficulty of the task of the
 
 1863 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AND RELIEF 155 
 
 ' boards,' or ' committees ' ; it is deeply grateful to the nation for 
 its benevolence ; it scorns the tempting of the seditious ; would, 
 were there need, be active to put down riot. But, alas ! loaded 
 beneath a weight of care, worn down by hope deferred, it sickens 
 fast towards a condition — not that of the good man struggling 
 against difficulties, but that of the good man so weak in heart 
 and body that he must soon sink, for he has no power to strive. 
 
 I admit, could you by loan, by any expenditure whatever, 
 take up this mass of good skilled labour and put it to work 
 which would return bread, clothes, decent shelter, and hope, for 
 the exercise of a patient, stout determination to earn them, you 
 might save, comparatively unhurt, the general moral standard of 
 the hands. How is this to be done ? 
 
 The operative's skill and health and strength are his pounds, 
 shillings, and pence. He is a capitalist ; these are the capital 
 on which he trades ; but, unfortunately, as certain looms — 
 capital — can only work cotton, so the cotton hand has acquired 
 skill only for the working in the cotton manufacture. Money 
 can purchase the engineer, whose lathe, files, drills, castings, &c, 
 can alter looms to improve them at once, or fit them even to 
 work other material. The human machine is a very complex 
 one, is slowly adapted to meet particular ends ; after a time it 
 rarely can be fresh adapted to manipulate on new principles, in 
 new fields of hand and brain skill. A ' hand ' of good health 
 and ordinary strength might descend in the scale of labour, and 
 learn to do work requiring more of muscle than of dexterity ; 
 but he would require long training to attain a fresh adaptation 
 of hand skill, to be guided by the brain in a new field ; if he was 
 past middle age, I doubt whether he could do so at all. The 
 ' hand ' that did descend to field labour and went to it with a will 
 would, I am told, soon become physically disqualified for any 
 work requiring delicacy of touch. 
 
 It appears to me, then, Sir, that the labourers under the loan 
 must be either kept as now, which all wise men deprecate, or 
 employed on enforced hard manual labour— i.e. agricultural, 
 road-making, draining, or such like work — or they must be put 
 to some trade work which, not damaging, but rather holding in 
 reserve their cotton skill, shall give them to feel conscious that
 
 156 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. March 28 
 
 they are again industrious men, earning the fruits of skilled in- 
 dustry. Is there at this moment any trade which will bear 
 further pushing by throwing into it, say, only 200,000 subsidised 
 ' hands ' ? How about the effect of this on the present workers 
 at that trade, supposing it exists at all ? 
 
 We are not to help these men to emigrate, we are not to 
 tempt them to field labour ; it is admitted we are doing worse 
 than either by keeping them as they now are kept. Who will 
 tell us how, poor creatures, they are to be kept ? I think when 
 the nation is asked to loan a few millions to keep up perforce 
 the moral standard of near half a million of souls whose occupa- 
 tion is gone, those who ask the loan should favour us with some 
 statement how the thing is to be done, especially as it is declared 
 that sweat and skill capital is to be thus kept in store for the 
 future purposes primarily of those who make the demand. 
 
 Of one thing I am quite certain, until some plan of moral 
 and industrial salvation is developed for the benefit of the 
 4 hands,' it is most dangerous for the Mansion House Committee 
 to in any way act to hinder the guardians and relief com- 
 mittees in their work ; they are on the spot, they have had many 
 months' experience, they know every dangerous element at 
 work — and, let me say, not the least dangerous element exists 
 in the weak folly of some very kind-hearted, well-educated 
 people ; they have had to battle against imposition so long that 
 we may assume them to be skilled judges in the matter. Their 
 real difficulties are now beginning, for the knowledge of the ' sum 
 in hand,' the moral certainty that voluntarily it has poor prospect 
 of increase, naturally, as it makes them economical and vigilant, 
 sharpens also the faculties of all of every degree who hope yet 
 to get their share of profit out of it. 
 
 Discontent is the demagogue's dunghill ; it turns him up as 
 a foul fungus to show what evil spirits an evil time will breed. 
 Popularity is his capital ; to get more and more of it he will 
 trade on anything, everything, which will serve the purpose ; he 
 will lie in the pulpit, lie at the ' halls,' lie at street corners, where - 
 ever his own person is safe. What matters it to him who starve, 
 who rob, who are ridden over by soldiery or knocked over by 
 police ? It will all make matter for sensation speaking, — that
 
 1 863 LANCASHIRE DISTRESS AXD RELIEF 157 
 
 is his trade, paying little but in noisy tribute to his vanity ; but 
 this vanity, this silly rule of men for an hour, is to him dear as 
 anything but his own dear person's safety. We must expect 
 these creatures — expect their work ; but well does it become us 
 to do all we can to render them harmless. We are as bad as 
 they are if we yield to the result of their work any one principle 
 it is thought right to adopt. 
 
 I have no fear now, Sir, but that the Government and the 
 nation generally are fully alive to the danger of the present state 
 of things ; that some course will be taken, not only to support 
 those who are doing the thankless duty of almoners, but to seek 
 out means to transfer some portion of the wasted labour to new 
 fields of industry, aiding, at the same time, any reasonable means 
 of local employment, to preserve the remnant ready for a happier 
 day.
 
 i 5 8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. June 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 EMIGRA TION. 
 
 Encouragement to emigration began in 1819, but it was not until 
 1831 that regulations were framed by the State. In 1840 the Colonial 
 I .and and Emigration Board was established. It is to this Board 
 reference is made in the following letters. 
 
 June 2, 1848. 
 
 I cannot say with how much satisfaction I regard the efforts 
 you are making to promote emigration to the colonies. We 
 want in these districts bold and able men, well acquainted 
 with the colonies, and the state of the poor here, to come 
 down and lecture far and wide amongst us ; men who can 
 show to our labourers the evils of their present lot, and prove 
 to them how, by the mere patient bearing of a voyage across 
 the seas and a little present inconvenience, they can find a 
 country in which they may claim and obtain fair wages for fair 
 work. 
 
 They want to be instructed in the nature of what they will 
 gain by the change, and to be assured of protection in their 
 efforts to gain it from the Government of this country. They 
 have been so long kept in a state of ignorance and of low 
 animal apathy to all social comfort or industrial independence, 
 that it requires strong and patient efforts to rouse them to travel 
 from home to seek fair treatment, rather than stay where they 
 are bound by the law of settlement, to live in crowded commu- 
 nities in which vice is fostered by circumstances they cannot 
 avoid, and their labour value depressed by causes against which 
 they have no power to contend. 
 
 There was a time when I should have started from the idea 
 of seeking to send the poor away from among us — from this
 
 i 848 EMIGRA TION 1 5 9 
 
 land of churches, chapels, schools, and charities — this land 
 whose whole soil has become one great workshop for the pro- 
 duction of food, the producing of which would appear to require 
 the active energies of every single labourer — this land in which 
 every poor man is supposed to have a right to relief in destitu- 
 tion, at, or near to, his own door. But, Sir, sad and lengthened 
 experience has convinced me that the producer of bread by the 
 sweat of his brow, for his body's sake and his soul's sake can 
 be placed in no worse position than he is at home — in merry 
 England (?), Christian England (?), England the nurse of in- 
 dustry, the very hot-bed of philanthropy (?). Late, very late, 
 personal experience — knowledge acquired far and near from 
 those in whom I can put trust — facts of which I am cognizant 
 from sources which defy contradiction — all prove to me that in 
 hundreds of our villages the social condition of man is below 
 that of any country of which I have ever read ; that vice is 
 increasing with a speed, and of a character, which would justly 
 call down any, the most awful, judgment on us ; that the 
 labourer is defrauded of his hire, oppressed and ill-treated in a 
 way that is a shame on our national character. 
 
 I hear much of the political grievances of the people ; these 
 are the stock in trade of every public declaimer. It requires 
 no courage to attack a Government, or to vilify a party op- 
 ponent. Political philanthropy is a cheap article and wears 
 well — hence so many array themselves in it. Sympathy for a 
 convicted felon, or that spurious sort of chivalric charity which 
 would do anything for a Pole, but nothing for a Dorset, Somer- 
 set, or Wilts labourer ; that missionary spirit which exposes the 
 abomination of foreign heathen lands, but shrinks from unveil- 
 ing the licentious infamy of our own land ; — these are profitable 
 and pleasant occupations, and many there are who work thereat. 
 I challenge one and all to prove to me that there is one single 
 mere political evil, any one class of God's creatures, in any land 
 on earth, the correction of which, or the social amendment of 
 whom, require such urgent instant attention as does the evil 
 condition, physical and mental abasement of the labourers in 
 agriculture in the south-western and many other counties. 
 
 Believe me, Sir, I am almost tired of repeating this now oft
 
 ,6c THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. June 10 
 
 told tale ; had I not seen something like a chance of escape for 
 some of these poor creatures by means of emigration, I should 
 not now have again troubled you. If the Government can be 
 persuaded to make bold and liberal efforts to assist families 
 disposed to go to Australia, I can point its attention to more 
 than one spot where the so doing will be the greatest boon to 
 the respectable and would-be industrious labourer ; it would not 
 only give him hope in this world, but it would enable him to 
 remove his family from scenes which, / am ready to prove, ex- 
 ceed in vice any of which we have record in history, sacred or 
 profane. 
 
 Every word of the above letter might have been written in the last 
 decade of the century. Now, as then, sympathy for the oppressed Pole 
 and Russ, and for the inhabitants of Central Africa, is more attractive 
 to many than the sorrows and wants of fellow-countrymen languishing 
 within the radius of a cab fare. Had the Government then acted with 
 energy, part of the soil of the colonies, acquired directly or indirectly by 
 the expenditure of British blood and treasure, could have been set aside 
 for the purposes recommended in this letter. While the needs of an over- 
 crowded population are now no less than in 1848, the Imperial Govern- 
 ment is unable to place its hand upon a single square mile of territory, 
 outside Great Britain, suitable for the settlement of British colonists. 
 
 Criticism was aroused in various quarters by the ' Times ' letter of 
 Tune 2. An instance of the common sense and knowledge of the con- 
 ditions surrounding the three parties interested in the soil— landlords, 
 tenants, and labourers— is offered by the following reply to strictures of 
 the 'Wiltshire Independent.' 
 
 To the Editor of the ' Wiltshire Independent! 
 
 June 10, 1848. 
 
 Good farming I know can only be carried on by men who 
 have ample capital for the purpose ; I know also that farmers, ol 
 all men living, are the least inclined, from the very nature of 
 their business, to invest capital without a reasonable security 
 that they shall have fair opportunity to reap the benefit of the 
 investment. The land is not a bank into which you can pay 
 one day, and from which you can draw out the next, if you 
 choose ; money ploughed in must be left till it can be reaped 
 out- and when it reappears from the soil, in the shape of ricks,
 
 1848 EMIGRATION 161 
 
 its value is liable to vary from week to week ; they only can 
 hope to be successful farmers who can afford to wait those 
 turns of the market which make all the difference between the 
 sovereigns the ricks cost, and the 12s. or 30s - . which, when sold, 
 those ricks may return for each sovereign so laid out. I think 
 it, I own, quite enough to leave a farmer exposed to the ca- 
 prices of the weather, and the markets ; I would spare him a 
 liability to ruin at the mere caprice of a landlord. But, Sir, 
 from what I have seen of tenant farmers, I think them quite 
 capable of fighting their own battle ; whenever I have said a 
 word for them on these matters, I have felt the presumption of 
 what I have done. 
 
 The labourer has few to speak for him ; few who care to 
 face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, 
 or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him. I am glad to 
 say his friends are on the increase ; I am thankful to add that 
 I have received no common encouragement from many indi- 
 viduals in the county of Wilts whose position makes their 
 sympathy most valuable. In spite however of your friendly 
 admonition, I feel still bound to advocate emigration as a hope 
 for the labourer ; though I hope the time may come, and we 
 may both yet live to see it, when the proprietors of landed 
 property may be led to feel that in reality we have no men or 
 capital for which, under a healthier policy, we could not find a 
 profitable return at home, and yet raise considerably the con- 
 dition of all our labouring poor. 
 
 Having taken on himself, in conjunction with some of his neigh- 
 bours, the responsibility of inducing a large party of poor labourers to 
 emigrate, he describes in the following letter the impressions made on 
 him after inspecting the vessel in which his proteges were to embark. 
 Some outcry had been raised against emigration by the farmers, who 
 feared paucity of labour. Advantage was taken of casualties to one or 
 two emigrant ships to emphasise the objections which always have been 
 raised to the relief of a stagnant labour market by means of emigration. 
 
 March 22, 1849. 
 
 The loss of the Floridianand other sad casualties to emigrant 
 ships which have occurred of late years have tended to throw no 
 little discredit in the public mind on the cause of emigration. 
 
 VOL. 1. M
 
 162 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 22 
 
 It is with some hope that I may be able to allay the apprehen- 
 sions of many connected with emigrants now on their outward 
 voyage, and also that I may, in some measure, aid the public 
 generally in obtaining a correct view on the subject of emigra- 
 tion, as carried on under the auspices of the Government com- 
 missioners, that I now beg a little space in your columns to 
 describe a visit to Plymouth, very lately made, for the sole 
 purpose of satisfying myself as to the nature of the arrangements 
 made to secure the comfort and safety of emigrants going to 
 Australia in ships chartered by the Government. 
 
 Having taken some little pains, in conjunction with many 
 of my neighbours, in preparing a large number of the labouring 
 classes around me who had volunteered as emigrants — or, I 
 should more properly say, who had besought our aid to enable 
 them to emigrate — -I promised to meet them at Plymouth, see 
 them on board, and, if possible, go some little way to sea with 
 them. On Monday, the 5th of this month, 136 souls, of ages 
 varying from two years to forty-one, left my immediate neigh- 
 bourhood under the auspices of the Blandford branch of the 
 Colonisation Society. Every pains had been taken to see that 
 they were properly outfitted for the voyage, and two respectable 
 individuals volunteered to go in charge of them, superintending 
 their provisioning, &c, on the road from Blandford to Taunton. 
 At the latter place, by the kindness of the railway companies, 
 third class carriages were found for them, and they were sent 
 on with little delay to Plymouth. At the Laira station I met 
 them, they having been joined on the road by a fresh batch 
 from another part of the county, an earlier train having also 
 brought in large numbers from Somerset, Wilts, and Gloucester- 
 shire. 
 
 By taking all the flys on the stand and one omnibus, we 
 soon stowed away the women and children ; the men were glad 
 to walk the two miles in to the depot at Plymouth. To the 
 great credit of our two superintendents, and owing also to the 
 precautionary rules we had drawn out for the journey, not a 
 single box was lost, and all our live and dead stock for the good 
 ship Emigrant arrived safe at the depot. Nor was any complaint 
 made to me of ill-conduct on the part of one of the travellers,
 
 iS49 EMIGRATION 163 
 
 through a wearying journey, in which none, for thirty-six hours, 
 could have had much, if any, rest. 
 
 The medical superintendents with whom I became acquainted 
 on board these ships seemed thoroughly respectable, and were 
 kind and active amongst the people on board. The dietaries 
 were most liberal ; the food seemed good of its kind ; the pro- 
 vision for the sick was most generous. The arrangement for 
 lighting, and warming, and ventilating the ' between decks ' 
 seemed all one could wish. I examined many of the passengers 
 who had come down the Channel in the Florentia, and none had 
 anything to complain of except the sea-sickness, but this called 
 forth an expression of gratitude for their captain and surgeon's 
 kind endeavours in the worst weather to cheer them up under it. 
 
 I have spoken of temporal matters ; — the emigrants are not 
 neglected in spiritual matters ; each ship I found again and 
 again visited by one of the Plymouth clergy, a lady who seems 
 to devote herself to this good work, and a gentleman whom I 
 believe to be an agent of the Pastoral Aid Society. These good 
 Samaritans seemed thoroughly united in their work. They were 
 assiduous amongst the emigrants, giving them Bibles, Prayer- 
 books, &c. ; providing work for the women for the voyage ; 
 advising them on their conduct ; seeking to form classes amongst 
 them for mutual instruction, &c. Nothing struck me more 
 forcibly than the respect paid by the captains, crews, and all 
 concerned to the persons who thus act amongst the emigrants. 
 I can remember when a boatload of preachers, teachers, and- 
 Bibles would not have met the respect and ready assistance I 
 have here witnessed again and again. I was asked to baptise two 
 infants born on the voyage down in the Florentia, just about to 
 sail out again. The captain was himself present, and took every 
 means in his power to show not only his sense of the solemnity 
 of the service, but his sympathy for the rather trying position of 
 the mothers. 
 
 Now, Sir, do not let me be misunderstood. I do not mean 
 to say that the 'between decks' of the Emigrant, with her 326 
 emigrating souls, or, in office language, her 256^ statute adults, 
 being Dorset, Wilts, Somerset, and Gloucestershire labourers and 
 their families, was an Elysium, a scene of perfect comfort and 
 
 m 2
 
 1 64 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 22 
 
 convenience ; — no ; it is folly to tell emigrants that a ship can 
 afford to labouring men with large families all that they could 
 wish, or we could wish for them. But I am perfectly satisfied 
 that, whilst the diet is infinitely superior to anything they have 
 ever been used to, their accommodation by day and by night is 
 as good in every way as any reasonable being could expect to 
 be at the command of so great numbers, conveyed free of all 
 expense, so great a distance, in a ship. 
 
 The single men's and the single women's compartments and 
 the infirmaries are, except in the matter of ornament, nearly as 
 good in their accommodation as that of many a yacht in which 
 noblemen live for months — superior to thousands of berths paid 
 for by parties emigrating at their own expense. The crying evil 
 is the noise and pranks of the very small children, which, until 
 one got a little used to it, made the married people's compart- 
 ment literally a Babel. But, as the parents did not seem to 
 mind it, I suppose it was not so insupportable as it appeared to 
 a looker-on ; however, from my present experience, I do not 
 feel inclined to urge persons with many small children to emi- 
 grate ; and I think the commissioners exercise a wise discretion 
 in being chary of free passages in such cases. 
 
 As to the safety of the ships, I found them all taking pas- 
 sengers of a superior class of life in the cabin part of the ship ; 
 they are carefully surveyed by competent persons, they must be 
 in a high class at Lloyd's, and the captains and mates must 
 have the best testimonials as to their seamanship, &c. By the 
 kindness of a gentleman at Plymouth, who put his yacht at my 
 service, I was enabled to go some little way out of the Sound 
 with my people ; to the last I saw them cheerful, contented, and 
 happy ; they had begun to get an insight into the way of the 
 place, and though small children would cry for a run ' in the 
 lane,' or be unreasonable enough to ask to go and see a neigh- 
 bour's kittens now many a mile distant, on the whole I saw no 
 one reason to regret the pains I and my neighbours have taken 
 to launch these our poor fellow-creatures on a sea of adventure 
 which I trust will bear them to lands where their industry and 
 honesty may win for them comforts for life denied them here. 
 Our leave-taking, trying as it was I believe on both sides, was
 
 1 849 EMIGRATION 165 
 
 mercifully cut short by the commencement of such a gale of 
 wind as gave us no time to think of anything but whether we 
 could pass at once to the yacht, or be content to be carried off, 
 no/ens vo/ens, to Madeira or the Cape as it might be. 
 
 Having made myself a party to aiding a quantity of poor 
 creatures to leave their homes for ever, I was determined to give 
 myself the satisfaction of seeing faith was kept with them by 
 the Government commissioners ; on this head I have no hesita- 
 tion in saying I was satisfied. I will only add that out of the 
 large number which went from this immediate neighbourhood 
 all were literally volunteers, and were well outfitted by voluntary 
 subscription. 
 
 S. G. O. was already teaching the principles on which the Canterbury 
 Settlement in New Zealand was afterwards founded. He was satisfied 
 of the danger of colonising only from one class, and he urged the 
 necessity of men belonging to the various professions accompanying the 
 rougher material. The pathos, the difficulties, and the inducements so 
 well set forth in the following letter are as true to-day as they were in 
 the forties. 
 
 ' A visit to an emigrant ship is not one of the most cheerful things in 
 
 the world. There must have been much to endure in England before 
 
 that floating household would have left it.' — Leading article of the 
 
 Times, March 22, 1849. 
 
 April 6, 1849. 
 
 You are most right in your estimate of the effect of a visit 
 to an emigrant ship. It is, indeed, not one of the most cheerful 
 things in the world ; and it is the sense of what that floating 
 household before one has suffered, and has yet to suffer, which 
 makes the feeling of the visitor one of a painfully mixed cha- 
 racter. Every step the intending emigrant has to take is one 
 more or less of trial. I speak only of those who I conceive are 
 fit for emigration — men of character — men who voluntarily 
 seek in another clime a position they feel no hope of obtaining 
 here. Misery may make domestic ties burdensome, but they 
 are still ties. Penury may make the English peasant's home a 
 scene of daily bitter struggle ; but it is still home. Cruel oppres- 
 sion may, in some localities, have made him despise and hate 
 the employers and authorities of the locality to which the law of
 
 1 66 THE LETTERS OF S. C. O. April 6 
 
 settlement has bound him ; still it is the locality in which 
 many of his kindred have lived and died, in which he has many 
 kindred now living ; the shadows of the picture of his home 
 and its surrounding circumstances may be very dark, still thee.1 
 are rays of light in it which he will hesitate to blot out for 
 ever. 
 
 It is the young and middle-aged who go, it is the old and the 
 infirm who are left ; the moment is a bitter one which tells the 
 aged father or mother that in a few short weeks their children, 
 their grandchildren, purpose quitting them — and that, in all 
 probability, for ever ; these wholesale buryings of the living are, 
 to the mourners bereaved of them, hardly less bitter than if the 
 waggons which were to take them on their way to the emigrant 
 ship were biers, bearing them to a home-dug grave. 
 
 It is fortunate for all parties that when once the resolution 
 to go is taken, and the free passage obtained, the time previous 
 to embarkation is short, and full of occupation. There is the 
 outfit to be procured, home debts to be paid, the furniture to be 
 sold, the cottage to be given up ; there is packing to be done. 
 The outfit was on the late occasion of one large number of 
 emigrants given most liberally from voluntary subscriptions. 
 The home debts are to be paid out of the furniture to be sold ; 
 the shoe bill, the shop bill, the bill for flour at the mill, arrear of 
 rent — all must be sold, in the majority of cases, to enable the 
 emigrant to pay these, and to leave home honestly. Gladly 
 would Will Pilgrim keep the clock. He says he ' could take it 
 out of its case, and then it would scarce occupy any room.' 
 Gladly would Mary Pilgrim, his wife, keep the great cooking 
 boiler, with its well-sooted hook and chain. ' It won't weigh 
 much,' she says, and they are allowed to take half-a-ton each. 
 There is the great staring tea-tray, with its picture of the waggon 
 with large white horses, and waggoner with his large white 
 calves ; this, the chief ornament of the cottage wall, the very 
 tray they bought for their wedding tea-party — both would like 
 to save this. Still, shopkeeper, shoemaker, miller's man, &c, by 
 their frequent calls keep alive the fact that money must be 
 found — that all their goods, when turned into money, will hardly 
 pay to all their due.
 
 1 849 EMIGRATION 167 
 
 The worst of it is, that when so many are going from one 
 locality the furniture market is glutted ; the purchasers, poor 
 themselves, have sufficient appreciation of the laws of supply 
 and demand to know, that when many clocks, and beds, and 
 tea-trays, and tables, are to be sold at once, they must go cheap ; 
 they then wait to the very last moment, and in the end it often 
 happens that the fortunate village Crispin gets the clock, well 
 worth 3/., in exchange for his receipt to a bill for two strong 
 pair of highlows. The tea-tray, and other festive furniture, in 
 like manner, fall an easy bargain to the village shopkeeper. 
 These are pangs, but there are worse ; children cannot be made 
 to understand why or where they are going. What are the gold 
 diggings of California, or the mutton-boilings of Sydney, to the 
 urchins whose chief happiness is in swinging on Farmer Bailey's 
 gate, or making dirt pies in the road with their hands ? The 
 ' When will mother come back ? ' of his child, spoken to a 
 widower, whose heart's wound is still unstanched, scarce touches 
 a more sensitive chord than little Billy Pilgrim's question from 
 his grandfather's knee, ' Why is dad selling everything and we all 
 agoing to have new clothes ? ' Then, when all is sold, and the 
 family live on loan of house and all about them, comes the hour 
 of doubt. ' Is all true we have heard from the gentlemen ? Are 
 we, having parted with all we possess, going to leave all we love 
 to find ourselves deceived ? ' Then rises up to memory all they 
 have heard of evil, from the sly and wicked men who for their 
 own purposes, not the poor's good, tax their brains to invent the 
 lies they dare not attempt to prove. The poor emigrants are 
 told again and again, ' You are going among savages — you will, 
 if you ever get to the colony, have to serve the Government seven 
 years as slaves before you may do a stroke of work for yourselves. 
 They put you into rotten ships, and when it comes on to blow, 
 why the captain and the sailors take to their boats and leave you 
 to sink. The gentlemen want to transport you,' &c. I have no 
 words with which I can speak my contempt of the malice of 
 those who use such foolish but cruel means as the above to effect 
 their purpose — i.e. to detain the industrious, valuable emigrant, 
 that he may yet toil on for his starving pittance doled to him at 
 their hands ; nor can I adequately express my sense of the
 
 1 68 THE LETTERS OF S. C. 0. April 6 
 
 courage and confidence shown by these unlettered men in our 
 honest intentions towards them. 
 
 And now, Sir, when all is sold, all debts paid, every box 
 packed, all doubts as to going removed, the very day and hour 
 of starting fixed, and that a very near day — do any think the 
 mental contest is all over ? There is the last Sabbath — the last 
 night ; a night which scarce gives the children sleep, for they 
 are in strange beds at the houses of different neighbours ; the 
 grown-up people seek no sleep. How little do they know of 
 the poor who think that any amount of hard work or hard usage 
 can obliterate amongst them love for each other — nay, a sort of 
 love for everything connected with the scene of their daily life, 
 even for things which have embittered it ! I would that such 
 could have been present at partings I have lately known. 
 Scenes they were, and sayings in those scenes, which preceded for 
 a few hours the starting of those waggons and vanloads of emi- 
 grants, which would have done honour to any, however gifted, 
 of any class, however exalted. ' You did not see our people, 
 did you, Sir, after we had gone ? ' was a question put to me again 
 and again when I met the travellers at Plymouth, having 
 started some twelve hours after them ; the suffering they had 
 caused to those they had left seemed then their only suffering. 
 
 Go where you will, or when you will, amongst a body of 
 emigrants, and, if it be possible at all, you will find them writing 
 letters home, or getting them written for them. I have seen 
 many of these letters, and it is curious to observe how similar is 
 the vein of feeling which runs through them all. They write with 
 one purpose — to comfort those they have left ; although I know 
 some of them have had to endure accidental hardships, of a 
 nature to — at the time — cause no little discontent, I cannot find 
 that one has alluded to it in a letter home ; and I am sure we 
 have brought letters enough ashore to have spread any news 
 very wide indeed ; nor have I ever found them speaking harshly 
 of those whose harshness in dealing with them has often been 
 one great inducement to them to emigrate. Rely on it, Sir, 
 there is right good material in even the lowest caste of English 
 peasantry. 
 
 It may bs asked, what really is the ruling motive which has
 
 1 849 EMIGRATION 169 
 
 made so many, at such mental cost, leave their homes to 
 encounter a long sea passage to a far distant country ? Some 
 go from the one simple motive, a desire to rise in life, coupled 
 with the hope that the distant land will afford them the means 
 of rising, coupled again with the knowledge that at home there 
 is no hope of rising. ' The best man, Sir, in our village don't 
 take more all ways than iof. a week all the year round ; I'd wish 
 to do something for myself better than that ; if I can't do it at 
 home, why I must travel to do it,'— so spoke one emigrant to 
 me ; he spoke the feelings of hundreds. Others go rather than 
 bear any longer a condition which makes each week a battle of 
 life, a fight for existence, for themselves and children. ' I tell 
 you what it is, Sir ; we are starving each other ; we be too thick 
 in our place ; the best of us can't earn what will find us bread 
 for our children and ourselves, let alone the clothing and the 
 rent ; when we be gone 'twill be better for they we leave ; if one 
 half had gone away it would have been better for all. When 
 the maister has to seek for labourers, he must pay them what 
 they can live on ; as long as we has to go and beg a job, it is 
 little enough they will give us for doing of it' Some few there 
 •were, I fear, amongst the many who lately left us, young and 
 thoughtless, who go for the pure love of change ; they have not 
 sufficiently bad characters to disqualify them for a free passage, 
 nor sufficiently good to make any feel their loss at home ; these 
 may, and will, I trust, gain the advantage of separation from 
 idle, bad company, of the breaking up of much vicious associa- 
 tion ; thrown on their own resources, finding the value of in- 
 dustry, with a new field open for them, I know many such have 
 made good colonists. 
 
 I cannot, will not deny the fact, that I found some emigrants 
 at Ply mouth— not, I rejoice to say, from this county, who had 
 been partly bribed, partly threatened into going ; they spoke 
 with very natural anger of some most shameful deception which 
 had been practised on them in the matter of outfit ; but on the 
 whole were well satisfied to be where they were ; at least, they 
 were now free from tyranny ; they were cared for, and, the 
 voyage over, they hoped to earn bread, and- to them— that 
 great mystery — mutton and beef fairly slain.
 
 170 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 6 
 
 And now, Sir, if I am asked — Do you think those ships you 
 saw took out those who will become good colonists, i.e. indus- 
 trious, loyal, and peaceable subjects of our Queen ? I unhesi- 
 tatingly answer — Yes. Our villages do not breed democrats ; 
 Will Pilgrim may have his own ideas of the justice of the rent 
 forced from him for the hovel in which he was forced to dwell ; 
 or of the price he paid for the bad corn for which he had to pay 
 best price ; but Will and his class are neither infidels nor 
 traitors ; it will take years of evil teaching and unjust govern- 
 ment to make that class forget their duty to their God and to 
 their Sovereign ; as long as there is a post which can take and 
 receive their letters, home ties will yet keep up love of the 
 mother country. The peasantry of England are no free-thinkers ; 
 if some of them neither attend church nor chapel, they are not 
 generally the less believers in the existence of the God they may 
 choose to slight. My own belief is, that a very large majority 
 of the labourers in the South of England have much religious 
 feeling ; that their principles do too easily give way to tempta- 
 tion, I admit ; but, as I was never tried as I see them tried, I 
 will not on that account malign their faith. No, I shall be much 
 disappointed if the future history of our colonies does not prove 
 that from an English peasantry, however poor and however in 
 circumstances degraded at home, may rise a race equal to any 
 of their position in any country ; a race obtaining a position in 
 the colonies superior to that of many wlio despised and trampled 
 on their forefathers at home. 
 
 At the same time I am quite satisfied of the danger of 
 colonising only from one class. I am sure it would be sound 
 policy to encourage the emigration of men of every class and 
 honourable profession. The ease with which men who were 
 mere daily labourers here soon rise to comparative affluence in 
 Australia, proved to me, as it has been, on evidence not to be 
 disputed, is an clement in the social economy of that colony not 
 altogether without its danger ; an increasing population will 
 require an increase of the local powers of Government ; I may 
 rejoice to hear, ten years hence, that \V i 1 1 Pilgrim is a man of 
 large property in New Holland, but I should hardly like to hear 
 he is a magistrate or a member of the colonial Legislature.
 
 1 8 4 9 EMIGRATION 171 
 
 It is not merely capital which is wanted to accompany the 
 rough material we are now sending out ; but we want men 
 belonging to the various professions to go out. Once let there 
 be a population, sufficient to develop all the wealth of our 
 colonies, and you will need, what every civilised country needs, 
 that staple stock of intelligence and sound learning from which 
 can be drawn proper officers for God's service — expounders 
 of His laws, teachers of His word ; proper officers for our 
 Sovereign's service — able translators of her laws, able dispensers 
 of those laws ; proper teachers of sound learning, divine and 
 secular — schoolmasters who can train the children of the colonists 
 to adorn and improve the position their unlettered parents by 
 their industry have obtained. 
 
 We are, I trust, at last beginning to learn what colonisation 
 is— the treating the poor emigrant well ; the taking some pains 
 to make emigration a boon to the man who would rise, rather 
 than a refuge to the man who would flee— these are steps in the 
 right direction ; I hail them with joy ; I look to see many yet 
 go in hope — to hear of many, who are gone, whose hopes have 
 been realised. 
 
 The following letter deals mainly with the question of emigration as 
 affecting women. S. G. O. was keenly sensible of the dangers to which 
 women were liable on emigrant ships. His inexperience of the practical 
 working and discipline on a vessel at sea leads him however to a some- 
 what impracticable suggestion as to superseding the authority of the 
 captain of the vessel by investing superior power in some competent 
 official. The scandals and trouble attending the transport of emigrants 
 forty years ago have now vanished. Credit for the order and discipline 
 now ruling on emigrant ships may be partly attributed to the careful 
 studies of S. G. O. in this tangled and difficult subject, and to the 
 publicity given by him to the result of his investigations. 
 
 January 4, 1850. 
 
 No one more sincerely rejoices than myself at the efforts 
 about to be made to remove by emigration a large number of 
 poor women whose condition in this country seems to be almost 
 as hopeless as pitiable. Knowing, as I well do, what a boon 
 emigration has proved in my own county to the agricultural 
 labourer, where it has opened a door of escape to him from a
 
 ]?2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 4 
 
 life of helpless strife with circumstances which kept him at the 
 lowest and most degraded point of existence, I can but sympa- 
 thise with the generous feeling which has so boldly stepped in 
 to aid an equally ill-paid, a more generally oppressed class — the 
 needlewomen of London. 
 
 It is true I am told — and I have some reason to believe it — 
 that the places of those who will emigrate will be rapidly filled 
 up by fresh hands from the country, themselves likely to become, 
 in a very short space of time, under the same pressure, the same 
 ill-paid, overworked, and too often guilty, creatures. True, also, 
 I am told that there are other classes of our fellow-creatures 
 whose condition is as pitiable as that of needlewomen ; and the 
 question is put, why give one class the preference ? Because it 
 is likely more people may rush upon unsound ice, is it any 
 reason why we should not try and save those who are already 
 on it ? — because the appearance of the excellent M. Soyer's 
 head out of a hole in the ice should concentrate the energies of 
 a particular iceman more than the greasy head of a coster- 
 monger who might be in the same predicament at the same 
 moment, are we to blame the said iceman that he did not pause 
 to consider which it had been better to save first ? 
 
 The case of the sempstresses turned up — so to speak — in 
 such a light as to arrest the attention of certain philanthropic 
 men and women of high station ; it was a strong case — strong 
 enough to enlist their every sympathy ; they gave it that sym- 
 pathy. Mr. Sidney Herbert takes the lead in the movement : 
 while hearts glow with the heat of indignation, with the full 
 excitement, of every kindling, of every warmthful impulse of 
 charity, he strikes, and seeks to weld the material to a certain 
 shape for a definite purpose. He offers all his powerful aid, all 
 he can command, to secure to this one class better prospects in 
 another country, so far as regards return for their industry ; he 
 seeks to offer them a new sphere, in which they may hope, by 
 virtue and industry, to obtain the position which want has driven 
 them from here. 
 
 Women are wanted in the colonies, or to send them there 
 would be folly, if not crime. Mr. Herbert proposes, as a work 
 of charity, to give the offer of emigrating to a class in whose
 
 1850 EMIGRATION 173 
 
 behalf a large amount of sympathy very properly exists. Who 
 shall blame him? It is not into the pockets of John Bull, as 
 personified in the person of Sir C. Wood, he purposes to dip his 
 hands ; he knocks at another door, he asks those who have 
 worn the articles these poor stitchers stitched as they starved — 
 he asks the tens of thousands, wearers of coats, and shirts, and 
 paletots, and robes, &c, who have boasted of the "cheapness of 
 the attire they have purchased, little knowing how that cheapness 
 was obtained, to let him touch their purses. 
 
 He does not say, ' I can buy justice for the poor — I can 
 enforce fair wages for fair work.' This is a question beyond his 
 present question, which, if I understand him, is simply this — 
 these thousands of wretched beings for whom I plead can be 
 lifted from their present misery, can be rescued from their 
 present too pressing temptation ; there is a land in which they 
 could find wages, on which they could live in comfort ; there is 
 a land in which, from the very great disproportion of the sexes, 
 it is more than probable very many of these women may soon 
 become wives of persons well able to keep them in comfort ; 
 will you help me to give them the chance of escaping a lot 
 which has so long and so deeply embittered their existence ? I 
 am truly glad to see the response given to this appeal. I might 
 have wished to have seen some of the vast tide of help to the 
 oppressed flow in channels in which I may take a more imme- 
 diate interest ; but I question the right we any of us have to 
 dictate on the matter of charity. If this were a question of 
 Government policy, I would be among the first to contend 
 against its justice, for I could, I am satisfied, make out claims 
 for other classes equally good on every ground of governmental 
 expediency with the claims of the sempstresses ; but I under- 
 stand the movement is one wholly independent of the State ; 
 its authors, then, had as much right to choose the objects for 
 whom they would work as the iceman might have who, in the 
 exercise of a discretion which left him no option but to save 
 one at a time, should choose to pull the French cook or the 
 costermonger out of a hole first, as the case might be. 
 
 I am told that day by day difficulties will rise up in the 
 way of the plan now proposed for the aid of these women —
 
 174 
 
 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Jan. 4 
 
 difficulties connected with the difference between their but too 
 common moral character and the character of those who, it is 
 said, would alone be welcomed by the colonists— difficulties con- 
 nected with the nature of the employment open to emigrants 
 in the colonies, and the nature of the employment to which 
 alone these poor creatures have been habituated. I am aware 
 how easy it would be to raise up a cloud of perplexity by a 
 display of all the rocks and shoals which threaten the success 
 of this scheme of Mr. Herbert's. That there are physical and 
 moral difficulties of no little magnitude, I am sure he will not 
 deny ; he must feel, as I do, that money, though a very great 
 ingredient in the work, would be useless, unless the untiring 
 energies of many men of his station, and not less ability, are 
 given at once to the mastering all the entanglements of the 
 question, so that no money may be wasted, but every pound, as 
 far as may be, brought directly to bear in aid of the great end 
 for which it has been subscribed. 
 
 Flies are not more sure attendants on a sugar-cask in sum- 
 mer than are a crowd of would-be private gainers the constant 
 attendants on every great philanthropic movement. If this 
 movement has in it the spirit of success, it will attain its end at 
 the cost of less paid agency than any movement approaching 
 its magnitude which has existed of late years : it is one which 
 should enlist, and will enlist, a large amount of gratuitous aid. 
 It must be, and will be, I trust, worked through, in all its im- 
 portant details, under the strict surveillance of its own committee. 
 
 I speak from experience — I have worked on an emigration 
 movement, from the smallest of its details to the seeing with 
 my own eyes the first meal served on board the vessel at sea. I 
 have had to correspond with honest friends and dishonest job- 
 bers in the cause at home ; I have had to wade through that 
 which was true and that which was false from the colonies ; I 
 have had to detect, and expose, and prevent the schemes of 
 those who, paid per head for emigrants, have not hesitated to 
 connive at anything which could add to their own gains. I 
 have studied the emigrant ship empty and full ; I have been on 
 board ships with cargoes of mixed emigrants, and, in one case, 
 a cargo of only young single women. Through your columns I
 
 1850 EMIGRATION 175 
 
 conveyed my satisfaction with all the apparent effort made by 
 the Colonial Commission for Emigration to secure the health 
 and comfort of the emigrants on the voyage. The ship in 
 which I had so deep an interest arrived in safety ; the accounts 
 I have seen from those on board give me no grounds for reflec- 
 tion on any of the authorities ; on the contrary, knowing what 
 I do of the habits of the people that went, and of the neces- 
 sary economy of a ship, I am wholly satisfied with what I have 
 heard. 
 
 Still, Sir, I have learnt matters connected with the transport 
 of women in emigrant ships which force me to call on all con- 
 cerned in this movement to weigh well their every step. They 
 have entered on a work which, if blessed with all the success I 
 wish it, will lay the foundation of a new era in emigration. 
 They must learn, as I have learnt, that even the eye of practised 
 inquirers may be deceived — the precautions admirable for some 
 purposes may be full of mischief for others. They must arrive 
 at the conclusion I have arrived at — that, at any cost, it is re- 
 quired that authority over the management of the emigrants 
 should be invested in some competent power, whose authority, 
 in his own department, should even override the authorities of 
 the vessel. No amount of testimonial to character should weigh 
 against precautions to secure the fulfilment of orders given. It 
 is not enough to have a picked crew, the most respectable 
 master, and surgeon, and matron. There are circumstances 
 attendant on the necessary arrangements of an emigrant ship 
 which require some deeply responsible authority to pass and 
 repass with emigrants, to enforce that moral discipline for want 
 of power to enforce which more than one captain and surgeon 
 of respectability have been compelled to witness, if not to 
 connive at, the grossest continued vice. 
 
 Where there is great temptation, there must be double 
 vigilance ; I am satisfied nozu, that to take large batches of 
 women long voyages, arrange your ship's accommodations how 
 you will, if you would secure comfort to the really modest, and 
 restraint on the immodest, you must uphold a strict discipline 
 on board ; the machinery for which has not, as far as I can find, 
 been yet afforded. I do not know that I had an)- right to
 
 176 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Oct. 23 
 
 expect for emigrants who beg a free passage from Government 
 a greater moral guardianship than that afforded in an ordinary 
 union-house ; that much, such as it is, they have had ; but it 
 has had to contend with difficulties, consequent on the difference 
 between a ship and such a house, and therefore was still weaker 
 to oppose evil ; still, the boon, all things considered, is great. 
 But, Sir, I arh satisfied that much improvement is yet to be 
 made in the arrangements for the voyage, before those who are 
 aiding Mr. Herbert, and Mr. Herbert himself, will be satisfied 
 that they have done all which can be done to so rule the cir- 
 cumstances of their emigrants on board that they may reason- 
 ably expect a voyage passed in comfort and decency. 
 
 The Potato Famine in Ireland and the operation of the Incumbered 
 Estates Bill had given great impulse to the process of emigration from 
 the sister isle in 185 1. The deterrent influences of agitators were 
 insufficient to neutralise the magnetic attraction of the United States. 
 The following letter lays stress on the strength of the feelings that led 
 to what was then called the ' Celtic Exodus,' and speaks of the insig- 
 nificance of the obstacles against emigration raised by agitators. 
 
 October 23, 1851. 
 
 I am not a little amused at the different opinions now given 
 as to the cause of the ' Celtic Exodus,' as it is now the fashion 
 to call Irish emigration. English Protectionists would make 
 out that it is the result of free trade ; Irish would-be repudiators 
 say it is the present heavy taxation, in the shape of poor rate, 
 aggravated by the prospect of repaying the debt to England. 
 Now, Sir, I believe neither of these causes has anything to do 
 with the matter. For some years past, even previous to the 
 potato pestilence, a large number of Irish left Ireland each year 
 for either Liverpool or America ; very many who settled for a 
 time at Liverpool afterwards went thence to America. The 
 Irish peasantry are, when separated, far more disposed to corre- 
 spond with their relatives than are the English under the same 
 circumstances. They have for a very long time been in the 
 habit of sending from America and from England occasional 
 presents of money to their families. The feeling that Ireland is 
 not the best place for the Irish is one of some years' gradual
 
 1 8 5 1 EMIGRA TION 1 77 
 
 growth. It only wanted that the potato — the link that bound 
 thousands to the soil — should fail, to fix the minds of the people 
 to the questions, Why should we now tarry here? Why not 
 follow those who are doing so well in other countries ? 
 
 Before the potato rot the process of extermination or eviction 
 on a wholesale scale had commenced on very many estates. 
 The people had got too numerous ; they competed against each 
 other, and could not realise the exorbitant rents they had 
 promised to pay. The landlords, in by far the majority of 
 cases, were virtually bankrupt ; they had ceased to be the real 
 owners of their property. Agents had to work far more for 
 mortgagees than »for their nominal employers. By some sort of 
 tacit agreement the word went generally forth — ' to clear.' To 
 famine was now added a war on houses. The starving were 
 made houseless. This was done at first with a barbarity almost 
 beyond belief. At last certain forms of humanity were enforced 
 on those who by the power of the law were about to ' clear ' 
 their estates. Still the process went on, and that on a scale no 
 Englishman can even now be brought to believe. Then fol- 
 lowed the pressure on the workhouses, and all the horrors, which 
 through the powerful efforts made to suppress them, have only 
 yet very partially met the public eye. For instance, had the 
 returns of the mortality in the Clare unions, laid on the table of 
 the House of Commons last session, and still in the printer's 
 hands, been published, instead of purposely kept back, you, Sir, 
 would see that it has been free trade in death, not in food, which 
 has forced the people to fly. 
 
 Then was first felt and seen what the operation of the 
 Encumbered Estates Bill was likely to prove. The peasantry 
 and small tenantry saw clearly that confidence in the potato 
 was gone ; they knew the new owners would pursue new systems 
 of culture ; they felt assured that holdings beyond their capital, 
 and requiring a knowledge they had not, would be the rule. 
 Still to hold on, with this disheartening prospect in view, was 
 now out of the question ; for to this very moment, in very many 
 districts, the most exorbitant rents are exacted. All has been 
 embittered to the small tenantry, they have met with no mercy, 
 no sympathy ; they know not in fact who their real landlords 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Oct. 23, 1851 
 
 are, or how soon they may be sold with the estate, and have to 
 meet a change for which old habits and ignorance utterly unfit 
 them. 
 
 Many thousands had early flown from the scene of deso- 
 lation and death. Parents had forsaken children, husbands 
 their wives. Their country they had learnt to loathe, but not 
 their kindred. Every sixpence they could save they devoted to 
 the purpose of helping their relatives to join them. I know it 
 to be a fact that money is now freely advanced in America by 
 employers to Irish labourers that they may get over more hands. 
 Mr. Lawrence knows as well as I do that America will take yet 
 the whole clearance of Ireland, and find a profit in doing so. 
 One of the active officers of a large bank in Ireland has sup- 
 plied me with the details for a few months of the money passing 
 through that bank alone. Those details satisfy me, that so far 
 from there being any reason to suppose the ' Exodus ' will 
 slacken, it has not reached its full height. 
 
 It is a sad thing to say, but so it is, the people — the masses 
 of Irish — have lost all confidence in every other class. They 
 have, by a system of extortion and wanton oppression, had 
 their hearts turned against the landowners ; they have been 
 deceived by the promises of agitators ; they have ceased to care 
 for any one thing but that — the great object of all — the desire 
 to join their relatives across the sea. A higher than human 
 power has ruled it — an oppressed and neglected people are 
 being led to liberty and food. As to agitation, be it for ' tenant 
 right,' for ' the defence of the Catholic faith,' for ' extension of 
 suffrage,' for any cause good or bad, real or false, it will fail. 
 Stood O'Connell again on the shore, and loved as he once was, 
 let him command as he once could command, — the masses would 
 cheer him, might weep as they left him ; but go they would. 
 They were a people devoted to their priesthood ; their hearts 
 went with any who spoke loudly of their wrongs. Were it 
 possible to plant every deck of every emigrant ship with the 
 excommunication of the Pope himself on those who trod it, 
 they would yet go. If the voice of the people is the sword of 
 the patriot, in Ireland, for years yet to come, patriotism will go 
 unarmed.
 
 April 9, 1 863 EMIGRATION 179 
 
 S. G. O.'s last letter on the subject of emigration was addressed to 
 the 'Times' on April 9, 1863. The back of the Lancashire distress 
 was nearly broken. The report of the Central Executive Committee 
 to the General Committee of Relief had just been placed in the hands 
 of the public. After allusion to other points in the report, S. G. O. 
 comments in the following letter on the references made by the Com- 
 mittee to the subject of emigration. He mildly deprecates the caution 
 with which the Committee approach the subject, and urges with his 
 usual force the necessity of avoiding the pauperisation of the mill-hands 
 at home, and of enabling them to better themselves across the sea if 
 they wished to do so. 
 
 April 9, 1863. 
 And now, Sir, having touched on the above points in the 
 official reports of the Central Executive Committee, I turn to 
 that part of their report which enters upon the question of 
 emigration. The committee, ' without doubt or hesitation,' has 
 lent itself to the publication among the operatives of the con- 
 ditions under which several colonies are ready to aid intending 
 emigrants ; candidates have been put into communication with 
 the emigration agents, and an officer of the Emigration Board 
 has visited several of the towns from which applications for aid 
 to emigrate have been received. The committee has reason to 
 believe that by these means, and by the spontaneous efforts of 
 the workmen themselves, a considerable emigration has com- 
 menced. They avow their opinion that it is better, in the 
 absence of any certainty as to the time when home employment 
 may revive, as to the positive fitness of the operative class to 
 meet the nature of the demand for labour in the colonies, and 
 as to the operative's physical and moral qualifications for this 
 new life, 'to leave the extent of the emigration to be determined 
 by the wants of the colonies and the intelligence of the work- 
 men in discerning their own interests.' They postpone more 
 positive interference in the matter until they can see clearer 
 proofs that in a moderate period of time the population of these 
 districts cannot find profitable employment, as of old, or become 
 absorbed, more or less, in other local work, or work elsewhere in 
 the mother country ; or until it is certain that these results can- 
 not be attained without a deterioration in the physical and moral 
 condition of the population.
 
 i So THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. April 9 
 
 I am not, Sir, now about to questibn the prudence of this 
 course of action thus marked out by the Central Executive 
 Committee. I believe they are endeavouring to act wisely with 
 regard to local manufacturing interest, regarding that interest to 
 be one important to mill-hand as well as mill-owner. If I read 
 a cautious forbearance in advising emigration, a clear indication 
 that at present they consider they can apply our alms more 
 wisely than in aiding it, I at the same time see fair play given 
 to the operative in the way of setting the question before him, 
 giving him every facility to learn from the best sources what 
 emigration offers — what it demands. 
 
 There is, to my mind, in the cautious language used with 
 respect to the revival of trade, that which convinces me the 
 Executive Committee are very far from sanguine. Their policy 
 clearly is to husband all their resources. They have, by power- 
 ful embanking, hitherto kept back the flood of distress so far 
 that they have successfully checked its power to destroy life ; 
 through certain sluice-gates they are endeavouring to drain off 
 pressure, to distribute it on new work on the spot, new work not 
 distant, new work wherever it can be found in the mother 
 country at any distance ; by the ticket system, by the manual 
 and mental labour test, they strive to turn back from their doors 
 all whom they can thus induce to seek work for themselves ; 
 they are not blind to the necessity for some colonial emigration, 
 but they plainly see that here self-effort should do a great deal 
 before they weaken their future power of distress-resistance by 
 giving anything more than facility to self-effort to obtain know- 
 ledge on the subject. 
 
 They know that the crisis involves many whom neither 
 parish pay nor alms can help ; they clearly see that these are in- 
 directly saved from becoming paupers by the expenditure on the 
 spot in alms and Poor Law relief to the existing wholly destitute. 
 I do not gather from what they put forth that they will hinder 
 emigration, though they may lament it ; neither do I assume 
 that they negative the idea of the possibility of a time coming 
 when they will see it right to directly aid it ; but I understand 
 them to look with just dread at any weakening of their force to 
 oppose starvation on the spot, threatening as yet for a time to
 
 1 863 EMIGRATION 181 
 
 which no living man can put a date, by the process of expending 
 very largely to remove a very limited number of mouths. Strong 
 advocate as I am for a large emigration of ' the hands,' I mus; 
 in truth own I accept this course of conduct as one with which 
 I cannot find fault, when I look at what this committee has 
 done, is doing, and is morally pledged yet to do. 
 
 And now, Sir, permit me to say something on this question 
 of the dispersion of mill-hands by home or foreign emigration. 
 We were told in your columns by Mr. Potter, the colonists 
 ' want the education and morals of the Lancashire operatives 
 superadded to the other qualifications provided by the agricul- 
 tural labourer. Educate him, and he would be the material 
 they seek, and much less costly. It would be perfectly cruel to 
 nine-tenths of the cotton workers to take them.' The very best 
 emigrants I believe Australia ever had were from districts and 
 parishes where the agricultural labourer would, in Lancashire 
 eyes, have been considered scarcely educated at all ; I myself, 
 aided by my neighbours, nearly filled one large ship for Sydney 
 with Dorset labourers. I have reason to know that they have, 
 with but one exception that I ever heard of, done so well that 
 the great majority possess property and position in the colony 
 far beyond what could possibly have been anticipated. It is 
 difficult for the little-taught common labourer to work up his 
 way to wealth, schooling himself on the road ; far easier does it 
 appear to me for the educated and moral mill-hand to descend 
 to the learning the simpler uses of limb and muscle rough labour 
 in a colony may at first demand, and adding to this the aid of 
 an educated mind, to rise in the field of colonial enterprise. 
 
 I am told that the mill-hand is a bad subject for colonial 
 acclimatisation ; I don't believe it ; I do believe there is far less 
 risk to him on the voyage out, in the first two years' struggle in 
 any one colony with hope before him, than there is in six months' 
 work in draining, roadmaking, or stonebreaking in fine weather, 
 with the confinement in school on wet days, for the wages he 
 will be allowed to earn of a relief committee, or could for some 
 time fairly earn for himself in the ordinary labour market. 
 
 I am told of the great moral danger to young women sent 
 out to the colonies. I was told some twenty-seven years ago,
 
 1 82 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 9 
 
 when Buckinghamshire lasses were being tempted to Manchester 
 looms, just the same thing. I ask, what is the danger to these 
 young women if they are to be kept another year as they now 
 are ? I am afraid I must add, outdoor agricultural work for 
 young women is a sad school. The same correspondents who 
 ask me if there will be haymaking work for Lancashire lasses 
 are very severe about the temptations of an emigrant ship. I 
 have seen both ; I should hesitate to say which is the more 
 dangerous. 
 
 I am afraid I am a little sceptical as to the real value of the 
 moral philanthropy that of a sudden is so fearful of the immo- 
 rality attendant on emigration. I have information before me 
 that, at all events, the young men of the mill are either held 
 very cheap on the spot, or considered as moral heroes under 
 difficulty from want of a field for heroism. Why, Sir, it is no 
 secret that there is a paid agitation, active, very active, purely 
 philanthropic, to send out a great number of these to the United 
 States to fight for that very Republic whose mad folly has been 
 the direct cause of all this distress ; and this, out of pure love 
 to the poor negro ! How about the Potomac climate ? How 
 about the moral atmosphere of the Northern army ? Are no 
 Lancashire capitalists conniving at this so-called emigration ? 
 Is there no name mixed up with this movement of note among 
 those who are against colonial emigration ? 
 
 I can quite understand the efforts made to discourage emi- 
 gration by cotton speculators. The existence on the spot of the 
 raw human, working, wearing material is an important element 
 in the value of raw cotton material as a speculative investment. 
 I don't look for philanthropy as an element of commerce ; I can 
 enter into the reasoning of a man who shall say, ' Ten thousand 
 young men here are worth so much to me if I can bring cotton 
 
 to them at per lb. ; they are worth so much more to me if 
 
 their help to the Northerners in America would let cotton free 
 by the subjection of the South. It is immaterial to the question, 
 so that they do go to fight, whether it is for the money only or 
 for this and the cry of " Freedom to the niggers ! " ' I say I can 
 enter into a man's reasoning who takes this line, only I must 
 say if there are many such I don't see why we need go to Mrs. 
 Stowe for a picture of a ' Legree,' and I must add that it makes
 
 1 863 EMIGRATION 183 
 
 me feel more than ever the necessity of viewing ' Emigration ' 
 from the workman's side of the question. 
 
 Here I have no difficulty at all ; it is indisputable that, day 
 by day, the hands are getting to argue ' Some of us must go, 
 that those who remain may have hope of restored independence ; 
 a great number are anxious to go at once.' They are studying 
 the subject, and they are already seeking to bring the valuable 
 principle of ' co-operation ' to bear upon it. The public may 
 rest assured the superior mill-hand thoroughly understands the 
 present crisis. I have read letters from these, and from wealthy 
 capitalists, and have been much struck with the thorough know- 
 ledge the former have of the business of the latter. They have 
 no hope for years to come of any such revival of the trade as 
 shall give employment, at the former wages, to one half of their 
 number. It is folly to try and arrest the disposition to emigrate ; 
 in my opinion, it would be most wise to aid it, still, however, 
 holding in reserve the fund of the General Executive to meet 
 home exigency. It will be yet most serious. 
 
 I admit a large number of ' hands ' may be absorbed in home 
 employment, away from Lancashire ; but there is the old house 
 difficulty, scarcity of lodging, where there is yet a demand for 
 field labour ; there would be the difficulty of leaving their wives 
 and children ; still no doubt there will thus be some absorption. 
 In home trade work I expect there will be very little, for ' the 
 trades ' keep out by their own rules all foreign labour, as far as 
 they possibly can, and by their unions they are very powerful. 
 
 The whole question is about to come before Parliament ; in 
 my view there never was a more important one — let me add, a 
 more difficult one. I am told ' the mill-hands ' are not, as yet, 
 at all morally deteriorated. I don't believe it. They are not 
 the men to live long dependent and yet unharmed. I claim for 
 them fair play ; — I ask nothing more. Of charity, of Poor Law, 
 it would be folly to grant to them more than necessary to sus- 
 tain health ; but if it becomes clear to the nation's great council 
 that to keep them alms-fed, Poor-Law-fed, when they are desir- 
 ous to earn anywhere the just wages of honest industry, is to do 
 them injury. I say, let their hopes, their comfort, their 'capital' 
 in muscle, head, and heart weigh in its degree with that of any 
 arguments founded on the capital of £. s. d.
 
 1 84 THE LETTERS OF 5. G. O. Sept. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 DISEASE. 
 
 Cholera visited England in 1849, and destroyed 13,161 lives in 
 London alone between June and October of that year, The mortality 
 lessened and the distemper vanished with the approach of winter. 
 Interested from early life in the origin of disease, S. G. O. never failed 
 to direct public attention to the close alliance between dirt and pestilence. 
 
 The Cholera. 
 
 September 20, 1849. 
 There is a certain class of persons, and that, I fear, a very 
 large class, who view with great indignation the daily published 
 accounts in your paper of the progress of the cholera. They 
 argue that it is dangerous to be frightened about that disease, 
 and therefore wicked to take any line which may produce fear. 
 They are of those who are so engaged in this world's business, 
 this world's pleasure, or this world's apathy, that they feel every- 
 thing which may tend to remind them of the uncertainty of their 
 stay in this world as a wanton aggression on their so-called 
 peace. They are of those who are for ever speaking of this 
 pestilence as almost confined to the wretched poor, and the 
 wretched locality of their habitations, but who are of the last to 
 lend aid in person or in purse, to minister to that wretchedness, 
 either by improving their condition in respect to food or dwell- 
 ing. I at once admit, that to put before a man whose all is here 
 daily proof of how very near he may be to hereafter, is to try his 
 patience on its most tender point. Just as the curers of pilchards 
 at Mevagissey object to interference with their trade, though it 
 may be to save their lives, so the worldling, in his selfish devo- 
 tion to his cold or no creed, objects to interference with his 
 satisfaction with things around him, though it may be done to 
 save his soul.
 
 1 849 DISEASE 185 
 
 It is very true that the cholera takes the multitude of its 
 victims from a class whose habits and whose dwellings have sur- 
 rounded them with circumstances especially predisposing them 
 to receive its death embrace ; but it is very far from true that it 
 limits its claims to the lives of these. No, Sir, you can scarcely 
 now encounter any, if any rank, who know not with sorrow that 
 their own sphere enjoys no real immunity from this disease. 
 Typhus bred in the village hovel but too often travels from its 
 birthplace, the abode of the poor, to take its place in the mansion 
 of the wealthiest. The poison of cholera finds in its journey 
 the best ground for its temporary encampment the locality where 
 neglect and sin have formed for it such preparation as suits its 
 head-quarters ; but it takes up those quarters under no restric- 
 tion to confine its force to them. Heavy will lie the guilt at the 
 door of any of every rank and position who have power to attack 
 it in its best loved spots, and who use not that power ; but 
 deep is the folly and still heavier the guilt of all who, callous to. 
 the lesson it reads to all, are endeavouring to drown the voice 
 of that lesson whenever it tries to be heard beyond the sphere 
 from which it chiefly directs its voice. 
 
 The authorities connected with the watering-places to which 
 the wealthy at this season resort are straining every nerve to 
 hide or qualify the report of every case which may occur, lest it 
 should drive people away, keep people away, and thus injure the 
 trade of the town ; nay, to such a pitch is this selfish folly carried, 
 that in some towns, inland as well as on the coast, there is a 
 question of whitewashing and cleansing places likely to be, or 
 actually infected, lest it should raise suspicion. 
 
 I can state, of my own knowledge, that either untrue returns 
 must be made, or returns are altogether withheld, of this disease 
 in many towns ; for it is notorious the cholera is rife in many 
 places never mentioned in your columns. What puerile, wicked 
 folly this is ! Is the present scourge really of so light a nature ? 
 Does it betoken so little purpose in the hands of our God, that 
 we may dare thus to pooh-pooh its existence, lest we injure our 
 trade or inconvenience the migratory bands of autumnal pleasure- 
 seekers ? Is the hand of God to be stayed by coaxing and 
 bribing sextons to bury and be quiet — giving medical men the
 
 1 86 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 20 
 
 option of concealing their cholera cases, or losing their best 
 customers ? Is it justifiable to trap the timid wealthy, who fly 
 about seeking uninfected places, by receiving them with the 
 smile of confident safety, when it is known to the courteous 
 mayor, the all-civil landlord of the hotel, the affable master of 
 the library, that, day by day, some are buried who die of cholera, 
 though perhaps the bell is forbidden to toll the tale ? In very 
 many places I am satisfied the clergy would before this have 
 used the appointed prayer against pestilence, and even had one 
 or more Sundays, or other days, noticed for special intercession 
 to the Almighty, had they not known, and unfortunately too 
 much respected, the dissatisfaction such steps would cause to 
 the very many who are set against public allusion to the possible 
 advent of the disease amongst them. I am quite ready to admit 
 that nervousness on the subject may predispose to the disease, 
 but we have long since got beyond the time when, if it were 
 admitted to be expedient to do so, it has been possible to conceal 
 the progress of the cholera. Where ten persons may be pre- 
 disposed by fear to take the poison, in consequence of publicity 
 given to the existence of the disease in any given locality, twenty 
 will be saved from its full power by being timely warned, and 
 thus enabled to take the only steps which can check that power. 
 There is still another class pre-eminent for their mischievous 
 folly ; these argue that the filth and crowding which characterise 
 the habitations of the poor in many towns, and in but too many 
 villages, have always hitherto existed, and yet been productive 
 of no such disease ; these people are for letting things alone. 
 They don't live adjoining to churchyards, which have become so 
 poisoned in the soil by the amount of corruption with which 
 they have been saturated that even the sparrows will not roost 
 near them, and a true earthworm is never dug up in them. 
 They do not spend hours of sedentary toil by windows opening 
 over stinking gullyholes, the foul air-shafts of the foulest tunnels 
 human negligence can build and human filth can fill ; they know 
 not what it is for scores to dwell under each roof of a crowded 
 court, with no means of depositing at a distance that shall not 
 taint the air they breathe the noxious matter, vegetable and 
 animal, to breathe the taint of which would, by degrees, even
 
 1 849 DISEASE 187 
 
 weaken the constitution of a sewer rat ; no, these self-satisfied 
 arguers from what has been borne hitherto, and they not called 
 on to cleanse and build, lest others die, live comfortably and 
 cosily at a distance from any such abominations ; they have 
 learned to regard filth, foul air, and foul crowding as the normal 
 state of certain districts set apart for the poor, and because the 
 filth, &c, is of old date and the cholera of recent date, they deny 
 that the two have any direct reference to each other. Self- 
 accusation is, of all assaults on our peace, one of the most 
 disagreeable ; many a man can walk unshamed in the face of 
 well-deserved public odium who trembles, when alone, at the 
 indictment his own conscience prefers against his integrity. I 
 can easily see the sore so many of these men now thus try to 
 hide. If it is admitted that our wanton neglect of the things 
 which constitute the common decencies of life to the poor man, 
 of the things which are necessary to save him from a too great 
 liability to low fever, and other analogous disease, has raised up 
 around him a state of things which make him now especially 
 open to the attacks of cholera ; — if men's hearts now generally 
 fail them for fear of a disease that seizes first on localities such 
 as those spoken of above, and then and there spreads and 
 becomes aggravated in its symptoms till such localities become 
 foci from which its pestiferous breath poisons the air far 
 and near ; — if this is once admitted, why, here is at once 
 a heavy indictment at the door of those who have connived at 
 and profited by such neglect — an indictment of many counts : 
 sin, disease, and now death, all the result of gross negligence, 
 may now be laid with justice as against them. 
 
 How often have we been warned of the sure moral result to 
 our population of that state of things which is now being daily 
 officially developed as of long existence ! How often have 
 we seen typhus tracked in its destroying power to the abodes 
 vouchsafed at high prices to the poor for rent ; but abodes on 
 which to spend a farthing to cleanse, ^repair, or make decent, 
 was considered unnecessary by the owners ! The filthy tale 
 which the public now daily reads, as it is set forth in your 
 columns, the scenery to the tragedy of each day's cholera work, 
 is no new tale. That the poor so lived in tens of thousands was
 
 1 88 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 20 
 
 well known ; that, in consequence, they were subject to disease, 
 which yearly slew a heavy percentage on their numbers, was 
 well known ; but scarce anything was done to wipe the shame 
 from our name. 
 
 Did the poor only rob the poor, were the rich never assaulted, 
 robbed, murdered, I fear we should grumble at the cost of justice 
 and the maintenance of police. So long as nothing much worse 
 proceeded from the neglect of the social and physical condition 
 of the poor man than an occasional inroad of typhus into the 
 houses of the better-conditioned classes, we should still have 
 lived on, regardless of that neglect. God is now teaching us 
 that, as we must pay to repress the crime which we will not, by 
 education, seek to prevent, so we must be content to receive 
 cholera to our own bosoms, if we will not seek to prevent its 
 advent by the destruction of the causes which court its presence. 
 
 Instead of seeking to disown the lesson, let us humbly accept 
 the wholesome teaching it conveys. It is useless to deny that 
 we deserved it ; it would, indeed, be wise to take the utmost 
 profit it can afford. There is much, very much, which can be 
 done at once to abate the disease amongst the poor, even where 
 it is established. There are few spots, indeed, in which there 
 is not abundant room for measures of prevention. God hath 
 suffered us to learn this much of this mysterious agent, that 
 though its power cannot be defied, it may be to some degree 
 turned aside — to some degree weakened. Cleanliness and watch- 
 fulness are the permitted means ; let us diligently use them. 
 Above all, whether we do so publicly or privately (we ought to 
 do both), let us humble ourselves before Him ; we should have 
 gone to Him as a nation sooner ; but, though we have waited to 
 seek Divine aid till human aid has been baffled, He will not yet 
 reject our cry for mercy. Let us put aside all foolish conceal- 
 ment of the extent of our punishment. Universal trust in the 
 great Disposer of all events is the best precaution against the 
 panic which begets the disease it would fly. Using every proper 
 means of human precaution, let us endeavour to live so that we 
 may be, in confidence in His good dealing, as ready to assist 
 others as, if needs be, to meet our own attack. Let us, learning 
 the lesson from David that it is better to fall into God's hands
 
 1 849 DISEASE • 189 
 
 than those of men, rejoice that He who directs the sword against 
 us can now, as in the time of David, be led, by the penitence of 
 the punished, to sheath the sword with which He punishes. 
 
 England was once more ravaged by cholera in 1853, especially in 
 the northern towns, and once again does S. G. O. take up his parable 
 against those who opposed the late Sir Edwin Chadwick and himself 
 in their propaganda of sanitary laws. 
 
 September 27, 1853. 
 
 The great scavenger of our race is among us, active and 
 awful. The cholera is cleaning out our human cesspools, re- 
 moving sewage — mortal and immortal. Stuff of our own kind 
 which we have hoarded and herded in our out-of-the way places, 
 where it could ferment, rot and perish, is now being no longer 
 left to the causes of destruction to which we were content to 
 leave it, but is being hurriedly swept away by a mysterious and 
 all-powerful agent. 
 
 Bodies reared in filth — souls reared in the midst of blas- 
 phemy — steeped in ignorance of all good, polluted with all 
 knowledge of all evil — men, women, and children, whose ap- 
 pearance and whose habits made them the eyesores of the 
 corners of those streets where the abodes of the neglected 
 adjoin the dwellings of the privileged— men, women, and chil- 
 dren who were born amidst filth of body and taint of every 
 moral sense — who have been reared to the age at which they 
 are now being removed, with a rearing in character with their 
 birth. 
 
 These, to whom the same message of eternal hope was sent, 
 and by the same hand, as to ourselves ; these, who had minds 
 which could have been trained to comprehend that message ; 
 these, who had all that organisation in common with ourselves 
 which could have been adapted to purposes honourable to their 
 race, to the things of the school of honest industry and deserving 
 ambition, cholera is taking them, struggling with us for their 
 possession just as they are ; from amid the filth of physical and 
 moral life cholera grasps them. And now, we who left these to 
 typhus — to miasma of mind and body ; we who looked on them 
 as we might have regarded the rats in our sewers, as the life
 
 19 o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 27 
 
 that must live among stuff and in places which we have chosen 
 to consider inseparable from our towns — that species of life to 
 be deplored and left to the police — we are engaging in the 
 struggle with cholera, because that agent chooses with too rude 
 a hand to snatch away that for which it has a direct affinity — 
 that which we have treated as if it were nothing of our own. 
 
 Tents from the Ordnance, physicians from London, medical 
 students from anywhere, every known disinfectant — all possible 
 means of early prevention of those symptoms the seeds of which 
 we have sown broadcast in the localities in which we have left 
 people in habits the most predisposing for them — a very host is 
 now putting on its armour to fight the common foe; the nation's 
 energies are roused, and what will not the roused English 
 attempt ? They who fought against sanitary laws ; they who 
 cast every impediment in the way of sanitary improvement ; the 
 men who pooh-poohed the efforts of those who said the soul- 
 possessed poor should have the opportunity to live with access 
 to soul health ; — all are now eager to arrest the progress of that 
 foe which, landing to destroy on the spots on which he was 
 most likely to land, shows a disposition to go beyond the filthy 
 bounds of his own prepared territory, and claim the lives of 
 classes who dreamt of safety in their own freedom from the 
 causes to which they were content to leave others exposed. 
 
 I know not, Sir, at what cost of human life we shall now pay 
 for our past mad neglect. Who shall count the value of the 
 immortal souls now flushed into the grave's vast pool from these 
 the sewers of our race ? Who shall stand up and say, ' Lay no 
 measure of the account at my door ' ? Cholera will not wait for 
 an impromptu, hurried mission. The Church I know — other 
 bodies of Christians I feel assured — will now lend every energy 
 and face every danger to try and warn, and point to heaven and 
 to hope. Alas ! an hour of panic is no time in which the hearts 
 of those reared in ignorance can grasp the truths grafted in our 
 own hearts now by faith, but learnt in our early days as the 
 necessary lessons of our creed. 
 
 Cholera will not wait for us to organise the means to minister 
 to its victims. We may — by God's help we shall, I have no 
 doubt — by the aid of science and the energy of that humanity
 
 1853 DISEASE 191 
 
 and that more selfish principle of self-preservation which is now 
 awakened, disarm it of many of its terrors, mitigate its destruc- 
 tive power. But, while we do thus struggle, using human 
 means, and pray, seeking heaven's aid, let us pause at times, and 
 say on what ground can we — above all, can the Church and 
 State — declare we are not guilty in that this mysterious power, 
 expected, yet found us so unprepared. 
 
 S. G. O.'s investigations of the Germ theory of disease, in 1854, 
 entitle him to the credit of being one of the first to connect the outbreak 
 of disease with the presence and propagation, in the air and the animal 
 system, of minute organisms afterwards known as ' microbes.' It was not 
 until 1870 that Professor Huxley publicly expressed his concurrence 
 with the Germ theory. The germ of the Germ theory is found in the 
 following letter : — - 
 
 Will it ever be possible to map a Smell ? 
 
 September 29, 1854. 
 
 I lately stated in your columns that, in my own opinion, the 
 pernicious products of the bad air of sewers and such places 
 might be made visible. I can now, with a great approach to 
 truth, assert that a bad smell may be mapped — i.e. the organic 
 atoms in it laid down on paper, so as to show their very outline. 
 I will give my experiment and its result ; I do so with the less 
 hesitation, as it is one very easily made. An upright metal 
 pipe, some four inches in diameter and ten feet high was some 
 months since placed as an air shaft from a vault or cesspool, 
 receiving daily additions of the worst animal matters. This 
 shaft so far answered that it carried the effluvia above the heads 
 of passers-by. By means of four uprights of wood, cut to a level 
 about half an inch above the orifice at the top of the shaft, a 
 rest or platform was made on which a piece of glass six inches 
 square was laid, so as to cover over the said orifice, and yet 
 leaving a narrow space for air to pass. This glass had been 
 most carefully cleaned. Before it was laid on the platform it 
 was lightly smeared on the under side with some pure glycerine, 
 procured for the purpose and carefully tested. A small weight 
 on the upper side kept the glass in its place. It was left thus 
 for eight hours, then taken down, and at once washed with dis- 
 tilled water which had been submitted to test. Some half-dozen
 
 1 9 2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 29 
 
 preparations were at once made from this washing — i.e. a few 
 drops were enclosed in very thin glass cells, and hermetically- 
 sealed. 
 
 I have now studied these preparations with the utmost care, 
 using a microscopic power of more than 600 linear, with the aid 
 of excellent illumination, by one of the very best inventions for 
 the purpose. The result was to show me that even in the small 
 portion of the infected or polluted fluid contained in each pre- 
 paration there were countless masses of animated active bodies. 
 The commonest form was that of a simple circular cell, with a 
 distinct nucleus ; there were also beautifully distinct oval cells ; 
 some few fungi I recognised as of the same genus as those found 
 on decaying vegetable matter. There were numbers of vibrionia, 
 small maggot-shaped bodies, not like those found in vegetable 
 infusions, with central lines of division, but broader in shape, 
 rather longer, evidently of greater diameter, and more active, 
 the motion being more rolling than vibratory. There were 
 thousands of bodies shaped like mushrooms, the stalks of which 
 twisted about as the umbrella head revolved. One peculiar cell 
 I found, but not in such great numbers ; it was always the 
 largest in the group, being about 4-7,oooths of an inch long, 
 nearly oval, well-defined outline, and the membranous sac easily 
 made out by a little subduing of the light. I compared it with 
 fungi in a preparation made from mould on meat ; it was of a 
 very similar character, but larger, and its contents more obscured 
 from sight. These cells alone were in a state of repose, with the 
 exception of the few vegetable ones of which I have spoken ; 
 the rest were all alive, or rather lively, and, though now in con- 
 finement some forty-eight hours, they continue so. 
 
 It is quite clear to the eye that the maggot-like forms are 
 generated in the cells, for they may be seen within tJiem and 
 escaping from them. Very many of these cells were so small 
 that they could have passed three abreast between the spaces 
 of a micrometer, ruled to give, with the power used, something 
 under the 7,000th part of an inch. All these bodies are in sub- 
 stance homogeneous ; I can detect nothing like organs within 
 or without them ; they are so far transparent that they appear 
 within these outlines as white and luminous. I am familiar with
 
 1 854 DISEASE 193 
 
 monads, and I think with most of the infusoria, but I have never 
 seen any corresponding with the form, action, and general 
 character of these bodies. I have within these few weeks taken 
 specimens of the vibrio from various sources ; I can trace in 
 them the characters ascribed in various books to the several 
 species ; I have caught them in large numbers in the air ; but 
 these, the product of the effluvia from the commonest of all very- 
 dirty matters, appear to me to be perhaps of the same genus, 
 so far as to deserve to be ranked as scavengers ; but yet a new 
 species. 
 
 I had been led to believe, as I stated in my last, that glyce- 
 rine might, when exposed to the rays of the sun or moon, itself 
 so decompose as to produce the so-called vibrios. I have, by 
 means that defied all such chance of deception, ascertained that, 
 as the rule, wherever a glass arrests in the air any vegetable 
 fungi, a very high microscopic power will discover with these 
 great multitudes of these lively bodies. Fungi washed from the 
 tomato, or from the mould on meat, with distilled water only, 
 which has been boiled afresh in a glass tube, will give to view 
 these same bodies. 
 
 That these creatures are in the atmosphere for some wise 
 purpose I have no doubt ; that they do, as it is written of them, 
 act as nature's scavengers I have no doubt ; that their existence 
 in the air is almost perpetual I believe, for when and where is 
 there season or locality in which some decaying process is not 
 going on ? 
 
 We may, probably, inhale these ordinary aerozoa in any 
 number with impunity, perhaps with benefit ; but I have my 
 doubts as to man's power to inhale, without injury, repeated 
 draughts of the animated matter, which, I now believe, forms an 
 element of animal decomposition, and is given off in its effluvia. 
 At all events, I think, if the public could be brought to see that 
 which floats in what they smell from sewers and cesspools, they 
 would be more careful in the removal of filth in such a way as 
 to, as far as may be, limit the escape of its life-crowded 
 atmosphere. 
 
 I trust these my crude experiments may be followed up by 
 those who possess even more powerful instruments and greater 
 VOL. I. O
 
 194 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 29, 1854 
 
 opportunities for observation than I have. I have only sought 
 to give the results of my attempts to shadow out my theory. I 
 am more than ever satisfied that a diligent study of the organised 
 products to be obtained in different conditions of the atmosphere 
 would lead to more light than we at present possess with regard 
 to the cause of epidemics. I am strengthened in my opinion 
 by that given to me by one of the very first physiologists of the 
 day. 
 
 But, Sir, let me add that, just in proportion as the experi- 
 mental means I have used and pointed out are simple, so are 
 they, unless used with the utmost care, liable to betray. In 
 dealing with these minute matters, the utmost care must be 
 taken to test every stage of the experiment ; to see that none of 
 the materials used are the parents of the things found. It is in 
 vain to work the product of glasses used to trap the air with 
 any powers less than those of the quarter-inch of the best 
 makers; to see thoroughly, a i-8th or i-6th with good eye- 
 pieces and good illumination is necessary. I am still sanguine 
 that these experiments are in the right path to discover pheno- 
 mena in nature's works which may prove most valuable ; I see 
 no reason why we may not make an approach to some ocular 
 analysis, giving the difference between various decaying matters 
 as to their specific effect on the atmosphere ; it would not sur- 
 prise me if particles of scent — say, from the fox or civet — could 
 be made apparent to the eye. 
 
 I am well aware that a great part of the value of my experi- 
 ment will depend upon the question — does glycerine, when 
 exposed to the air, so rapidly decompose as in a few hours to 
 give out this amount of life ? As I have found vibrios with 
 vegetable fungi taken directly from the plant to the stage of the 
 microscope, using only fresh boiled distilled water, and no 
 glycerine at all, I believe the bodies I have described are 
 literally taken floating in the atmosphere ; and when I see their 
 dimensions, and find with them the form of well-known fungi, it 
 does not surprise me. 
 
 Investigator.
 
 April 17, 1865 DISEASE 195 
 
 The Typhus Nest. 
 
 April 17, 1865. 
 
 All who have studied the subject know full well that as surely 
 as the early hedge-nest tells of the advent of the breeding-time 
 of birds, so do the first few cases of typhus in any locality warn 
 that here this foe of our race is about to build and breed to the 
 utmost of his power — that is, as far as he can do it, and we will 
 suffer it. 
 
 Whether or no the fever which has broken out in Russia and 
 elsewhere will invade our island none can say. To read the 
 accounts we have of it, it would appear to be no more or less 
 than typhoid fever of malignant character made more so from 
 the low condition of those it attacks, and probably further 
 aggravated by some peculiar atmospheric condition. 
 
 It is quite certain crowded cities are seldom, if ever, quite 
 free from this type of fever ; it is not disputed that there has 
 now, for some time, been a great deal of it in London. Let us 
 admit that it is, as it is now among us, simply what is called 
 typhus fever of the usual character, traceable to certain condi- 
 tions, which we know full well do for ever produce and propa- 
 gate it, such as the low feeding, dissolute habits, the crowding 
 together in masses of people of filthy habits, in localities ill 
 drained, ill ventilated ; these being the primary causes of typhus. 
 To such places the typhus-nester may go at all times, and feel 
 certain to find what he seeks. London has many hundred acres 
 of such typhus-ground. 
 
 It is early spring, we have only just warmed out the chill of 
 the last winter's atmosphere. It is not impossible that we shall 
 have one of those summers the heat of which intensifies the 
 odour of the crowded rooms of London dreg-life, depressing 
 human vitality, calling into full vitality every poisonous material 
 that foul water-butts, fouler drains, foul rags, are so ready to 
 yield to summer heat. Where typhus now nestles, now breeds, 
 it will be warmed up to more vigorous effort ; fed on the foul 
 food it loves best, inspiring the foul air on which it thrives 
 best, it is sure to spread and, spreading, aggravate its own fatal 
 type.
 
 196 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 17 
 
 Never were ' court,' ' alley,' and ' lane ' London more crowded 
 than at this moment ; never was there more clear indication that 
 pressed-down human life must yet submit to more pressure. It 
 is possible, I am told, to calculate how many pilchards can be 
 got into a barrel, how many figs into a drum, and yet preserve 
 their healthy market condition. Is it so difficult to calculate 
 how many human beings can possibly live in an unhealthy 
 locality and yet preserve health ? It appears as if we had no 
 power to number the amount of persons in such a locality who 
 can be crammed into one bed, or how many such beds any one 
 room can be made to hold. We have long since cried out loud 
 enough that the condition of the lowest strata of our London 
 poor is a shame to our humanity ; we have still been content to 
 see that condition year by year made worse. At this very 
 moment we are well aware that large numbers of poor people, 
 already too closely packed for health or decency, are about to 
 be evicted from their present dwellings, with no option but that 
 of wedging themselves into the lanes and courts in other dis- 
 tricts, which already are hotbeds of all the vice and disease re- 
 sulting from humanity submitted to a pressure under which 
 cattle might just live, but could not thrive. 
 
 We read of the ' typhoid relapsing fever ' of St. Petersburg ; 
 we send professional experts to see all about it and ' report.' It 
 strikes me this is something like sending a professor of botany 
 to bring home some rare exotic, to prepare for which we have 
 already got our soil ready. Have we not read that it is the 
 poor, overcrowded, and ill-fed of the Russian capital who are the 
 victims of this pestilence ? To calm our fears is it not written 
 that the disease is confined to this class and the doctors who 
 attend them ; that, after all, it is no plague — oh no, only an 
 epidemic, the result of too many dirty, poor, lower-class people 
 congregated in one spot ; in fact, are we not informed that it is 
 nothing more than a rather abundant hatching of typhus, where 
 that disease has had every encouragement to settle and breed ? 
 
 It is quite true that, as the rule, this kind of low fever takes 
 its victims chiefly from the lowest and poorest class of society. 
 Let it, however, assume the full proportions of a wide-spread 
 epidemic among this class, instead of dealing with it as it now
 
 1 865 DISEASE r 97 
 
 does, a few cases in a house, and this in a few dozen houses here 
 and there in the neglected, miserable districts of London, we 
 may rest assured that then it will not only assume a more 
 malignant form, but will extend its contagion far beyond the 
 boundaries which now divide those whose life in its scene and 
 circumstance seems a mockery of human life from their more 
 privileged brethren, who live in a comfort and an ease which 
 would seem to set at naught disease hatched of want and un- 
 cleanness. 
 
 Typhus is so far from being a strange thing in the over- 
 crowded portions of the town that it is received as a resident 
 rather than an intruder ; to be ' down with the fever ' is a very 
 common lot — so common that terror of it has little power to 
 produce that condition of mind which makes men most suscept- 
 ible of its contagion. Not so is it in the wealthier quarters of 
 the town ; we all know full well the dread felt of this disease. 
 We can easily imagine, then, the consequences which would 
 follow should it break out from its accustomed breeding-ground 
 and invade in all its power the streets and squares where, as yet, 
 it is rarely known. The dread and anxiety it would cause would 
 in itself produce the very depression which predisposes for its 
 contagion. 
 
 Be it remembered, the natural foci of typhus irf the metropolis 
 are situate, not on the outskirts of those quarters of the town in 
 which the well-to-do live, but in the midst of them, in the closest 
 contact with them. The typhus-nester may in a few minutes 
 walk from the door of luxury and affluence and find abundant 
 typhus ground of the most promising nature. He has only to 
 apply to the officials of that admirable institution the Fever 
 Hospital, and they will afford him every information of the 
 whereabouts, at the moment, of this pest. 
 
 It has been my lot to see a good deal of fever ; in Ireland I 
 had every opportunity of studying it. We had it there in every 
 degree of virulence ; that it gained its first power there from 
 close crowding, low food and too little of it I have no doubt ; 
 that it assumed from time to time a more or less malignant form 
 I believe resulted from several causes. There ever is in and 
 about localities where fever breeds a certain condition of atmo-
 
 1 98 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 17 
 
 sphere which aids its production, itself becomes poisoned by it 
 the more it progresses, and this tends not only to sustain and 
 spread it but to increase its virulence. I have reason to believe 
 that a strong gale of wind blowing from one quarter for some 
 days will often be followed by a partial cessation of the progress 
 of fever in a locality exposed to such wind. I believe the acci- 
 dental circumstance of a fire taking place close to a typhus nest 
 has so purified the atmosphere that there has been a mitigation 
 of the disease ; I have, then, no doubt atmosphere plays an im- 
 portant part in the production, support, arrest, or aggravation of 
 the disease. 
 
 There is a peculiar condition of mind that seems strongly to 
 predispose the constitution to take the disease, — fear of it, that 
 anxious state of depression which very naturally affects heads of 
 families living near to an infected locality ; which affects espe- 
 cially their servants, a class very apt to magnify danger of all 
 kind. This, very often, by destroying a desire for food, inter- 
 fering with rest, and otherwise depressing the system, produces 
 that physical weakness which invites the attack of this species of 
 disease. It is impossible for a close observer to mistake the 
 peculiar cast of countenance which at once becomes common in 
 all ranks of life in the neighbourhood of any powerful pestilence. 
 
 When the disease first breaks out it seizes on those who have 
 been bred to it in some of the low typhus nests ; these poor 
 creatures, already scantily fed, ill-fed, living in dirt around, and 
 breathing the air it has polluted, are soon taken ; the next seized 
 are those somewhat stronger, on whom the conditions of their 
 common life had not borne quite so hardly ; none who have 
 once smelt and tasted (it is a thing of nose and palate) can for- 
 get the atmosphere of a fever room in a low locality— a room 
 where there may be but one dying or lately dead. We may 
 leave it for fresh air, and thus drown out for a time the foul 
 effluvia in a pure air bath ; but lodgers and relatives have to 
 eat, sleep, live in it ; they very soon sicken and die of it. Now, 
 panic met by gin, not argument, supervene^, and fresh elements 
 of danger are bred- elements of worse danger, for as more are 
 .fitted to take the virus the disease becomes the more malignant- 
 1 believe the buboes, boils, &c, we read of in Russia are nothing
 
 1 86 s DISEASE 199 
 
 more than might occur, probably will occur, if the fever which 
 has existed in London for months past becomes, by more 
 crowding and the action of the summer heat, of a more malig- 
 nant type. 
 
 It was not till England was seriously threatened that we 
 went to work so lavishly to prepare against invasion. The iron- 
 clads, the fortresses over which economists grumble, but which 
 make the nation at large comfortable in the matter of war from 
 without, would never have existed, had not certain clouds, not 
 larger than one man's hand, awakened the nation to our defence- 
 less state. 
 
 When the voyagers in steamers from Putney to Greenwich 
 became subject to nausea on smooth water ; when Westminster 
 Palace was found to be built by the side of the outfall of London 
 nastiness ; and the deliberate wisdom of English legislators 
 threatened to become hasty to execute, bilious in conception, 
 from the action of Thames stink, making every committee-room 
 and the very body of the House feel as private houses do when 
 the plumber is wanted at once, then, and not till then, were the 
 money and the scheme found which has just been inaugurated 
 on its completion by the heir to the throne. Who twenty years 
 ago would have conceived it possible that a few handles of iron, 
 not ivory, had only to be kept lifting, miles out of London, sub- 
 sidiary to our domestic machinery, and that thus we could 
 cleanse our river and transport our abominations? That royalty 
 itself next the throne should inaugurate the first pull of the 
 valve of this great water vault speaks volumes for the honour we 
 give to domestic sanitary matters. 
 
 W r ould it not, Sir, be as well to now at once coolly regard 
 the means and cost necessary to attack the fever which does 
 exist in its present strongholds, before, by anything which may 
 aggravate it, it flows forth a mighty pestilence, to force us to the 
 task ? A great many good reasons will, doubtless, be given why 
 the Russian pestilence will not reach our shores ; but somehow 
 it for ever happens epidemics behave most unreasonably ; they 
 show no deference to public opinion or to the arguments of 
 private individuals. I have no doubt that if we have an out- 
 break of violent malignant typhus we shall go over the old
 
 200 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 29 
 
 track ; boards of health will be very active, printed advice will 
 be distributed gratis, fever hospitals will be extemporised, the 
 Privy Council will direct the use of a particular prayer, the 
 custom house officers will vigilantly watch foreign ships ; all 
 who have country seats will go to them ; we shall have regular 
 returns of the mortality and large subscriptions to aid the sick. 
 
 For my own part, I think it would be wise to anticipate the 
 possibility of the necessity of this old routine ; but at the same 
 time to go to work at once to clear the ground, where typhus 
 does exist, and is likely to exist ; destroying, as far as may be, 
 the domestic foe, before we burnish up our armour to meet the 
 foreign one. It can hardly be doubted that this is not the time 
 to cram more typhus nests, already quite crammed enough to 
 breed to any amount. 
 
 The Cattle Disease and Cholera. 
 
 August 29, 1865. 
 
 We are at this time visited by an epidemic in our grazing 
 fields'and cattle sheds ; we are threatened with one in our own 
 dwelling places. The cattle epidemic is already doing its deadly 
 work ; the cholera appears to be on its way to our shores. 
 Veterinary science gives forth great difference of opinion as to 
 the origin of the cattle disease, is altogether at fault as to any 
 efficient specific in the way of cure. Medical science has as yet 
 failed to discover the originating cause of cholera, has discovered 
 no one plan of treatment entitled to entire confidence. 
 
 There is great division of opinion upon the question of the 
 cattle epidemic being an imported or a home-begotten disease. 
 It is argued, because it appeared abroad before it broke out 
 here, it must have been through imported cattle that it reached 
 our herds. Because the cholera is raging in places from which 
 our ships, or foreign ships, sail to our ports, it is also held that 
 we are thus likely to import this disease. 
 
 In my opinion it is quite possible that these two epidemics 
 may have this feature in common. Existing in a country with 
 which we trade, oxen may be so far affected by the virus that, 
 although apparently quite well when they leave for England, 
 they may sicken on the voyage and die soon after landing, or
 
 1 865 DISEASE 201 
 
 may appear still for some time well, but from local causes, 
 English causes, develop the disease and then die. At the same 
 time, I firmly believe that an ox and a man may alike absorb 
 into the system the poison of disease, and yet, if in good health, 
 so long as they retain that health, escape its full development. 
 I am quite satisfied no man can go into places where there are 
 many severe typhoid or choleraic cases and not take into his 
 system some specific source of mischief from the atmosphere in 
 which they exist. You may place mushroom spawn on several 
 different soils, but there is one particular soil in which it will the 
 quickest fructify ; so with these epidemic diseases. The man of 
 to-day may be in a state of health which renders his constitu- 
 tion altogether unfit to develop the virus he may absorb ; the 
 same man the very next day, from some physical or mental 
 cause of depression, may present to that virus just the pabulum 
 it requires for its worst development. 
 
 It is my belief, then, that diseases of this nature once planted 
 in a population, do in reality scatter their seeds over a far wider 
 surface than is usually supposed ; that very many of us, who 
 have been again and again exposed to typhoid malignant disease, 
 and cholera, from having had to go among those suffering from 
 them, have taken into our systems their poison, although, from 
 circumstances simply constitutional, we have altogether escaped 
 any exhibition in our own persons of such diseases. Further, 
 that the seeds of these diseases are ever present among us, 
 awaiting peculiar atmospheric action for their development. 
 There are localities so inhabited, so ill-drained, so utterly denied 
 all proper ventilation, the men, women, and children, the in- 
 habitants, of such foul callings and habits, that the riddle science 
 has failed to solve is, how typhus is ever absent, how there 
 should be such apparent failure in its production. For years, 
 in such a locality, the people have been, not healthy, perhaps, 
 but still free from malignant fever and cholera. Either of these 
 diseases may on a sudden break out among them ; and, per- 
 haps, in a dozen such localities the same thing will occur at the 
 same time — there is an epidemic. If at the time malignant 
 typhoid fever raged at Boulogne, or cholera at Marseilles, we set 
 to work to find out how we can connect the fact with our own
 
 202 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Aug. 29 
 
 pestilence, then we have the old story of sailors just come 
 ashore, who had taken lodgings for a night, or some rag mer- 
 chant who had bought some rags from a ship on the river. 
 
 Our safety consists in this, — until science can teach us some- 
 thing certain as to the cause of these diseases, let us fall back 
 on common sense. We find when cholera comes it pitches its 
 tent on the foul grounds of human life, and there it at once 
 develops its full destroying force. It jumps over the well-aired 
 cleanly mansion to produce a sporadic case here and there in 
 crowded mews, where the steam of dung bins without, mingling 
 with that from boiling dirty linen within, depresses the constitu- 
 tions of the hapless beings who crowd the rooms over the stables. 
 It is not heard of again until, passing by whole streets and 
 squares of the rich, it falls foul of some filthy alley, where all 
 abomination to mind and body is perennial ; here it at once 
 takes up a position, it revels among the life that lives ever pre- 
 pared for its reception. The inhabitants of such places may 
 have dwelt for years under the precise circumstances in which 
 cholera now finds them and escaped it. The question to me is, 
 whether all the time its elementary matter was not present, but 
 the peculiar atmospheric condition wanting to complete the 
 process necessary to its development. It vegetated unseen, 
 simply because this, its vegetation, wanted a certain condition 
 of atmosphere to force it into that destructive growth which it 
 could alone obtain under such condition. I do not, for one 
 moment, believe that any cordon, any human known means of 
 isolating a cholera bed or typhus nest, can secure it from the 
 disease, the seeds of which are contained in its polluted soil, 
 awaiting incubation in due season. 
 
 As to contagion in its literal sense, I doubt whether contact 
 with the dead or living in these diseases will give them ; but I 
 am quite satisfied that whether it be from the excreta, the 
 secretion from the skin, or the air expired from the lungs, where 
 there are many choleraic or typhoid cases in a small space 
 whatever care may be taken, there is this much infection in the 
 air — it renders those who breathe it liable to the disease, doubly 
 so if in weak health ; the strongest men if depressed by fatigue 
 become as susceptible to the virus as the weakest ; in fact, it
 
 1 86 s DISEASE 203 
 
 appeared to me that those most liable to take it, among the 
 attendants and medical men, were men and women originally 
 strong who were worn out physically by the heavy work cast 
 upon them, and to these I would add those whose peculiar 
 nervous temperament kept them in a state of desponding appre- 
 hension of its attack. 
 
 Where cholera has got a strong hold on any one locality, 
 and the deaths are very numerous, I have no doubt that the 
 poison is developed in excess. In addition to the causes which 
 led to its production in the first instance, still adding all its own 
 peculiar morbid matters, it becomes more virulent on the spot, 
 and thus taints a considerable area of atmosphere. For some 
 distance around every locality in which there is human life 
 dwelling under circumstances which depress, healthy life is in 
 danger. 
 
 What I have now said with regard to cholera I believe will 
 apply to the case of the cattle epidemic. Let us suppose 
 two steamers, under precisely the same conditions, vessels which 
 for years have been in use in the importation of cattle, being in 
 every respect as clean or dirty, well or ill ventilated ; the ac- 
 commodation for the beasts, as to the average number brought, 
 being the same. I strongly suspect, if you travelled my squire's 
 healthy Devons the same distance, to embark them for Holland 
 in one of these steamers, that a herd of healthy foreign cattle 
 were travelled to be embarked for London, either on the voyage 
 or so3n after landing, the probability would be as great that the 
 one set of beasts as the other would show the disease. It is no 
 use assuring me that the mode of transport for years has been 
 the same by rail and by boat ; that the beasts stood the crowd- 
 ing, bruising, half-starving and foul accommodation, and yet 
 escaped the disease. I assert that they did so simply because, 
 to develop this scourge, it requires a locality to be tainted up 
 to a certain degree ; all that is then wanting is the action of a 
 certain atmosphere to make it at once a hotbed of disease. 
 Without this peculiar atmospheric condition, the seeds of the 
 disease, existing, could not fructify. 
 
 As with crowded alleys and lodging-houses, so with steamers, 
 cattle trucks and cowsheds ; nothing but continued care and
 
 204 THE LETTERS 0E S. G. 0. Aug. 29 
 
 cleanliness at all times can guard against pestilence at peculiar 
 seasons. We nurse the viper until we think him harmless — a 
 change of temper and he bites to kill us. Why should we have 
 expected a thing so tame should ever become so deadly? — 
 because he was a viper at best. So with dirt and bad air ; for 
 a season they leave us unharmed, and we bear with them, but 
 on a sudden they vindicate their nature and destroy. 
 
 Cleanliness is next to godliness. Soap, whitewash, pure air, 
 clean clothing, good drainage, take precedence of medicine. An 
 assembly of ' vets ' over the deceased in a cowshed, a board of 
 medical inspectors with cabs waiting at the mouth of a blind 
 alley, cholera-smitten, are alike worthy of respect : they are the 
 detectives come — after the robbery. Had they been called in a 
 few short months since to inspect the premises and point out 
 the weak places, death would not have stolen the cows or the 
 men. I once knew a row of cottages in a healthy village, in 
 which there were repeated cases of low fever ; the gardens were 
 close up to the doors ; the only accessible cesspools were just 
 the distance which the poor call, not convenient for such con- 
 veniences. I ascertained the mothers and daughters who did 
 the housework were accustomed to bring out slops of all de- 
 scriptions to their doors, take two strides, and then jerk the stuff 
 as far as they could into the garden. The result was, the soil 
 for some nine feet or so (a woman, strong in the arm, can only 
 jerk the contents of a large vessel three feet) was saturated with 
 mixed noxious matters. I advised during the fever keeping the 
 soil twelve feet from the houses, covered with quicklime ; the 
 fever abated, certain sanitary alterations were made, I have 
 never heard of a case in the same locality since. 
 
 My strong impression is that, with regard to the cattle 
 disease, every shed in the kingdom should be kept for some 
 time to come not only in a state of the utmost cleanliness, but 
 that no cost should be spared to remove to some distance from 
 it any accumulation of dung ; that cattle owners cannot be too 
 liberal in whitewash everywhere, that especial attention should 
 be paid to the water given the beasts to drink, never taking 
 it from any source in any, the most distant, connection with 
 decayed vegetable or animal matter. Were it my good luck to
 
 1 865 DISEASE 205 
 
 possess a valuable herd of beasts I would at any reasonable cost 
 at once erect temporary wooden buildings for them, remove 
 them for a season from the sheds to which they have been 
 accustomed, and treat these as I would a stable in which by ill 
 luck a horse might have had the glanders. As to steamers and 
 railway trucks, all the scrubbing and disinfecting in the world 
 can only mitigate the evil. I doubt whether fresh painting the 
 whole of a truck would be more than partially effectual ; boards 
 not only absorb noxious matters and retain them far below their 
 surface ; but cattle on a journey rub in and scratch in their 
 excreta to a degree of incorporation with the fibre of the wood 
 which must thoroughly inoculate it. The paint would only be 
 a covering soon lifted, the old sore would be exposed and re- 
 moistened. You may deodorise and not disinfect, kill the smell 
 and yet leave its source prepared to give out its peculiar poison ; 
 the plan I would suggest is, to thoroughly clean each journey, 
 and then quicklime every inch of exposed wooden surface. I 
 know not whether the disease is imported or not, but be it how 
 it may, I am satisfied common prudence points out the wisdom 
 of not trusting to the mere close watching our herds that no 
 foreign cattle come among them — it is well to regard it as an 
 epidemic, and as one to be prepared for its outbreak anywhere. 
 
 With regard to human beings, as yet only threatened with 
 epidemic disease, our hands are but too much bound by circum- 
 stances we cannot control. There is a fringe to civilised life of 
 social existence, the character of which must always be most 
 deplorable. House to house visitation, to warn and advise, is a 
 wise step ; but how speedily do the visitors arrive at the con- 
 viction that to preach purity of air, personal cleanliness, and 
 wholesome life in such localities becomes as preaching to foul 
 winds ? Human nature on the lees is a very helpless nature. 
 The stir and bustle of our common life is ever precipitating a 
 vast amount of living human matter, to fall where to live at all 
 is scarcely human. 
 
 Two jobbing tinkers, a rheumatic old man, an Irishwoman 
 with three children, a single female lodger who binds shoes, a 
 girl who helps her, with chance extra inmates coming to see 
 any of the lot, all in a space of 16 feet by 1 1 feet ; low ceiling,
 
 206 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 29 
 
 very small fireplace, any ' convenience ' inaccessible to the chil- 
 dren, scarcely obtainable by the women ; water supply scant 
 and bad ; as to drainage, bad originally, for ever made worse ; 
 staircase a filthy shaft ; story after story just as crammed, even 
 the cellar full of life ; — from what text can we preach cleanli- 
 ness, purity, decency to such folk ? Society could not go on 
 without these poor creatures, their poverty can afford them no 
 higher social status. Wealth, commerce want space, pure air, 
 good drainage — expensive matters in a town ; these can buy 
 them, the poor cannot ; they are to them luxuries ; the poor 
 must dwell according to poverty, hence so many dwell in a con- 
 dition which invites cholera. How are we to deal with such 
 people so living ? We are not justified in leaving them to their 
 fate, how can we make that fate less one of destruction ? With 
 cattle we can do a good deal, they are not bound to one pasture ; 
 these our fellow-creatures are helpless to change their position 
 or better it. 
 
 Some work may be done, and it cannot be too quickly done, 
 in preparation against an attack of pestilence. Investigation 
 into the condition of the water supply may lead to measures for 
 its improvement. If there is no means of obtaining drainage, I 
 presume means could be found to remove daily all offensive 
 matters. We cannot force cleanliness of person or secure to 
 each human being the proper amount of pure air ; but I assume 
 it to be possible to enforce periodical whitewashing of the rooms, 
 thorough cleansing of the staircases and courtyards, &c. In 
 this direction the law might act for great good. A regular 
 sanitary supervision of every house would afford timely warning 
 of the disease in its premonitory stage, the only stage in which 
 there is much hope of arrest. Proper medicines to be adminis- 
 tered on the spot should be found, and every endeavour made 
 to give confidence in them, that they may at once be applied for. 
 Here let me relate a fact within my own knowledge. When 
 the cholera first broke out in this country several children died 
 of it very near a school for the poor, many of the scholars living 
 in the houses where the disease had appeared. A common- 
 sense clergyman took measures to administer a certain small 
 amount of chalk mixture with opium to each child in the school
 
 1 86 S DISEASE 207 
 
 every day, giving them also a luncheon of plain boiled rice, with 
 treacle. The result was a good many complaints of pain in the 
 head, some breaking out about nose and lips of unpleasant sores, 
 a rather general fractiousness ; but in no one case was a child 
 attacked with cholera. I believe I must add there were a few 
 cases in which it was necessary to reverse the principle for a 
 day, and give some castor oil. The argument of the rev. divine 
 was — if you can't cure cholera you may do something to keep 
 the constitution on its defence against its first symptom. I saw 
 this same mixture, or one at least of the same nature, served out 
 from a tin pail with a ladle in Ireland, but it was at too late a 
 period ; it was used as a quasi remedy, it should have been used 
 in anticipation of the disease. Presuming that sanitary mea- 
 sures have been taken in anticipation of the disease, in the worst 
 districts of our crowded towns, should the disease break out, 
 temporary hospitals should at once be established. It is wonder- 
 ful in how short a time any large building can be turned into 
 an hospital for one class of patients. Of course it requires 
 money ; with this, the aid of a few gentlemen of ordinary sani- 
 tary knowledge, and a few builders' men, will soon extemporise 
 all that is necessary to secure pure air, proper temperature, &c. 
 The best temporary hospitals I ever saw were some run up by 
 the Poor Law authorities in Ireland for fever and cholera cases. 
 They were mere deal sheds, but erected with all regard to the 
 end sought. You may not save many of the lives of those you 
 move into these places, but you get the best chance of doing so, 
 and by taking them from crowded rooms, you give those who 
 are yet untouched a better chance of escape. You secure cleanli- 
 ness and decency, and kind nursing to the dying — at such a 
 season blessings inestimable. 
 
 If this letter appears in your columns I may be accused as a 
 rash alarmist. I am willing to be so. I wish to alarm, even if 
 I am rash in doing so. I have seen enough to convince me that 
 cholera of all diseases is just the one the public pooh-pooh until 
 it is at their doors ; then rush into a state of panic, most preju- 
 dicial to themselves and the more rational of their neighbours. 
 I know that a great deal is easy to do well before it comes, 
 which it is next to impossible to get well done when it is come.
 
 2o3 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 21 
 
 I believe it to be our plain duty to seek to protect the class 
 most exposed to it, seeing that it is a class whose condition, 
 however lamentable, is the result of the state of things which 
 gives to so many of us blessings they can never know. 
 
 Had half the zeal now expended to cleanse and purify cattle 
 steamers, trucks, and sheds been given six months ago, when 
 we had every reason to expect the existing disease, we should 
 have saved many a milcher, have had yet to eat hundreds of 
 tons of beef now buried. 
 
 We have some expectation that cholera will come ; we have 
 sent forth warnings ; shall we do no more ? 
 
 The cattle plague appeared in Laycock's dairy, Barnsbury, London, 
 in June 1865. It rapidly spread, and by October in the same year 
 27,000 beasts had been attacked. 
 
 Cattle and Christians. 
 
 September 21, 1865. 
 
 The memorandum of Dr. Thudichum on the cattle disease 
 will be read by those who take an interest in the subject with 
 all the attention a document so exhaustive deserves. If it is 
 much studied by agriculturists it will bewilder a great many ; 
 give to very few much, if any, comfort. We are told that ' the 
 contagion adheres with particular pertinacity to all secretions 
 and discharges from sick animals.' Disinfection means ' the 
 destruction of all matters actually being or containing products 
 of disease capable of reproducing disease in other animals.' I 
 had hitherto believed that we were altogether ignorant of what 
 contagion is. If I could detect it in adhesion to anything liquid 
 or solid, I should be inclined to believe that then quicklime, or 
 the more costly so-called disinfectants, would then and there 
 kill it. I know a forest fly will make my sober pony tempo- 
 rarily insane ; if I kill the fly pertinaciously adhering to his 
 stomach, I am satisfied that I have, as regards that one matter 
 containing a stinging product, stamped it out. Inasmuch as we 
 have some reason to assert that cows infected at a distance from 
 cows sound may be the cause of giving the sound cows the 
 disease, we can hardly doubt that the seeds of the disease, so to
 
 1 865 DISEASE 209 
 
 speak, must travel by some agency other than that of contact 
 on the part of the sound with the poison adhering to any sub- 
 stance, man or thing, which has itself been either the product 
 of the disease, or in contact with it. 
 
 I myself believe that air poison will give a healthy being a 
 form of disease which will show itself in the poisoning of the 
 blood. At the same time I am quite satisfied that local and 
 constitutional causes do for ever beget, in men and beasts, 
 diseases ; the excreta and secreta produced under such diseases 
 acting at once so to poison the air that thus the peculiar morbid 
 ailment is carried to beasts and men in good health. In other 
 words, there is at times a something in the atmosphere which 
 will affect the healthiest with disease ; this something we 
 hitherto have altogether failed to discover. There are also 
 certain well-known local causes of air pollution, which give 
 such air power to infect with deadly diseases those dwelling in 
 such localities ; and the poison of such air is intensified by the 
 excreta and secreta proceeding from those first affected. I, 
 therefore, utterly despair of the discovery of any disinfectant 
 which shall secure man or beast against these occasional atmo- 
 spheric afflictions. I have, however, always advocated all pos- 
 sible measures to keep the best atmosphere we can around us ; 
 when the presence of the disease is admitted, to then remove, 
 disinfect, treat all its products in any and every way calculated 
 to prevent their further pollution of the atmosphere. 
 
 Some years ago — there are those now living who will well 
 remember it — a man and his son took a load of straw to Lon- 
 don to sell, to return with a load of London stable dung. The 
 distance was about twenty-two miles. The boy got tired, and 
 lay down to sleep on the top of the dung. Within twenty-four 
 hours of his return home he was seized with the symptoms of 
 low fever ; it became malignant typhus, spread through the 
 cottage, and into the next. I never saw such malignant cases 
 before or since. I think three died at once ; one was saved, I 
 dare say is now alive, who went through all the worst stages of 
 the disease. We took active measures with soap, lime, &c, to 
 cleanse all the houses near ; we had not another case on that 
 spot, but within a week a (ew cases, here and there, in dista?it 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 2io THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 21 
 
 parts of the same parish. I recollect an old carter saying to 
 me, ' It wasn't altogether the sleeping a-top of the dung — we 
 often does that, and never take harm — but 'twas a bright moon, 
 and stuff is always twice as bad then.' I took the hint. Again 
 and again when I have wished to trace bad drainage, I have 
 chosen a bright moonlight night ; it has never failed me. Men 
 of • science ' have acknowledged to me the fact that the moon's 
 rays do act on corruptible matters in a manner inexplicable. I 
 know not whether the dung that gave my poor people the 
 typhus was stable, cowshed, or composite, but I never was more 
 convinced of anything than I am of the fact that the ' visitation,' 
 which at the time frightened my whole neighbourhood, did come 
 from the boy sleeping on the dung. He was healthy, well fed, 
 perhaps under some exhaustion, but not such as was likely to 
 make him a peculiarly liable subject for infection. 
 
 I defy all the powers of science to arrest the spread of 
 epidemic disease. You may deal with its consequences, to pre- 
 vent an atmosphere already in an abnormal state from becoming 
 worse by your neglect of common precautions ; but it will act 
 its play out ; all that we can do is to keep up all the purity of 
 air we can at all times, and thus remove those causes which, 
 when air is poisoned, directly attract its worst destructive 
 powers. That cowsheds where there are animals diseased and 
 dying are most offensive there can be no doubt ; so are the best 
 bedrooms of the richest people, in their degree, when any 
 analogous causes arise. The question is, not whether a smelling 
 air is unwholesome, does sicken and depress, and therefore tend 
 to produce disease of a low type, but whether the bad air from 
 the product of a particular disease is likely to directly produce 
 that disease. Does the destruction of the smell really destroy 
 the contagious power of the disease ? Or may it not be that 
 the good done is this — we take away a cause of depression in 
 that we preserve the air from that savour of nastiness which 
 nose and tongue alike feel, and, feeling, resent by the peculiar 
 nausea in the stomach that will at times cause fainting, and thus 
 we avoid predisposition to the disease? I am not convinced 
 that we can by any means secure immunity, nor am I at all 
 convinced that contagious disease has yet been traced to any
 
 1865 DISEASE 211 
 
 one matter, solid or fluid, so that we could say that such matter, 
 being removed where there was a perfectly clean bill of health, 
 would there produce the identical disease of which it was a pro- 
 duct in healthy animals. It may be the case with such diseases 
 as scarlet fever and small-pox, but these are diseases of a 
 different class from those we are considering. 
 
 As I read the memorandum of Dr. Thudichum, it would 
 appear that this cattle disease has features, I have never read of 
 as belonging to any disease whatever. It is of a character not 
 only deadly in itself, but giving deadly power to everything that 
 comes from it, surrounds it, is within reach of its breath. Dr. 
 Thudichum advises measures so many in number, embracing 
 action on such a multitude of things dead and living, that I can 
 quite understand the cowkeeper saying, — ' Better burn the lot 
 and have done with it.' He seems to me to argue that the con- 
 tagious matter is everywhere, on every thing and person, in and 
 about a dairy where there are diseased beasts. I wish I thought 
 this was the case, for I then should not for one moment doubt 
 but that the prying eyes of science would find some new ele- 
 ment, a common element, to so many matters. Chemistry has 
 wonderful detective power. The microscopists have penetrated 
 by the power of their lenses to regions of discovery physiolo- 
 gists a century ago would have considered inaccessible. Intel- 
 lectual rivalry was never more powerful. There is nothing 
 scientific men won't do and endure to elicit a new truth, or 
 throw more light on an old one. Comparative anatomy has its 
 scholars, men of world-wide fame. I believe if specific con- 
 tagious matter could be found in dung, on pails, on forks, on 
 the human hand, deep in the boards, in water standing in the 
 sheds, or flowing from them, &c, science would lay hand upon 
 it ; there would be a something the lens could see, or the action 
 of the analyst discover, common to the substances thus accused. 
 I admire the courage with which Dr. Thudichum exhorts to this 
 wholesale dealing with everything that could be supposed to be 
 infected ; I am satisfied we cannot in fighting an epidemic over- 
 wash, scrub, whitewash, secure all cleanliness in and about the 
 patients and all who wait on them. We certainly thus in some 
 measure secure ourselves against the consequences of the atmo- 
 
 P 2
 
 212 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 21 
 
 sphere being poisoned by the products of disease. We give the 
 diseased a better chance, but I am as yet altogether unconvinced 
 that we thus really deal with the immediate cause of the disease 
 itself. 
 
 I sincerely hope that the cleanliness and caution to which 
 Dr. Thudichum invites may as far as possible he carried out. If 
 done so in sheds unaffected, the beasts will stand a better chance 
 should the disease come upon them. If I have my doubts as to 
 his theory of contagion, I wholly agree with him in the valuable 
 4 recommendations ' at the end of his memorandum. ' The same 
 great measures which are known to maintain and restore the 
 health of human beings will also maintain and restore the health 
 of cattle.' He proceeds to give them. Pray allow me the 
 smallest possible liberty with this part of the instructions the 
 Privy Council have put forth with high authority. Dr. Thudichum 
 says, and means to say, cattle and Christians, at least his and 
 our fellow men, require, to maintain or restore health, pure air, 
 dry, spacious, well ventilated and well drained clean sheds, or 
 cottages ; clean and dry meadows for cattle, a clean and dry 
 locality for the Christians ; plenty of pure water ; frequent 
 currying, and cow and man washing ; the prevention of the 
 development, by the destruction of the germs, of internal and 
 external parasites, particularly entozoa ; in the case of Christians 
 the pulex domesticus and pediculus humanus, as parasites, the 
 entozoa resulting from feeding on diseased meat, &c. ; proper 
 food in suitable quantities and at proper times ; protection from 
 inclement weather ; the utmost cleanliness in the removing of 
 manure ; the privies of Christians to be sufficient in number, 
 placed conveniently, and constructed to secure decency and 
 cleanliness, &c, — all these measures and agents together will 
 secure the utmost health of the stock, and the prosperity of the 
 agriculturist and dairyman, also, the generality of labourers and 
 poor Christians. 
 
 These are the recommendations by which man and beast may 
 preserve health ; he does not say that they can thus defy the 
 contagion of any epidemic, but it would not find them in a state 
 to invite it. 
 
 For years past, I have said, cattle have been more cared
 
 1 865 DISEASE 213 
 
 for, as to their housing and general cleanliness, than Christians. 
 Let the public now say whether or no tens of thousands of 
 Christians are not for ever living and dying among us ; we 
 knowing well that they have not these common elements of 
 health, which we are warned to give our cattle. When Dr. 
 Jeaffreson, in your columns, told his typhus tale, did any dare 
 to dispute it ? Has anything the least approaching to the 
 measures now advised for dairies been carried out in the scenes 
 where we know typhus is destroying, and has been for years 
 past? In every possible detail, Dr. Thudichum, under the wing 
 of the Privy Council, proclaims a campaign against the cattle 
 typhus, which is to penetrate and cleanse to the smallest details 
 of cow life. How is it with the boards of guardians, sanitary 
 boards, and inspectors, who have charge over the health of the 
 poor creatures who dwell in well known typhus nests ? How 
 is it with landowners, especially that one in Norfolk, who fought 
 the inspector on a question of common decency, and still is said 
 to hold his people worse housed than the cows of many a bad 
 dairy ? I thank Dr. Thudichum for having admitted that a man 
 and a cow have alike a claim on decent cleanly shelter, pure air, 
 and water. The Privy Council have indorsed his deliberate 
 opinion. Typhus is among our poor, cholera threatens them. 
 Shall all interest run to cow-ward, no active sympathy be shown 
 for human beings kept in the condition which ensures disease ? 
 When I read Dr. Thudichum's advice as to every living and dead 
 thing coming in contact with a sick cow, and then thought, how 
 typhoid poor are tended, the condition of their sheds, the state 
 of their ventilation, to what their attendants are exposed, what 
 the air they breathe, the water they drink, I could not but ask 
 myself whether we have really arrived at the conclusion, that 
 animal is more precious than human life. Sanitariums are 
 established for cows, with veterinary surgeons armed with all 
 power, found in all means, to try and save. Throughout the 
 whole kingdom committees are formed, money subscribed, every 
 available agency enlisted to protect the cow. Two sick heifers 
 in a dairy five miles off make a sensational topic. What, I ask, 
 is being done for the crowded, ill-fed, air-poisoned poor of our 
 towns and villages ? Your columns have been open to the
 
 214 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 29 
 
 statements of medical men, clergymen, all the host of wit- 
 nesses who tell the public where mankind live, deprived of all, 
 Dr. Thudichum says, they should have in common with a cow. 
 Is there anything like the interest shown for the poor of 
 • Thompson's Rents ' that is shown for the heifers on any farm ? 
 The Government of the country is alive to human typhus, as 
 existing among us, as it is to that disease which slays our cattle, 
 but does it show the energy with regard to the former it clearly 
 evinces about the latter? Are owners of property as keenly 
 appreciative of the necessity for clean cottages in good repair, 
 with all conveniences, as they are to the cleanliness and general 
 furniture of the cowshed or stable ? 
 
 We fight in the dark with the cow disaster, do our best, but 
 scarce know what to do. We do know what is best to do as 
 against typhus in man, to guard against cholera ; why don't we 
 do it? 
 
 The Cattle Disease. 
 
 September 29, 1S65. 
 
 I have known for some weeks that sheep had in some locali- 
 ties been affected with a typhoid disease which was very de- 
 structive. I also know that there is a good deal of a similar 
 disease among pigs. A farmer has just told me that a man 
 informed him he lately bought six pigs ; two of them sickened 
 and died ; he sold the other four ; the man who bought them 
 has since lost six by the same complaint. 
 
 It is of no use attempting to conceal the fact ; some par- 
 ticular atmospheric action, acting per sc or in combination with 
 existing matters, whatever they may be, is at work pestilentially 
 affecting animal life. 
 
 If we had the same opportunities for observation, and an 
 equal interest in using them, I have no doubt that we should 
 find there is disease in the insect world, probably in all living 
 creatures, or at least in very many classes of them. It does not 
 at all follow that the same symptoms in disease, the same morbid 
 evidence from post-mortem examination, shall always proceed 
 from the action of the same identical virus. But it is reasonable 
 to assume that any atmospheric condition which seriously affects 
 one class of animal life shall, more or less, act on all such life.
 
 1 865 DISEASE 215 
 
 There can be no doubt that the past summer and the present 
 autumn are in many ways exceptional seasons. It is not a 
 question of more or less heat on any one day, or in any one 
 week, that we are often for nights together submitted to heavy 
 cold dews, falling on overheated soil ; that then we are for a 
 time with little if any dew at all ; that we have been deprived 
 for weeks, under these circumstances, of all rainfall, rain in 
 heavy torrents, I believe, being one of nature's most sanitary 
 provisions. Beyond all this, it is reasonable to suppose that 
 such weather acts directly on the atmosphere itself, tends 
 to deprive it of a proportion of some elements, or to give 
 it in excess the action of others, thus rendering it by its 
 abnormal state a direct cause of disturbance to ordinary animal 
 life. 
 
 The 'books' give us many different theories as to the 
 origin of epidemics and epizoics. Able writers have propounded 
 theories founded on the direct action of insect life as, under 
 certain circumstances, likely to produce disease. Again, we 
 have men of high scientific degrees leaning to the theory that 
 these diseases are of a fungoid nature. It is quite true that the 
 ova of certain insects may exist for years unhatched ; that then, 
 from some peculiar cause, they at once become living things, 
 propagating with a rapidity almost beyond belief. I, for one, 
 am not at all sure that in certain states of the human and other 
 animal bodies entozoa are not spontaneously generated, and then 
 proceed to multiply. This may be heresy against the dictum 
 ' Omne ovum ab ovo,' but in these matters I am, I fear, that way 
 inclined. With regard to fungi, I know from experiment that 
 the spores are for ever in the air. We breathe them, eat them. 
 I know, also, that they will lie dormant for years ; some peculiar 
 atmosphere calls them to life, and in a few days they spread 
 over countless miles of vegetation. It is admitted that human 
 beings are subject to fungoid disease, although I have never 
 heard on good authority whether it can be propagated by the 
 sporules taken from one being applied to another. I have 
 satisfied myself that vaccine matter can be applied to quick- 
 growing plants, so as to show direct injurious action upon 
 them of a very peculiar character. It has been stated that in
 
 216 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 29 
 
 Germany the virus of other diseases has been tried with the 
 same result upon plants. 
 
 I long since arrived at the conclusion that, as the first bricks 
 of the structure of all animals, all vegetation — the cells from 
 which all alike commence — are, so far as science has ascertained, 
 not only similar in apparent structure, but can be affected in 
 the same way by the same preparation — that of cochineal used 
 for microscopic investigation — we have much of our life in 
 common with all life around us. I do not believe there could 
 be an ox murrain, or pig or sheep disease, extensive, sudden 
 destruction of any one crop growing on a large scale, mortality, 
 or excessive vitality of any class of insect life, without some 
 causes at work, liable to produce disease in man and beast, herb, 
 every creeping and flying thing, directly connected with life on 
 our common soil. The whole universe is as much, to me, a 
 system of adjustment as is the system of daily life of every 
 living animal and vegetable in it. All such systems have been 
 ever subject to more or less disturbance. Whatever acts to 
 disturb the ordinary course of those elements of the atmosphere 
 we breathe, to which we have been adapted, must affect us, for 
 good or evil. 
 
 If the excreta, the secreta of diseased animals have power 
 to infect healthy beasts with the disease — and I for one by no 
 means admit the fact, still believing their action is to predispose 
 for the disease, not to give it — the question is, for how long do 
 they retain this power? If the grass of our fields is infected 
 by the droppings of the cattle, again I ask, for how long ? You 
 bury cattle under six feet of soil ; unless the said soil is dry and 
 loose, it will do little in the way of deodorising ; trodden down 
 over the beasts, you have so many flesh pies with a crust of 
 dirt. The rapid decomposition will saturate the lower soil with 
 fluid, permeate the upper with gases. I can conceive it quite 
 possible that, some of this soil taken six weeks after burial of 
 the beasts, and put into a new cattle-shed in a locality that has 
 not known the disease, the cattle chosen from a healthy herd, 
 would have no disastrous effect whatever a few months hence, 
 when, I trust, other weather will have given us a suspension of 
 the disease. But I am of opinion that six years hence, or any
 
 1 865 DISEASE 217 
 
 one year with such an atmosphere as we have had this year, it 
 is quite possible that this identical disease might appear in that 
 very shed. Corrupt animal or vegetable matters beget — I 
 choose that term — vibrionic life, insect life, fungoid life ; it is 
 more than probable that this class of living products, or pro- 
 ducts ready to become alive, partake of the nature of that from 
 which they are bred ; it is, to me, quite possible they may re- 
 quire the same atmospheric action to give them active life that 
 caused the death of the beast from which they proceed. 
 
 I could go to places where many hundreds of those who died 
 of cholera were packed in pits, scarcely coffined, so loose and 
 ill-fitted were the boxes in which they were placed, the soil over 
 them not three feet from the surface of the land. I have never 
 heard that cholera has broken out in those places since ; it will 
 not surprise me if it does so now. Two sheds being erected, the 
 one out of boards which have lain in a workhouse yard since 
 they were used on fever duty ten years ago, the other of entirely 
 new boards, place healthy people in both of these ; it would not 
 surprise me when fever was an epidemic if it broke out in the 
 shed where the old boards had been used ; were there no epi- 
 demic, I would as soon sleep in one as the other. 
 
 It strikes me as madness to destroy every beast affected 
 with the epizoic. I do not believe you lessen the infection on 
 the spot. I cannot but hope that a downpour of rain, a gale or 
 two of strong wind, must come before long, and I firmly believe 
 that this would do more good than anything we can ourselves 
 do. Public markets will be the great agents for the spread of 
 the disease. Closely packed for hours without food in a railway 
 truck, exposed to the sun's rays, then driven into a steaming 
 crowd of tired beasts, standing on excrement poured forth in 
 excess from distress and heat, I can conceive no better way of 
 inviting the disease to break out in any beast that may from any 
 cause have absorbed its virus. 
 
 It is humiliating to confess, but the fact is, science is fairly 
 beaten on the subject of these diseases. Because the cause 
 beats us are we to give up contention with its result — to resort 
 to the polcaxe and knife, and neither let art nor nature contend 
 with the disease ? We cannot afford to lose one pound of
 
 2i8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 8 
 
 animal food \vc can save. Malignant typhus is, as the rule, a 
 very fatal disease ; still it is not always fatal. Too much atten- 
 tion cannot be given to cleanliness, for reasons I stated in 
 former letters. The air cannot be kept too pure, the animals 
 and all around them too clean. 
 
 I know nothing of veterinary science, but I believe the prin- 
 ciples which apply to men, with a certain subordination to the 
 peculiar difference in some portions of the economy of life of ani- 
 mals, hold good. I am incredulous as to new diseases. When I 
 am shown a man or beast of novel construction I shall expect to 
 hear of new complications in their organism — diseases of de- 
 rangement of functions, as new to us as the functions them- 
 selves. In cholera, and in malignant typhus, we have morbid 
 action and disorganisation in excess — a destructive excess ; in 
 a less degree the animal economy shows the same morbid ten- 
 dency under many other complaints. 
 
 Cliolera and its Germs. 
 
 September 8, 1866. 
 
 There seems to be very satisfactory evidence that whenever 
 we are subject to the choleraic epidemic it prevails most where 
 the water drunk is the worst. Those who assert this to be the 
 case do not, I assume, allege that cholera is produced by bad 
 water, because they must be aware that the same water is drunk 
 at other times for years together, and cholera does not exhibit 
 itself in consequence. I presume we are asked to believe that, 
 given the presence of cholera in any one district supplied with 
 bad water, it will there spread more and be more fatal than in 
 the districts supplied with purer water ; further, that a district 
 thus likely to suffer most from the pestilence is one, from this 
 same cause — i.e. bad water, in a condition to invite the disease. 
 
 The public are advised to boil all water used with food, or 
 drunk at any time. It is urged that the action of boiling on 
 water purifies it from all matter capable of evil, or, at all events, 
 makes that matter harmless. But we are now told by high 
 authority that even boiling will not render this bad water harm- 
 less — that there is evidence to prove that the germs of disease 
 can withstand the action even of a sound boiling.
 
 1 866 DISEASE 219 
 
 I make no claim to be a scientific writer. I can, however, 
 claim some experience, gained from a good deal of experiment, 
 in this and other kindred matters. It is known to yourself that 
 certain letters published in the ' Times ' some years since on ' the 
 fungoid theory of cholera,' and under other titles, all bearing on 
 this subject, although signed ' Investigator,' were written by 
 myself. That this was well known in what is called the scientific 
 world I can have no doubt, as reference has of late been often 
 made to the experiments I then described, and I, by name, have 
 been credited with them. It has been no small satisfaction to 
 me to see the views I then adopted obtain, as they have done, 
 so much corroboration from the experiments and researches of 
 men really scientific. Permit me now to say a few words on 
 this question of the power of boiling to make water said to be 
 poisonous free from poison. 
 
 I know from experiment that there are ' germs,' containing 
 a principle of life, that will stand very strange usage, and yet 
 not have that principle destroyed. Many years since I applied a 
 certain matter to a piece of glass about four inches square. This 
 has another very thin piece of the same material cemented over 
 it close on three sides, leaving a space just sufficient for a thin 
 stratum of water between the two. It has been exposed for 
 days to the action of the direct rays of the sun, it has been kept 
 for months in the dark, sometimes has been for a year or two 
 left without a particle of water touching its surface, in a very dry 
 place. To amuse friends I have again and again allowed a little 
 water, sometimes filtered, generally of the coldest spring nature, 
 to fill up the space between the two glasses — water I have pre- 
 viously tested for any living organisms. I have never failed, in 
 a few hours, to produce a most beautiful exhibition of one of 
 the most interesting species of infusoria, having beforehand 
 sketched the exact creature I would produce. With the same 
 water in another glass tank, of the same nature but not so pre- 
 pared, I fail to produce anything at all until it has been left 
 some days, and then the creatures seen are not my old friends. 
 I have read, not seen, that these organisms retain their vitality 
 even when the glass has been made red-hot. I don't say I 
 believe it, but from what I have seen I think it quite possible.
 
 220 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 8 
 
 I therefore can believe that, granting water has certain ' germs ' 
 which can be detected in it before boiling, which germs, received 
 into the human stomach, become a proximate cause of cramps, 
 &c, some germs might exist with great vitality even after the 
 boiling process. I say some germs \ I do not believe the former 
 germs would be visible as such, but, as they are only the develop- 
 ment of others far more minute, I can credit the fact that in this, 
 the earliest state of vitality, be it animal or vegetable, the matter 
 of such life may be indestructible even by boiling, unless some 
 chemical agency had added to such boiling its own peculiar life- 
 destroying element. But I think it right to urge another view 
 of the subject. I will assume that water in which these germs 
 are found has been distilled and filtered again and again. I will 
 defy any one to say how instantaneously it may receive these 
 same germs on its surface as soon as it is exposed to a polluted 
 atmosphere. There is no surface which can be exposed which 
 is not for ever swept by a crowd of organisms floating in the 
 air — aerozoa, as I have named them ; many of these we may 
 trace and name, and build theories about them, but there is a 
 vast mass, I believe, which not even the greatest powers of the 
 modern microscope can reach. Of those we can see there are 
 very many of which we know nothing ; they may be very 
 poisonous, or may have their part in the economy of health. 
 As yet, I am altogether unsatisfied as to their real place in 
 nature, be it for good or evil. 
 
 Drs. Lankester and Hogg have of late referred to the investi- 
 gations made by myself, and published in your columns. It 
 is quite true that these experiments were made at a period of 
 cholera, but I believe I detected nothing then that I could not 
 detect in a healthy season ; it is quite possible, however, that 
 ' germs ' which in ordinary seasons may be harmless, at peculiar 
 seasons may assume a pernicious character. When, in your 
 columns, I called attention to the possibility of mapping a smell, 
 I had made the attempt. I have the diagrams I then made of 
 the various air-floated matters I obtained from vegetable and 
 animal substances, in a condition more truly expressed by a 
 stronger word than smelling. There can be no doubt that there 
 are floating matters, particles, germs, molecules, fungoid spores,
 
 1 866 DISEASE 221 
 
 or whatever we may please to call them, which do vary, accord- 
 ing to the source from which we obtain them, but I have ever 
 found with these there were others, to be found at all times in 
 the purest atmosphere. Agreeing, as I do, with those who 
 attribute the spread of contagious diseases, such as cholera or 
 rinderpest, to certain air-borne particles of poisonous matter, I 
 am still of opinion that as yet no one has discovered any particle 
 of which it can be said that it is the special agent of any special 
 disease. 
 
 My own belief is that the danger from all discharges from 
 patients affected with contagious disease exists at its worst 
 when, having become for a time dry, they are afterwards again 
 moistened through damp, warm air, or by any other means. I 
 am also of opinion that in a dry state they may give off to 
 draughts of air minute particles, which, finding a nidus on any 
 moist, mucoid surface, would thus infect. Cleanliness in a sick 
 chamber cannot be too thorough ; a cartload of linen and other 
 articles might be sent to the laundress every day, and yet a yard 
 square of dirty linen or of dirty furniture of any kind left for a 
 few days would defeat the most liberal and otherwise careful 
 attempts to keep all things clean. As to the question of boiling 
 water before use, there can be no doubt that it is most advisable, 
 for you do thus give it the best simple purification in your power. 
 I wish people could be persuaded of the fact that no liquid to 
 be used in cooking in any way as food or medicine should ever 
 be exposed to the action of the atmosphere in a bedroom, sick- 
 room, or ward, but for the shortest possible time. If patients 
 must have water, lemonade, &c, handy to them at night, let 
 these be kept in stoppered bottles. Let any microscopist expose 
 plain water, gruel, tea, milk, Or barley-water in shallow, thin-glass 
 plates to a night's air in any bedchamber, sick-room, or hospital 
 ward, and then carefully examine the surface with a good micro- 
 scope ; he will satisfy himself of the fact that such surfaces are 
 of all others those which receive, to detain, a great deal that, for 
 all that we know, may be very deleterious. 
 
 I don't know what water-butts may be in London ; I know 
 that they are very valuable in the country as breeding places for 
 some of the most interesting organisms we ever exhibit to friends
 
 222 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 8, 1866 
 
 with the microscope. In London I should expect to find them 
 most gratefully prolific. Water originally but partially pure, 
 kept in rotten wood, which probably never was clean, surrounded 
 by all kinds of dirty things and beings, in an atmosphere ever 
 odoriferous, the bottoms and sides of the butts never cleaned, so 
 that vegetation at the sides is nourished by the accumulated 
 deposit at the base, must ever be water of great microscopic 
 promise. I can quite conceive a glass of clean, pure water twice 
 a day acting as a powerful tonic alterative in the case of people 
 who have been thus for years vegetarians and insectivorous by 
 compulsion.
 
 223 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 IRELAND. 
 
 The following is a spirited panegyric of English sacrifice for Irish 
 distress at a time when Ireland coldly accepted all that England had to 
 give. 
 
 March 8, 1847. 
 It is said that an Irish representative 1 has ventured to hint, 
 if not to assert in public, that the English generally, and a large 
 proportion of the members of the House of Commons in par- 
 ticular, hold the cold-hearted and cruel doctrine that the present 
 famine and pestilence in Ireland is of the nature of a providen- 
 tial dispensation, sent for the purpose of reducing the population 
 down to its legitimate and natural extent, and, as such, impos- 
 sible to be prevented ; he asserted that some such idea as this 
 was held in quarters unconnected with Government, but not 
 altogether unlikely to influence it ; he added, ' that there was no 
 distress in England at all approaching that which exists in the 
 least distressed districts in Ireland.' Why, Sir, one would really 
 suppose from this, that England was doing nothing, had done 
 nothing, was pledged to do nothing for the Irish ; that we were 
 a nation fat in the matter of alms, plethoric in the matter of 
 compassion, having no poverty of our own people to sweat us of 
 our coin, to bleed us of our sympathy ; and yet content to look 
 at the dying Irish as so many mere animals who had bred in 
 numbers out of proportion to the soil, and were therefore just 
 undergoing the legitimate operation of a principle that would 
 starve down the mouths to a due proportion to the existing 
 amount of food ; that this was no matter for us to concern our- 
 selves about. 
 
 If this is not true of us, I have no hesitation in saying that 
 
 1 Mr. J. O'Connell.
 
 224 THE LETTERS OF S G. O. March 8 
 
 a more deliberately wicked, and false, and cruel assertion was 
 never yet made, than that which I have above alluded to. The 
 beggar who presented a musket at the traveller's head whilst he 
 asked ' for the love of God ' that an alms should be cast into 
 his hat, was modest and pious in comparison with any Irishman 
 who will dare to say that the English have not already shown, 
 are not showing, and have not pledged themselves yet to show, 
 an example of the most unbounded liberality, both in what they 
 are doing through the Government and also through voluntary 
 contribution for the Irish, and this under circumstances far more 
 calculated to arrest than to provoke charity. If returning good 
 for evil is an heaping up of coals on an adversary's head, Ireland 
 at this moment should be scorched to the very shoulders, or 
 there is no truth in facts of which none are ignorant ; and yet we 
 are to be coolly told that we, the English, phlegmatically regard 
 the work of pestilence and famine as a sort of necessary regulator 
 of a certain physical and social inequality between the people to 
 be fed and the food their soil affords them, which we may ven- 
 ture to do a little to disturb, but which it is folly, for it is impos- 
 sible for us, wholly to arrest. Let us look, Sir, for a moment at 
 what we, the thus maligned Saxons, are doing — how we are 
 justifying this our character of being ghouls bred up under the 
 tutelage of the worst featured political economy. 
 
 I presume the nation at large may claim some credit for the 
 way in which it makes no objection whatever to the millions of 
 pounds already taken, and yet to be taken, from the public 
 treasury to — aid the Irish. The most sanguine, when they re- 
 gard what Government is doing and has done, give up all idea, 
 for years to come, of anything but increased taxation. If I am 
 not misinformed, committees receiving only voluntary subscrip- 
 tions will soon have collected a sum little short of 200,000/., the 
 greater part of which has already gone to — aid the Irish. It 
 sounds a large sum, but I believe I am below the mark when I 
 say that not less than 20,000/. has been privately collected in 
 this country and gone through private channels — to aid the 
 Irish. In almost every pulpit through the land, on Sunday 
 last, or on some previous Sabbath, the congregation were 
 exhorted to give of their means — to aid the Irish. There is,
 
 1 847 IRELAND 225 
 
 I believe, no one body of worshippers of any denomination 
 that has not responded most liberally to the cry — help the 
 Irish. In addition to these public collections, there are count- 
 less individuals in every class of life who are straining every 
 faculty of invention that they may make something, or do some- 
 thing, or beg something that may benefit the cause of — the 
 suffering Irish. The public do not hear of one-half of the real 
 efforts making in this cause by the cold-hearted Saxons. Every 
 avenue of society is beset with collectors, pledged to get a par- 
 ticular sum for the Irish, in one particular coin, be it a sovereign 
 or a fourpenny piece ; importunate and eloquent in the power of 
 their cause, they will scarce take, or ever have to fear, a denial. 
 So determined is the spirit of charity that it seems reckless of 
 what shape it takes : beg it will ; none shall be so deaf as not 
 to hear, or so blind as not to see that the Irish are dying, that 
 England's blood is warm to save them. Her Majesty and her 
 Court at the opera, the champions of the prize-ring at the 
 Flyes Court, each in their chosen sphere collect all around them 
 that they can for ' a benefit for the Irish.' Families in every 
 class of life are curtailing every expenditure on anything but 
 absolute necessaries, not to save for their own profit, but that the 
 difference gained from their usual expenditure may go to — help 
 the Irish. Noblemen, for the same object, have put their whole 
 households on an allowance of bread. The great Soyer (all 
 honour to him !), resisting the smell and taste of the more won- 
 derful productions of his culinary science, has lived for weeks 
 a life of feverish activity, devoting his every energy to the in- 
 vention of cheap, good, palatable soup, himself supported per- 
 force on the tastings of his charitable essays — to help the Irish. 
 Liverpool has received and fed with scarce a murmur tens of 
 thousands Irish immigrants ; her ratepayers are being ruined, 
 three of her officers have lost their lives, she is threatened with 
 a devastating pestilence, as well as an avalanche of misery, that 
 threatens to swamp her means, and all this because she will not 
 close her hand against the Irish. One parish in London is pay- 
 ing elevenpence out of every shilling raised to the Irish. 
 
 And now, Sir, let me ask are not these senseless revilers of 
 our nation more exacting than the young of that bird which 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. March 8 
 
 strips and wounds its own breast that they may live. Surely we 
 have plucked our breasts till they bleed at every pore ; would 
 they have us take our every possession, and cast it at the feet of 
 a nation one of whose representatives has taunted us in terms of 
 the foulest suspicion ? Are Irish orators to say that Ireland's 
 day of hunger and fever was taken as England's opportunity for 
 contempt and neglect ? No, let them speak the truth, and own 
 that the English, as one man, have risen to her succour, urged 
 on by one common feeling of pity for her distress, and desire to 
 alleviate it, at any and every reasonable cost. But, Sir, as I have 
 said above, this orator has asserted ' that there is no distress in 
 England at all approaching that which exists in the least dis- 
 tressed districts in Ireland.' It is quite true, we do not let any 
 starve for want of food ; we find medicine and a doctor for all 
 who cannot, from destitution, provide medical aid themselves ; 
 we find coffins for the greater part of the peasantry who die over 
 all the poor districts of England. If the value of the food, the 
 value of and amount of medical attendance, the number of and 
 value of coffins, that have been found for the labouring class of 
 the south-western counties alone during any one year under the 
 Poor Law was set out on paper, it would afford a rather striking 
 indication of what their condition would be, were the landowners 
 and occupiers of the land left like the Irish free from, the re- 
 sponsibility of providing such relief to the destitute. Stop the 
 action of the Poor Law, arrest the machinery established by 
 local voluntary charity, in the shape cf clothing and sick clubs, 
 coal funds and allotments, and who shall deny that at least two- 
 fifths of England would be much as Ireland is now ? Our law 
 allows the landed proprietor little power of escape from his duty. 
 The poor over a vast surface of our land may be, they are, and 
 long have been, living on the verge of starvation ; but the law 
 steps in to prevent any one on our soil from dying for want of 
 food or medicine. None have to trust to chance for the decent 
 interment of their dead ; there is a special machinery acting 
 under an Act of the Legislature, with a large staff of officers, 
 whose duty it is to administer to the relief of our destitute poor. 
 Do any die under the barest suspicion of having been starved to 
 death, we institute a jealous inquiry into the question — by what
 
 IRELAND 227 
 
 accident, or what neglect of any of the officials appointed under 
 this Act, it has come to pass. 
 
 On the occasion of the late attempt to get sixteen millions 
 of money voted for railway adventure in Ireland, there was a 
 hope expressed that such a measure would give to the peasantry 
 of Ireland Wiltshire clothing, Coventry ribbons, and roast beef. 
 Within these few days I have seen complaints in that we (the 
 English) are offering only soup to the starving Irish ; a cargo of 
 biscuits manufactured for the purpose has been sent out to act in 
 aid to the soup. I see Sir R. Peel is, like all the rest of us, 
 puzzled to know how an English labourer supports a family on 
 1 or. a week. I happen, Sir, to have the means of proving to 
 you on what the js. and 8s. a w r eek labourers in the south- 
 western part of England are now living. I have letters before 
 me of a recent date from clergymen and others in Wilts, Dorset, 
 Somerset, and Devonshire. I have the published inquiry of a 
 gentleman employed to look into the condition of the poor by 
 the editor of the ' Bridgew r ater Times.' From these and other 
 sources I am prepared to state, that I will defy any Irish orator 
 to produce a district in Ireland which is short of starving, and 
 at the same time worse in distress than a very large proportion 
 of these counties. Our labourers can never spare one hour's 
 work which they can procure ; they could not, if they would, 
 attend the meetings called by any demagogue, did he charm 
 their ears ever so pleasantly ; they cannot pay even the rent of 
 the hovels many of them live in ; they have no loose cash to 
 pay for any agitation of their cause, however just. Their soup 
 is made of crusts of grist bread boiled with water in a teakettle, 
 made savoury by a spoonful of cheap rancid butter and a little 
 salt. With wheat at 10s. the bushel, wages say even at 8s. — 
 many I find as low as 6s. — I need not say how little besides 
 bread, and how little of that, can enter into their consumption ; 
 turnips and horse-beans are becoming in many places the staff 
 of their existence — burnt bread and water make their tea. Any 
 one who will take the trouble of turning to the file of the paper 
 named above for a few weeks back will find details of misery 
 and want which, short of the actual starving districts of Ireland, 
 I defy to be exceeded ; and, as I have said, we have a law that 
 
 q 2
 
 228 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. March 8 
 
 steps in to save when the hour of positive death by want arrives. 
 Such soup, Sir, as the Government are giving in Ireland with 
 the biscuits which accompany it, would be a luxury to thousands 
 in these counties, which they have never been able to earn, or 
 even taste except from the hand of charity. But do our poor 
 ever have the roast beef which railways were to afford the Irish? 
 We have plenty of railways, have our poor the beef? I gave a 
 prize for the best account kept by a Dorset labourer of his earn- 
 ings and expenditure for the year ending 1843. The winner 
 had a wife and four children— if you wish for it, I shall forward 
 you the account — he had a good master, and was a good ser- 
 vant ; in the whole year, he spent lod. for meat; the average 
 expenditure of the family was ys. gd. per week — cost per head 
 per week is. $\d. The average price of wheat in the district 
 for that year was 6s. $\d. per bushel, at present it is from gs. to 
 \os. ; he killed a pig weighing about nine score, but I see it cost 
 him altogether 2/. 12s. Sd. ; he had no rent to pay, no medicine 
 or doctor, an allotment of ground and some perquisites ; with 
 harvest work, piecework, and all included, he had a balance of 
 1/. 1 $s. yd. Could this man have even eaten his pig if he had had 
 only his earnings and had had rent to pay ? This is a specimen 
 of one of our most favoured class — an 8s. a week man. I should 
 suppose he scarce ever dreamt of beef. A clergyman lately in- 
 formed me that in a parish he named in Dorsetshire, where he 
 was some time since doing duty, a cow died of fever ; it lay near 
 a path or road for some days ; he made it a request that it 
 should be buried, as it would soon be a nuisance. The request 
 was granted, but before it could be executed the poor creatures 
 in the village heard of this contemplated waste of beef; like 
 ravens they attacked and stripped the carcase, women standing 
 within it to the work ; it was hacked up, a good deal of it carried 
 off and eaten by them. Near the same spot an individual keeping 
 dogs has had the carrion hung up in the trees for them, stolen, to 
 be salted for food, by these poor creatures. I enclose you my 
 authority for this fact. Now, Sir, this happened some little time 
 ago ; it had no more to do with the loss of the potato than had 
 much of the carrion eating proved on the inquiry at Ryme ; ft 
 simply goes to prove that, in what I must call, I suppose, their
 
 1 847 IRELAND 229 
 
 normal state, these poor creatures are so hopeless of good meat 
 that they will eat greedily any meat whatever. I see, Sir, the 
 Irish peasant gets 8d. a day on the public works ; thousands of 
 English labourers, when their rent is deducted, get no such sum ; 
 in some counties single men from twenty to thirty years of age 
 scarce ever, except at harvest, earn $s. a week. Again, our Js. a 
 week labourers have their families to keep, buying, not at Govern- 
 ment stores, but at village shops, or of their masters — in both 
 instances but rarely indeed having anything but a dear market. 
 
 At this moment I am satisfied nothing but the poor rate, 
 aided by no common amount of local exertion, is keeping masses 
 of patient, loyal, industrious, unmurmuring English labourers 
 from starvation. The guardians are affording medicine and 
 food for the sick and aged, coffins for all that need, with a liberal 
 hand. The resident gentry and clergy, and many yeomen and 
 others, are doing a great deal to alleviate distress in their own 
 several localities ; the weight and burden of these exertions will 
 be almost doubled from the unavoidable rise in price of pro- 
 visions in consequence of the amount of corn bought to be given 
 away in Ireland. This weight must still increase from the same 
 cause. Our poor must still suffer more and more ; the charit- 
 able must soon be restrained in their work, for they have to give 
 to, and to be taxed for, Ireland ; the niggardly employer will 
 become more niggardly still, for he looks for higher prices still, 
 for he says they are doing little this year to grow corn in 
 Ireland. 
 
 No man, Sir, who loves the English poor from a right prin- 
 ciple can fail to love also the poor of Ireland. Let Lord John 
 call for what expenditure he will to save those now in danger of 
 death, none will oppose him, all will thank him for the energy 
 that, at any cost, upholds our national character in its own spirit 
 of open-handed charity ; but, Sir, for our own poor's sake, for 
 the sake of every charitable institution in this country, which is 
 threatened with ruin from the necessary turning of the channel 
 of our charity in a new direction, in order that every good and 
 philanthropic work now in hand here may not be arrested by all 
 our surplus means being demanded elsewhere, we have a right to 
 demand, not that the dying should be left to die, but that instant
 
 230 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. June 19 
 
 steps should be taken to throw on Irish property the same 
 obligation to relieve destitution as lies on the property of Eng- 
 land. We have a right to demand of the Irish orators of the 
 day a decent admission of the extent of our present aid to 
 them, if not in terms of gratitude, at least in terms that do not 
 insult us, as callous to the suffering of a nation we are robbing 
 our own to feed. 
 
 A protest against the brawling patriotism that condones murder. 
 
 June 19, 1847. 
 
 Is the commission of cold-blooded murder sanctioned by the 
 laws which govern Ireland ? Is there anything in the nature of 
 the religion of the Irish which palliates the destruction of life 
 when the murderers can plead cause of private offence ? Do 
 owners of land in Ireland only exercise the right of ownership 
 subject to the penalty of death if they do not bow to the will of 
 any confederacy of any the smallest number of villains bound 
 by some secret oath to destroy all owners who will not submit 
 to their dictation ? Are the Irish peasantry so callous to every 
 feeling of pity for their fellow-creatures — are they so hardened 
 to the sight of human blood flowing from the wound of the 
 assassin's weapon, that they can look unmoved on the slaugh- 
 tering of parents in their children's presence — are careless to 
 point a finger or whisper one word to discover the person of the 
 murderer? Is the working of the law's machinery so imper- 
 fect, so inadequate to its end in that unhappy country, that the 
 provincial papers are daily full of the bloody records of cowardly 
 assassination, and yet we scarce ever hear of a murderer being 
 brought to justice? Is the cry of 'Justice for Ireland' to be 
 ever ringing in our ears as the watchword of that species of 
 oatriotism which fosters the rebellious spirit it affects to reprove, 
 and urges its dupes to the brink of a fate in which it would at 
 oiice desert them ? — and is it to bear no other interpretation but 
 that which may suit at the moment the bombastic ravings of 
 the silly, wicked members of an assembly which apes the func- 
 tions, but wants the commonest decency of a Parliament ? 
 
 Surely, Sir, justice for Ireland requires that murderers 
 should be hung, not concealed ; it is inconsistent with the exist-
 
 1 847 IRELAND 231 
 
 ence of juries leagued — not to convict. It would call on every 
 man possessed of one grain of real courage, having the smallest 
 atom of real love for his country, to give every faculty he pos- 
 sesses to the expression of an open detestation of the crime of 
 murder ; it would call on every man to use every power his 
 station will afford openly to aid the law in the person of even its 
 lowest agent, to pursue, to take, and to convict the actors in 
 every scene of blood which may occur. It was said that it was 
 'justice to Ireland' which required the English patient and 
 enduring peasantry to halve their scanty loaf to save the Irish 
 from starvation. We have placed the yoke of heavy increased 
 taxation on our necks to be worn for years yet to come; -we 
 have given millions we could not spare but with suffering to our 
 own people ; we have lent millions we shall as inevitably lose as 
 we most assuredly shall need them : we did this because we 
 would be just to Ireland ; we would not allow the stain to rest 
 upon our character, that the country whose leader's foul abuse 
 of us had been but too widely echoed was allowed to want when 
 we at any sacrifice could minister help. The English are liberal 
 as they are brave ; they will feed the hungry, but to the very 
 soul they loathe as a nation that species of crime which is, alas ! 
 now stamping on Ireland a brand of public infamy. The Irish 
 say our newspapers tell of many a deed of violence in our own 
 land. Who denies it ? — who does not lament it ? But can they 
 say we screen the murderer ? Can they point to one single 
 instance in which the law has not received every possible assist- 
 ance to detect and punish the guilty ? Do Englishmen go on 
 with their work in the field at the moment they know two or 
 three villains are lying concealed in a ditch in that very field, 
 waiting the passing of their own employer that they may shoot 
 him in his gig in broad daylight, as though they were merely 
 about the destruction of some soulless, venomous reptile which 
 they might have watched to its hole, and waited to destroy ? 
 Are our people as their people, ever blind and deaf and for- 
 getful when a murder is in the course of doing ? Our good 
 fame is stained whenever one of our people, in sudden passion 
 or in deliberate revenge, murders a fellow-creature ; but the 
 stain is not allowed to take this foulest of colours that the deed
 
 232 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. June 19 
 
 had the sanction of the bystanders — was kept by general con- 
 nivance from liability to the sentence of the law. 
 
 We are likely, it is said, to have a new system of agitation 
 in that misgoverned country. The wretched failure of the poor 
 old man who is now gone to his account l to elicit good for his 
 country out of the stirrings up of all its worst passions has not 
 taught those reason to whom the lesson should be of the most 
 value. Surely, Sir, England has now a powerful claim on the 
 Government, that some new and better system should be pur- 
 sued towards Ireland than has hitherto prevailed. If we have 
 fed her so that she did not starve — if we forgot in the day of 
 her weakness everything but her urgent necessity, we have a 
 right to expect, if not gratitude, at least decent behaviour 
 towards us. If we are to look at her distress, as we were told 
 we should, as the distress of an integral part of our own empire, 
 let us claim that the law which holds good in this portion of the 
 empire should at any expense, at every risk, be upheld in 
 Ireland. Let sedition in England be still sedition in Ireland. 
 Let the murder of one single individual in that country be 
 viewed there, as it would be here, as the commission of a crime 
 calling for the utmost exercise of the law's vigilance to detect — 
 severity to punish. I say, that did tens of thousands die of 
 famine because unhelped by us, it would not entail greater 
 infamy on our national character than the allowing ten open 
 murders to remain undiscovered, the blood of the slain appeal- 
 ing in vain to all the powers of our law, those who are known to 
 have seen the deeds done by their silence conniving at them. 
 Justice for Ireland will still be the cry of the empty orators of 
 that false school which has so long racked its peace. Yes, jus- 
 tice is indeed wanted when society hears of deeds of cruel 
 violence with apathy. When private revenge can with ease find 
 hands who, for small hire, will slay those it hates and would 
 destroy ; when neither person nor property is secure, there is 
 indeed a call for justice. When a father can be thrown down 
 before his wife and children, and be coolly shot to death, the 
 mother then dragged out to be mutilated in her limbs at the 
 threshold ol er home ; — when the doers of such like deeds 
 
 1 O'Connell.
 
 1847 IRELAND 233 
 
 go their way unquestioned, and if by any mere chance they are 
 arrested, can find plenty ready to forswear themselves to secure 
 their acquittal when tried — who shall say Ireland needs not 
 justice ? If there are not police enough to protect the lives of 
 the Irish, double or treble the number ; surely if this country is to 
 bleed at every pore to find bread for the famishing, it is not 
 asking too much to demand that they should pay on the spot 
 for the blood they choose to shed. 
 
 We have allowed a false, brawling patriotism to have a long 
 reign in that country. Providence has suffered us to buy a dear 
 experience of the folly of our conduct : to uphold a party in 
 England a system has been connived at which has weaned the 
 affections of the Irish millions from us. They saw us fawning 
 on the man who taught them to hate us ; they gave him the 
 affection they should have bestowed on us ; to please him we 
 allowed him to hold millions on the verge of rebellion. When 
 the mischief was done — when loyalty had departed from them — 
 when crimes of cruel violence had become as common as the 
 revenge that prompted them —we made a weak attempt to 
 check the evil we had nourished. Had not the hand of Provi- 
 dence made the Irish suppliants for food at that very time when 
 age and disease struck down the power of him who in his best 
 days scarce held in their rebellion, who shall say what would 
 have been the issue ? We are now in full possession of all the 
 particulars of the social state of Ireland ; the machinery by 
 which we have fed the hungry has developed the character of 
 every class in that country to an extent unattainable by any 
 other means. We can trace the origin of much of their want ; 
 we know where they are criminal from oppression — we know 
 how they are leagued together to minister to their revenge. 
 The blue-books already published, the experience of parties of 
 known talent and integrity who have taken a part in the service 
 of love for which England's charity found the supplies — all goto 
 prove that nothing can save that unhappy country from peri- 
 odical famine but the firm carrying out of laws which shall 
 entail on the possessors of property the due performance of its 
 duties. But, Sir, the owner of property has a right to look to 
 the law to do its duty in defence of his person and his rights.
 
 2)4 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 19 
 
 Without this it is absurd to talk of improved systems of farm- 
 ing, of the giving every encouragement to the employment of 
 capital in developing the riches of the soil of Ireland : good 
 farmers have a wholesome love of life ; capitalists not merely 
 invest for the sake of profit, but in the hope of living to enjoy it. 
 Let the Government use but half the energy, and go to but a 
 small portion of the expense, to check murder which they lately 
 devoted to arrest famine, and then we may hope to see the 
 present visitation prove itself a future and lasting good. Let 
 crime go on unheeded by those who see its perpetration — let its 
 frequency prove the inefficiency of the law — let the real govern- 
 ment of the country, the only power that can awe and punish, 
 be found, as at present, in the hands of hired assassins — let the 
 crimes that stain that land seem to call down the misery and 
 famine that overspread it, and soon will the heart of the most 
 charitable become callous to the misery that takes the form of 
 punishment courted and deserved ; those who suffer will de- 
 stroy, by our abhorrence of their crimes, the pity we should 
 otherwise feel for their distress. 
 
 July 19, 1847. 
 
 The doctrine of repudiation has at last found an open advo- 
 cate in the House of Commons. An Irish member has coolly 
 told the country, that money advanced as a loan to Ireland, and 
 accepted in Ireland as a loan, ought never to be expected to be 
 repaid ; that you might as well call the alms you give in the 
 street to a beggar a loan. A significant hint was added, that 
 any endeavour to recover the money so lent must be made at 
 the point of the bayonet. For the few hundred thousands of 
 pounds, the produce of English private charity, the givings of 
 all who had anything to give, some measure of gratitude is ex- 
 pressed ; but for the millions sent by the Government to Ireland 
 for the same charitable purpose, millions raised by a taxation 
 which will press 'for years to come on tens of thousands who 
 scarce have bread for their own children, the Government are 
 offered nothing but insult and reproach. The opportunity 
 taken for this expression of ungrateful spleen is worthy of it — 
 the House going into committee for the purpose of generously
 
 1 847 IRELAND 235 
 
 turning no small portion of the loan lent to Ireland into a posi- 
 tive free gift. We have it as a matter proverbial, that the 
 drummer who flogs a man never can please him, hit high or low 
 he does not hit so as to give satisfaction, he always leaves some 
 ground for murmuring. One can see very plainly why it is the 
 fiogger does not and cannot well please the floggee ; but it is 
 something new to us to find that even when gifts do not excite 
 gratitude the remitting a great part of a debt should be met 
 with insult. 
 
 We are very plainly told to consider it as quite possible that 
 we may have Ireland to support through another winter. Now, 
 it appears that in our campaign of mercy of the last winter, we 
 have, in the opinion of the Irish demagogues, been guilty of 
 every conceivable blunder. The Government, it would appear, 
 has done nothing right ; it has, it is said, ruined the country it 
 sent its millions to save ; all that has been done has had some 
 evil in its train, against which the real lovers of that country (?) 
 are for ever inveighing. Be it so, let us just for this once, by a 
 very strong effort of imagination, believe that professional agi- 
 tators in that country speak the truth ; let us try whether we 
 may not gain some good from the lectures of these grateful 
 remonstrants. A nation forming part of our own empire is, by 
 a sudden dispensation of Providence, aggravated by its own past 
 lazy habits, thrown into a state of famine ; we are at once 
 deluged with petitions for help ; Protestant and Catholic priest 
 alike bend their every energy to the work of affording to Eng- 
 land every possible inducement to be generous and charitable 
 to Ireland. The most graphic narratives that pen can indite of 
 scenes whose horrid misery gives to such writing all its most 
 powerful effect — pictures of Death rioting in every cabin and in 
 every corner of it— all that could awe into reflection, all that 
 could excite to instant liberal sympathy, were given with a pain- 
 ful faithfulness that roused England, as one man, to the task of 
 staying the hand of the Destroyer ; whilst private charity set to 
 work with an activity that soon raised its hundreds of thou- 
 sands of pounds. All looked to the Government to be prompt 
 in applying on the instant its every resource to avert the horrid 
 work of pressing famine. The Ministry promptly answered to
 
 23 6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 19 
 
 the call ; millions were voted as though they were hundreds — a 
 mighty commissariat was despatched to this scene of strife be- 
 tween Irish want and English liberality; vessels of war were 
 sent in all directions, bearers of the ammunition that was to 
 give, not to destroy life ; all was hurry and bustle, for post after 
 post brought accounts of fresh horrors ; one plan after another 
 was tried, the co-operation of every local Irish agency was 
 besought to aid the efforts of Government, to get the greatest 
 amount of benefit from the outlay they were ungrudgingly 
 making ; the plague was not stayed until many millions were 
 lavished with a freedom that nothing but the known generosity 
 of the givers, the reported misery of the aided, could have justi- 
 fied. Meal and bread stuffs were given away or sold at low 
 prices, to an amount which, were the relative nourishment of the 
 two sorts of food valued, would I suspect have nearly covered 
 all the real loss of the potato crop. More wages were paid in 
 money than perhaps were ever paid before. Soup was laid on, 
 by machinery and various appliances, for the supply of the 
 starving, and distributed to an amount that baffles all calcula- 
 tion : and now, when we are passing a bill to secure the repay- 
 ment of half of a loan of 9,000,000/., making the Irish a free gift 
 of the other half, we are to be taunted with the fact, that we 
 need not look for its repayment ; nay further, that in all we 
 have done we have blundered to such a degree that the very 
 recipients of our charity think it right to lecture us. 
 
 Pressing imminent danger tends, as we all know, in general, 
 to disturb rather than to settle our minds ; we are apt to take 
 the first step that strikes us as good in the emergency, without 
 stopping to consider whether it really is the very best step. I 
 was once in a house the upper rooms of which took fire ; there 
 was of course a general cry for ' water ; ' an energetic stillroom 
 maid was met rushing up the stairs with a cream-jug full of 
 that quenching element ; had she stopped to reason in the still- 
 room, she would perhaps have brought up a pailful, but her 
 intention was for the best though the emergency had rather dis- 
 turbed her good sense. A Humane Society's official got a 
 considerable scolding one day in the Regent's Park for breaking 
 the gold guard chain of a gentleman he was dragging out of a
 
 i8 4 7 IRELAND 237 
 
 hole in the ice ; he was indignantly asked, ' Why did you not 
 look where you laid hold ? ' The man doubtless felt he might 
 have looked, but at the moment his first thought was to save the 
 gentleman ; it never crossed his mind he might contrive to do 
 this without breaking a guard chain. Now, Sir, admitting that 
 the Government, in the rush and bustle of trying to save a 
 country from instant famine, has in some instances acted weakly, 
 in others to the discomposure of some favourite feature of Irish 
 adoration, surely, if England found the money, as long as Eng- 
 land does not complain, it is hardly fair or honest that Ireland 
 should. If we have only drained 100 acres where with more 
 foresight we might have drained 1,000 ; if we have spoilt a few 
 roads ; if the almost navigable rivers of soup, made from the 
 receipt of the best cook in England, have once or twice tasted 
 too much of the seasoning and too little of the meat, why are 
 these trifling imperfections in the work of one nation on a 
 sudden called on to feed and employ another, to be for ever 
 made grounds of indictment against the Government ? When 
 Lord George Bentinck and his followers impede and annoy the 
 Government to the best of their power, we understand their 
 motive ; the guerrilla force of oppositionists is allowed a certain 
 field of operation ; they may do mischief, but then they only do 
 that which is expected of them ; but not so is it when the repre- 
 sentatives of those whom we have fed and preserved, whom com- 
 mon decency should make silent if common gratitude fails to do 
 so, taunt and insult the very Ministry that, with more zeal per- 
 haps than discretion, rushed to their rescue at a moment when 
 unaided their country would have presented a scene of anarchy 
 and suffering which would hardly have left an acre worth their 
 representing. But, Sir, if gratitude and decency will not get us 
 civility from those on whom we have lavished sums for the want 
 of which our own poor will suffer for years to come, will shame 
 do nothing for us ?
 
 238 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Nov. 9 
 
 On the duty of Government to establish law and order, he writes : — 
 The Life Market and the Money Market. 
 
 November 9, 1847. 
 
 The Government, it is generally understood, have determined 
 a limit beyond which the Bank of England is not to pass in its 
 infringement of Peel's Act. It would be a mercy to thousands 
 if the ruling powers would allow to ooze out, through some 
 official source, however obscure, the limit beyond which the 
 advocates of ' tenant-right ' will not be allowed to assassinate in 
 Ireland. A certain number of landlords, it is known, are booked 
 for eternity in furtherance of ' the great cause ' ; these have, it is 
 hoped, set their houses in order for the event, but a not unnatural 
 curiosity exists in the minds of their relatives to know whether 
 it may please the ruling powers of the country to give them any 
 hopes of a reprieve. Doubtless, some anxiety is also felt in the 
 families of other landlords as to whether, when the present 
 marked victims are slain, this discounting of life is to cease or 
 to continue. The Hibernian life market is, from ignorance on 
 these points, in a most unsettled state ; it would not surprise me 
 if a deputation from the chief insurance offices was to wait on 
 Lord John to complain of the gross injury inflicted upon their 
 several corporations by the liberty given to murderers to deter- 
 mine policies under circumstances against which no calculations 
 can guard. It seems almost hopeless to expect that any of the 
 old arguments against murder being allowed to go unpunished 
 should prevail ; the moral view of the case has been apparently 
 long consigned to oblivion ; but just as any amount of com- 
 mercial swindling obtained impunity until what are called great 
 houses were endangered, and then, and not till then, active steps 
 were taken to check roguery, and if possible save the fall of the 
 entire credit of the country, may we not hope that, now deputy- 
 lieutenants are in the course of being murdered, and all Irish 
 life policies are becoming depreciated, a mercantile view of the 
 matter may prevail, and life may be made ordinarily safe, even 
 though some eight per cent, may be added to our taxes for the 
 pay of a sufficient staff of troops, police, and hangmen ?
 
 1 847 IRELAND 239 
 
 I may be told it is impossible to detect the murderers in 
 Ireland, that the Executive is doing already its utmost to pro- 
 tect life and property. This I believe to be utterly untrue ; 
 these murders are done with weapons which cannot easily be 
 concealed, and they are done in so open a manner as to prove 
 that detection is scarcely feared ; they are not considered to be 
 murders, they are esteemed simply as accidents of a war, the 
 purpose of which is not concealed. It is the will of the bellige- 
 rents that bullet right shall be the code by which land shall be 
 held in Ireland ; the right of occupation, say these fine peasantry, 
 shall depend simply on the issue, which shall prove the most 
 powerful argument, a writ of law to dispossess, or the dread of 
 assassination forcing the owner to give up his rights. It is of 
 no use concealing the fact, the southern parts of Ireland are in 
 a state of open armed mutiny against the powers of the law. 
 Now, Sir, the effect of this in the mere old-fashioned moral and 
 social point of view may be, as it seems to have been long con- 
 sidered, of no great importance ; but it becomes of infinite im- 
 portance when the modern political view is taken of it. The 
 death of a magistrate causes a blank in the county roll of 
 justices which the Lord Lieutenant can fill up with a few strokes 
 of his pen ; most landlords have heirs — when one, therefore, is 
 murdered the inheritance passes to another. Ireland is, how- 
 ever, and has been for some time, a money-borrowing country ; 
 few landlords in the south possess unencumbered estates, very 
 many have had to insure their lives and place the policies in the 
 hands of creditors as collateral security ; Lord John may safely 
 believe me when I say that the prosperity — nay, almost the very 
 existence, of many insurance societies, the positive salvation 
 from utter ruin of many, very many, mortgagees, depends on 
 some instant steps to make life ordinarily secure in Ireland ; of 
 course, I only mean life in that class of it in which individuals 
 effect insurances or give mortgages. 
 
 Your columns now before me bear witness of the sad 
 deterioration of the value of an estate in Roscommon, merely 
 because at the sale a gentleman let out that it adjoined the spot 
 where the last landlord was murdered the night before. 1 In a 
 
 1 Major Marion.
 
 2 4 o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 9 
 
 commercial country is this, Sir, to be borne? Is land thus to 
 be wantonly depreciated in value ? Is the vested interest of 
 mortgagees to be thus trifled with ? Are all the calculations of 
 skilful actuaries and learned M.D.'s on the probabilities of life 
 to be thus rendered nugatory ? Surely, Sir, if the authorities of 
 the land, to whom we pay taxes to uphold any amount of 
 military and civil force for the suppression of crime, choose to 
 allow a crime to go on unrepressed which endangers the very 
 existence of some of the most valuable commercial securities, 
 they are bound to state openly why they do so, how long they 
 will continue to do so, and their readiness to indemnify the 
 sufferers whose commercial prospects are thus endangered. If 
 the Government are prepared to state that landlord murder is 
 merely a sort of transient eruption on the body politic, a neces- 
 sary adjunct to the transition of a country from a state of law- 
 lessness and idleness to one of order and industry, and is, there- 
 fore, a thing to be borne with patience as a present necessary 
 evil leading to eventual good, or if they will allow that they are 
 powerless to prevent it, let them do so at once, and leave the Irish 
 landlords to their own means of defence, absolving them from 
 any expenses for military or police. I, for one, believe that 
 would be a better state of things than that mockery of protection 
 under which a man is murdered when walking with the police- 
 man paid to protect him. 
 
 The Israelites bidden to make bricks, but denied the straw 
 necessary for the work ; the West Indian planter bidden to do 
 without slaves, denied free labourers, and yet told to compete 
 with the slave-holders of Cuba — these are instances of unmis- 
 takeable tyranny on the part of the parties exacting the work 
 under the conditions that forbid it. But what shall we say of 
 the position of an Irish landlord, resident, loyal, intelligent, and 
 really anxious to fulfil the duties of his station ? It is demanded 
 of him that he should pay poor rates, to support the aged, and 
 sick, and destitute ; he is expected punctually to repay his share 
 of any loan granted last year for these purposes ; he is implored 
 to find on his estate reproductive employment for all he possibly 
 can ; he is advised to encourage a new and improved system of 
 agriculture ; he is asked to send his tenantry to hear lectures on
 
 1 847 IRELAND 241 
 
 the said system, and to set them the example by himself pro- 
 curing all necessary implements, and following out all the sug- 
 gested improvements ; he is told on all hands that the great 
 object is to do away with the conacre system, to establish larger 
 occupations, and the production of more corn crops ; he is pre- 
 pared to devote himself to this work at any sacrifice but one — it 
 is not an unreasonable exception — he only asks that his own life 
 and the life of his agents may be protected ; this done, he is 
 ready to plunge his estate still further into debt, to make any 
 exercise of self-denial, so that he can but put these hopeful 
 plans in force. He gets a note by post to tell him his agent is 
 shot at his dinner, and that on the body is left a cool notice that 
 himself and some seven other landlords are marked for slaughter. 
 A few days after, a brother magistrate, one of the marked, 
 is murdered ; the week following another is as punctually 
 despatched. Having planked up, with four-inch oak slabs, all 
 his lower windows, and sent his wife and children to England, 
 he takes up the newspaper, and reads that a monster meeting 
 has been held in favour of tenant-right,' under the sanction of 
 the whole priesthood of the district, and that language was then 
 and there held subversive of all the established laws of property. 
 True, there was no direction as to the shooting landlords or 
 agents, but there was plenty said in favour of the cause in which 
 it was known they were being daily shot. 
 
 He reads on, and finds that two opposition mock Parliaments 
 are being held in Ireland, divided, it is true, in opinion, but 
 simply on the question, which is the most advisable way of 
 keeping up the disloyal, semi-treasonable agitation to which 
 Ireland owes two-thirds of her sad condition. He looks for 
 the London news, and he finds the Ministry breaking through 
 the law that governs the Bank of England, to save the credit of 
 a few respectable houses from the ruin caused by the reckless 
 speculation of the trading community in general. He sees in 
 this one glimpse of hope for his country. A few more, say a 
 dozen, murders of proprietors, and such will become the in- 
 security of life that even as parsons were not insurable when, some 
 years back, it was the pleasure of the popular leaders to bring 
 them into that unpopularity which may be called bullet-range— 
 
 VOL. I. 1<
 
 24 2 THE LETTERS 01- S. G. O. Nov. 29 
 
 even as property in tithes then ceased to be marketable, so now 
 no policy on a landlord's life will be esteemed of any value, no 
 mortgage on land worth a farthing, for foreclosure will only pay 
 in the prospect of collecting rent — this can only be done at the 
 risk of instant murder. There is hope for the landlord if the 
 Government will once open their eyes to the fact that the money- 
 market may again become most seriously embarrassed if the 
 land of Ireland cease to bear any value simply because it is in 
 the hands of people who have been taught that to hold it from 
 its rightful owner is not robbery, to shoot him if he questions the 
 holding is not murder. 
 
 The following is a call on the Government to do its duty. Hanging 
 priests for the use of inflammatory language is still in advance of public 
 opinion. 
 
 November 29, 1847. 
 
 To name any one particular remedy for the moral and poli- 
 tical diseases of Ireland is doubtless very difficult ; but it surely 
 requires no great amount of wisdom to define the immediate 
 causes which at present aggravate the customary wretched state 
 of that unhappy country. If this be true, the question arises, 
 are these causes of present evil capable of removal ? If we say 
 they are not, we seem, to my poor judgment, to admit that Ire- 
 land is anarchised — is virtually in a condition defying all means 
 of sound government. 
 
 It is folly to speak of religious grievances as being the cause 
 of the present disorganisation of the Irish; even the silliest of 
 the agitator class are silent on this subject ; nor do we hear 
 much of any distinct political grievance, for I count that stale 
 cuckooism which perpetually chants ' repeal ' as nothing, or next 
 t) it. The man who under the name of Liberator enslaved 
 millions under that hardest of task-masters, a pernicious agita- 
 tion aiming at an end he never for one moment dreamed of 
 attaining, gave to the repeal cry a certain amount of importance ; 
 leading the priests, who rode the ' million,' he could have given 
 just as much importance to any other, even more insane ' cry,' 
 which he and they for their own purposes might choose to con- 
 *~rratp with their approval. Still I shall be told there must be
 
 r847 IRELAND 243 
 
 some deeply felt grievance, or the Irish would not be in their 
 present state of almost declared rebellion ; the peasantry in 
 several counties are evidently in a league which sanctions, if it 
 does not demand, the commission of the foulest crimes history 
 has ever recorded. The late murders have been no common 
 murders ; they are done with an amount of cold-blooded cruelty 
 to which we can find no parallel ; they spare neither sex, age, 
 nor rank ; they seek no disguise ; the assassins do their bloody 
 work in parties in open day ; they are sheltered whilst they 
 await their victim ; they receive all the connivance at escape 
 they need as soon as their work of blood is finished ; they care 
 not to take the child out of the father's arms before they fire into 
 his breast ; they fired into the breast of a wife who threw her- 
 self between the muzzles of their guns and her husband ; they 
 might with a little force have removed her a yard or two from 
 him, but they see no virtue in her courage that they should spare 
 her ; she stands between them and their victim — true, that 
 victim is her husband, still they fire, and she falls. If, at the 
 day of judgment, one deed of violence is found recorded in 
 darker colours than all, save one, that the hand of murder ever 
 committed, it will be that accursed deed which slew a wife in an 
 act of devoted courage which would have turned the weapon of 
 any savage but an Irish one ; and yet, ere this, who shall say 
 but some dispenser of the comforts of the confessional shall 
 have heard this tale of blood whispered into his ear, and then, in 
 his turn, have whispered into the ear of the kneeling villain the 
 words — ' This thy sin is forgiven thee, thou art absolved of it' 
 When the priestly office is so prostituted that to gain worldly 
 ends the steps of the altar are made the theatre from which the 
 holy actor thunders the denunciation that so immediately fore- 
 runs the death of the denounced, shall any man be called to 
 account for bigotry if he presumes to argue that where murder 
 is provoked it is not unreasonable to suppose it would find easy 
 terms of absolution ? 
 
 It is said the people have been taught to feel that these acts 
 of blood are not murder ; that though they kill, they do not 
 ahvays kill in hate, but simply because they believe that the 
 deaths of a certain number of agents and landlords arc necessary 
 
 K 2
 
 244 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 29 
 
 to carry the end at which they are encouraged to aim, viz. the 
 right of occupying land as tenants, with every privilege of owner- 
 ship. I have not before me the number of tithe proctors and 
 Protestant clergy who were slain in the campaign against tithes ; 
 the deaths of such people are soon forgotten in Ireland ; but 
 they slew the number necessary to carry their end ; they then, 
 and not till then, ceased their war on these classes of their 
 fellow-creatures. 
 
 ' Tenant-right,' as they call it, is now the end at which they 
 aim ; it is a grievance that the owner of property in Ireland 
 claims to let it to whom he likes, on his own terms. True, the 
 law of the land gives him this right, and in every civilised 
 country owners of land have it conceded to them as a matter of 
 course. Not so in Ireland ; the priests have ruled it, the agi- 
 tators have proclaimed it, and therefore the people in their way 
 are enforcing the principle that ownership means that mere 
 relation to property which permits the owner to occupy a certain 
 portion himself, leaving him a mere rent-charge on the rest, to 
 be determined in its amount by rules over which he is to have 
 little, if any, control ; as to using any discretion in the regulation 
 of the numbers who may choose to locate on his estate, their 
 characters, or the mode in which they may choose to cultivate 
 it — in this he is to have no voice, beyond a chance opportunity 
 now and then of bidding, at a sort of auction, for the privilege of 
 letting one of his own farms to a tenant of his own choosing. 
 That this principle should ever obtain the sanction of the law 
 would be thought impossible by any sane person in any other 
 country but Ireland ; that any minister of religion, any educated 
 man, should openly advocate it, would be considered incredible, 
 and yet the thing is done ; priests and so-called gentlemen of 
 education are for ever preaching up this robbery of the land- 
 owner as the legitimate right of the tenant. Surely, Sir, this is 
 striking at the root of all government, for can that country be 
 called governed in which the just rights of property are thus 
 with impunity assailed ? The State can claim a right to enforce 
 the duty due from property to the power that upholds it, but it 
 cannot claim allegiance where it affords no protection. Such 
 an agitation differs but little from positive treason. Monster
 
 1847 IRELAND 245 
 
 meetings are openly held, at which doctrines are as openly 
 broached, which, if they are just as against the rights of a land- 
 lord, would in principle be equally so if applied to much that is 
 claimed as the right of the Crown. At what point is that 
 system of lawless aggression to be arrested which gives to the 
 rash theories of brawling mock patriotism the seal of the approba- 
 tion of a priesthood whose approval of any object, however wild 
 and base, has long obtained that weight with the peasantry of 
 Ireland which hounds them on to its pursuit with a bloodthirsty 
 eagerness, defying alike the laws of man and the judgments of 
 God ? How long is it to be borne that, in a country professing 
 Christianity, with some characteristics of civilisation, and all the 
 outward and visible signs of civil government, life is to be held 
 so cheap that a policy of insurance on a living Tipperary magis- 
 trate is held to be as good as cash at Liverpool, simply because 
 he has been denounced by a so-called Christian priest from the 
 altar in the hearing of those whose hearts are ever ready to seize 
 any hint to commit the foul crimes in which their hands are 
 already practised ? How long are the O'Connells, the Lalors, 
 and Dohenys to be allowed full freedom to advocate the peace- 
 able agitation (?) of a cause so likely to inflame all the worst 
 passions of the peasantry that it needs only the easily attained 
 advocacy of such a priest as Laffan to make the infatuated 
 peasantry think its pursuit justifiable by any, the. most violent of 
 means ? 
 
 Is it not enough that history should record that one man for 
 some fifteen or twenty years was allowed to check the whole 
 industry of Ireland by keeping up the agitation of questions that 
 never turned one penny's profit to any but himself ? — that he to 
 whose memory a starving people (?) are about to erect a splendid 
 monument, should, by his senseless folly, have so paralysed all 
 that could have added to his country's wealth, all that tended to 
 its peace, that he has left it bankrupt in food, distracted in every 
 branch of its social economy ? Are we, now the craft and skill 
 which could stir the passions but check the blow is departed, to 
 see this senseless multitude handed over to a noisy divided set 
 of dangerous agitators, who, backed by a bad section of their 
 priesthood, have but too much power to inflame the hearts of
 
 246 THE LETTERS OF S. C. O. Nov. 29 
 
 evil men, but not one atom of power to restrain the hands of 
 those they address from the commission of crimes that cry aloud 
 to God and man for vengeance ? 
 
 Detect the assassins, try them, hang them — what then ? 
 They will die as martyrs. Can they who denounce from the 
 altar hesitate to absolve the over-rash spirit that rushed to murder 
 the landlord the priest only intended to curse ? Think you the 
 peasantry will fear to die, or not be lauded in their death, for fi 
 cause that has the sanction of ' the leaders of the people/ the 
 good wishes and advocacy of 'their priesthood'? I would ten 
 times sooner have the detected murderer flogged than hung ; it 
 is a longer process of punishment, has none of the melodrama 
 of an Irish execution, and would soon prove absolution-proof. 
 Muzzle by heavy penalties the mouths of those that agitate 
 questions which strike at order ; hang the priests who henceforth 
 pollute their office by denunciations which they now know the 
 rabble take to be doom to be done at their hands ; flog again 
 and again, on the spot of their deeds of violence, every perpe- 
 trator of assault on the life of any one subject of the realm, every 
 writer of threats of such violence ; place every district stained 
 by murder under martial law, watching by day and night every 
 possible rendezvous of the disaffected, however hallowed the 
 spot. Let the Government at once, in unmistakeable terms, 
 announce their determination to uphold every well-known right 
 of property at any and every cost, and we may yet have some 
 faint hopes of seeing Ireland brought within the common bounds 
 of civilisation. At the same time, let every encouragement 
 within the power of the Crown be given to every Catholic or 
 Protestant priest who does his utmost to stem the torrent of 
 agrarian violence ; let it be proved that it is no question of the 
 nature of their creed which is to obtain favour or disfavour, but 
 that the rulers of a Christian country will uphold both Catholic 
 and Protestant in all that the good of either creed can approve 
 of, but will punish with the utmost extremity of the law eveiy 
 attempt to use religious authority as an instrument of social dis- 
 turbance. There are many priests of both persuasions — there 
 are many resident gentlemen, Protestant and Catholic, who 
 ving, perhaps, a known doomed life, still do their utmost to
 
 1847 IRELAND =47 
 
 uphold the law ; let them have every countenance the Crown 
 can give ; they stand in the breach against a determined, relent- 
 less foe— they deserve all that bravery can win of honour from 
 the Crown ; above all, let the Government be deaf to the old cry 
 of the liberty of the subject when opposed to the use of mea- 
 sures which the gross abuse of liberty has made indispensable. 
 Districts that connive at murder should expect no more liberty 
 than that accorded to murderers. 
 
 The Queen's Visit. 
 
 August 20, 1849. 
 
 At this period of Ireland's crisis the late visit of the Queen 
 is likely to be productive of far more than mere temporary good. 
 It is well that she has personally tested the loyalty of her Irish 
 subjects, and that, too, in some localities in which expression 
 had been recently given to opinions hardly consistent with the 
 faintest loyalty. It was well for her thus to afford to Ireland an 
 opportunity, through the voice of her chief cities, to give the lie 
 to that false babbling spirit of misrule, which, assuming an air of 
 earnest truth, has so long spoken only to deceive. More, how- 
 ever, than this was needed ; and I for one am sanguine enough 
 to believe that far more of good will yet flow to Ireland from 
 the Royal visit. 
 
 Although her Majesty did not with her own eyes behold the 
 evidence of Ireland's worst calamity in all its most painful 
 features, she has not left Ireland in any ignorance of its real 
 condition. The splendour of her reception did not blind her to 
 the effort it cost to afford it to her. Her visit, I believe, was 
 purposely confined in its limits, from a delicate sense of the 
 serious inconvenience a longer stay might have occasioned to a 
 people determined at any cost, however individually imprudent, 
 to give her a Queen's welcome ; she felt that there were claims 
 on the means of her subjects to which no attention capable of 
 being offered to herself should be preferred. At least one organ 
 of public opinion, with somewhat questionable taste, has com- 
 mented upon the poor appearance as to equipage, &c, which was 
 made by a large majority of those who attended the levee. It 
 is quite true that the miscellaneous string of vehicles and their
 
 248 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 20 
 
 general poverty of appearance would have been fair objects of 
 ridicule had they passed on a similar errand down St. James's 
 Street in our own metropolis. The Queen, however, was waiting 
 the presence of an Irish, not an English assemblage. She was 
 holding a levee in a country on the higher orders of which there 
 has of late years been such a pressure that wealth has become 
 almost a fable ; a decent respectability of circumstance is only 
 sustained with difficulty by those whose nominal condition is 
 one of apparent large means, but who, in reality, are most 
 straitened. The Queen did not hold out her hand with the 
 less earnest welcome to Irish noblemen, Irish proprietors, in 
 that she knew that famine and disease had so affected the 
 value of their several properties that they had long since given 
 up the luxury of a private equipage, and now were forced to 
 wait on their Sovereign, perhaps, from the outside of a ' street 
 car.' 
 
 The roaring of cannon, the cheers, the wildest hurrahs, that 
 could pour forth again and again from the excited feelings of 
 the masses who lined the course of her progress never for one 
 moment banished from her mind the real condition of the 
 country in which she then was. No appeal to external sense 
 could close the ear of her heart to that not far distant wail of 
 the famishing which spoke to her in tones she would be the last 
 to resist. She is now more than ever alive, as well to the deep 
 suffering of the Irish peasantry in the west and south, as to the 
 ruin with which that suffering threatens the proprietary, from 
 whose already embarrassed resources it must in a great measure 
 be met. Let no Irish landowner for one moment suppose that 
 she gave no attention when on the spot to those who were ready 
 to give, and from whom she sought, information on the subject 
 of Ireland's present difficulties. No ; the welcome given to her- 
 self, her consort, and her children, would have enlisted her 
 sympathy at once for Ireland, had she needed anything to excite 
 her interest. As it was, it has doubtless given to her sympathy 
 a still warmer tone ; but she needed no such further inducement 
 to feel for the misfortunes of this portion of her empire. 
 
 The full advantage of the Royal visit will betray itself 
 directly in this —it will give confidence to those who are engaged
 
 1 849 IRELAND 249 
 
 in the struggle against a force of disastrous circumstances almost 
 unparalleled. In almost every one of the distressed unions there 
 are some few, more or less, landed proprietors who have never 
 left their post or flinched from the duties their residence has en- 
 tailed upon them. Only those who have witnessed it can judge 
 of the self-denial, mental anxiety, and positive personal risk 
 these noblemen and gentlemen have shown and incurred in their 
 gallant endeavour to stem the torrent of ruin and destruction 
 around them. We in England hear ad nauseam of absentee and 
 insolvent Irish proprietors ; we hear but little, and know still 
 less, of that small sturdy band who, having yet life and property 
 to lose, have not hesitated to stay and stand the shock active 
 local duties have entailed upon them, amidst famine, fever, 
 pestilence, and agrarian outrage. If the west of Ireland is yet 
 to be saved, either from positive depopulation or such a state of 
 destitution as shall cause common preservation of life to make 
 common head against all law, it will be done, not perhaps by 
 their means — for they are well nigh exhausted— but by the 
 advice and active co-operation of these tried and experienced 
 men. They needed some cordial source of present confidence ; 
 they were getting worn out in mind, in body, and estate ; and 
 yet the task which had claims on all three seemed to grow in 
 measure even upon each day's successive work. Irish debates 
 certainly did not tend to give them any substantial ground of 
 hope. There has been a great talk of great capitalists, indi- 
 vidual and corporate, coming to their speedy assistance— it is 
 still talk, and getting less loud daily. Did they write to friends 
 of ' either House ' in England, the answer was, ' Nothing can be 
 done this session ; we here do nothing but hope from the pro- 
 mise of your harvest that your present troubles will soon pass 
 away. We are passing the Encumbered Estates Bill ; this will 
 give you a fresh infusion of capital. Everybody is hopeful 
 about the potatoes.' Poor comfort this for noblemen and 
 magistrates, guardians, &c, who from week to week have to see 
 their workhouses and hospitals and graveyards still filling ; who 
 on the spot have to bear, as the result of their position, all the 
 hard-earned popular hostility which is entailed on those who 
 have to contend against the poverty of a famine and the suffer-
 
 2 5 o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 20 
 
 ings of a pestilence, utterly absorbing all that could aid in either 
 
 T I 
 
 exigency 
 
 Many weeks ago, to my own certain knowledge, the potato 
 was known to be in some places diseased. I saw it so myself, 
 in company with one of the Poor Law inspectors. It would 
 give you a lively idea of the perplexed condition of the upper 
 classes of Ireland, if I could in any way convey it to you, the 
 peculiar tone conversation ever took if the possibility of the 
 failure of this year's crop of potatoes was alluded to ; it was as 
 if a hint given to the captain of a large ship far at sea had been 
 overheard, ' That there was a smell of fire coming from the hold.' 
 I have seen men who went through any distance of contagious 
 wards with me in apparent good spirits become painfully 
 thoughtful and silent if the probability of a failure in this crop 
 this year was alluded to ; not that it was supposed that however 
 good the crop the lives of all who were threatened with famine 
 could be saved ; but it was a sort of anchor out, which the ship 
 might hold on by till succour came from some other quarter. 
 Alas! I now know some strands in the cable of that anchor 
 have already given way ; they who are on board, and have to 
 officer the ship, need every help which can be given from every 
 quarter to keep up their courage. 
 
 Apart from mere political bias, I believe Lord Clarendon is 
 universally respected in Ireland, and all the credit he deserves 
 is given to him for the part he has taken throughout this long 
 season of difficulty ; none ever doubted his humanity or the deep 
 interest he takes in the regeneration of Ireland, for he, with 
 every other resident, must long have seen that no term of less 
 meaning than ' regeneration ' could define that which is to turn 
 the tide of present ruin and suffering. To the Lord-Lieutenant, 
 and to every individual bound up with the machinery of Ireland's 
 social government, the visit of the Queen will give renewed con- 
 fidence. All required cheering in their tasks. The Queen's 
 visit, its form, the thoroughly domestic as well as Royal guise in 
 which she appeared, will act as a cordial to him and to them ; 
 for once and for ever it is felt she has identified herself with her 
 Irish subjects in a way to which, as subjects of the Imperial 
 Crown, they had long been strangers. It is felt that the Vice-
 
 1849 IRELAXD 251 
 
 toy's voice will find now a powerful echo in the English council 
 chamber. It is hoped— glorious hope — that her grateful pre- 
 sence has hushed for good the grumblings of that contentious 
 spirit of useless agitation which, only presently curbed by the 
 power of the law, might soon again burst forth, again to sow 
 dissension and strife amongst a people needing all the efforts all 
 possible union could afford. 
 
 We all know the power of fashion to sway public opinion. 
 Let it once be known that our Sovereign takes a deep personal 
 interest in every wise attempt to benefit Ireland ; let it be 
 understood that she will from time to time land on Ireland's 
 shores, and meet her Irish people of every condition in the spirit 
 of her last visit ; let it be felt that Irish improvements, Irish 
 works of art, may from time to time share with English in the 
 benefit of personal Royal encouragement — and at once a new 
 element will be infused into the spirit of Irish renovation. 
 
 I shall not be surprised soon to hear of property purchased 
 in trust for the ' Earl of Dublin,' to be managed as a model of 
 improved management ; nor would it amaze me to hear of the 
 possibility of the Royal occupant of the ' Flemish farm ' at Wind- 
 sor going from time to time to advise with the managers of his 
 son's farms— perhaps in Gal way. We may as yet be a long way 
 from the realisation of either supposition, but every — the least 
 analogous movement of Royal sympathy and interest towards 
 Ireland will beget a crowd of imitators ; and could we but hope 
 for a truce with all political and polemical agitators for a season, 
 I should be very sanguine of an interchange of social and com- 
 mercial benefits between the two countries springing up, not 
 only most encouraging to those who had so long sighed in vain 
 for such a period, but productive of vast mutual good. Irish 
 soil offers every inducement for the investment of English 
 capital. There are many fields of profit open for the manufac- 
 turer who would invest in factory employment. The lines of 
 railroad already open will take you from Euston Square to 
 Dublin, to Limerick — almost to Cork, and soon, quite to Gal- 
 way — to say nothing of the ready communication with the north 
 of Ireland. It is true, you must on the way have a few hours' 
 voyage, nauseous or pleasant, as it may be, in the fastest and
 
 252 THE LETTERS OF S. C. O. Aug. 20 
 
 best ordered boats to be found on any seas. To the man of 
 commerce this is a mere matter of form ; to the tourist it is a 
 part of his business— for who now goes anywhere for pleasure 
 and does not include a voyage in the account ? After the 
 example of our Sovereign and her children, the greatest sea- 
 hater can hardly pretend to that pitch of effeminacy which shall 
 count the Irish Channel a briar in the path of a tour taken to 
 see the real beauties of the south and far west of Ireland. It 
 may appear trifling with a serious matter ; but I am satisfied 
 that the encouragement, the impulse, the Queen has given to 
 travelling Hiberniaward will be of the utmost value. The Irish 
 and Ireland cannot be too much and too often seen by the 
 English of every degree ; both sides have great prejudices to get 
 rid of, very mistaken notions to be corrected. I am satisfied the 
 fraternisation will be as complete, as enduring, if the acquaint- 
 ance is made in Ireland rather than in England ; for it is in his 
 own country that the Irishman's character is best seen ; and it 
 will be there seen, not as drawn in the books of vulgar novelists, 
 who seem to dip their pens in a composition of whisky and 
 duelling powder, and attuning their tale to the fluid in which they 
 write, fill their pages with scenes of vulgar wit, practical unheard- 
 of jokes, strange narratives of abduction and seduction, drunken 
 quarrels ending in duels, in which all parties act as unlike men 
 of gentlemanly honour as well can be conceived. No ; the 
 English traveller will find in every class of Irish society a kind 
 and earnest and hospitable tone, bespeaking at once that respect 
 and interest which no English gentleman will ever refuse to it. 
 The Irish have their peculiarities ; they are themselves fully 
 alive to them ; they do not deny that very many of their country- 
 men may speak in a tone and with a liveliness of manner which 
 to the sobered ear of the English may at first astonish rather 
 than please ; but they justly plead that the richest brogue of the 
 most boisterous Milesian never spoke to English stranger or 
 guest anything but a right hearty welcome to all of civility or 
 information or aid he might need. I trust ere many months are 
 over Ireland may be better known to England than she now is ; 
 I hope yet in a few years to live to see a constant yearly flow of 
 intercourse between all who love nature's richest pictures and
 
 1 849 IRELAND 253 
 
 the inhabitants of that country who have so many of them to 
 exhibit. Many who will visit Ireland's scenes of interest from 
 the very force of fashion will return to England ready to give, 
 each in his own circle, that evidence of her real condition which, 
 thus forcing its way in private life, will at last find a way to the 
 conviction of those on the wisdom and firmness of whose legis- 
 lation so much of the future welfare of Ireland depends. 
 
 Once more let us regard a feature of no little importance in 
 the Queen's late visit. The want of capital invested in the im- 
 provement of the soil, is, perhaps, the greatest of any from which 
 the west and south of Ireland now suffers. No sane man will 
 invest his capital in a country in which the laws which protect 
 property are not firmly and effectually administered. Lord 
 Clarendon, alive to this fact, has shown a firm determination to 
 do his utmost to carry out the full force of the law against all 
 who seek wantonly to disturb the peace of the country. I need 
 not now relate all the difficulties which beset him in his task ; 
 he did, however, at last so far prevail that he checked the course 
 of treason and firmly carried out the law, with no respect of 
 persons, and at no slight cost, against the ringleaders ; in doing 
 this, I firmly believe he had the approval of the great mass of 
 Irishmen possessed of any real love of their country. The 
 Queen's visit and most marked attention to him was but a fitting 
 proof of the Royal approval of his conduct ; it is calculated on 
 this ground to reassure those whose hearts began to fail them 
 on the subject of the policy which was to direct future Irish 
 legislation ; they now see that the Sovereign takes her open 
 stand by the side of the principles for the carrying out of which 
 her servant has had to endure so much ; she was ready to show 
 herself in the most open manner, as most sensible of the valuable 
 services of her Viceroy, thus stamping as her own the policy 
 it was his painful duty to follow. The straightforward moral 
 courage she showed in presenting herself so openly amongst the 
 Irish masses at Cork and Dublin at so early a period after the 
 time her representative had refused all appeals for a mercy 
 towards popular individuals which he felt would be no mercy to 
 the country from which their crimes had banished them, will of 
 itself prove of eminent service to the cause of order. Every
 
 254 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Oct. 20 
 
 honest Repealer must feel she has acted from honest conviction 
 in the approval she has shown of the Lord-Lieutenant's policy. 
 He must also feel the force of that argument to his own reason, 
 so strongly implied by the open manner in which she threw her- 
 self in the way of public opinion for good or for evil. 
 
 The following views on the rights of property might have been 
 written at the end of Mr. Gladstone's last administration. 
 
 ' Property' 
 
 October 20, 1849. 
 
 If we employ ourselves, for ever so short a time, in com- 
 paring the state of England with that of Ireland at this moment, 
 we are enabled to see at once in what consists our chief happi- 
 ness — the sister kingdom's chief. misery. Men of every class in 
 England look to the night season as a time of peaceful rest and 
 quiet. We go about our daily business or pleasure under a 
 sense of legal protection to person and property from the 
 violence and wickedness of any of our fellow-creatures whose 
 hearts and hands may be set against ourselves or anything 
 which we possess. I do not say that we English know not 
 what it is to be robbed, assaulted — nay, exposed to the hand of 
 the assassin ; but we do know that the law is so upheld amongst 
 us by the general disposition of the whole community that no 
 countenance is given to evildoers, no pains spared to bring them 
 to justice. We may have our grievances, political and polemical, 
 but we do not suffer our opinions on them, or our efforts for 
 their redress, to lead us to sanction the disturbance of those 
 fixed principles of general protection which give to us a sense 
 of personal safety by day and by night. 
 
 The most violent Protectionist magistrate would dare any 
 danger to protect Tamworth from a mob of spoliators, and Mr. 
 Cobden would not hesitate for one moment to seize a Bill Sykes 
 whom he might chance to discover breaking into the War Office. 
 What clerical justice, however dignified with ecclesiastical office, 
 is there who would not do his utmost to protect a Dissenter, of 
 any persuasion, in any matter in which the law empowered him 
 to do so ? Where have we ever heard of an opponent of the 
 Church so bitter in his opponency that he would look on and see
 
 1 849 IRELAND 255 
 
 the rector of the parish robbed or assaulted and yet not aid him, 
 simply because he was a State-connected priest ? 
 
 The fact is, Sir, we have long since arrived at a knowledge 
 of the value of that first element of civilisation — protection to 
 life, limb, and property — without a due sense of which daily life 
 is daily pain ; the life of night is nightly fear. We contend 
 against every oppression of law and custom, fancied or real, with 
 a determination equal to that shown by any of the injured in 
 creed, in privilege, or in pocket, in any country on earth ; we 
 give and take every bearable license of tongue and pen ; but 
 before we enter the ring or any contention, public or private, we 
 shake hands on this matter of agreement- — until laws are altered, 
 laws shall be upheld ; for we all know very well, if we allow 
 license to break the laws we object to, we do so at the risk of 
 the breakage of the laws on which all we have depends. We 
 don't read tenant-right to be licensed landlord robbery ; we 
 don't understand that landlord oppression justifies landlord 
 assassination ; we don't say the hungry cannot be thieves if they 
 only take food ; we don't argue that to owe what we cannot pay 
 justifies our plunder of our debtor ; we don't justify or connive 
 at the disturbance of all respect for law simply because there 
 may exist some laws which are abhorrent to our creed or our 
 political opinion ; our magistrates could put no sane or honour- 
 able construction on any feeling which should tempt them to 
 use, abuse, or pervert their position as dispensers of strict justice 
 to all on any party grounds, even of recent date, much less of 
 so ancient a date as to have become mere matter of history. It 
 can, then, be no matter of surprise to us that we do live under 
 a state of things in England st» altogether different from that 
 which now disfigures, degrades, and destroys all that is good to 
 look upon, honourable, and profitable in Ireland. 
 
 We for ever hear it said, why don't the Lord-Lieutenant and 
 Government of Ireland force the law into respect there — that 
 part of the law, at least, which preserves to a subject the posses- 
 sion of his property in something like peace and quiet ? Alas ! 
 Sir, this question is easier put than answered. When a nation 
 is unanimous on a political question, even should the voice that 
 claims that nation's will speak treason, there is the dilemma —
 
 256 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Oct. 20 
 
 how shall a nation be indicted ? Where shall be the court ? 
 Who shall constitute the jury ? It is of no use concealing the 
 fact : there is imminent danger in a large proportion of Ireland 
 of unanimity in opposition to the first principles of those laws 
 which are admitted to be for the general good in every nation ; 
 what between those who are leagued against the rights of pro- 
 perty, those who covertly connive at their league, those who are 
 afraid to oppose it, and those who are careless of everything but 
 the gratification of a spirit of partisanship, the upholders of the 
 law are fast becoming a small minority. Government is not a 
 mere matter of police and military organisation : no country can 
 be well ruled by mere stipendiary force ; laws require the aid of 
 all well-doers to support them ; they claim of every individual, 
 in any and every position of life, that if he be not in heart and 
 purpose dishonest, he be a supporter in heart and hand of the 
 laws which restrain evildoers. The magistrate and the constable 
 are the instruments to carry on and out the common will ; when 
 that common will is opposed to law and order, it becomes a 
 matter either of anarchy and confusion, or of that despotism 
 which secures by paid force, overwhelming in its amount, that 
 forced obedience to law which the health of every civilised society 
 absolutely requires. 
 
 Let me ask of those mad, or misguided, or malevolent men 
 who are now fostering by their tongues and pens the present 
 agrarian outrages in the West and South of Ireland, have they 
 looked to what must be the end of this state of things ? Having 
 called from the depths of misery and ignorance a spirit of wild, 
 daring outrage, which respects no law, is sparing of no crime ; 
 having seen that spirit rise at their call, and proceed to work out 
 its crusade of evil, where do they think that it will stay its 
 hand ? How shall they chain this monster of their creation, so 
 that he shall only prey on landlords, only steal corn, murder 
 policemen ? Do they think that they can still the waves of 
 rapine at any given moment by pouring out on them a torrent 
 of the old oil of political grievance, or religious grievance ? 
 When all the corn is stolen, all the landlords ruined, every 
 haggard empty, every farm a waste, all industry checked, all 
 capital locked up, the good landlord and the bad landlord
 
 1 849 IRELAND 257 
 
 involved in one common ruin, do they think these crowds, 
 triumphant in their villany, but starving on their laurels, will at 
 once become again the mere tools of political agitation, shouters 
 of old political war cries, worshippers of itinerant declaimers of 
 sedition ? No, Sir ; let this system run out its course, encouraged 
 by the faint disapproval of a press which can indeed boast of 
 talent as great as it is perverted ; let the war against rent rend 
 asunder all local ties, destroy all local energy for good, and 
 though you cast down the Church as a bone to be at once 
 devoured, repeal of the union as only waiting to be accepted, 
 Ulster tenant-right interpreted according to Holycross interpre- 
 tation, as already prepared for national adoption — though you 
 offered these a crown to give O'Brien, and power to recall him 
 to accept it ; though you could canonise the late O'Connell, and 
 put the present one into his shoes, all would fail— for I am 
 satisfied the riddle is now being read — the secret of monster 
 agitators is being developed. Monster meetings cheered the 
 repeal orators, but for repeal the peasant reads land — land at his 
 own value, on his own terms. It was well understood by those 
 who trained the peasantry for these meetings that their duty 
 was simply to bring them together ; how they did it was left to 
 themselves. It is scarcely to be believed how little the Irish 
 peasantry know about the things for which they have been 
 trained to shout ; the commonest cant terms of the agitation 
 schools are as algebra to tens of thousands of those whose 
 presence gave life to agitation. They know little of their 
 national history so far as regards its political features ; they care 
 next to nothing for any of the men who built a reputation upon 
 their supposed love. They know well the history of their own 
 localities ; their traditionary knowledge of all matters connected 
 with land, so far as it regards who have held it, who have left it, 
 who have owned, or who have claimed it, is wonderful ; from 
 generation to generation they have been bred in a love of the 
 possession of land proportionate to their entire dependence on 
 such possession. They saw that their numbers forced land up 
 to a fictitious value ; still, it was life to them ; they clung to it 
 as their only hope ; close observers of every cloud threatening 
 their possession of it, the)- saw the gradual accumulation of debt 
 VOL. I. S
 
 258 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 20 
 
 on the proprietors' estates as a warning of a time when there 
 must be sales, and their holdings might be sold. They felt the 
 increasing pressure of the landlords' debts in the landlords' 
 rapacity, in the shape of increasing rent ; still they paid it, it 
 was their life — they knew no other hope of life. They heard 
 the agitator denounce the landlords, they knew monster meetings 
 were so many engines of intimidation as against the owners of 
 property. Repeal was the text from which landlords were to be 
 preached into submissive fear ; they were content to gain that 
 end from any text. ' Sure, and if we can meet in our blessed 
 thousands to intimidate the Saxon Governmint, won't it be just 
 telling them that we could meet, too, to terrify the landlords of 
 us ? ' The men who taught them to come in their power of 
 numbers to suit their particular purpose are dead or transported ; 
 their lesson survives ; they can now intimidate for their own 
 ends. 
 
 An Irish patriot at this moment would feel that the one 
 great question is, not whether the government of Ireland should 
 be vested in the united legislating and executive powers of the 
 two countries of England and Ireland, but whether all govern- 
 ment is to be at an end, and every Irish interest left at the 
 mercy of ignorant men, driven by their own want to follow a 
 path for their own purposes, once taught to them, to further the 
 mere political ends of ambitious leaders. Real patriotism would, 
 for the present at least, shelve every other topic of public interest 
 but the one, all pressing one, Is mob law to rule ? — Is all legal 
 right to succumb at the dictation of a desperate peasantry used 
 as instruments by a dishonest tenantry ? Are the horrors of 
 another year's famine to be made more horrible by a present 
 wanton waste of food, by a depression of every energy which 
 could act in its mitigation, by a course of violent outrage which 
 shall steel the hearts of the charitable against a people who so 
 rashly induce the very evils the consequences of which must fall 
 upon themselves ? 
 
 Let the tradesmen of every town look to it — the owners of 
 every species of property ; all who would be saved from the 
 supremacy of a mob tyranny, invading every right and destroy- 
 ing the very base of every interest on which men rely for the
 
 1 849 IRELAND 259 
 
 security of their possessions, the safety of their very lives. I 
 admit at once that the law of 'land tenure' may need improve- 
 ment, that it has been made an instrument of tyranny ; I admit 
 that want is driving many to crime ; still this cannot for one 
 moment justify any connivance at those deeds of violence which 
 now prevail. All order is endangered, all law is defied. If the 
 Government is to contend against this outbreak with no local 
 aid given for the good of the commonweal ; if the power of the 
 executive is to be hampered and hindered by the cowardice of 
 those whose position demands that they should firmly assist it ; 
 if the priesthood choose to look on with arms folded and mute 
 tongues ; if magistrates choose this season of common danger 
 to show their sense of offence against the Government by adding 
 their share of indecorous discontent, and giving none or a mere 
 cold service to the State ; if the press is still to keep irritating 
 old sores, and giving out daily new causes of irritation, it is clear 
 what the issue must be — force must meet force. There will be 
 a cost of life dreadful to contemplate, and that, too, at a cost to 
 every acre of Irish property which will lead to one common 
 ruin. But the law will prevail ; the Irish will be saved even 
 from themselves. The very men who now connive at or en- 
 courage lawlessness will be the most suffering of its victims ; to 
 their own ruin will be added the shame of having, under the 
 false plea of patriotism, been the betrayers of that ignorant, hard- 
 driven class whose bad habits they made worse, whose prejudices 
 they fostered into hate, whom, starving from scarcity, they yet 
 taught to make still more scarce all means of obtaining bread — 
 whom they irritated into rebellion, and then left them to meet 
 all its awful consequences. Let those who now sneer at the 
 evil of evasion of debt to the landlord look to it ; repudiation is 
 a very catching disorder ; there are few debtors who do not look 
 on creditors as oppressive in their claims. Anarchy will heed 
 figures on red ruled paper- quite as little as it heeds a bailiff's 
 process. 
 
 The Condition of the West of Ireland. 
 
 June 27, 1850. 
 I, Sir, hold Ireland to be a hardly separable part of the 
 British empire, a part we could only lose with pain and with
 
 260 THE LETTERS OF S. C. O. July 18 
 
 detriment : I believe it to be a part that, once separated from us, 
 would itself at once lose every element of sound social existence. 
 As an Englishman, I am opposed to the evil I find here, as I 
 should be opposed to it in my own more immediate county ; 
 I would contend against oppression here as I would there. So 
 far as I am able, I would expose everything in the shape of 
 wilful, illegal ill-treatment, which affects the poor as a class 
 here, as I would expose, and have exposed, the same treatment 
 at home. 
 
 July 1 8, 1850. 
 
 In passing through the different wards, &c, of the Ballina 
 workhouse, I observed the initials ' S. G.' painted, or branded, as 
 the case might be, on all the various articles of furniture, linen 
 of the beds, &c. The explanation given to me was that some 
 time last year a seizure was made for debt of the whole work- 
 house furniture, and a peremptory sale resorted to ; even the 
 beds under the sick were not spared. It happened that this 
 came to the knowledge of Mr. Samuel Gurney, Sir E. Buxton, 
 I believe, and some other benevolent individuals, who were then 
 on a tour in Ireland. Mr. Gurney, with his friends, and with the 
 aid of some money subscribed by a local proprietor, empowered 
 a gentleman to bid for and buy what was absolutely necessary for 
 the use of the poor creatures, whose condition otherwise would 
 have been wretched in the extreme. This v/as done, and the 
 goods marked as above to save them from a second seizure. 
 They are now, in fact, the property of Mr. Gurney, lent to the 
 guardians. I copied from the doors of the wards in the Castle- 
 bar house a paper pasted on each cf them, with the following 
 declaration printed upon it : — ' Contents. Charles Malley, Jan. 9, 
 1850.' The said Charles Malley, I understand, is a contractor, 
 who has put in a seizure of the whole property of the work- 
 house, as well to secure himself as, I should suppose, to keep 
 others from doing the same. There are sheriffs' officers in 
 possession in every house of this union. It is called a friendly 
 transaction, and I dare say is so — to such shifts are these unions 
 driven. 
 
 And now, Sir, bear with me for a while, that I may call your 
 attention to what is to me a most painful subject — the moral
 
 1850 IRELAND 261 
 
 treatment of the dying, and the outrage to decency shewn in 
 the absence of all respect for the dead. I think I must in this 
 tour have walked some miles of ward ground between rows of 
 sick and dying people. I have never in one instance seen any — 
 the least — attempt to administer comfort to the dying beyond 
 the usual attention to their physical wants. I am well aware 
 that the priests are said to be most diligent in administering 
 ' the extreme rites ' whenever called on to do so ; and I believe 
 few adults die, if any, in a workhouse without these rites being 
 administered, unless their deaths are so sudden as to make it 
 impossible. I do not deny that the adult trained in the Catholic 
 faith may, after these rites, be ready, without a desire for more 
 of earthly assistance, ' to turn his face to the wall ' and wait his 
 end in all the peace to his soul he desires. But, it is sad to see 
 many hundreds of children lying dying ; two, three, four in a 
 bed ; the dead from time to time weeded out that other living 
 ones on their way to death may be planted in the vacant space. 
 To see this, and to see from day to day, as one travels up and 
 down these lanes, hedged with decaying infancy, no means 
 taken to cheer these little pilgrims in their sad path, is, to me in 
 a Christian country, a fearful reproach on humanity. 
 
 Smileless and tearless as they lie, I still believe that all trace 
 of childhood's spirit cannot be obliterated in them ; I think 
 kind words and kind offices, such as all know the sick child to 
 value, might be afforded to some at least of these vast numbers. 
 That mild but holy chivalry which led a Sellon and her band to 
 go forth last year at Plymouth to face cholera at its worst 
 in its worst scenes, that she and hers might cheer, at least, those 
 they could not otherwise aid, would find in the wards of Irish 
 workhouses a field in which it might reap abundantly that holy 
 laurel, which is its only— its deferred — but its sure reward. 
 
 Far be it from me, however, to wish to see imported into 
 Catholic scenes of distress— for there are very few Protestants 
 in these places — a band of earnest people who would proselytise 
 whilst they ministered to the sick. No ; I desire to see Catholic 
 women — Catholic mothers, who know what children are — giving 
 themselves to a work which no priesthood could do so well ; 
 the very numbers now in these houses defy the power of the
 
 262 THE LETTERS OE S. C. O. July iS 
 
 priests appointed to them. I know not but that they do their 
 best ; bui the work must beat them in its amount. 
 
 It is, Sir, difficult to make the English believe that the 
 thousands who die in these unions, in the houses, and on out- 
 relief, are buried with no religious rites whatever : the dead-cart 
 takes sometimes every morning for weeks its burden to the 
 burying ground if it is at any distance ; certain paupers go with 
 it to just put the coffins in the pits as they are dug, cover them, 
 and leave them. Where there are burying grounds attached to 
 the houses, they are carried out and put in the ground the day 
 after they die with no form whatever. I have not yet seen one 
 of these grounds that had any one mark or sign about it of the 
 purpose to which it is dedicated ; though I am told they are 
 consecrated. One large walled-in ground, in which, to my 
 knowledge, there cannot have been less than 2,000 interred 
 within the last three years, has a crop (I think of flax) now 
 growing on that part of it to which the spades of the coffin 
 planters have not yet reached ; this bit of agricultural practice 
 may not be on consecrated soil ; all I know is, that it is within 
 the walls of the so-called burying ground, and the dead-planted 
 ground is fast approaching the border of the agriculturist. Some 
 have no walls at all, no mark capable of pointing out to a 
 stranger their boundary. I cannot wonder at the horror the 
 peasantry have of these grounds ; how they will resort to any 
 practicable scheme to get their dead away, that they may 
 smuggle them into some of the old abbey or church grounds. 
 
 I was with my friend one afternoon, looking at the ruins of 
 the old abbey at Ballina ; hearing some noise, I looked in the 
 direction from which it came, and saw two women crouched 
 under an old tree, at their feet two coffins ; four boys in the 
 workhouse dress, with the long spades of the country, scratching 
 at a grave into which they were going to put the coffins. I 
 returned in the evening and found they had just put them some 
 six or eight inches beneath the soil, a few loose stones above 
 them. On looking further about the abbey ground, which 
 seems to be the public receptacle of all the filth of the Ballina 
 public, I found a quantity of coffin wood, tops, sides, &c, which 
 evidently could not ever have been long under ground ; it was
 
 1 3 so IRELAND 263 
 
 deal, and not the least mouldered. A man who lives close by 
 explained to us that so full is the ground, that often when a 
 fresh corpse is buried they have to knock off the coffin head and 
 sides from one that has been lately buried, that the new comer 
 may be the more easily forced down upon the present occupant. 
 The coffin wood we saw was the result. This abbey ground is 
 one of the most public parts of Ballina. The two pauper coffins 
 were being put in by the pauper boys at a time of day when 
 everyone was about. It turned out that the buried were two 
 children from a neighbouring auxiliary house — one six months, 
 the other ten months old ; one certainly had not been dead 
 twenty hours ; the women were the mothers. The thing was 
 against orders, I found, not as to the method of interment, but 
 as to the place. 
 
 I cannot but think that if there was one more element want- 
 ing in aid of the thoroughly demoralising effect of the present 
 crowding of the workhouses in these unions, that element exists 
 in this lowering of the feeling of the people towards their dead. 
 For the sake of common decency, the burial grounds of the 
 paupers — i.e. of nearly a third of the population — should be 
 walled in, should have some outward and visible token of what 
 they are ; should be kept with some respect to the fact that they 
 are sown with the bodies of those who must rise from them to 
 be on a level with all, wherever, however, buried. Decent walls 
 and gates — a stone cross in the centre of the ground — the ground 
 kept free from other use — this would not cost much, and would, 
 I am satisfied, gratify thousands. 
 
 I say it with regret, but 1 say that which is true, when I 
 declare the tone of but too many of those above the peasant 
 class to be of a nature, as towards them, most hard, unfeeling,, 
 and in the worst possible taste. Many a time have I been 
 struck with the fact that, as regards the suffering of the poor, 
 the regret felt is, that it is discovered, not that it exists. There 
 is no term which can be applied to lower the character of a 
 human being that is not for ever used towards the peasantry ; 
 they arc called idle, liars, cunning, and ignorant. Be it so-. 
 Have not half, yes, more than half, of the proprietors of estates 
 in the West owed their power of involving themselves to obtain
 
 264 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 18 
 
 the position they coveted to the high rents paid to them directly 
 or indirectly for conacre — that parent of idleness ? If lying and 
 cunning are, which I deny, so generally characteristic of the 
 peasantry, I must say that I think they have had no little 
 temptation to become deceptive ; it was the unanimous testi- 
 mony to me of all impartial persons, who have had much to do 
 of late years in the employment of the peasantry — that the diffi- 
 culty in getting them to work at task work arose from their 
 incredulity that they would be paid the sum agreed on when the 
 work was done, they were so accustomed to being overreached 
 by those who had in other days been their employers. I think, 
 too, the reports to Parliament of the exposures made on the 
 relief works are enough to convince any one that cunning and 
 falsehood, as means of obtaining benefit, are not qualities, in the 
 distressed parts of Ireland, confined to the peasant class. 
 
 With what a microscopic eye is every action of every Act 
 scanned which pinches the higher orders ; the magnifying 
 power, on the other hand, is applied in the case of their de- 
 pendants to everything which tends to help them ; the eyes of 
 their superiors are very blind to what hurts them. Tens of 
 thousands of the peasant or tenant class have been driven from 
 their homes, and forced to sell their property when the market 
 was so gorged with the species of property they had to sell, that 
 their potato pots, spinning wheels, stools, beds, &c, might have 
 been had for not one fiftieth part of their value ; the potato rot 
 had made them bankrupts ; the landlord or middleman creditor 
 was inexorable ; what had he to do with the state of the market 
 for the things they had to sell ? On the other hand, that excel- 
 lent measure, ' the Encumbered Estates Bill,' gives creditors 
 power over landlords ; and now hark to the cry, ' It is gross 
 confiscation to sell our property when the market is so full of 
 landed property for sale ; you are driving men of our order to 
 madness, to suicide.' And have no peasants been driven to 
 death and madness because their creditors were inexorable ? 
 And who were those creditors ? 
 
 Could one-tenth part of those horrors I have described (not 
 a fifth of what I know) have occurred if the guardians had 
 properly visited their houses and entered in the proper book the
 
 1850 IRELAND 265 
 
 answers to the questions there printed ? For instance — Ques- 
 tion 1. (Report Book of Visiting Committee.) ' Is the work- 
 house, with its wards, offices, yards, and appurtenances, clean 
 and well ventilated in every part ? If not, state the defect and 
 omission.' Q. 2. ' Do the adult inmates of the workhouse of all 
 classes appear clean in their persons . . . ? ' What says the 
 board at Limerick, at Gort, at Clifden ? What say the guar- 
 dians of Ballinasloe, where in one yard, as confessed by the 
 master, the men, 140 in number, breaking stones, had been for 
 nine days— when I called attention to the fact — without power 
 to get one drop of water to zvash with or drink : what say these 
 guardians to the above questions ? 
 
 ' To the workhouse ! to the workhouse ! ' is the cry from the 
 lips of the well-dressed in answer to prayers for help from the 
 lips of the ragged. If vagrancy is a nuisance and illegal, work- 
 house accommodation a legalised charity, is it not a burden at 
 the door of the classes who bid the miserable go to the work- 
 house that they themselves should go and see that justice is 
 done within it ? For a political or polemical purpose the highest 
 will stoop to speak kindly, coaxingly, to the lowest, worst clad 
 instrument they may seek to enlist ; the workhouse, where the 
 hungry are said to be fed and the naked ought to be clothed, to 
 this the guardians will crowd, to meddle with its finance and 
 influence the contracts ; but in nine cases out of ten they will 
 shirk in any way they can the admission business, and when the 
 poor are admitted leave all care of them to a low-paid narrow 
 staff of overworked officers, often chosen chiefly for what is 
 called their ' tightness ' — i.e. their want of sympathy. 
 
 Now, Sir, I myself see only one remedy for this state of 
 things : no Acts of Parliament, no official inspection, can im- 
 prove the ' tone' of the higher towards the lowest order in this 
 part of Ireland : but railroads will do it. Again and again 
 was it wrung from my travelling companion's lips, ' I would not 
 for anything a foreigner should see these things.' I agree with 
 him ; but I do want the English of all classes to see and hear 
 for themselves, what no power of description can bring home to 
 them. Whatever the railway may do for the commerce of 
 Ireland, it will have the effect of bringing public opinion to bear
 
 266 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 1 8 
 
 heavily on the state of society in its western districts. Multiply 
 the number of travellers, and you will multiply the number of 
 those who will regard with equal pain and indignation the things 
 they will see. It will soon then be felt that one of the first 
 steps to induce the English or the Irish, from other happier 
 districts, to invest their capital in commerce or in agriculture 
 as owners of factories, or tenants, or purchasers of farms, in the 
 West, will be to show a disposition towards the employed similar 
 to what they have been used to. Englishmen would require 
 some time to get over the fear of peasantry so treated. 
 
 The placing overburdened estates in the hands of unbur- 
 dened possessors will do much, for the new race will hardly fall 
 at once into the follies of the old ; it will also clear the land of 
 the present real despots, that race whose name is Legion, who, 
 whether as agents or money-lenders, or both, have acquired all 
 the influence of the properties they have bled, with none of the 
 responsibility. I do not know that they should be blamed ; 
 they have only acted in their known vocation. Still, order and 
 humanity will gain when a different style of men administer the 
 laws and manage the properties of these districts. 
 
 Some few miles from Clifden our eyes were gladdened by 
 coming suddenly amidst some beautiful scenery on a large space 
 of ground under very high and clean cultivation ; it sloped to 
 the road, and had as background a comfortable-looking, clean, 
 English house with neat lawns, &c, in front. A great many 
 women and men were hard at work, looking clean, well clad, 
 and happy, and working with great activity. Really I could 
 have believed myself anywhere but where I was. This was part 
 of the estate purchased by Mr. Ellis, a member of the Society 
 of Friends ; he has settled here with his family, is farming 
 extensively, and doing all the good in every way he can. 
 Nothing could exceed the kindness with which he received us, 
 and gave me all the information I sought of him. He seems to 
 have settled here with the one view — that of doing good; he 
 does not expect much, if any, present gain from his farming 
 operations, but he is full of hope. He says the men work well 
 and cheerfully ; their labour is at first quite unskilled, but they 
 quickly improve ; he now finds them very honest and trust-
 
 1850 IRELAND 267 
 
 worthy. He believes that with kindness, firmness, and fair 
 dealing they maybe made excellent labourers. Neither himself 
 nor Mrs. Ellis repented their venture upon this wild spot ; they 
 have established schools, &c, and she evidently works with him, 
 heart and soul, in the good cause in which he has embarked ; 
 from my heart I can say — May God bless them in it, for it is a 
 gallant attempt at a noble end. It was like water to thirsty 
 men to meet in such a spot one whose countenance was as 
 characteristic of the benevolent nature of the man as was all 
 about him in character with the neatness and precision of the 
 sect to which he belongs. 
 
 August 31, 1851. 
 
 The late murder in the Queen's County, in Ireland, has very 
 naturally horrified afresh that portion of the public of the United 
 Kingdom which is not, as yet, quite callous to the oft-repeated 
 tale of Irish social disorganisation. I have again and again 
 given my opinion of these assassinations ; no man can view 
 them in a graver light than I do ; but they are no matters of 
 surprise to me ; they are in my eye a not unnatural result of the 
 social condition of the Irish people. I am not now going to 
 enter on the many features of that social condition which, 
 familiar as I am with them, have led me to regard these agrarian 
 murders as the direct effects of causes likely to lead to them. I 
 will now, however, with your permission, unfold a picture, true, 
 and yet surpassing all fiction in its horror, which, I think, will 
 show a page in Ireland's present history as instructive as dis- 
 graceful. My story is beyond all cavil true ; no salaried inspec- 
 tor of any department, interested in the suppression of truth, 
 could touch one hair of this monster tale of cruelty. 
 
 On the estate of the Marquis of Lansdowne, in Kerry, there 
 lived a few months ago a man and his wife, Michael and Judith 
 Donoghue ; they lived in the house of one Casey ; an order has 
 gone forth on this estate (a common order in Ireland ; you 
 published one in your columns about a year ago), that no tenant 
 is to admit any lodger into his house ; this was a general order : 
 it appears, however, that sometimes special orders are given, 
 having regard to particular individuals. The Donoghues had a 
 nephew, one Denis Shea ; this boy had no father living ; he had
 
 268 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 31 
 
 lived with a grandmother, who had been turned out of her hold- 
 ing on account of harbouring him. Denis Shea was tivelve years 
 of age, a child of decidedly dishonest habits. Orders were given 
 by the driver of the estate that this child should not be har- 
 boured upon it. This young Cain, thus branded and prosecuted, 
 being a thief — he had stolen a shilling, a hen, and done many 
 other such crimes as a neglected twelve-year old famishing 
 child will do — wandered about ; one night he came to his aunt 
 Donoghue's, who lodged with Casey ; he had the hen with 
 him. 
 
 Casey told his lodgers not 'to allow him in the house,' as the 
 agent's driver had given orders about it. The woman, the child's 
 aunt, took up a pike, or pitchfork, and struck him doivn with it ; 
 the child was crying at the time. The man Donoghue, his 
 uncle, with a cord, tied the child's hands behind his back. The 
 poor child, after a while, crawls or staggers to the door of one 
 Sullivan, and tried to get in there ; the maid of Sullivan called 
 Donoghue to take him away ; this he did, but he afterwards 
 returned, his hands still tied behind his back. Donoghue had 
 already beaten him severely. The child seeks refuge in other 
 cabins, but is pursued by his character — he tvas so bad a boy, 
 the fear of the agent and driver — all ivere forbidden to shelter 
 him. He is brought back by some neighbours in the night to 
 Casey's, where his uncle and aunt lived ; the said neighbours try 
 to force the sinking child in upon his relatives ; there is a 
 struggle at the door ; the child was heard asking some one to 
 put him upright. In the morning there is blood on the threshold 
 — the child is stiff, dead ; a corpse with its arms tied ; around it 
 every mark of a last fierce struggle for shelter — food — the com- 
 monest rights of humanity. 
 
 The Donoghues were tried at the late Kerry assizes : it was 
 morally a clear case of murder ; but, as it was said, or believed, 
 that these Donoghues acted not in malice to the child, but under 
 a sort of sense of self-preservation — that they felt to admit him 
 was to become wanderers themselves, they were indicted for 
 manslaughter, and found guilty. And now, Sir, read the judge's 
 address to them on passing sentence. I know not who that 
 judge was, but his feeling docs him honour. His tears, his holy
 
 1 85 1 IRELAND 269 
 
 indignation, ermine him more to my eye than if he sat on the 
 seat of the highest earthly honour. 
 
 Not quite a year ago I published in your columns the awful 
 death of one Denis Kerin, the child who fell dead from hunger 
 on that death march from Ennistymon workhouse to Miltown 
 Malbay, which at the time attached all the infamy they deserved 
 to the parties concerned in the cruel work. The Government 
 had an inquiry, and held some one to bail in the matter ; but, for 
 all I have ever heard, no one ever yet was punished for the 
 deed. This was a cause in which officials were to blame : had 
 the Donoghues been Poor Law officials, or guardians, it would 
 not have surprised me if Denis Shea had been quietly buried 
 and quickly forgotten. 
 
 I know very well all that will be urged to wipe out this foul 
 blot on the history of the day. A child twelve years old is cross, 
 steals, and is starving ; he is a nuisance ; all lodgers are for- 
 bidden — but this little creature is to be specially vermin-stamped ; 
 to harbour him is forbidden on that penalty which only gives 
 life or the chance of keeping it in an Irish workhouse in the 
 west. His grandmother became houseless because she housed 
 this infantine Barabbas ; thieves — adult rogues— are sometimes 
 hard up for a meal ; this creature was watched as Irishmen in 
 debt watch a bailiff; he could not now by thieving beat hunger ; 
 he seizes a hen — his grandmother's — takes it to his aunt's ; he 
 could hardly have eaten it raw : he probably hoped to barter it 
 for a meal. She is only a lodger, one of the forbidden class ; 
 her landlord bids her drive off this small, and weak, but, of all 
 invaders, the most forbidden. She does so, does it savagely ; no 
 driver could have asked her to do more ; she struck the starveling 
 to the earth, and there he lay bleeding. The crisis of his famine 
 is at hand ; he staggers to another door ; the uncle is sent for to 
 outdo the savage fury of the aunt ; he flogs him, as was proved, 
 most cruelly — binds with a cord the four scarce-skinclad bones 
 which in a cry for mercy were held out as arms. Mercy in the 
 breast of a man doing the behests of a ' driver ' ! He is flogged 
 again and shut out, not even a morsel of food given him. It was 
 a cold night, says one witness. 
 
 Neighbours once more make an effort to get the dying bound
 
 270 THE LETTERS OF S. C. O. Aug. 31 
 
 child beneath the uncle's roof ; he is savagely refused. A few 
 hours after an eye that had never been off him saw him reel 
 from the flagstone of his mother's sister's door ; she, her hus- 
 band, and his landlord were ' retired to rest ' ! He tries to get 
 his hands round from their cords, to press the forehead, to press 
 the eye, as children do who die of famine ; no, his uncle had 
 bound him ; death kindly came and released him. 
 
 If drivers and agents, acting out what is considered sound 
 policy, can thus make men and women into brutes, whose 
 blood becomes so frozen that they can whip and knock down, 
 bind and leave to death, a child of twelve — cne to whom by 
 nature their hearts must have warmed — if permission to hold a 
 poor lodging is price enough to purchase such Herod quality, 
 are we to wonder that there is a price at which men can be 
 hired to kill a landlord with the pistol in open day ; and that 
 they who look on, knowing it is a landlord, will not lift a finger 
 to arrest the assassin ? Can class hate be more successfully 
 fostered than by the modern system of wholesale depopulation ? 
 
 Let me be understood : I have ever held that the landlord has 
 in law the right to evict : but I hold there is a power that should 
 temper the use of law, which is above it. These landlords in 
 general know very well that the evicted, if destitute, have a right 
 to support in the workhouse, under proper regulations. Now, 
 the eviction law is read literally, the Poor Law interpreted most 
 arbitrarily. To lodge a stranger may be a thing to be forbidden, 
 and no wrong be done ; but when the peasantry know what they 
 must expect in the workhouse — when they know that once off 
 the land is only one step from being put under it, they will cling 
 to land as life ; they will see their own flesh and blood die, rather 
 than risk the tenure of their own hovel. 
 
 After what I have seen, and from what I know, of Irish 
 workhouses, I can easily believe that to escape the workhouse 
 there have been many of these Shea cases ; but I know enough 
 of these Irish peasants to feel convinced that every such deed 
 done in self-preservation adds fuel to the hardly smothered fire 
 which will from time to time burn forth in agrarian murders. 
 The last few years have put the finishing stroke to the degrada- 
 tion of the peasantry ; they with one mind arc set on one object
 
 1851 IRELAND 271 
 
 — to leave a country that seems to them one in which the 
 struggle for life is too severe for that poor amount of life it can 
 ever obtain. 
 
 It is, alas ! but too true — to compass one proselyte to any 
 one religious brotherhood there is no land in which more energy 
 is developed. To oppose Orange to Green, to uphold this or 
 that polemical flag, Irishmen will meet in thousands and throw 
 themselves into sectarian or political strife with a seeming self- 
 devotion almost heroic. To claim justice for the people — 
 liberty of conscience for the people — freedom of thought and 
 word for the people — these are cries which will assemble title- 
 capped clouds of agitators. In the meantime, the people are 
 passing away— across the sea or beneath the earth ; the people 
 want, not bread — they don't dream of such a luxury — but a 
 pennyworth a day of coarse raw Indian meal. They find it 
 denied them. They were content to have lived on it in scal- 
 peens ; they are unearthed from these homes — they have not 
 even the fox's privilege. By the time Irish patriotism or English 
 policy has gilded Ireland's hourglass the sand will be run out. 
 
 The following speaks of the sure and certain hope after absolution. 
 As shooting at the Queen has been stopped by flogging, why not try the 
 same remedy for the outbreak of murderous assaults which marks the 
 discussion of the agrarian question in Ireland ? 
 
 Irish Executions. 
 
 April 20, 1854. 
 
 I did not need the late disgusting exhibition at the exe- 
 cution of the Bateson murderers to satisfy me that hanging 
 for agrarian murders in Ireland is a mere farce. The class from 
 which the assassins are chosen is one that regards death as the 
 risk they freely encounter in such business. They no more look 
 on being hung for carrying out their law upon an agent or land- 
 lord as an ignominious end than they regard the death of a 
 soldier in action in that light. The popular idea is, that their 
 confession to the priest after sentence, and his absolution, give 
 them their scaffold courage. It may work to this end, but my 
 own belief is that these men in reality care very little for religion 
 in any shape whatever, but they take it as it comes to them in 
 gaol, just as they take the rest of the rules and customs of the
 
 272 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 19 
 
 place ; a priest or parson is a regular character in every flash 
 gaol song. Hanging would lose a part of its accepted character 
 in the eyes of these creatures, had not the criminal the attend- 
 ance of one of these gentlemen to patter with him, &c. 
 
 I have never seen but one way of dealing with these ' Riband- 
 men : ' — don't hang the murderers, but spare no legitimate 
 means to detect them ; try them by special juries in Dublin, of 
 half Catholics, half Protestants ; if found guilty, sentence them 
 to three several severe floggings with the cat on a triangle, 
 erected at the spot of the murder, at intervals of six months 
 between each ; within three months after the last flogging trans- 
 port them for life to a penal settlement. 
 
 No religious consolation will blunt the effect of the ' cat,' 
 especially when the dose is to be repeated. It is one thing to 
 steel the mind to one moment's pain — it is another to give it 
 courage under some ten minutes' flagellation, with the certainty 
 of its repetition. Absolution from the Romanist, or such hope 
 as I have known crammed into the Protestant murderer by his 
 pastor, may make a villain brave under the drop — I doubt its 
 effect at the triangles. A man being flogged is a very different 
 hero from a man being hung. Let the thing be tried, and my 
 belief is Ireland would soon lose this stain on her character. 
 
 An appeal for the Duchess of Marlborough's Fund. S. G. O.'s pro- 
 phecy as to good administration was not altogether fulfilled. 
 
 December 19, 1S79. 
 
 I have read with great satisfaction the letter of the Duchess 
 of Marlborough in your yesterday's paper. I have with plea- 
 sure sent her a contribution towards the fund she proposes to 
 promote. 
 
 In the two years — now a long time since — in which famine 
 and cholera had produced an amount of suffering and distress 
 in Ireland which could hardly be surpassed, I — the readers of 
 the 'Times' had, perhaps, painful experience of the fact — 
 occupied for some months a considerable space in its columns, 
 giving the result of personal inquiry into the condition of the 
 peasantry over a large part— the most afflicted part— of that 
 unhappy country. In that inquiry I not only_had the kind
 
 1 879 IRELAND 273 
 
 support of the then Lord Lieutenant, but also letters to use as I 
 might think fit from some of the highest and most respected of 
 the Roman Catholic Church authorities. I met with a good 
 deal of kind assistance from almost every local authority with 
 whom I came in contact. In my many published letters I 
 endeavoured to give a true and impartial narrative of what my 
 own eyes had seen, my own ears had heard ; but no pen power 
 could really work out, to fully exhibit, a true picture of the 
 awful condition in which the friend who accompanied me the 
 second time found many thousands of the peasantry from the 
 effects of famine. In what I saw on the first occasion of the 
 work of cholera it was simply the work of a visitation of a well- 
 known disease, coming upon a low-fed, ill-housed population. 
 It killed its thousands, as it will always kill under such circum- 
 stances. I must say here, that considering the appalling nature 
 of this death-dealing visitation, the officials in every department 
 did all that they had the means of doing to save life ; but the 
 means were necessarily limited, and the very nature of the work 
 to be done made it difficult to obtain all the agency required ; 
 it was, to me, not surprising that the loss of life was so great, for 
 certainly at that time, if not at the present, under the best of 
 conditions, we have not yet discovered any really effective treat- 
 ment of a disease which in a few hours will prostrate the strongest, 
 and with death-blast sweep off the face of the earth those who 
 are weak. 
 
 From my experience of the work of famine, I am satisfied 
 the time to save is that which first threatens famishing. As I 
 saw it, I am satisfied no amount of food, or clothing, or shelter, 
 could have saved the large majority of those who died within 
 and without the gigantic workhouses ; scanty food, of a low 
 supporting nature at best, had become more scarce, the consti- 
 tution was undermined ; so to speak, the animal had become 
 deadened ; its life flickers in its flame from want of all that could 
 give it support ; the swelled ankles, the patchy hair on the head, 
 told the tale to any close observer that food had come too late. 
 The patience with which this was endured was to me a fearful 
 symptom, for it betrayed the fact that all mental energy had 
 succumbed under physical depression. 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 20 
 
 How far the causes which then led to this state of things may 
 now exist I am not able to say. The Duchess of Marlborough 
 may well from her position be held as a trustworthy authority in 
 the matter, and that position appears to me all the guarantee 
 the public needs to secure that what is given to her fund will 
 be prudently expended. I therefore hope that her appeal may 
 meet with all success, but I am satisfied that the good she can 
 do will in the main depend on the speed with which she can 
 commence it. 
 
 Peace may arrest the horrors of war. Pestilence has its 
 course to run, departs as it came at its own time ; having 
 gathered its dead, it leaves the living unscathed. Famine has 
 no limit so long as there are the famishing, and when at last 
 restrained within some bounds, the dead may be counted, but 
 the hunger-wounded are many of them, for life, but partly 
 healed. The great end, then, at which the charitable should 
 aim is to meet the enemy at the first threatening, not to wait 
 until the awful horrors of starvation have become appeals for 
 compassion on the largest scale, but at the same time defiant of 
 all that compassion can really effect. The Government as such 
 will, I have no fear, do its duty. Had there been a poor law 
 including the road to Jericho, I don't think the good Samaritan 
 would have jogged on his way to send out a relieving officer. 
 
 On Mr. Herbert Gladstone's pilot balloon of Home Rule at Leeds. 
 The Home Rule manifesto was issued November 21, 1885. 
 
 December 20, 1885. 
 
 In my poor opinion, and in that I am sure of every man 
 possessed of common sense who takes a real interest in the 
 welldoing of Ireland, the sending out the programme for Home 
 Rule in that unhappy country with a complexion of an autho- 
 rity at once to be equivocally disclaimed is one of the most 
 deplorable of all political artifices which this nation has ever 
 known. 
 
 It clearly was of the nature of a party pilot balloon, set afloat 
 on the political atmosphere to test the currents which some such 
 measure would have to encounter ; whence, by whom this strange 
 dangerous movement has originated may yet be made clear.
 
 i88s IRELAND 275 
 
 Its effect may well be to paralyse still further the arm of the law 
 in its defence of the lives of those who are doomed to murder on 
 agrarian grounds. 
 
 Is there any one member of any existing party who can really 
 doubt that the power which has given Mr. Parnell his Parlia- 
 mentary force is simply derived from the fact that he is regarded 
 as the pioneer of the party which is to give the land where it is 
 now rented ? Conceive for one moment this so-called Home 
 Rule in force on the lines which have been so prominently pro- 
 claimed and but equivocally disclaimed ; the action of the 
 magistrates and police to be governed by this new authority : 
 what would be the result ? It must follow that boycotting and 
 moonlight raids and murder must be met with decisive action, 
 or, failing this, that the actors in this direction must be tempted 
 to ordinary loyalty to the law of property by some ultra 
 measures, which would go to confiscate that property to gain 
 their temporary abstention from outrage. 
 
 Is it likely — nay, is it possible — that an executive which has 
 gained its power by the support of lawlessness would go to work 
 to destroy the scaffolding by which it was raised ? Is it not 
 most probable that, failing to do this, the powers which have 
 gone to raise this party to the position of rulers, once convinced 
 that they have made a rod for themselves, will now become 
 more than ever lawless, and with some reason on their side, for 
 who was it who taught them the lesson that by defiance of law, 
 they could become owners where they are renters or at best rent 
 on their own terms ? 
 
 A warning to Mr. Gladstone, whom S. G. O. does not name. 
 
 January 12, 1886. 
 
 Admitting that the two great parties of the State are in the 
 dilemma in which Mr. Parnell's tactics have placed them, one in 
 which they are now forced to grapple with the question of Home 
 Rule, and assuming that this will necessitate some action from 
 the one party or the other, or from a temporary coalition on the 
 part of both, to arrive at a practical solution of this important 
 question, is it not as well to consider how far, if this solution can 
 be arrived at after some fashion which will go far to meet Mr. 
 
 T 2
 
 276 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 12 
 
 Parnell's demands and yet preserve the integrity of the Empire, 
 the material is to be found to carry out any real government of 
 Ireland, let it be called by what name it may ? It necessarily 
 follows that the executive must be one not only largely recruited 
 from Mr. Parnell's adherents, but, being so, that it must have 
 what is called the support of the great body of those Nationalists 
 who have placed him in the position he now occupies. It has, 
 however, been but too readily assumed that a desire for what is 
 called Home Rule was the moving cause which has secured that 
 powerful Parliamentary force of which Mr. Parnell is the com- 
 mander. That he may choose to assume, or affect to assume, 
 this for his own ulterior purposes it is easy to understand. I, 
 however, have no doubt whatever that if he once gains his point, 
 and finds himself, with the following he has secured for Parlia- 
 mentary purposes, placed in a position to carry out Home Rule 
 in any practical form, the very forces which have given him his 
 position will just be those who will confront him in a way to 
 defy all such rule as any civilised community requires to preserve 
 its social and constitutional existence. 
 
 I do not for one moment believe that one-tenth of those who 
 have, under the mask of the cry for Home Rule, supported the 
 Nationalist party regard such change of ruling power in any 
 other light than simply as a means to an end, which with them 
 outweighs all other considerations — one which promises that 
 when those men are in power who have urged them to their law- 
 less warfare against rent they will be able with impunity to push 
 their demand for land rent free. 
 
 Home Rule, with the vast mass of the peasantry, has little 
 other meaning than the rule of those they have lifted into power 
 by the leverage of outrage against all who, being landlords, will 
 not submit to the tyranny which reduces them, as such, to the 
 conditions in regard to ownership which make it profitless to 
 return fair income, dangerous to life if any attempt is made to 
 obtain it. 
 
 The Irish peasantry are of the earth most earthy. They, in 
 their hearts, set land possession above all other feeling ; it is 
 with them an inherited, impulsive force ever in action, one which 
 swallows up all other national or religious sentiment. It is of
 
 1 886 IRELAND 277 
 
 their very nature to cling to the portions of the soil on which 
 they have been born. No owner of any, the largest, estate to 
 which he has succeeded by inheritance, and which he hopes to 
 hand down to his heirs, has a stronger territorial sentiment than 
 Paddy has for the wretched hovel and its few acres of soil, be it 
 good or bad, which he may have rented as his forefathers did, 
 or, it may be, at one time owned. 
 
 We are too apt to forget that to the peasant land-renters of 
 Ireland life has long been one of perennial struggle for the 
 means to sustain it. When the gathering of the English harvest 
 depended in no small degree on the immigration of the Irish 
 peasantry, the assistance they rendered to us was most valuable, 
 as it was a great boon to them. They worked with industry, 
 receiving fair wages, and saved their earnings for their home 
 expenditure. These, with the aid of the then existing conacre 
 system, which afforded to these peasant farmers their cherished 
 food, the potato, enabled them to live the life to which they were 
 born and bred. They were content with the home little better 
 than a hovel, so long as thus homed they could exist. At the 
 time I wrote much in your columns denouncing the condition of 
 the cottages in which English peasants had to live, it was for 
 ever forced upon me that the worst dwelling in their case on 
 which I ever looked was in the case of Hodge a palace compared 
 with the ordinary home of Pat, and yet the latter was quite con- 
 tent it should be so. 
 
 The failure of the potato, the cessation in England of the 
 harvest demand on the Irish, the years of famine and cholera 
 utterly dislocated the economy of Irish peasant life. 
 
 If land, in however small a quantity, the few acres and the 
 pigs, was at any time so much cherished, it became now of the 
 more value, for, small as could be the return from it to support 
 life at all, it was the all. Now came the inability to pay rent 
 followed at once by the reckless system of eviction, which cast 
 into the gigantic workhouses those over whose heads the roof- 
 tree had been broken. 
 
 When I re-peruse the statements I published in your columns 
 of what I saw in the many miles I travelled in Ireland more than 
 thirty years ago ; when I had, from day to day, to inspect the
 
 27 8 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 12 
 
 workhouses containing thousands under their roofs of this race 
 thus pauperised, hopeless, if disease spared them, ever again to 
 find a home, I felt satisfied that thus was sown the seed of a dis- 
 affection one day to bear bitter fruit, and so I have lived to see 
 it come to pass. 
 
 Pat is by nature a strangely emotional being ; his passions 
 are but too easily excited, when so but little under control. By 
 the force of circumstances he has become dependent on land 
 occupation to live at all. He is just the instrument ready made 
 for the hand of those who, for ulterior purposes, would enlist him 
 in that wide conspiracy which attracts him with the hope that, 
 as pressure by outrage and murder led to the Act which laid 
 down terms of present rent, more of the same pressure would 
 still further reduce it, or even make land free to the present 
 tenants. Thus inoculated with the virus of a disaffection to 
 which he is but too much disposed, he is taught, under the thin 
 cloak of the patriotism which would cast off Imperial rule, to 
 believe that Home Rule would further the most extreme of 
 those views which offer to him free occupation of land. Hence 
 the well-organised system of outrage, that rule by terrorism 
 which now shakes the whole social fabric, and makes the lives of 
 those compelled to live in the disturbed districts an existence of 
 continued fearful apprehension. 
 
 Of all conceivable forms of wickedness no one is more 
 flagrant than the building up a political party by pandering to 
 the lawless passions of those from whom it is to derive its force : 
 in every such case there will be a fearful Nemesis. To obtain 
 the power to rule by fostering lawlessness is to prepare for the 
 rulers a time when their own destruction shall be the fruit 
 of the spirit they evoked to obtain authority. That the 
 so-called National representatives are heavily subsidised from 
 America is not denied. This being so, an ignorant peasantry 
 will give this foreign aid a complexion leading them to believe 
 that actual force as well as money will, if required to sustain 
 the party their own action has placed in the position to threaten 
 the Imperial Government, be as readily afforded. 
 
 Let it be supposed that Mr. Parnell by some means so far 
 carries out his programme of Home Rule that with his followers
 
 1 836 IRELAND 279 
 
 he is placed in a position of authority under it, in what position 
 will he stand in reference to the land question ? Can he suppose 
 that by any possible exercise of authority or persuasion he will 
 be able to meet the demands which will be made upon him by 
 the National League short of confiscation ? He can hardly 
 entertain the idea that a home Government would entertain a 
 project so wild as this. If short of this he endeavours to procure 
 the enactment of another Land Act, can he really believe that 
 it would be accepted, that any possible revaluation of the land 
 for the determination of its rental would appease the appetite 
 for land, on their own terms, which is now the object of all that 
 movement which has placed him in his present powerful posi- 
 tion ? If the rental is to be readjusted, not swept away, to be 
 recovered when due, who can doubt but that, as at present, it 
 could only be done by legal measures, such measures enforced 
 by police action ? Our common sense must surely teach us 
 that police put in action by a home Government of Nationalist 
 complexion is, if conceivable at all, likely to have but one 
 end — i.e. open rebellion ; the betrayed would rise against the 
 betrayers. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that conspiracy against rent is no 
 new thing. I can well speak to the fact that Lord Clarendon 
 foresaw it, and it was a great cause of uneasiness to him. It is 
 quite impossible for any one who has made Irish affairs a study 
 for many years, as I have done — much opportunity afforded me 
 to do so — to underrate the importance of the present crisis. It 
 is easy on paper to theorise on the value of conciliation or 
 coercion in this or that direction ; it is difficult to conciliate 
 where all is for ever in action to aggravate, as it is to coerce 
 where rebellion takes that passive form which, many headed and 
 many handed, so works that in its nature and extended action 
 it can only be met in detail, and that rarely to any good 
 purpose. 
 
 The present crisis is one which should put aside the weapons 
 of mere party action and intrigue ; it calls for true patriotism 
 outside all mere party feeling. The highest interests of the 
 whole Empire are at stake. It is no season for personal or 
 political ambition on the part of leaders, it is one in which all of
 
 28o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 30 
 
 true statesmanship which can be obtained from the wisest of all 
 parties is called for. It will be little short of treason to the 
 Throne if it is to be met in any other spirit. 
 
 A warning against Mr. Gladstone's Bill, especially with regard to the 
 judges. 
 
 April 30, 1886. 
 
 ' Under the peculiar circumstances of Ireland, we cannot forget that 
 some of these judges, by no fault of their own, have been placed in 
 relations more or less uneasy with popular influences, and with what, 
 under the new Constitution, will in all probability be the dominating 
 influence in the country. We cannot overlook the peculiarities of 
 Irish history in framing the provisions of this Bill, and we therefore 
 propose, both with regard to the judges now holding office and with 
 regard to other persons who, in what they deemed loyal service to 
 the Empire, have been concerned in the conduct and administration 
 of the criminal law in Ireland, that her Majesty may, not lightly or 
 wholesale, but if she should see good cause on any particular occa- 
 sion, by Order in Council, antedate the pensions of these particular 
 persons.' — Extract from Mr. Gladstone 's Speech. 
 
 Of all the strange propositions in connection with any legis- 
 lative action to be found in history, I can hardly believe one can 
 be discovered more extraordinary than the above, as taken from 
 the speech of Mr. Gladstone in introducing a measure for the 
 future government of Ireland. 
 
 Is it really come to this ? Is it to be held that, in the event 
 of any great popular movement in the direction of an open and 
 persistent breach of criminal existing law, the judges who are 
 appointed in their several circuits to try the offenders accused of 
 such breach, are to act under a clear warning that in the exercise 
 of this their office they must bear in mind that popular crime 
 is to receive judicial indulgence ; that where the position of such 
 judges is uneasy from the dominating influence of illegality, 
 justice is to be tempered, not with mercy, but with the dread of 
 the offence just dealing may give to the Queen in Council, hold- 
 ing over their heads not wholesale pensionate eviction from 
 office, but a particular decision in any one case where it may be 
 held that due regard has not been paid to this dominant influ- 
 ence ? And, Sir, we are also to further learn that a similar 
 treatment is to be held over other persons holding office. Does
 
 1 886 IRELAND 281 
 
 this mean the muzzling and blinding of the police and Crown 
 lawyers, lest in the execution of their offices they do not duly 
 bow to popular disorder ? 
 
 I am at that advanced age which enables me to look back on 
 a long series of popular movements, which at the time aroused 
 the action of very large bodies of men, to procure the alteration 
 in existing laws in a direction which they demanded as an act 
 of justice to their class or interest — this as well in Ireland as in 
 England ; I have seen many a legal change brought about by 
 such popular movements. I cannot, however, call to mind a 
 single instance in which, when outrage on person or property 
 was committed in connection with such movements and the 
 criminals put upon trial, it was urged on the judges and other 
 officials, at the peril of uneasiness in their office, to be lenient in 
 the carrying out of the law, in that the crimes committed could 
 be more or less affiliated on a popular movement. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone tells us, in all probability under the new Con- 
 stitution there will be a dominating influence making the seats 
 of judges and other officials uneasy, more or less. I wish he 
 had explained in what shape this dominating power will appear. 
 Is it to have a ^^z'-religious complexion, one creed seeking to 
 dominate over another ; or, on another hand, is it to be that of 
 tenancy against landownership ? It is possible Mr. Gladstone 
 may foresee a league between the two — a land-seizing company, 
 with powerful clerical directors. 
 
 It has been stated that some of the judges have of late 
 executed their office at the peril of their lives. It may be true ; 
 I can easily conceive it to be so. Let me assume that some 
 one of these judges who have been so threatened had been 
 assassinated, the assassins seized, and put on their trial, it being 
 proved that they were members of the Land League. I feel 
 yet assured that even in such a case there is not one judge on 
 the bench who would swerve a hair's breadth from a strict line 
 of duty because he had to adjudicate in a case in which it might 
 be attributed to him that he must be more or less prejudiced 
 against the prisoners. lie would have had proof that the 
 judicial seat was subject to uneasiness from powerful domi- 
 nating influences, but he would scorn to make it easier by any
 
 282 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 30, 1886 
 
 the least departure from his clear duty. If he sentenced the 
 prisoners on conviction to death, is it believable it would be 
 under the risk of an Order in Council to antedate his pension, 
 because, overlooking the peculiarities of Irish history, the popular 
 and dominating influences which for ever arise in that history, 
 he had not made due allowance for them ?
 
 283 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 WARS. 
 
 In these days of worship of United Germany, the contempt S. G. O. 
 expressed towards Prussia for her conduct in the Danish war savours 
 of the antique. 
 
 The Danish Wounded. 
 
 February 23, 1864. 
 
 I trust the appeal of Lord Clanricarde in favour of the 
 victims of the outrageous conduct of Prussia and Austria will be 
 met as it deserves to be. England may be powerless to give 
 the strong help of an armed alliance to the Dane in the day of 
 his weakness ; but the silver and gold to find comforts for the 
 sick and wounded of his army, these we have to give : let us 
 freely give them. 
 
 It is a work which appeals to the English nation at large. 
 It sets aside the hair-splitting of cold, crafty, diplomatic action. 
 It sets before us mangled brave men, bereaved and afflicted 
 women and children, the mourning and the wailing in soldiers' 
 homes ; this, the work of those who call that a just war which, 
 on unjust false pretence, enlists the whole strength and hate of 
 two so-called great nations against one very small one. 
 
 It is said, and with a good deal of truth, that Lord Palmerston 
 is the impersonation of English pluck ; that whenever it comes 
 to a question of English feeling, stirred by the contemplation of 
 tyranny in any quarter, however powerful, his is the voice that 
 utters for England what Englishmen would have uttered. In 
 his place in Parliament he has spoken the English sense of the 
 disgraceful conduct of Germany in this war. He did this in 
 language powerful as true ; the representatives of the nation 
 cheered him. 
 
 Doubtless, Sir, it is prudent, but it is yet very hard, for
 
 284 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 23, 1864 
 
 Englishmen to be only indignant spectators when two powerful 
 strange mastiffs have gone out of their way to bully and mangle 
 one little dog of a small but very brave breed. It is the more 
 so when we know that these great hairy bullies have only been 
 driven to their cowardly work by the snarling, at their own 
 heels, of a limited pack of very small dogs belonging to their 
 own kennel ; that they have been barked and snarled out of 
 their own yard to go and thus overweight and mangle the weak, 
 for a purpose which, in its real end, they hate, and know, even 
 if they loved it ever so much, they cannot carry out. If, at 
 present, we can only treat these German Powers with the con- 
 tempt those deserve who, under false pretence, seek glory in 
 wanton, cowardly aggression, leaving them to the defence of 
 those special pleaders who as yet have only shown how power- 
 less the ablest advocacy is to gloss over or pervert plain principles 
 of justice, we may yet safely look to a time, not far distant, 
 when their iniquity abroad shall meet with retribution in the 
 chastisement they will receive at the hands of their own 'peoples ' 
 at home. 
 
 As we cannot subsidise with arms, let us at once offer the 
 free gift of our material sympathy — show to the Danes we do 
 from our hearts pity, though we cannot, with a nation's strength, 
 defend or avenge them. At any time I trust we would have 
 done this ; with all the power a nation could put forth, to 
 show a natural welcome to the Danish bride of our Prince, we 
 welcomed her to her English home. Let our hearts now warm 
 to the call for generous aid to the wounded and the sick of the 
 army of her land, the orphans and the widows of the soldiers of 
 her own first home land. 
 
 Contempt for Prussia in 1864 did not prevent S. G. O. from wishing 
 success to German arms in 1870. 
 
 A Plea for the Wounded. 
 
 August 17, 1870. 
 
 I have read with no little interest the letters which have 
 appeared in your journal referring to various plans of rendering 
 aid ' to the wounded ' in the present war of France and Prussia. 
 
 As you are well aware, I do not write as one who has not
 
 Aug. 17, 1870 WARS 285 
 
 had some experience of the state of things which arises from the 
 hacking, hewing, and mutilation of human beings by the instru- 
 ments of warfare, aggravated by a want of preparation in those 
 departments which are entrusted with the task of trying to 
 repair the work of such engines on the said human beings. 
 
 Of all the crimes it is possible for the ruling power or powers 
 of a nation to commit, there can scarcely be conceived a greater 
 than that which wantonly hurries its army into war. If anything, 
 however, can make that crime more odious in the sight of 
 God and man, it is the doing this without previous sufficient 
 preparation to secure the care necessary to be taken of ' the 
 wounded.' 
 
 View it as we may, war, after all, is a mere trial of the power 
 of the parties engaged — the one to slay or wound as many as 
 possible of the army of the other. To effect this — to slay or 
 mutilate — recourse is had to every weapon or appliance science 
 can invent. The sweet days of peace are now employed by 
 nation after nation in the work of seeking out and manufacturing 
 anything and everything which promises to give to the rulers of 
 the earth the best means of destroying and maiming each other's 
 armies whenever it may please them to fall foul of each other 
 on any just or unjust pretext. 
 
 We are now told that in this hour of wholesale carnage, 
 when modern arms of precision, &c, are being exercised on 
 living human flesh — an hour for which both these great nations 
 have been for years preparing — a cry has arisen that, however 
 fitted for the field, there is not fitting preparation for the 
 ' hospitals.' I can hardly bring myself to believe that this can 
 be true ; my own eyes proved to me that the French in the 
 East had a hospital service which seemed to me thoroughly well 
 appointed, at least in the earlier days of their Crimean work. 
 During that long incubation which has at last hatched this war 
 with Prussia, it to me appears inconceivable that so much thought 
 was given to weapons, and so little to those who might fall 
 wounded in their use. Nor can I conceive that Prussia, watchful 
 and armed to watch, waiting the challenge, prepared to accept 
 it, had not taken lint and linen and all the necessaries of hospital 
 routine, worked at the rear of the field that made it, into considera-
 
 286 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 17 
 
 tion. In our generation I did not conceive it possible that any 
 army could be held fit for action in the field when the cost had 
 not been counted of preparation for its wounded as far as is 
 possible. 
 
 I am as yet credulous as to the fact that these two great 
 nations have gone to this bloody war in that cold-blooded 
 inhumanity which would thus use up on the field their soldiers, 
 with insufficient means to at least try and save what mutilated 
 life may remain to them when left useless on the field of battle, 
 wound-bound there. I am not, however, without the firmest 
 belief that there is a demand for every possible exertion we, as 
 a Christian nation, can make to render all the aid in our power 
 to alleviate the sufferings of the wounded of both armies. The 
 real fact is, it is next to impossible that in a war of this magni- 
 tude either the necessary staff of surgeons and hospital servants 
 could be found, or that all the most ordinary appliances they 
 require could be at hand. No nation on earth could keep up a 
 corps of skilled surgeons, practised nurses, and hospital orderlies 
 equal to meet the real necessities of these modern wholesale 
 mutilations. The wounds of modern warfare come in so many 
 a ghastly form, require such an amount of skilled manipulation 
 aided by hospital materiel of an amount, if procurable, yet so 
 difficult of transport in all the exigencies of ' advance ' or 
 ' retreat,' that it must ever follow that to lives lost on the field, 
 purposely destroyed, must be added a very large proportion of 
 those gleaned yet alive who might have been saved, however 
 maimed for life, were it possible to use all the means modern 
 science and appliance, modern nurse devotion, could afford. 
 
 Many a time did I feel when walking those miles of mangled 
 men in the hospitals at Scutari, what a blessed thing it would be 
 if mankind's rulers, who get up wars so coolly for their own 
 purposes, were forced to see with their own eyes, and feel with 
 their every sense, what work was made behind the field of battle 
 as well as what was the work of the field itself as seen in its 
 dead. To me one of the most degrading features of our day is 
 the cool way in which, in all nations, the soldier seems to be 
 held as a mere article for war use and consumption. We read 
 of ' actions ' in which tens of thousands are sent with bullet-
 
 1870 WARS 287 
 
 haste to eternity ; in which, when the dead pits have been rilled, 
 there yet remain thousands on thousands in all the torment of 
 the wounded — many to die before means for moving them can be 
 found, to be moved at all only with aggravation of their present 
 fever and agony. But why seek to paint the scene ? There 
 is triumph in the camp of the victors, every evil and revengeful 
 passion in that of the beaten ; the groans of the wounded are 
 as a chorus very faint, like powder-smell — part of the thing. 
 
 But to matters more practical. I have great doubt whether 
 either side in this war would accept volunteer aid from us with 
 the army — i.e. accompanying its hospital staff. I can hardly, 
 however, conceive that France or Prussia would reject aid in 
 hospital materiel offered on purely Christian grounds. I believe 
 the readiest aid we could afford, and, perhaps, that which we 
 could obtain the quickest, would be the sending out rag, lint, 
 linen in any shape, rollers or bandages. I would say, scrape lint 
 if you like at your leisure, and keep on sending it ; but lose no 
 time in sending all you can get at once ; make rollers, many- 
 tailed, three-cornered bandages, and such things as you can, to 
 send out when made ; but at once send out rag and linen, &c, 
 as you can get it. Hearts will find hands to make the most of 
 it ; delay for better things, when anything is of value, is folly. 
 It is wonderful how many a thing we think necessary for the 
 wounded can, however, be done without, or some rough substitute 
 found on the spot ; but sponges and the ordinary appliances for 
 stanching and dressing wounds, for these there is no sufficient 
 substitute. By this post I shall send my small contribution to 
 the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War. 
 All my own sympathies are strongly with the Prussians, but I 
 feel the wounded are cut off from the strife ; they should be to 
 us simply objects of compassion, subjects for mercy. I earnestly 
 hope this my view may be proved to be that of our nation at 
 large. 
 
 War and Humanity. 
 
 September 1, 1S70. 
 Yes, Sir, too much public attention cannot be drawn to the 
 real nature of that bloody scene now enacting on the Continent. 
 Men may differ as to the future destination of the souls, the tens
 
 288 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Sept. i 
 
 of thousands souls, driven into eternity by arms of precision. 
 We who have to preach the teaching of Christ may well feel 
 soul-shaken ourselves when we speak of heaven or hell, as our 
 commission demands we should speak. Two Christian nations 
 in the nineteenth century of Christianity dealing in such scientific 
 butchery that, from day to day, we have to read of thousands of 
 dead and dying, and the dying often in agony to which death is 
 the to-be-desired respite : the killed sent to eternity in a moment 
 of excited, death-daring determination to use the killing or maim- 
 ing arm in their hands to slay those against whom, personally, 
 they have no one feeling of hate but that begotten of war's 
 demand on the soldier's duty to his nation — his courage to do 
 it. There they lie, stiff or writhing as it may be ; husbands, 
 fathers, who thought of home before they went to death, where 
 physical agony permits, as they lie, only lacerated, only tortured, 
 only fevered to the verge of madness, the heart, yet true as the 
 compass to its home north, turning to the home point, to thus 
 add to what the poor frame suffers the sense of what the heart 
 then home-sickened can alone feel. Let those deny it who may 
 choose to do so, I know that the great heart wound, after all, in 
 these cases, is the sense in the despairing wounded of what their 
 suffering and their death will cause to many a loved heart at 
 home, to one heart often whose life they believe, and with truth, 
 to be knit to their own. 
 
 I don't wonder at the refusal of the French to allow any 
 such aid to their foe, as permitting the French wounded and 
 Prussian wounded in Prussian custody to be taken into Belgium, 
 that they might have better chance of being saved alive or better 
 dealt with, to die with less want of care. The more of your 
 enemy that die the greater injury to his ' Fatherland ; ' are they 
 not his children ? Living, they might live to his use ; no, in this 
 modern atrocity of war feeling, the mowed crop, dried to death, 
 is the gain to the mower ; it cripples the future hour of peace 
 when it comes ; it weakens the national muscle ; we may fight 
 now, shake hands when peace is proclaimed at last, but there is 
 a grim satisfaction in the fact each did its best to let peace come 
 on the other after every the worst fruit of war. 
 
 So it goes forth, ' Huddle our wounded and your own as you
 
 1870 WARS 289 
 
 may, into every conceivable substitute for a hospital ; let the 
 atmosphere proclaim the fact, as passing breezes catch up the 
 wound-tainted air ; take our own " braves " to help this process, 
 the more you have of them the more they will cost you — us 
 nothing ; are they not crippled ? Useless to us, for they are like 
 burst guns, spiked cannon ; worse, they eat, drink ; they bleed, 
 and you must do something with them, they help to diminish 
 your " means ; " above all, they may help to work a pestilence ! ' 
 All this, Sir, in the day when one Church knows, as she says, 
 infallibly, the mind of God and Christ. All Churches believe in 
 humanity as a principle of religion, and preach hell or heaven, 
 as man dies prepared and in charity. 
 
 What can England do ? As yet, I see nothing more than 
 look on — indignant, but compassionate. As regards the war 
 itself, we all have our own views of what we may individually 
 consider the conduct of those who brought it about ; but in the 
 name of our common humanity, not to say only in that of our 
 common Christianity, let us put aside all feeling as to the cause 
 of the awful carnage, and throw all our energies into the work of 
 endeavouring to alleviate some of its horrors. The dead we 
 cannot recall ; their existence is where living man cannot reach — 
 in the unseen land of our common future ; we can but hope for 
 the mercy there is only One can now show them. The yet alive, 
 to be found in bruised and battered tenements of mortality, cry 
 aloud to us. The cry is not one of tongues : come it in French 
 or Prussian language, it is the human voice ; let us heed it. 
 
 I know something now of the working of the National Society 
 in Aid of the Sick and Wounded. Able, active men, thoroughly 
 versed in the ways of the world— a great point — aided by the 
 best professional advice, are straining every possible means, not 
 only to raise funds, money, but to secure the utmost amount of 
 things most pressingly wanted in war hospitals : they have skilled 
 and authorised agents with both armies. I know it to be their 
 wish that all that England can do to help them shall be received 
 as aid, simply, to the sick and wounded, without any reference to 
 nationality. They have already published, as I am advised they 
 will yet again publish, the plainest directions to those who would 
 help them how best to do so. As one now grown old, and little 
 VOL. I. U
 
 ■■ 9 o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 27 
 
 capable of work of any kind, who yet has in a long life received 
 at the hands of the public much support, much encouragement, 
 in his endeavours to aid humanity, I once more plead to that 
 public to meet the views of this society — nay, more, every society 
 which can show it can execute what it undertakes, by giving 
 money, by promoting systematically the provision of those special 
 matters which are now so cruelly needed for the French and 
 Prussian sick and wounded. 
 
 The Red Cross. 
 
 September 27, 1870. 
 It seems to me advisable that public attention should be 
 called once more to the real nature of the work Colonel Lindsay 
 and his colleagues have undertaken, and are with such single- 
 minded devotion now carrying out. They have voluntarily 
 undertaken a trust and a responsibility for which there is no 
 precedent, involving work the full amount and nature of which 
 no one could have foreseen. The object they have in view is to 
 accept whatever amount of money the charity of the land will 
 place in their hands in aid of the sick and wounded of both 
 sides in the present Continental war. A sum fast approaching 
 200,000/. has come into their hands, and the stream of contribu- 
 tions shows little abatement. 
 
 They undertook to receive and forward to the war hospitals 
 any amount of the material such hospitals required. Hundreds 
 of tons, in varying quantities, of many descriptions, sorted and 
 unsorted, have been sent them from all parts of the kingdom, 
 until all the warehouse room they could procure has been literally 
 choked. There is also a very large amount of material, but a 
 small quantity of which can be thus acquired, yet most necessary, 
 which they have out of their funds to purchase as they best 
 can. 
 
 They have to seek out, salary, and despatch a staff of surgeons 
 and personal material to the different scenes of suffering. They 
 have to establish foreign agencies to secure the proper despatch 
 to their destination of all their hospital stores. They have to 
 keep up, often under the greatest difficulty, communication with 
 the authorities abroad, through whose sanction and local aid
 
 1 87© WARS 291 
 
 they can alone expect to do any real work, or know where it 
 can best be done. 
 
 When they have ascertained what is most needed, where, 
 and how they can convey it through all the difficulties and 
 dangers which the state of war produces to hinder traffic of any 
 nature, there is yet the work to be done of sorting the mass of 
 material in their possession, so as to meet the requisitions from 
 different scenes of operation for particular species of it ; there is 
 the work of securing the transit of the goods from this country 
 across the Channel, so as to have them delivered as speedily as 
 possible at the separate agencies to which they are directed. 
 
 Consignees of specie to a large amount, they have to go into 
 the market, to use all a trader's caution to make good investment 
 where they have to purchase. Consignees of goods, they have to 
 seek out the best and cheapest methods of despatch ; to regulate 
 the streams of miscellaneous goods, so that the amount required 
 from each of any particular kind should as quickly as possible 
 flow to where the call is most urgent for it. 
 
 Just in proportion to England's zeal and charitable warmth, 
 affording specie and material, is the zeal, as genuine and honest, 
 to advise the Committee by letter of various opinions the writers 
 entertain as to the best mode of action in dealing with these 
 gifts. Charity at this white heat becomes sadly inconvenient in 
 the matter of correspondence. Where so many are at work 
 there is a daily craving for knowledge as to how they can best 
 work, a craving still to do more ; even to go to any spot, any- 
 where to do it. The utmost untiring work of hands seems to 
 thousands of excited hearts no valve of escape for that yearning 
 spirit, which, reading the daily blood-stained page of the war, is 
 impatient under the seeming necessity to work only at home. 
 The mere work of acknowledging each day the daily consign- 
 ments of money or goods is a task itself of no little magnitude ; 
 add to this the task of answering the letters of the vast host who 
 write ' to be informed,' ' to suggest,' ' to advise ; ' add to this 
 again that host of communications which commercial instinct 
 produces wherever a large sum is to be disbursed in ' purchase,' 
 and where thousands of dealers seek to turn some of it into 
 their own market — my surprise is that Colonel Lindsay and his 
 
 u 2
 
 292 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 27 
 
 colleagues, the Ladies' Committee, the whole staff in St. Martin's 
 Place, have borne the heat and burden of a work such as no 
 department with the most practised staff and greatest space for 
 its operations have ever had to encounter. 
 
 Now, Sir, what I urge is this — had not these gentlemen been 
 well known as men of ability, of a position in life which proved 
 they could have had none but the purest motives to lead them 
 from the first to undertake what they did, the confidence hitherto 
 so nobly reposed in them never would have been shown. Among 
 them are men who have won honour in war ; some are well 
 known as men of the highest repute in matters of finance, home 
 and foreign ; it is known they have, as medical advisers, some 
 of the highest rank and skill in the profession. None of us out- 
 siders can form any real idea of the hourly call on their adminis- 
 trative power — the perpetual cropping up of fresh calls for work, 
 and of obstacles in the way of its performance day by day. If 
 England's generosity throws on them fresh responsibility, there 
 is the greater call for English forbearance from anything which 
 can distract them in its exercise or add to that labour, which now 
 must be far more than any of them could ever have contem- 
 plated. Let us, then, one and all, not only continue to them 
 that measure of confidence they have nobly earned, but rest 
 content in the belief that they will still deserve its continuance, 
 being ever slow to believe, where shortcoming is in any matter 
 imputed to them, that it has any foundation in their want of 
 will and action to have prevented it. 
 
 It is ever to be borne in mind that, however gratefully help 
 may be received by the French or German hospital administra- 
 tion, the fact that it is at all wanted is more or less a reflection 
 on their own failure to have provided what we offer ; that in the 
 very nature of things there must arise some jealousy on their 
 part if our interference, however really valuable, becomes of a 
 character they may come to think intrusive. There has, I feel 
 well assured, been much the subscribers to this noble fund and 
 the committee may have earnestly desired to see done, which to 
 have attempted might have endangered the power to do what 
 has already been achieved. It must have required no little tact 
 and skilful dealing with the prejudices and tempers, national and
 
 i87o- • WARS 293 
 
 personal, of the authorities, military and medical, to have gained 
 that ground for this Christian work already obtained. Just as it 
 is impossible at this moment to calculate the exact amount of 
 liability in the way of money disbursements, for which the com- 
 mittee have made themselves responsible, so is it altogether 
 impossible to foresee to what extent that liability may yet be 
 increased, or to form any sound judgment when it may altogether 
 cease. 
 
 At the present moment, however great the amount of material 
 at their disposal,- however large the balance at their bankers, day 
 by day proves there is no cessation of requisitions from their 
 foreign staff for that help in specie they are as yet able to meet, 
 in material much of which can only be bought here, for active 
 medical and other staff scarcely to be obtained at any cost, and 
 for materials in store to be despatched to the destination at a 
 very heavy outlay. 
 
 When by God's mercy this awful war has taken its blood- 
 written record into the realms of past history, when its life of 
 strife shall have become as a tale that has been told, when all 
 that have been stricken for death are gone, and those of the 
 wounded who remain, war-stamped but not war-slain, have found 
 again their homes and what there may have been left to them ; 
 when Colonel Lindsay and his corps may at last strike their 
 well-known ensign, I, for one, have no fear but such an amount 
 of self-denying, hard work will be proved to have been done in 
 this cause, such evidence afforded of the thorough honesty and 
 impartiality of every feature of its administration, that England 
 will have good reason to be proud that her people of every class 
 and creed nobly responded to this uplifting of the Red Cross 
 appeal to their sympathy.
 
 294 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 CORN LA WS. 
 
 At the date of the following letter the country was in the thick of the 
 agitation produced by Peel's proposed surrender of the Corn Laws, which 
 were repealed in the Corn Importation Act that received the Royal 
 Assent on June 26, 1846. 
 
 Mr. Bankes and the Corn Laivs. 
 
 February 3, 1S46. 
 ' A great landowner might exist, and even receive large returns from 
 his property, without any tenants at all. By employing bailiffs, who were 
 much cheaper than tenants, he would obtain the same return that he 
 received now.' — Speech of G. Bankes (' Dorset County Chronicle '). 
 
 Of all the odd things, of all the unhappy and unwise things, 
 which the leading exponents of the agricultural mind have given 
 utterance to, surely none have exceeded in oddity and folly the 
 above specimen of reasoning, said to have been spoken on a late 
 occasion by the pet member for Dorsetshire, the self-appointed 
 defender of the ' Coverley ' interest, G. Bankes. How has the 
 learned gentleman arrived at his most sapient conclusion — ' that 
 great landowners may receive large returns from their property, 
 under the new policy, if they will employ bailiffs instead of 
 tenants ' ? How has he arrived at the fact that ' bailiffs are 
 cheaper articles than tenants ' ? To what market are the 
 ' Coverleys ' to carry their samples of bailiff-grown wheat to 
 receive the same for it as they do now ? Are we about to have 
 a ' Bankes on Soils,' to supersede ' Morton,' proving to us some 
 new capabilities, only needing development at the hands of 
 active bailiffs, guided by the known intelligence of great land- 
 owners ? — has he discovered that the landlords could, without 
 any inconvenience, at once provide all the capital that the tenants 
 now invest in the land, and that they might be sure, after paying 
 the salaries of their bailiff staff, to yet make as great a return
 
 1846 CORN LAWS 295 
 
 under the 4?. duty as they have done through their tenants 
 under the late sliding scale ? 
 
 Is he prepared to prove that the great landowners are ready 
 to take upon themselves to pay the poor's-rates on their estates, 
 to themselves employ all the poor ? If so, I trust he is prepared 
 to defend them against the storm of public contempt to which 
 they would at once be subject, if, when making these great re- 
 turns, they dared to leave their peasantry to struggle for bread 
 and shelter as they now do. Has he joined the League? Would 
 Bright himself have ever proposed to turn Peel's ' proud aristo- 
 cracy ' into a race of corn dealers, who, having exterminated the 
 race of tenants, are to appear themselves on the market stage,. 
 the vendors of the produce of their own industry ? Is it for this, 
 that Richmond and his colleagues of the great Agricultural 
 Society have been so assiduous in their study of fat and lean 
 kine, in their attention to all the details of ploughing, dunging,, 
 dibbling, &c. ? Can it be true that they have given their most 
 serious consideration to the important question, how they can 
 become useful members of society, and have resolved to quit the- 
 Court and the course for the market and the barn ? Or is it, 
 Sir, that, looking at the tenant farmers as on the brink of ruin, 
 and having a certain pricking of conscience in the matter of that 
 ruin, after hurling this argument at the Premier, and at the same 
 time by its force on the fears of the tenantry having brought 
 them to a proper state of humility, the ' Coverleys ' propose 
 offering the bailiffdoms of their respective farms to their present 
 tenant occupants, taking the live and dead stock at a valuation,, 
 paying for the money yet sunk in the land, and then giving a 
 fair salary to them to farm as agents ? If so, I have no hesita- 
 tion in saying that three-fourths of the tenant farmers of Mr. 
 Bankes's own county will jump at the offer : let them invest 
 their capital on mortgages at 4 per cent, (there would soon be 
 plenty to be had), and give them their present houses and a very 
 moderate salary, and they would be too happy to change the 
 uncertain and harassing business of a tenant for the light, easy, 
 and interesting pursuit of a farming bailiff. 
 
 But what is to become of the political importance of landed 
 property ? — how arc voters to be provided when tenants have
 
 296 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 3 
 
 been exterminated ? I fear some noisy orator of the League 
 has corrupted this Bond Street Boanerges, and that he actually 
 contemplates the fabrication of county votes. If so, let me re- 
 mind him that he must deduct the expense of the 40s. rent- 
 charges from the great return he expects under his new system, 
 unless he purposes to qualify the bailiffs, under bonds of sale, 
 if discharged from their office. 
 
 What, too, is to become of market-table popularity ? Cheer- 
 ing of a hundred-bailiff-power would be but a very faint echo of 
 the grateful noise which in past years has ever greeted the 
 popular protection member from his applauding constituents. 
 Really, Sir, I cannot fathom the depth of these dicta of the hon. 
 member. He must either be grossly ignorant of the real con- 
 dition of the tenant farmer, and the value to an estate of a 
 tenantry who, paying the full value of their occupations, are 
 content to hold them subject to their landlords' will, relieving 
 him of all the anxiety attached to land cultivation and labour 
 employment ; he must be speaking in jest ; or he must be classed 
 amongst those who in a moment of urgent trial come forward as 
 champions in a cause which, by their utter folly, they injure 
 more than serve. 
 
 I, Sir, rejoice in the plan proposed by Sir R. Peel, and I 
 believe the country generally are well satisfied with it : if the 
 tenant farmers were let alone they would be much less irritated 
 about it than they now arc ; but those who have led them into 
 the mess seem disposed to make it as unpalatable as possible to 
 them. Sooner or later the days of protection must have ended, 
 and surely they ought to rejoice that this measure is propounded 
 by one whose political sagacity they have been so long taught 
 by their landlords to reverence. If ever men had a just claim 
 for compensation, they have it from those to whom, or to whose 
 candidates, they have so long given their votes, on the expressed 
 understanding that the Minister of their landlords was their pro- 
 tecting genius : that he may have deceived the said landlords is 
 their look-out, not that of the tenant farmers. Because the 
 leaders of a great party have blundered, and are blundering, are 
 the voters who gave those leaders their strength to be greeted 
 with such idle implied threats as that the genus farmer is to
 
 1846 CORN LAWS 297 
 
 cease and yield its place to the genus bailiff ? Common justice 
 demands that the loss of the contemplated change should not 
 fall wholly on the tenant, but that the landowner should at once 
 come forward and take his share. As for the senseless agitation 
 against the measure which it is endeavoured to raise, it is utter 
 folly : the nation will have the measure ; the section who are 
 leagued to oppose it have no representatives capable of govern- 
 ing the country ; the leaders of the two great parties in the State 
 are for it ; what can exceed the folly which would rouse all the 
 angry feelings of a bitter strife that can tend to no good ? 
 
 Are the agricultural interest, as represented by the great 
 landowners, in a condition in which it is wise to draw more than 
 ordinary attention to their affairs ? I think not. The measure 
 of the Minister seems to me calculated to better the condition of 
 the labourer ; for I firmly believe the land will be better culti- 
 vated, and every interest connected with it in the end better 
 looked to. I say not but that there may be present loss ; but it 
 is better to bear this than to provoke inquiries which may elicit 
 evidence of the utter neglect, the wanton ill-usage, to which the 
 actual tillers of the land have been exposed in the palmy days 
 of protection. 
 
 Let the landlords, if they choose to do so, abuse Peel to their 
 hearts' content ; let them call that man foolish and rash whom 
 they have so long upheld as absolute wisdom ; the public will 
 make great allowance for men who certainly have much reason 
 to complain ; but the public will not pardon an opposition 
 founded on friendship for the tenant farmer, love for the labourer, 
 in those who have grasped competition rents from the former, 
 and have treated the latter as a nuisance. There are many able, 
 and honourable, and kind landowners, may they now save us 
 from the folly of some of their brethren ! 
 
 The ' adder ' in the following letter was Mr. Disraeli. ' Punch ' had at 
 the time a caricature of Peel as a file being gnawed by the late Lord 
 Beaconsfield ; the idea being suggested in this letter. 
 
 April 14, 1846. 
 
 The debate on the second reading of the Corn Bill, though 
 very dull in itself, may prove very useful to the country. It is
 
 298 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 14 
 
 surely much to be desired, that we should have ample oppor- 
 tunity of studying the characters and acquirements of the party 
 which seems inclined to arrogate to itself the possession of the 
 real confidence of the country. It matters little at the present 
 day what were the colour and age of the particular geese by 
 whose timely hissing a capitol was saved in ancient days ; but 
 if it had been known in those days that these particular geese 
 were to play so important, so patriotic a part, we cannot doubt 
 but that they would have occupied no small share of public 
 attention — their personal appearance and character would now 
 be matters of history. I think, Sir, it was Miss Edgeworth who 
 wrote the story of the ' Barring Out,' in which certain rebellious 
 little boys are represented as shutting themselves in, and exclud- 
 ing their master from the schoolroom, by means of certain laths, 
 they being determined thus to keep their master in the distance 
 until he had given up some point of discipline offensive to them. 
 The commissariat of the rebels had provided buns for food, and- 
 a few pounds of candles to light up their fortress ; they were for 
 some hours very brave, but the hose of a fire engine being in- 
 serted through the ceiling put out their lights, spoiled their buns, 
 wet them through, and forced them, eventually, to capitulate, 
 under a force of circumstances that made them look very foolish 
 and act very humbly towards the triumphant pedagogue. 
 
 Since the Peel school has become a ' free school/ some of his 
 pupils have become very riotous, very disobedient, and very 
 foolish ; they want to bar him out of Downing Street, that they 
 may set up some new master, with less cleverness to expose 
 their duncehood, and less determination to force them to make 
 progress in their legislative lessons ; the laths, and the buns, and 
 the dip-candles of Miss Edgeworth's boys were fully as equal to 
 the exigencies of their warfare as are the obstructions the pro- 
 tectionists can offer to Peel's power ; the support they can afford 
 to themselves without him, the light in which they can work 
 against him ; they talk very big to each other, they threaten 
 very loudly, they first try one of their party's powers to lead 
 them, and then, when he fails, they put forth another ; and, if 
 we are to believe them, the talent they have hitherto displayed 
 is as nothing to the stock they have on hand in concealment.
 
 1846 CORN LAWS 299 
 
 But what, after all, must be the end of the struggle between the 
 political pupils and their master ? The pedagogue in the story- 
 book might have sent for two gardeners, a pickaxe, two ushers, 
 a cane, and a rod, and have at once knocked in the door of the 
 school, and forthwith have caned and birched the little rebels 
 into submission ; but he preferred leaving them a little while, to 
 quarrel amongst themselves, to learn their own weakness and 
 folly, and then to raise the siege by means which would throw 
 ridicule on the whole affair. 
 
 And, Sir, who can doubt but that the present contest will 
 come to an end in a way equally ridiculous ? The adder that 
 gnawed the file, and believed its own blood to be that of its iron 
 antagonist, was not more innocent in its spiteful attempt to 
 injure, more mistaken in its estimation of its powers of injury, 
 than are the leaders of the protectionist party ; spitefully spitting 
 their venom at one so much above them, that it only falls back 
 upon, to foul themselves. They are fast wearing out the 
 patience of the public, who in this country, happily, never sym- 
 pathise with a party whose motives are obviously more personal 
 than political. Are these gentlemen so blind to the expression 
 of public opinion, that they cannot see into how much contempt 
 their present course must inevitably bring the very cause they 
 affect to advocate ? Are the landed proprietors of England so 
 blind to their own interest, as not to perceive that no injury 
 from the Corn Bill itself can do them the harm that the nature 
 of the opposition offered to it is doing them ? Is the whole 
 commerce of this great nation to be impeded, all trade to be 
 suspended, in order that a few chairmen of quarter sessions, a 
 few young noblemen and country squires, may vent their spleen 
 and indignation at what they call the betrayal of their party, by 
 carrying on a useless contest against a majority, their superiors 
 in every single quality on which a safe and wise system of legis- 
 lation depends ? Eclipsed, as the old hack leaders of the 
 Covcrleys have been, by the sudden and earnest co-operation of 
 one hitherto as great at Tattersall's as unknown at St. Stephen's 
 — do they really think that a certain readiness with figures and 
 that bold species of declamation that hides weak reasoning 
 under strong assertion and savage personal attack, can afford
 
 3oo THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 14 
 
 their cause any real abiding aid ? If office could now be won, 
 as a kingdom once was, by the neighing of a horse, Lord George 
 would be perhaps the most likely man in the kingdom to manage 
 such an affair successfully ; but it is drawing rather too largely 
 upon the good sense of the nation to suppose that the reasoning 
 and experience of a Peel are to be put aside to make way on a 
 great political and commercial question for the dicta of one 
 whose faculties have hitherto been devoted to the dealing with 
 the chances of the turf rather than the exigencies of the state. 
 
 We hear a great deal from these gentlemen on the subject 
 of their betrayal : they argue ' Sir Robert accepted our support 
 and thus gained his high position, knowing that we, as a party, 
 would never yield the question of protection ; he, therefore, has 
 now betrayed us, by himself becoming the Minister about to 
 carry a measure of free trade.' Now, let us admit that he did 
 owe his position to the party of which the protectionists are a 
 section ; his defence stands on two grounds. The official re- 
 ports received by the Government on the state of the potato 
 crop in Ireland forced on him the conviction that restriction on 
 the importation of corn must be relaxed. The force of public 
 opinion on the question of free trade in corn convinced him of 
 the difficulty of making the suspension of the import duty a 
 temporary measure ; he therefore saw no alternative, but either 
 to leave the expected famine in Ireland unprovided against, or 
 to bring forward such a measure as that now in progress. It yet 
 remains to be proved whether his fears about Ireland were or 
 were not well founded, and, therefore, whether the present 
 measure, as one of precaution, was not really called for. If he 
 betrayed his party in thus acting, it has been by allowing any 
 force of circumstances whatever to change his policy on a point 
 on which he must have known any change would be most offen- 
 sive to those who had so long and so strongly supported him. 
 We must admit the force of the accusation, and be content to 
 rest his defence on that evil principle, in which, however, he has 
 at least on one memorable occasion been supported by many 
 of his accusers, viz. that circumstances do occasionally occur 
 making that which is in itself morally right politically inexpe- 
 dient : on this rests his justification ; he yielded private friend-
 
 1846 CORN LAWS 301 
 
 ship and old political ties to the more pressing force of public 
 opinion, and fear for the public safety. 
 
 But we are also bound to remember that he is not at this 
 moment, in real fact, the Minister of any party, but rather the 
 Minister of circumstances. He resigned office ; it was found 
 impossible to find any other Minister who could undertake the 
 government ; he returns at the request of his Sovereign, not at 
 the instigation or by the support of any known political party. 
 His betrayal of his old party in making the proposals he did to 
 his Cabinet, if unjustified by the official information he possessed 
 of the condition of Ireland, and the inevitable approach of a 
 time when free trade principles must triumph, cannot, it is true, 
 be excused on the grounds that he is not the Minister of his 
 former party, but of a particular crisis, if he wilfully provoked 
 that crisis himself. The events, then, of the next few months 
 must test, if not his honesty to his party, at least his wisdom in 
 sacrificing it for the general welfare of the country ; they will 
 prove whether he sought to produce a crisis to justify the aban- 
 donment of old principles, or whether the shadow of an inevit- 
 able crisis forced on him considerations productive of that 
 change in opinion which he avows, on which he is acting, and 
 for which he is exposed to a harassing personal opposition from 
 his old friends and supporters not more trying to him than dis- 
 creditable to them. In common justice, let us wait the issue of 
 the next few months before we exalt the wisdom of the country 
 gentlemen so much above that of this great statesman as to 
 brand him with the imputation of ignorance, as well as treachery, 
 on such grounds as those as yet brought against him. 
 
 And now, Sir, permit me to ask, how many of this very 
 party would now have had seats in Parliament had they in their 
 addresses, at the last election, announced that they were pre- 
 pared to vote with the Minister in support of such measures as 
 the Tariff, and the Canada Corn and Maynooth Bills ? They 
 were not pledged to the ultra-protection or ultra-Protestant in- 
 terests on such measures as these ; but did they not obtain their 
 seats from constituencies who would not have returned them 
 unless they had believed them to be trusted on them ? Dared 
 they on the hustings have avowed themselves so pliant as they
 
 302 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 14, 1846 
 
 proved on those measures, and on that ever memorable division 
 on the Factory Bill, which stamped with their sanction the — to 
 me — fearful principle, that that may be politically right which 
 is acknowledged to be morally wrong ? 
 
 If Sir R. Peel has betrayed the agricultural members by his 
 present cpurse, their betrayal to him on former occasions of the 
 constituencies they represented could, I think, as easily be proved. 
 The tenant farmers relied on their members and the landowners 
 who chose them, not on the Minister ; that the 50/. tenant voters 
 have been deceived I know very well, but I look in other quarters 
 than Downing Street for their deceivers. 
 
 The public would have sympathised with any reasonable de- 
 velopment of Miso-Peelism, any reasonable outbreak of Pedo- 
 phobia ; they who so lately loved and so loudly praised him 
 might have been pardoned that amount of angry opposition 
 necessary to thoroughly develop their hatred of him, for his 
 late seeming contempt of them ; but, Sir, Ireland is not to starve, 
 the trade of England is not to come to a stand-still, all legisla- 
 tion is not to be hindered, in order that those who have already 
 exhausted every known source of vituperation should go on 
 hashing up and serving up, again and again, sneers that from 
 use have lost all point, and arguments offensive, because they 
 were weak and have become stale. The Newmarket spring 
 meetings are commencing ; Lord G. Bentinck will prefer his 
 interest in the Jockey Club pasture estate to that of the squires 
 in their less exciting defence of the produce of their arable 
 estates ; quitting the study of blue-books, he will soon be deep 
 in the mysteries of his betting-book ; with him they have, though 
 weak, just escaped death by ridicule ; without him, further 
 opposition will only make their overthrow not less certain, but 
 infinitely more humiliating.
 
 3°3 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 S ANITA TION. 
 
 The late Sir Edwin Chadvvick may be said to have invented sanita- 
 tion about 1845. In him S. G. 0. had a lifelong friend, and of him he 
 was the warmest ally. 
 
 The Metropolitan Sanitary Commissions. 
 
 December 27, 1847. 
 A board is now sitting in London to conduct an inquiry as 
 to the means requisite to improve the health of the metropolis ; 
 it consists of five members who are known to be thoroughly in 
 earnest in the matter, and to possess every capacity likely to 
 ensure a useful result to their labours. They have made their 
 first report ; it is one which will well repay perusal, for it tells a 
 tale which must come home at least to every metropolitan breast. 
 It seems clear that there is every probability that we shall 
 before long be subject to a visit from the cholera, and it is as 
 clear that whilst we have a considerable stock of food, i.e. dirt, for 
 its maintenance and propagation, we are nearly without any rules 
 for its proper, successful medical treatment, we are in a condition 
 to show the utmost hospitality to the dreaded guest ; we can 
 house and feed it after its own heart, and if it was a welcome 
 guest right merry should we be to see it at our Christmas fes- 
 tivities ; but it so happens that this visitor brings death and 
 terror in its train — death which defies the doctor, and terror pre- 
 disposing for that death. I know of but one way in which you 
 can get rid of a visitor who seeks a lodging you are not disposed 
 to offer him — find out what he requires for his comfort and take 
 care that he has it not. If he loves to sleep on a feather bed 
 take care that he has a hard, knotty, workhouse sort of a mat- 
 tress ; if he likes warmth, put a brick or two up the chimney 
 and make it to so smoke that his fire cannot be lighted ; hard
 
 304 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 27 
 
 beer, raisin wine, and the baby in the next room to him, with a 
 few other decided inhospitable hints, will probably cut short his 
 visit. Failing these, you can but try and borrow money of him 
 and you are sure of a speedy departure. 
 
 Now, the Metropolitan Health Commission seem disposed to 
 act on this common sense view of the case ; they have ascer- 
 tained the exact nature of those things which are most inviting 
 to the cholera, the particular localities in which it most loves to 
 take up its abode, the particular class of persons it chiefly loves 
 to embrace. As with typhus so with cholera, the first attraction 
 is a vitiated atmosphere. Both these devourers of human exist- 
 ence flourish best in a climate thoroughly impregnated with the 
 odours of decayed vegetable and animal matter ; a pure air is 
 their destruction ; they wing their flight over the localities 
 which are blessed with the cleanliness which removes to a dis- 
 tance from the abodes of man those decaying matters which are 
 as offensive to every well regulated sense as they are deleterious ; 
 they stop in their course to alight and settle where they find 
 man in close contact with dirt of the worst quality, in quantity 
 sufficient to depress those physical energies on which his health 
 depends. What carrion is to the vulture and the raven, bad 
 drainage and overcrowded dwellings are to typhus and cholera. 
 If, then, we would greet these destroyers of our kind, if we 
 would court their presence, we have only to take care that they 
 find multitudes living in lanes and alleys in which there is no 
 drainage, or in which the drainage is inefficient, where open 
 cesspools and accumulated heaps of a filth unnameable abound ; 
 pack these multitudes together in close unventilated rooms, let 
 the habits of their lives be, as they almost ever will be, in keep- 
 ing with the atmosphere around them, and you have spread the 
 banquet and prepared the lodging which will ensure the advent 
 of typhus at all times ; at this particular time — will in all pro- 
 bability also ensure the visit of cholera. 
 
 Having ascertained thus much of the habits of these plagues, 
 the Commission has pointed out on clear evidence that, like my 
 unwelcome guest, typhus or cholera, in possession, can only be 
 ejected by depriving them of these essentials to their abiding. 
 Loving dirt, we must offer cleanliness ; an air that stinks being
 
 1847 SANITATION 305 
 
 the air they love to breathe, we must banish stink — (I wish I 
 could find a more civilised word, but it is a libel on the word 
 smell to apply to these matters) ; seeking a dwelling in rooms 
 whose walls are painted with a thick coating of smoke and 
 animal exhalation, laid on in combination, we must disturb their 
 rest, by scraping off this inviting paint, and laying on that 
 which is the object of the worst hate of typhus — a coat of quick- 
 lime ; hating ventilation, we must boldly ventilate. Let me add 
 to this stock of commission-found experience, that which I have 
 again and again remarked — that typhus has peculiar notions as 
 to the bed on which it loves to lie and mutter its wild delirium ; it 
 hates clean sheets — it cannot have too many companions in bed 
 with it — it likes to have its bed-fellows sleep unwashed — it 
 loves to see the floor beneath its bed one mass of accumulated 
 woollen and other rags — a head or two of old herrings and a 
 few rabbit-skins add much to its sense of domestic comfort ; I 
 have again and again seen it sulk, rebel, and quit when I have 
 offered to those with whom it has taken up its abode, clean bed- 
 linen ; when I have forced their own bed-linen and furniture into 
 a washing-tub, the water of which has been impregnated with 
 chloride of lime ; I have seen a fair fight between typhus and a 
 clever M.D., in which the latter was getting the worst, put to an 
 end, and typhus forced to yield to chlorine preparations or bark, 
 simply by the removal of about half a barrow load of rags from 
 under the bed. I have again and again seen it driven from a 
 locality by a little pains taken to either lessen the number sleep- 
 ing in one room, or, where that was not possible, the taking steps 
 to ventilate the room. 
 
 That the report of the Sanitary Commission will effect much 
 good in the metropolis I have no doubt, and for once I think we 
 may see the law forward in the prevention of evil, rather than 
 waiting the time when it is forced to aim at its remedy. . I am 
 not sanguine enough to suppose that all that is necessary to save 
 the poorer classes from the liability to cholera under which they 
 lie, can be done before the enemy reaches our shores ; but I feel 
 convinced that the public mind is at last alive to those causes of 
 pestilence which have so long been cherished in the very heart 
 of the metropolis ; that these causes will now be attacked with 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 306 THE LETTERS OF S. C. 0. Dec. 27 
 
 an earnestness and under a direction that will enforce their 
 mitigation to a great extent, and will at last remove them as far 
 as they are capable of removal. 
 
 The real condition of the very poor of the metropolis has 
 now for some years occupied a great deal of public attention, 
 but alas ! has not enlisted any great amount of public sympathy ; 
 myriads have sunk, in misery, ignorance, and want, into graves 
 as unfitted to receive them in death as their abodes were to 
 shelter them in life. The sanitary epicureanism which has sought 
 out with zest every possible condition under which human beings 
 have been forced by poverty to live in close contact with the 
 causes which generate disease — conditions which so familiarise 
 man to the endurance of a life under a worse than piglike 
 aspect, that, like the brute itself, he is heedless of the filth 
 amongst which he dwells — has of late years become rather 
 fashionable and very successful in the object of its search ; even 
 my friend Chadwick must have almost had his appetite for the 
 discovery of these matters destroyed by the very abundance of 
 the feast he has found spread out for his study. Let us, how- 
 ever, be thankful that he has survived these his most useful 
 voyages of discovery. Alas ! Dr. Lynch and other most valu- 
 able men have given their lives, and left their families to poverty, 
 or what nowadays is the same thing — a nation's gratitude — in 
 this task of public benefit. The man who is paid to stand in the 
 ranks and fight his country's enemies, if he dies, is honoured in 
 his death, and a pension is given to his widow ; if he lives, he 
 bears a medal on his breast, and at last himself obtains a 
 pension. A bold, unflinching, liberal professor of divinity, who 
 falters not at the onset of a legion of academic authorities, 
 robed in all the splendour of 'head of house' majesty, armed 
 with all the weapons of antiquated orthodoxy, receives his re- 
 ward from the Liberal Minister in the shape of a mitre. Con- 
 test a county or buy a borough, so that you do it for party's 
 sake, and when your party is in your reward is sure ; black your 
 face, call yourself Ethiopian, be an adept at serving up grimace 
 with the accompaniment of a voice tuned to harmony with other 
 of your brethren who have taken the Ethiop's skin, and the 
 grateful nation will pour thousands at your feet ; come with the
 
 1 847 SANITATION 307 
 
 simple grace of a Jenny Lind, to bewitch with such song as hers, 
 and there is no bound to the amount you may draw from the 
 purse of a British public. The ministering to the nation's pride, 
 the furthering the interests of political party, activity in polemi- 
 cal strife — anything that will startle ; to amuse — be it by means 
 which border on the limits of vulgarity, or which lift us at once 
 to the perception of that which is most refined, so that it is new 
 and startling, John Bull will pay for most liberally. Do as Dr. 
 Lynch and two or three others have done — give up hours, of 
 value to your family, to devote yourself to the task of searching 
 out, that they may be remedied, the causes that slay tens of 
 thousands annually ; do this at the risk of your life ; do it in 
 the teeth of daily contact with everything that can make your 
 every sense revolt ; do it till you have forced on the public the 
 value of your work ; go on, cheered thus far with the prospect of 
 some success, to die of fever taken in that work — and what 
 follows ? A few friends may raise a few pounds for your ruined 
 family, Ministers shall build noble works of sanitary improve- 
 ment on the foundation you have laid, they shall gain the thanks 
 of the existing generation, a grateful record in history — your 
 name shall be forgotten, and your family shall struggle on, less 
 noticed, less assisted, than if by some lucky chance you had 
 been made a supernumerary surgeon to a police force or had 
 been the inventor of some successful ointment for chilblains. 
 
 And now, Sir, one word upon the state in which, should 
 cholera visit these shores, many of our smaller county towns 
 and villages will be found, for I cannot see why life is not as 
 valuable in the provinces as in the metropolis. It is laid down 
 on good authority, that, where the causes which are known to 
 generate typhus exist, there there will be predisposition to 
 cholera, however isolated these localities may be. Are no pre- 
 cautions to be taken with regard to those thousands of villages 
 in which it is but too well known that fevers of low type almost 
 always exist ? in which the inhabitants are in a condition 
 always so physically depressed that they may be said to be in 
 the best possible state for the ravages of this expected plague ? 
 I know it for a fact, that there are many hundred so-called parish 
 houses still existing in the agricultural districts, so crowded, so
 
 308 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 27 
 
 entirely without drainage, or any of the commonest accessories 
 to decency, that the worst cellars of Liverpool could hardly be 
 in a worse state. The back lanes and suburbs of many of 
 our county towns are much in the same condition ; there are 
 hundreds of villages, many, to their shame be it said, on the 
 properties of men whose rank and known wealth should forbid 
 such a disgrace, in which the dwellings of the poor are little 
 better than hovels ; — yes, in these days of attention to animals, 
 it would seem, so that pigs and Devons, breeding ewes and 
 brood mares, are taken care of, it matters little how a labourer is 
 housed, if he has a thing sufficiently of the nature of a house to 
 justify rent being charged for it ; as to any regard for decency, 
 any attention to drainage, this is thought of in very few locali- 
 ties. It is true, certain published researches of Liebig have 
 turned the attention of some proprietors to the policy of erect- 
 ing buildings which favour decency, though for that reason 
 alone they would probably never have been built. 
 
 In towns I have no reason to doubt but that the moment 
 cholera is announced to be in the country, the several corpora- 
 tions will take sufficiently active steps as regards the drainage 
 and other matters which may require attention ; in the villages, 
 where the proprietors or parish officers may chance to dwell in 
 close contact with the poor, there would then be a great white- 
 washing and drain emptying, &c. I have often observed, with 
 regard to typhus, that when no entreaties of the board of 
 guardians could get these matters rectified in villages where the 
 poor were dying one after another, the moment a parish officer's 
 child sickened all one could wish was at once done. There are, 
 Sir, many thousands of labourers dwelling apart from any con- 
 tact with the classes above them ; these are the parties whose 
 lot is the most pitiable at all times, who, in a season of prepara- 
 tion against such an enemy as cholera, deserve the immediate 
 attention of the legislature. Let the union surgeons be at once 
 called on to inspect and report on all parts of their respective 
 districts, in which, from their experience, low fever is often 
 prevalent, or in which they perceive remediable defects in 
 drainage, nr other matters which may be likely to produce it. 
 Let such a report be made at the request and at the expense of
 
 1 847 SANITATION 309 
 
 Government. It is folly to suppose, that men unpaid as they 
 now are would give the time and attention required for the pur- 
 pose, for such a pittance as the boards of guardians would allow 
 for it. Let them be required to state what they consider neces- 
 sary at once to be done as a matter of instant precaution, what 
 in their judgment they consider the best means of permanently 
 amending the sanitary condition of these at present unhealthy 
 spots. I have no hesitation in saying, that the evils reported on 
 would very generally be of a nature admitting of much instant 
 mitigation with very little machinery. A very short ' Act,' with 
 a few very plain clauses, calling on all union, medical, and re- 
 lieving officers, at all times to report the existence of certain 
 clearly specified nuisances to the boards of guardians, or, what 
 would be better, some district sanitary board, making it com- 
 pulsory on the said boards to give the parish officers and parties 
 concerned notice to remove or remedy such nuisances on pain 
 of certain penalties, to be adjudged by two magistrates on good 
 proof of their failure to do so ; charging every union surgeon 
 with the responsibility of sanitary inspection as part of his 
 office, to be paid for in addition to his present salary according 
 to the population of his district ; — this I believe could be easily 
 done, would cost but little, would save many a life, would tend 
 to better the condition of the poor man by securing to him that 
 which he cannot secure for himself — that though he may have 
 to live in poverty it does not follow that he must live subject to 
 causes sure to generate disease. 
 
 Twenty-seven years of sanitation, improved dwellings, and better 
 food had left their mark for good on the labouring classes. Much 
 remained to be done, especially in the enforcement of the provisions of 
 existing Acts. But S. G. O. is glad to note the changes he and his 
 friend Chadwick had done so much to bring about. 
 
 Sanitary Legislation. 
 
 January I, 1874. 
 
 It is indeed a thing much to be desired that legislation on 
 sanitary matters should receive all possible support, for if :lean- 
 liness is next to godliness, to be godly at all is very difficult, 
 where all around is unclean. Those, however, who seem to me
 
 310 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Jan. i 
 
 to be the ablest speakers and writers on sanitary legislation are 
 apt to forget that the real difficulty lies in the direction of the 
 machinery to carry out what the law enacts. 
 
 There can be no shadow of doubt that polluted water does 
 produce typhoid and other disease ; that a very large proportion, 
 especially of the poor, have no other water to drink but that 
 which comes from a polluted source. It is equally true that 
 crowded bedrooms — rooms in which from six to ten people who 
 have small change of body clothing, still smaller of bed clothing, 
 being of all ages and both sexes, working in all weathers for the 
 most part out of doors, therefore for ever damped, and sweating 
 for their bread in the clothes to be thrown on their beds at 
 night, if taken off, must beget the exact atmosphere to produce 
 low physique and to generate rheumatism and other chronic 
 disease. It is not less true that to rear children in houses with 
 damp floors, on which, very short-coated, they are for ever 
 crawling, is an efficient process for the production of cripples in 
 after life. 
 
 It cannot be denied that if there is no latrine accommoda- 
 tion for a cottage, the surface soil around it must be top dressed 
 with fcecal matters, which will be washed into the nearest stream 
 or filtered into the nearest well whenever it rains heavily. If 
 there is such accommodation, but so limited that one latrine is 
 common to some fifteen or sixteen people, and therefore soon 
 becomes, as it were, a well-devised store of poisonous matters 
 filtering through its walls into the ground, from which it again 
 filters into the well or the stream water supply, this is as good a 
 way as human ingenuity could devise for the permanent propa- 
 gation of disease. The slops, &c, of the house are in general 
 thrown just as far away from the path to the door as a woman's 
 arm can ' chuck ' them. As a rule, this is a very short distance 
 indeed. 
 
 Now, Sir, I am thankful to admit that in the last twenty 
 years there has been a great deal of real improvement in the 
 dwellings let to the labouring classes. But I do most unhesi- 
 tatingly assert that, taken on the whole, these dwellings in a 
 very large proportion of our villages, in the great majority of 
 our towns, are in a sanitary point of view utterly disgraceful.
 
 1 874 SA NIT A TION 3 1 1 
 
 As yet, I believe, all which has been done under the present 
 sanitary authorities, if rigidly inquired into, would resolve itseif 
 into a very small compass. I should, indeed, rejoice to see a 
 real independent commission at work investigating how much 
 real work has been done compared with the machinery set to do 
 it and the local noise made by local boards and their staff. 
 
 We are inclined to assume that legislation is the enactment 
 into law of whatever the nation at large holds to require the aid 
 of the law to obtain ; but it is one thing to cry out for remedy 
 against abuse, it is another to apply the remedy. We have 
 local boards of health, with sanitary officers and inspectors of 
 nuisances ; these are easily floated, but when they come into 
 action then, and then only, do we find the difference between 
 machinery with power and the power or the will to work. 
 
 Elected by local influence, that same influence governs their 
 work. There is not only ' wheel within wheel,' but a vis a 
 tergo guiding every wheel from the outside. The elected are 
 no more jobbery proof than those who elect them ; some show 
 of work must be done, and to be done local dealers in labour 
 and material must be preferred ; those who have the most friends 
 on ' the board ' of course get the preference. The ratepayers 
 generally, being the electors, of course, advocate the doing of as 
 little work as can be done. If money is to be spent, the object 
 is to give the local tradesmen the work ; their estimates, their 
 bills, come before ' the board ' — their own child. 
 
 Again, where is there town or village which has not its in- 
 fluential ' magnate ' or ' magnates ' ? The custom of these is the 
 life-blood of this or that, of many shops. Who of the boaid is 
 to ' bell the cat ' which laps so much milk to the good of the 
 local trade ? Who is to look the agent of the Marquis of 
 Barabbas in the face when the inspector of nuisances says a 
 tithe of his cottages are, according to the law, unfit for human 
 habitation ? W T hat member of the board could walk the street 
 in peace after directing notices to be served on the many owners 
 he must meet of dwellings in Stink Alley and Noxmary Court, 
 &c. ? Is not the medical sanitary officer the medical attendant 
 of many of them? Is he not a member of the board? His 
 inspector reports to him that in that court — that alley — the
 
 312 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. I 
 
 water supply is polluted because the latrine supply is non- 
 existent ; as he feelingly looks into the nursery at the measled 
 patients of the owner of Stink Alley, is he to gently hint to 
 Paterfamilias, ' We (the board) have just condemned five of your 
 houses on my certificate ' ? 
 
 It is all very well, Sir, to ask for more legislation ; I am 
 satisfied the wise course is to first see how far present legislation 
 is really carried out. I am of opinion that if existing laws were 
 put in force, gradually, but firmly, with tact if you will, but still 
 with common honesty of purpose, a very great amount of good 
 would be done ; quite as much as we have a right to expect. 
 For where there has been long abuse, violent hasty remedy is 
 apt to fail : an Augean stable can't be cleaned in a day ; broom 
 power and hand training for the work are not to be found to 
 order. 
 
 That the work is sadly needed few have better means 
 of knowing than myself. That it is sadly bungled in the 
 attempt to do it, I have daily experience. But I must live 
 to see local nature ' human,' very different from what I ever 
 yet knew it before I expect to see local dirt swept away by 
 local hands, if in the sweeping there is offence given to local 
 influence. 
 
 What we do want is — independent supervision over the 
 action of ' boards,' to whom public money is lent, to whom is 
 given the power of making rates for the work they order. As it 
 is, they have all the power and all the temptation, to say nothing 
 of compulsion, to undertake works which spend money ' in the 
 place ' in matters of no real sanitary importance ; they are next 
 to powerless to order the expenditure of money by those they 
 fear to offend in those very matters which concern the very lives 
 of the class in whose favour sanitary legislation professes chiefly 
 to act. 
 
 For your edification I enclose a paper showing the condition 
 of a small portion of a town under the sanitary protection of a 
 board of health. It is the printed result of inquiry made by a 
 member of the local board. I could, if I so chose, supplement 
 it with detail of far worse complexion in the same directions, 
 from another portion of the same parish, where the mass of
 
 1 87 SANITATION 313 
 
 the poor have to dwell in a condition utterly disgraceful to 
 humanity ; I could, within a few hours' drive from where I 
 write, show any sanitary authority hundreds of dwellings the 
 construction and surroundings of which are in direct defiance 
 of what the law now demands, and, for all I can see, may go on 
 demanding:.
 
 314 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 26 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREA TMENT. 
 
 The Pentonville Model Prison was completed in* 1842. The Peni- 
 tentiary at Millbank had lasted from 1816 to 1843, when it was reported 
 a failure, and changed to an ordinary prison. The transportation system 
 was near its end. The Cape Colony in 1849 successfully refused to 
 admit convicts, and the Australian colonies shortly after succeeded in 
 their opposition to a system begun in defiance of all reason, and pur- 
 sued in defiance of all experience. The word ■ Maconochising ' was 
 coined by S. G. O. from the name of Captain Maconochie, who devised 
 and superintended the system of ' ticket-of-leave.' 
 
 Prevention better than Cure. 
 
 February 26, 1 847. 
 Scarce a day passes over our heads but we have some fresh 
 evidence afforded us of the utter failure of our present systems 
 for the repression of crime. It is needless to go into the various 
 experiments which have been made with a view to reform as 
 well as punish the criminal ; there is a very general opinion 
 that, in spite of all we have done, crime does increase, punish- 
 ment effects little in the way of deterring from it, no really effi- 
 cient means have yet been discovered to reclaim the criminal. 
 Of one of our penal settlements the public will soon, I fear, 
 have proof that we are fast turning it into a colony which in 
 another age might well have been suspected of being an offshoot 
 from one of the ' cities of the plain.' In other of our depen- 
 dencies we have tainted the whole surface of society by inocu- 
 lating it with a too liberal supply of expiree convicts, of whom I 
 have heard it said it was difficult to say which were the worst, 
 those who were said to have been reformed, or those who laid 
 claim to no such distinction. I, for one, have great doubts 
 whether Pentonville and Parkhurst, with all their penal and
 
 1847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 315 
 
 reformatory machinery, will ever succeed in making out of the 
 raw material of home's worst guilt, juvenile and adult, anything 
 that can be exported to any of our colonies, and not do them 
 serious moral injury. 
 
 I once asked a police officer about a certain young offender, 
 on trial for a petty larceny, whether there was any chance of his 
 being sent to Parkhurst ; his answer was that he believed it 
 was required of them to do ' a pretty goodish felony ' before they 
 were sent there. I believe the qualification for the Pentonville 
 university don't differ very much from that required for Park- 
 hurst public school ; at all events, in both seminaries it is neces- 
 sary that the matriculating process should prove the intended 
 pupil to be a convicted rogue. When Captain Maconochie 
 undertook the moral cleansing of one of our worst penal settle- 
 ments, he asked the Government for a grant of a certain number 
 of instruments of music, a certain weight of music paper, pro- 
 perties for theatrical representations, and rum to make punch 
 with to drink the Queen's health on her birthday ; he also de- 
 sired a complete library of entertaining and useful knowledge, 
 with an assortment of fancy fireworks, and some chaplains. 
 His aim was to humanise and loyalise this colony of beings, 
 sent out as England's blackest criminals, and made still more 
 awfully criminal under the circumstances of their foreign loca- 
 tion. In our attempts to reform, as connected with our female 
 penitentiaries, we act on a somewhat similar principle. To be 
 very young and yet very degraded is the qualification for ad- 
 mission ; we then surround the penitent with everything that 
 can prevent the commission of sin ; we turn on a full flood of 
 moral and religious advice, do all that zealous chaplains, earnest, 
 kind, and judicious matrons, assisted by pious lady assistants, 
 can do, to reform the character, holding out a hope, which we 
 on our parts do our best to fulfil, that, the time of probation 
 past, the penitent shall be sent back to society under circum- 
 stances in which it shall be her own fault if she does not obtain 
 the bread of honest industry. 
 
 I have passed a day with the intelligent chaplain of Park- 
 hurst, going with him through its every department ; I have 
 passed a day in a model prison ; I have looked into the
 
 3 i6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 26 
 
 management of more than one penitentiary ; I have studied 
 the reports of prison inspectors at home, reports on the penal 
 settlements abroad ; I have seen much to admire in the pains 
 taken to reform those whom the law and society must con- 
 demn ; but I have seen no reason to wonder that juvenile 
 crime is on the increase, that the penal settlements are becoming 
 so full, and yet such very hells, that the Government may well 
 hesitate before they send any more transports — I beg their par- 
 don, ' exiles ' — to those settlements. It was said lately at one of 
 the police offices by a young prostitute, ' that the streets could 
 no longer find such as her bare bread, there were so many of 
 them! The supply for the gratification of the lowest vice of 
 the lowest men exceeds the demand in an age in which those 
 who look into these matters will tell you there is a greater 
 demand than ever ! This, too, don't astonish me, even when I 
 have lying before me a catalogue of new churches built in the 
 last twenty years, and a statement of money expended in pro- 
 moting Christian knowledge, Christian education, spoken of in 
 a language of almost boastful triumph, that would lead one to 
 suppose there were none untaught, and but few who had not a 
 seat at a place of Christian worship. 
 
 The Church, Sir, has been very active, her members very 
 liberal of money to aid her in her efforts ; the Nonconformists 
 have been very diligent, and if not so rich in the dead stock of 
 moral and religious advancement, yet daily sending forth their 
 legions of pious and active teachers to try and make head 
 against the growth of evil. As to the Legislature, I dare not 
 venture on the sea of figures which could alone represent the 
 cost and enterprise of the nation's work of attempted reforma- 
 tion of her wicked children — what she has given and lent to 
 aid the schoolmaster at home and abroad, to encourage the 
 building of churches, to aid the law in making its sentence 
 reformatory as well as penal, by Maconochising the convict 
 abroad, and submitting him regardless of all expense to the 
 reformatory discipline of model gaols and penitentiaries at 
 home. Still, Sir, there is the sad fact that the fruit has borne 
 no proportion whatever to the seed sown. The sanitary, the 
 physical, the moral condition of the masses is in just as unsatis-
 
 1847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 317 
 
 factory a state as if the filth, want, and crime of tens of thou- 
 sands of our poorer fellow-creatures had never been made 
 evident. 
 
 We do not let wasps breed in freedom, and then first try to 
 destroy them one by one when they begin to plague us ; we try 
 to keep down the breed ; we attack the nest. Men do not let 
 filth accumulate in their wells, and then buy filters to make the 
 water fit to drink ; they do their best to keep filth out from the 
 first. Are we not, as a nation, seemingly content to let crime 
 breed, and then try to catch criminals as we can ? Do we take 
 any measures that can be called effective to remove the causes of 
 social pollution ? Or is it not the fact that we do rather spend, 
 our millions in a useless endeavour to pass the thoroughly pol- 
 luted through the filtering process of such penal penitence as the 
 systems of Parkhurst and Pentonville may produce ? Church 
 and State have alike begun at the wrong end. They have 
 aimed at the cure of evil they took too little pains to prevent. 
 One symptom of a coming wiser course of action is the esta- 
 blishment of ' Ragged Schools.' This is a step, and a very 
 important one, in the right direction ; if persevered in, it will, 
 I believe, considerably diminish the business of our criminal 
 courts, and by direct action on the soil from which ' pretty good 
 felonies ' spring will diminish the number of candidates for 
 Parkhurst. 
 
 I very lately visited one of these schools at Bath. I found 
 in it about 1 30 juveniles of both sexes, evidently collected from 
 the highways and byways of the city. A certain number of 
 respectable persons gratuitously give their time and attention as 
 teachers for three nights in the week, the chief local authority 
 being vested in a very active, intelligent schoolmistress. The 
 school was, I believe, set on foot by some of the clergy, aided by 
 a few charitable residents. The girls were being taught plain 
 work, but they are also taught to read and understand the 
 Scriptures ; the boys were formed in classes, learning to read 
 and write, &c. I was a witness to the examination of a class 
 of boys, who read and answered questions on the fourth chapter 
 of St. John quite as well as any class in any common parochial 
 school. Several of this class were without shoes and stockings ;
 
 3 i 8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Feb. 26 
 
 the clothing of the whole of them would hardly have brought 
 2s. at a rag-mill. Great order prevailed, and I saw nothing the 
 least like impertinence or levity; they evidently were most 
 grateful for the pains taken with them. In the lineaments of 
 the face and in the dress of the great majority you could at 
 once read the plain tale that they were children reared, if not in 
 the abodes of infamy, at least under circumstances of utter 
 neglect and moral destitution ; no one for one minute would 
 have thought of receiving them into any other sort of school. 
 Here I had before me the evident gathering of the lowest 
 hovels, the worst lodging-houses — the homeless and the un- 
 taught ; there could be no doubt but that they were of those 
 who, failing to obtain bread by begging, must obtain it by steal- 
 ing, or worse — mere boys, whose breeding had made them 
 familiar with the worst vices of the adult ; girls, bred in sin, reared 
 where modesty could find no place, having known no shame, 
 for they had been taught no virtue : they were, indeed, a sample 
 of the field in which the police find their toil, from which the 
 law gathers its harvest, to be garnered in its gaols and penal 
 settlements. The doors of the school are open to any of that 
 particular class ; to be uncared for and elsewhere untaught, on 
 account of their rags or vagrant habits, would seem to be the 
 only qualification. The regularity with which they attend, the 
 progress that they make, and the easily proved fact, that though 
 they may yet by their destitution be forced to beg, they are 
 seldom heard of as detected in dishonesty, prove the value of 
 the plan. Here the passed-on from union to union, the hunted 
 of the police, those whose rags and dirt create loathing in every 
 decent place, are welcomed. Amongst those who greet them 
 kindly, who advise, teach, and encourage, are found persons of 
 high rank, but of higher purpose ; they face, week after week, 
 this scene of motley misery, that they may do the Christian 
 work of seeking to save a class till lately left, in this land of 
 churches, uncared for until steeped in sufficient crime to qualify 
 them for the education of a gaol. I heard them sing a plain 
 hymn ; I saw them addressed by a clergyman on what they 
 were, what was offered them in this school, what it was hoped, 
 through its means, they might become ; it was a tale of hope
 
 1 847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 319 
 
 told, I trust, in ears which had already learned to hear that 
 there was hope even for such as they were. A signal was given, 
 and on the floor of that building knelt a group highly illus- 
 trative of the extremes of society ; there were some of the rank 
 to which the worldly sycophant bows ; there were many of the 
 ragged, from whom the proud and callous turn in disgust. I 
 closely watched the scholars' faces whilst a prayer was offered 
 to God embodying the needs of the orphan, the destitute, the 
 hardened, and the penitent ; I looked, to gather in any one 
 countenance proof of levity or mockery. I have ere now looked 
 on congregations composed of the great of the world, the early 
 educated, the ever cared for, those whose lips were early taught 
 to pray, whose minds were shielded from early contamination ; 
 I never yet saw in any congregation so close and almost 
 universal an attention as that of those then before me. I left 
 the room, thankful at heart that at last we seem disposed to put 
 the axe to the root of the tree, that we are coming to the 
 conclusion that it is better to seek the early eradication of vice 
 by going to meet it in its nursery, than to wait its full growth 
 and then first try to reclaim the vicious. 
 
 I hail the establishment of these schools as the acknow- 
 ledgment of a fact we seem to have forgotten, viz. that rags 
 and filth are no bars to religious truth, that neither the powers 
 of Church or State are justified in the neglect of any simply 
 because they may have been reared amongst those whose neg- 
 lected condition has stamped their minds with the early impress 
 of vice and given to their bodies no covering but rags. 
 
 Let us now hope that the establishment of these schools 
 may lead us a step or two further in the right direction. If there 
 are tens of thousands of children, whose rags, dirt, and evident 
 depravity have excluded them from our schools, how many 
 thousands of adults are there who, on the same grounds, find 
 no place in our houses of worship ? We want, Sir, churches for 
 the ragged. At present, Church and State alike leave undis- 
 turbed in their ignorance and vice vast masses of our fellow- 
 creatures, many of whom might be won to paths of industry 
 and probity. Go over the whole of the acres that lie beneath 
 church roofs in London ; hunt into every corner, in every hour
 
 3 2o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Feb. 26 
 
 of divine worship, and then see how many you can find of those 
 who are too poor to be decently clad. It is vain to argue that 
 the tramp, the street idler, the profligate, the low prostitute, will 
 not be taught. Have we tried to teach them ? Where will they 
 find the master and the school ? Say that their appearance 
 and certain concomitants of their filthy condition would drive 
 away all respectable persons endangered with contact with them 
 — say that the beadle only does his duty when he turns the 
 half-naked from the church door, and bids them ' go about their 
 business,' — you only arrive at the point at which I aim. Souls 
 are clad in rags, souls live in frames on which vermin take their 
 pastime, the most abandoned have souls. The thief on the 
 cross, the woman who was a sinner, Lazarus with his sores — 
 these were not beneath the notice of Christ, nor should they for 
 one instant be beneath the notice of a Christian State, the care 
 of a Christian Church. We have built churches for the wealthy ; 
 never could such pray with such luxury, or be taught with such 
 inducement to attend on teaching as at present. I ask not for 
 buildings whose architectural beauties shall elevate the soul ; 
 those whose cause I advocate are as yet incapable of such 
 mental elevation. I ask not for the melody of an accomplished 
 choir ; they who live in sin, and want food and clothing, have 
 little in common with such harmony. I ask not for splendid 
 altars, with all the glittering furniture and subdued bustle of 
 many attendant scarfed and coped priests ; this would only awe 
 to repulsion those who, as yet, have known no contact with any 
 but the teachers and ministers of vice. What I would pray to 
 see is a sufficient number of plain buildings, distinctive in cha- 
 racter, as subsidiary to the church, plainly but conveniently 
 fitted, placed in neighbourhoods where these poor creatures 
 mostly dwell, avowedly appropriated to this class alone. Were 
 I to invent a name, I would call them ' Lazarenes ' ; no question 
 should be asked of any that entered the door, no matter what 
 their evident calling ; to be poor, ragged, and evidently of a 
 class that would feel shamed in any other place of worship, 
 should be the title of admittance. The service I would have 
 selected from our own, but with one or more forms purposely 
 written as applicable to the class assembled. If in these days
 
 1 847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 321 
 
 of religious zeal no ordained clergy could be found who would, 
 in a worldly sense, stoop to a work most noble in the eyes of God, 
 why not employ some of the many well-informed pious laity 
 who would volunteer for the work, keeping them under some 
 stipulation which should bring them under the surveillance of 
 the authorities of the Church ? Their commission should be 
 to teach in the plainest language the plain truths of revealed 
 religion, aiming by words of love and kindness to win the confi- 
 dence of their congregation ; using all persuasion to lead them 
 to seek that moral elevation towards which they should have 
 every encouragement ; impressing on them day by day that 
 Church and State both desire to seek their temporal as well as 
 eternal good ; making them feel that we recognise no degree of 
 debasement as excluding from our efforts to raise the debased ; 
 patiently bearing with all the vexations of such a ministry, 
 returning good for evil ; bold to rebuke, but kind and affec- 
 tionate to win their regard. I do not for one moment doubt 
 but that such a ministry amongst such a class would do im- 
 measurable good ; it would be an honour to our Church, an 
 invaluable aid to the spread of that order and honesty which 
 every State is bound to promote. 
 
 If it is true that four new bishops are to be appointed, to 
 whom respect and authority will doubtless be given, not the less 
 because they are not to be spiritual peers, may we not hope 
 that the Church will not fear lest it lose caste by turning its 
 attention, devoting some of its zeal to dealing with those who 
 as yet have known no fold within its pale ? I cannot see that a 
 minister whose church should be the plainest building with the 
 plainest fitting, whose congregation should be in rags, would be 
 either more lowered himself, or accessory to the lowering of the 
 dignity of the Establishment, than the bishop who consents to 
 wear the mitre shorn of the privileges of the peer. I for one 
 should hail both events as indicative of a new and better era of 
 the Church. 
 
 Modern criminal anthropology tells us that the mere intellectual 
 rudiments of education have little influence in preventing crime, though 
 they have a distinct influence in modifying its forms. When S. G. O. 
 first wrote on criminality, it was thought that the panacea for crime was 
 
 VOL. I. V
 
 322 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 7 
 
 education of the mind. The proportion of educated criminals is now 
 very large. 
 
 April 7, 1847. 
 
 A comment has been made on a contribution to your 
 columns under the above head, in the words, ' But if cure avert 
 contagion, it is also prevention, and it is better than death in all 
 cases.' To cure a fatal contagious disease, and thus check its 
 extension, is, of course, preferable to letting it run its course, to 
 the continued destruction of life. In urging the expediency of 
 education as preventive of crime, I would neither decry just 
 punishment to deter from it, nor any reasonable attempt to 
 reform the criminal ; but I do assert, that it is the first duty of 
 a Christian State to devote its utmost energies to the rearing of 
 its people in habits of virtue, to the preserving them as far as 
 may be from temptation to vice ; it is also its duty, I admit, to 
 do its utmost to deter by punishment, and yet, in punishing, to 
 seek the welfare of the individual criminal, as well as that of the 
 community. The small-pox is a highly contagious disorder ; 
 when it does break out we very properly do our best to arrest 
 its progress, we isolate the affected as far as we can, and we do 
 all that medicine can to cure them ; but the State, as well as 
 most sensible individuals, promotes the process of vaccination, 
 knowing that though it may not prevent all small-pox, it will 
 and does prevent a good deal ; people who have the disease 
 from their neglect of this well-known preventive receive little 
 sympathy ; we count them very foolish. A low fever broke out 
 in a certain part of a village I knew very well ; the doctors, 
 relieving officers, &c, all said it arose from some dirty choked-up 
 drains, and a great accumulation of decaying vegetable matter 
 close to the cottages infected ; the parish went to no small 
 expense for medicines, nurses, port wine, and other necessaries 
 for the sick, funeral expenses for five or six who died ; a pro- 
 prietor of a neighbouring block of cottages, as soon as the first 
 of these cases occurred, had all his drains thoroughly cleaned 
 and strewed with lime ; had all dung heaps and other impurities 
 removed ; whitewashed every room, and thus, I believe, saved 
 his tenants from the disease. I have often stood by the side of 
 the beds of typhoid patients ; rags dipped in chloride of lime
 
 1847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 323 
 
 have hung on the bed-frame, almost touching my face, when, at 
 the same time, I have had to pick my way to the door in danger 
 of falling into an open cesspool, and have had to skip steps on 
 the staircase to avoid other abominations. 
 
 Now it is evident to the commonest observer that the prac- 
 tice in this country has hitherto been, to apply the chloride of 
 lime of quack reformation in pretty liberal quantities over the 
 heads of the criminally diseased, but at the same time to leave 
 undisturbed every possible source of moral contagion. We have 
 hung, pilloried, whipped, treadwheeled, transported, worked in 
 irons, &c, &c, &c, the criminals we have detected and con- 
 victed ; we have indulged in all sorts of reformatory experiments 
 on the convicts at home and abroad, sparing no expense in our 
 endeavours to find some real use we can put a man to whom we 
 have determined to be too bad to run loose here at home ; we 
 have utterly failed as yet in inventing any sound system of 
 secondary punishment ; but we have not failed in proving that, 
 in the matter of removing the causes that induce crime, we have 
 as yet scarce done anything. The disease is baffling us, the 
 foul sources from which we derive it are open to the cognisance 
 of every sense we possess. 
 
 There is one public man living and in full force, known for 
 a perseverance nothing can tire — a patience that seems to be 
 soothed by abuse — a zeal that will admit of no hindrance — a 
 power of acquiring and condensing and popularising the result 
 of statistical inquiry almost marvellous — who is for ever pulling 
 forth from all the odd corners and recesses of human life its 
 most hidden sores — where can any moral filth be discovered, 
 and my worthy friend Edwin Chadwick is not found stirring 
 it, turning it over, analysing its pernicious power, proving the 
 source whence it has arisen ?— he is, indeed, the great moral 
 scavenger of the age. Where is there a class whose avocations 
 can give them any experience as to the amount of physical or 
 moral dirtiness existing, to the bane of any one locality, whose 
 brains he has not picked ; giving to the public, in some popular 
 form, the result of this his intellectual mudlarking ? Such is his 
 zeal in the cause of sanitary reform, that, if I mistake not, he 
 has been known to have had his hair cut in hot weather at a
 
 324 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 7 
 
 shop in a certain alley, the door of which opened opposite to the 
 grating of a sewer, in order that, during the operation, he might 
 get out of the barber a bulletin of the health of the neighbouring 
 houses, as to how far the effect of the said sewer operated to 
 produce a certain amount of local disease. The sanitary and 
 other reports on matters connected with the moral and physical 
 condition of the poor in this kingdom, produced through his 
 labour, will be, for many a year yet to come, evidence of a 
 useful industry that in any other country would have met with 
 the reward their value deserves ; at all events, they have left us 
 without excuse as to ignorance of some of the chief sources of 
 that degradation which fosters crime. Again, there is a thick 
 blue-book, the report of an inquiry into drunkenness. The 
 inquisitive in such matters may gather from its pages proof of a 
 state of things almost baffling belief. He will there learn that 
 infants at the breast are given gin to put them to sleep ; that 
 the gin palace has its penny glass for the accommodation of its 
 child customer. It is stated, that in fourteen such places which 
 were watched, an average each week of 1,313 children entered 
 each house ! It is proved, from the evidence of witnesses of all 
 professions, that the State, for the sake of the duty on the spirits, 
 licenses, &c, directly encourages these schools of crime ; it is 
 proved that the spirits sold are adulterated with the most 
 poisonous drugs ; that the gin-drinker becomes, at last, but too 
 often a sudden victim of a disease produced by this habit, or 
 ends his existence in hopeless madness ; it is proved, that the 
 absence of proper control over these places makes them theatres 
 for the exhibition of every vice — nurseries in which are reared a 
 majority of those who die on the scaffold, or live out the law's 
 sentence as convicts at home or abroad. The sanitary report 
 proved how, amongst the poor, decency and health are pursued 
 under almost insuperable difficulties ; the report on drunkenness 
 proves how the indulgence of the most morally and physically 
 pernicious of all vices is afforded every facility. 
 
 Now turn to another blue-book, the Report of the Constabu- 
 lary Force Commissioners, Mr. E. Chadwick being one of them : 
 it is a perfect encyclopaedia of roguery ; there is nothing bad 
 which you may not learn from it, — how to make and use the
 
 1 847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 325 
 
 apparatus fitting for picking the pocket of a gentleman ; how in 
 picking a lady's pocket it is necessary in walking by her side to 
 keep step with her ; the anatomy of window shutters, with prac- 
 tical directions for the operation upon them of bolt excision ; 
 the mechanical application of a very simple apparatus, by which 
 a key is turned and pushed out of a front door, so as to fall 
 within reach of a wire hook which can draw it under the said 
 door for the use of the ingenious practitioner in burglary ; the 
 architectural details of cellar windows, with proper specifications 
 for such alterations in them as may promote forcible entry ; how 
 to manipulate the nose of a fellow-creature so as to perform 
 that twisting of its cartilaginous extremity which will cause pain 
 sufficient to make him insensible to the abstraction of his watch ; 
 the means of obtaining information for felonious purposes ; of 
 disposing of property feloniously obtained ; the characters of 
 various police officers in the United Kingdom ; the accommoda- 
 tion to be obtained in its various gaols — in short, all that a thief 
 ought to know and to do will be found given in a most popular if 
 not pleasing form. This report forms, as a whole, very satis- 
 factory evidence of the utter want of sufficient means for the 
 prevention of crime — for the suppression of the thousands of 
 existing causes which directly encourage it. 
 
 Having now glanced at the official exposure made of the 
 filth, drunkenness, and roguery of this civilised Christian state, 
 my next step shall be to call attention to the official exposure of 
 the ignorance, heathenism, and mere sensual vice of tens of 
 thousands of the young. ' The Report of the Commission for 
 inquiring into the Employment of Children and Young Persons 
 in Mines, Collieries, Trades, and Manufactures, &c.,' will afford to 
 any one who will take the trouble to peruse its pages proof of a 
 state of ignorance and morals far beyond anything I have ever 
 heard the most zealous of missionary deputations describe, as 
 grounds for us, here in England, giving of our means to send the 
 Gospel to heathen lands ; as to any knowledge of the Creator 
 or Redeemer, in thousands of cases it does not seem to exist at 
 all ; the answer given again and again to questions on these 
 points are such that, if it had not been necessary to prove the 
 fact, I should have regretted that they were ever published. The
 
 326 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 7 
 
 wittiest and worst of infidels that ever lived could not have 
 given answers more awful to any thinking person than those 
 given, in a serious endeavour to speak truth, by these children. 
 That swearing and habitual obscene conversation should be pre- 
 valent amongst. a class who till lately were allowed, as children 
 of both sexes, to work in the pits, in attendance on men who 
 were perfectly naked, is not to be wondered at ; but the evi- 
 dence given of the filthy juvenile depravity in word and deed of 
 the young of both sexes in all the great manufacturing towns is 
 perfectly horrifying, as it is most assuredly a shame on us, who, 
 so ready to work in aid of philanthropic measures in other lands, 
 have left this mass of moral corruption to spread and fester and 
 pollute, unchecked, tens of thousands in our own land. As to 
 the masses of children in London and its suburbs who are being 
 reared in ignorance of everything that is not infamous ; and the 
 masses of adults who have no place of worship into which they 
 can enter, who are in fact as separate from any Christian com- 
 munity as if they had no souls, this is so self-evident that it 
 does not need any official report to prove it. 
 
 There is much cause for thankfulness that the present 
 Government does seem disposed to grapple with the difficulties 
 of our social condition ; we have already evidence of more than 
 one move in the right direction ; still, it will require all the 
 known courage and perseverance of the Minister to confront and 
 conquer the opposition he must expect ; so many have profited 
 by the vice, ignorance, and misery of the lower orders, that there 
 will be no slight outcry against any measures which may tend 
 to elevate those whose depression has made them useful tools ; 
 to teach those whose ignorance has made them easy dupes. The 
 political and polemical disturbers of the day will lose no oppor- 
 tunity of venting their party or sectarian prejudices ; the former 
 will sing the old song, ' More patronage, more commissions,' 
 simply because it is not their own party that has the disposal of 
 them ; the latter cry out against anything that can be construed 
 to favour the Church, simply because they do not belong to it ; 
 have been bred to hate it. Let the Minister tender the means 
 of education to the ignorant ; good air and cleanliness to the 
 filth)' ; protection to the honest against the evil-doer ; the oppor-
 
 1847 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 327 
 
 tunity of reform to the criminal ; still, however well-devised his 
 measures, however pressing the necessity for them, because 
 there must be offices to which the Government may appoint, or 
 grants to schools in which that sectarian bugbear the Church 
 Catechism may be taught, a cry arises that the liberty of the 
 people is in danger, freedom of conscience is threatened. The 
 same modest good sense which caused a legislator, who until 
 lately was chiefly known as an oracle to the fraternity of the 
 turf, to get up, and with all the assumed pomposity of matured 
 but conceited statesmanship accuse the Secretary of Ireland as 
 the destroyer of the Irish, because, while he fed millions with 
 English money, he could give no return of the number of deaths 
 that might have occurred from a state of things engendered by 
 Irish neglect, will prompt other equally wise men to accuse the 
 President of the Privy Council of a covert desire to favour the 
 Established Church, to the detriment of the Nonconformists, 
 simply because, in offering a broad scheme of educational encou- 
 ragement to the million, the Church may chance to have her full 
 share of the advantage. Happily, Sir, for the nation at large, 
 Lord John knows something of the world, has been a good deal 
 behind the scenes of political and polemical warfare, he has out- 
 lived the day when a verdict on the goodness of any measure 
 was to be taken from the evidence afforded by party clamour 
 against it ; he can discern between the value of petitions result- 
 ing from the conscientious opinion of the educated, and those 
 signed by the unthinking, through a mechanism established to 
 support the views of a few by this cheaply gained assent of 
 many. I have no fear but that he will persevere, and that the 
 good sense of the nation will support him ; he is looked to, in a 
 true Conservative sense, as the Minister of the people ; as one 
 who will seek that his reign in office shall be distinguished by 
 this one characteristic — that the general social good of the 
 people was its chief object ; that he was less mindful of the 
 claims of party or sect than he was of the general good ; that 
 he sought so to rule that, by the blessing of Providence on his 
 endeavours, her Majesty's subjects should be preserved in 
 wealth, in peace, in godliness.
 
 328 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Oct. 19 
 
 In 1853 the nurseries of crime and moral degradation were either 
 under the religious care of Nonconformists, or were left alone. S. G. O. 
 feels that the Church of England had her part to play in preventing the 
 formation of criminal characters. 
 
 October 19, 1853. 
 
 To any one who will stop half-an-hour in life's walk, and 
 think of an English Sunday, there will be afforded some very 
 curious and instructive matter for consideration. A very busy 
 nation, a restless people, put on the appearance of commercial 
 idleness and rest. Work in the factory, the counting-house, the 
 shop, the farm, in every occupation but one or two, is, with little 
 exception, arrested. The debtor walks free from danger of 
 capture, and even the bailiff pleads liberty to interrupt for a few 
 hours his life of man-chase. 
 
 No matter how pressing the order which has to be executed 
 by the manufacturer, he will on this day lose hours, in a money 
 point of view, most precious. The harvest weather has been 
 bad, the corn stands ready for carting, but it is too wet. Friday 
 is dry — so is Saturday ; Sunday very fine ; yet not a team goes 
 forth to save that corn, and secure to the owner a return for his 
 industry — it is the Sabbath. 
 
 Between the hours of eleven and twelve in the morning, 
 and three and five, and six and eight in the afternoon and 
 evening, hundreds of thousands, young and old, of every rank 
 and almost every creed, leave their own homes to go to par- 
 ticular buildings to join in services, and to listen to teaching, 
 all speaking one truth : — there is a great unseen Power to whom 
 all are bound to bow ; whose will it will profit all to learn and 
 do ; whose peculiar day this Sunday is, and to whose worship 
 these buildings are devoted. At these same hours, in many 
 thousand dwellings, they who from necessity are left at home 
 would be found reading one book, the revealed will of Him — 
 the Lord of the day. In many a town suburb, in many a village 
 lane, knots of people will be seen collected round one man, 
 who with loud voice and earnest manner, in plain but forcible 
 language, will be telling them of what they owe to the Lord of 
 the day — how they are for ever angering Him — how He is ever 
 seeking to pardon them— the way in which He offers that par-
 
 1 853 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 329 
 
 don — the terms on which He will grant it, and the mercies He 
 will add to it. 
 
 In all the places in which the Lord of the day is spoken 
 of — in every interpretation of His will, there will be this one 
 almost universal statement — that He knows no distinction of 
 persons ; that a beggar's soul is as dear to Him as that of a 
 sovereign, and that to gain His love and pardon both alike must 
 tread the very selfsame path, and will then both alike equally 
 share in exactly the same reward. 
 
 The Sunday is a great day of levelling ; all the pompous 
 events of the week, which may have exalted any of the great 
 ones of the earth, fail on this day in its peculiar business to give 
 them any priority in the choice of blessings, any precedence in 
 spiritual honour, above the poorest beggar who believes and begs 
 of heaven. 
 
 Take Bradshaw's railway map ; abstract your ideas from 
 aught else but a contemplation of the tracery of the 'lines in 
 work ; ' look at England as you look at the skeleton clock on 
 your chimney-piece, regarding the machinery of locomotion as 
 it works — disregarding its end. What a spectacle bursts on 
 the mind ! Our island becomes a mere clock case, the sup- 
 porting scaffold of a most wonderful network of mechanical 
 appliance, on every part of which, from hour to hour, we see the 
 rushing about of thousands of motive powers, drawing tens of 
 thousands of our fellow-subjects in a race of distance against 
 time. This shuffling of human beings by the iron hand of 
 enterprise, changing and exchanging, here, there, and every- 
 where, at almost every moment, the population of the land, of 
 course has its interruptions, its mishaps ; a little confusion on 
 this or that part of the tracery for a few or more hours may tell 
 of some dozen deaths or so, some food for the columns of 
 ' dreadful accidents,' some days of adjourned inquests ; but this 
 is accidental, and in the order of things — it does not make it a 
 bit less wonderful. 
 
 Just as this tracery of iron on the surface of the land, its 
 daily use, proves our enterprise, our daring, persevering effort, 
 at the accumulation of earth's wealth, and the increase of earth's 
 luxuries, so docs a map of England, looked at in another sense ,
 
 33o THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 19 
 
 prove by evidence equally clear that we English do also show a 
 wonderful outward regard to the worship and will of Him who 
 bids us hold all earth's life's things as secondary to those of 
 heaven and eternity. Look at a map of England again, and 
 try and realise to yourself every place of worship marked with, 
 say, a coloured cross — every village having one or more, many 
 towns very many ; and you would see an amount of tracery of 
 spiritual machinery, marking man's route heavenwards, which 
 would leave an impression on the mind not easily defined ; 
 remember that this display of the actual houses of worship 
 carries with it the existence also of a mass of schools, its feeding 
 stores. Bear in mind the great staff of teachers, stipendiary and 
 voluntary, ever at work on this line of spiritual travel, and who 
 would, with such a map in the mind's eye, doubt the nation's 
 earnestness in the business of eternity ? That the national mind 
 is a believing mind must be true, or our nation is an utter im- 
 personation of hypocrisy, yes, and of self-sacrificing hypocrisy, 
 for religion and its appliances are a thing of cost to us, its 
 observances every seventh day a check upon our earthly gains. 
 The very bitterness of our religious strifes is so much evidence 
 of our professed reverence for religious truth. 
 
 Now, Sir, turn to another view ; leave outward evidence of 
 man's contempt for all earthly impediment, when he is deter- 
 mined to have the means of extending his commerce or aiding 
 his pleasure, by means of travel nearly as unlimited in distance 
 as in speed. Forget for a while the great existing evidence of 
 the nation's desire to uphold the worship of God, and therefore 
 the great truth that to every being is given an accountable soul. 
 The cholera is among us, has affrighted us, and we are, with our 
 usual national courage and perseverance, calling to our aid every 
 help of science, every result of experience, to disarm it of its 
 power. We are pursuing death to destroy it, as we have pur- 
 sued distance with steam to almost annihilate it — as we profess 
 to pursue religion to disarm death of its worst sting. We find 
 that cholera, as such, is our master ; when once adult it defies 
 us, but we find we can strangle it in its birth. There is vicious 
 inclination before there is vice ; depravity has its premonitory 
 symptoms. So we find with cholera — it has its premonitory
 
 1853 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 331 
 
 state ; there we can contend with it and conquer it. We do so, 
 and heaven blesses us in using the means to which the reason 
 heaven has given us has led us. 
 
 Look at the scenes house-to-house visitation is opening out 
 to us, scenes long known to some of us. The nation which, by- 
 common consent, has stamped its people as immortal has been 
 content to leave a very large proportion of them to live in a 
 state of brutality lower than that of the brutes which die and 
 perish. Portions of our large towns have, by tacit consent, been 
 allowed to exist as the natural refuge of human living refuse. 
 We have bred human beings, as maggots are bred, in atmo- 
 sphere contaminated by the unopposed accumulation of all pos- 
 sible moral and physical filth. Knowing what vice is, what it 
 costs us here — the vicious in common hereafter — we have had 
 but little regard to its premonitory stages ; we have kept by us 
 vast stores of matter directly provocative of vice ; we have 
 accumulated a population existing in and about these stores 
 who must thus be reared in the deepest moral degradation. We 
 had police to live at war with them, gaols and hangmen to 
 scare them from trespassing beyond their own squalid vicious 
 misery to maraud on our better territory ; we are now cleansing 
 their drains, whitewashing their houses, finding them medicines, 
 coffins, tracts, and tents. Did we ever try yet seriously to com- 
 bine a cleansing of the creature with a cleansing of the scene 
 of its existence ? 
 
 It is one thing to brew gallons of cinnamon-water with chalk 
 mixture and opium, and to implore all premonished of the 
 poison of cholera to come and drink gratis. It is another to 
 tell them there is a mental poison, for which God has given to 
 man, free of cost, that which can arrest the premonitory evi- 
 dence of an approaching life and death in vice. Will any man 
 deny that the lifting of the veil which hid from the privileged 
 classes the filthy, helpless depravity in which millions of the 
 lowest class live, is an appeal that it would be blasphemy on our 
 part to reject ? My own eyes saw in Ireland the moral courage 
 which the clergy of all professions — the medical men, however 
 ill-paid — gave (to the life's cost of many), to meet the fever and 
 cholera of that unhappy land. It was beyond all praise. So
 
 332 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 19 
 
 now is it in England : there is no shirking danger, no desertion 
 of the duty the moment imperatively demands ; but the danger 
 will pass away ; may God grant that the lesson to be read in it 
 may abide 1 
 
 We have indeed exposed our moral nakedness. We have 
 proved that in towns in which we can show a stranger wonderful 
 proofs of our wealth, industry, love of science, and devotion to 
 the spread of Christian knowledge at home and abroad, there 
 exist scenes to which we will not take him, which, in contrast 
 to all else, make the rites of heathenism, the morality of Mor- 
 mons, the filth of the worst races of our species, comparatively 
 as nothing. 
 
 At our very wits' end to know what to do with the convicted 
 criminal, we are yet content, except when cholera comes, to 
 leave the foul nurseries of crime unexplored. Man's moral 
 death we are prepared to meet with such weapons as the 
 Leicester prison cranks or the Birmingham gaol garotte ; but we 
 seem to care little about attacking the premonitory symptoms- 
 which warn us where a population is exposed to more than 
 ordinary temptation. How many there are who, hearing of the 
 large sums raised for home and foreign missions, knowing the 
 impulse given to the lodging-house question, hearing of the zeal 
 in the cause of ' the ragged ' so honourably at last shown, go to 
 bed each night thankful that they live in such a land ! It may 
 be, and is, better than other lands ; but, when compared with its 
 professions, who among us does not blush at our shortcomings ? 
 Take any, the most refined part of London, a locality even 
 such as Belgrave Square ; let two dogs have a fight in the street, 
 or a dead cab-horse lie there one hour ; observe the crowd 
 which will gather round, and you will need little other evidence 
 to prove that if such beings can so suddenly appear, on such 
 short notice, in that locality, the population in other less favoured 
 districts must indeed be a study for the moralist 
 
 I have no hesitation in stating my firm belief that, all-praise- 
 worthy as have been the efforts made of late years to treat the 
 refuse of our species in the light we by profession regard them, 
 i.e. as immortal beings, as yet the effort made has not penetrated 
 beyond the mere frontier of that foul territory in which we have
 
 1853 CRIME-ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 333 
 
 bred so many tens of thousands. There will now, I have no doubt, 
 be a great impulse given to the cause of sanitary improvement ; 
 I wish I could believe that the question of immortal sewerage 
 would assume the same importance. 
 
 Would men of all Christian opinion combine, something 
 might be done ; so anomalous is the present state of things, 
 that for a churchman to have ' a ragged church,' unless he will 
 have the liturgy, and go through many forms which would often 
 be inexpedient, he must license it as a Dissenting place of 
 worship, or those who teach therein have no power to keep 
 decent order. 
 
 I rejoice to say I have papers before me from Aberdeen 
 proving that, by tact and perseverance, the worst localities can, 
 by the use, at first, of the plainest and most ordinary religious 
 appliances, be so acted on that a desire for advanced means 
 has grown up, and the plain room has grown into the well- 
 ordered chapel ; those who by the first were led from a state of 
 ignorance and filth and disorder, are now regular worshippers 
 in houses of God the proper adornment of which they have now 
 the taste to value. 
 
 S. G. O. was one of the first to rouse public opinion against the 
 ticket-of-leave system. He assailed it with his wonted force. It was 
 not until 1864 that the system was modified by the Penal Servitude 
 Act. 
 
 April 8, 1856. 
 
 In the rural districts there not only very generally is no 
 efficient machinery to aid in the detection of criminals, but there 
 is the greatest difficulty in securing their proper prosecution 
 when by any chance they are detected. In a country village 
 the property of the persons who suffer most from depredation is 
 so exposed to injury that very many are afraid to prosecute 
 those who rob them, lest at the expiration of their sentence they 
 in revenge should do them some more serious mischief. If this 
 holds true with regard to petty crimes and petty criminals, it is 
 even more true as regards a more hardened and desperate class 
 of offenders. 
 
 Still, when by a happy chance some of these have been
 
 334 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 8 
 
 taken in the commission of an offence which gave hopes of their 
 removal by transportation from the country, a prosecution has 
 hitherto in general with more or less willingness followed. A 
 different feeling is now beginning to prevail, for it is known the 
 sentence of transportation is a mere fiction, and that the pro- 
 bable result will be that a few years will scarcely elapse before 
 men of such a character that no one would employ them before 
 their last conviction are to return to their old haunts with a 
 * ticket of leave.' I will not go into the question as to whether 
 the philanthropists are right or wrong in their solemn assevera- 
 tions of the injustice of the cry now so general against ' ticket- 
 of-leave ' men ; the blue-book statistics are, I dare say, to those 
 who believe in the figures of published reports, all-convincing 
 the other way. I do not believe in them, for I know well how 
 easy it is to get anything whitewashed in a blue-book. I read 
 the papers, and I there read almost daily proof that crime is 
 fearfully on the increase, and that scarcely a day passes in which 
 the most desperate crimes are not traced to ' ticket-of-leave ' men. 
 I know enough of human nature — at least, of it as it is in the 
 clever bad man— to feel convinced that the said bad man can 
 make repentance so close a study that he easily acquires the 
 power to counterfeit it with the same skill and the same success 
 as that which makes him a master of our locks, dogs, doors, and 
 shutters. I believe that neither gaol chaplains nor visiting 
 magistrates are any match for the convict who knows that he 
 can cut off the length of his sentence by the docility he shows 
 under reformatory discipline and teaching. 
 
 A gentleman who had had every opportunity of arriving at 
 the truth in the matter some time since assured me that four- 
 fifths of the criminals who came under his notice, from the 
 moment they entered the cells for three years' probation, « sang 
 the same song,' one they had all well studied before they had 
 entered the prison walls. I am told how hard it is upon the 
 convict that his former misdeeds should be remembered against 
 him when the law allows him to return to his home. Now, Sir, 
 to me this argument is pure folly; loss of character is the 
 penalty of ill-doing, quite irrespective of the law's punishment 
 of the ill-doer. No man will willingly employ a thief if he can
 
 1856 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 335 
 
 get an honest man ; true, rather than give large parish pay to a 
 large family, many a known dishonest man finds employment 
 in our villages ; but when he has committed a transportable 
 offence his place is filled up ; his family is recognised as a gene- 
 ral parochial charge. Is it reasonable to expect that he should 
 find employers ready to take him and give him work simply 
 because he returns with a ' ticket of leave ' ? 
 
 I admit that the poor man suffers more from loss of charac- 
 ter than the rich man — that in the case of the latter he may do 
 deeds, and be well known as having done them, which, exposed 
 in a court of law, would make him a felon ; and yet, after a nine 
 days' talk, tide over the business, and be again seen in his own 
 circle ; but be it remembered that the ' ticket of leave ' the lax 
 morality of society gives to the rich is, after all, only a license to 
 live by his money or his wits ; it is not a passport of service to 
 be about a man's person or property as a clerk or servant. 
 
 The position I would maintain is that certain crimes should 
 secure to the criminal, as near as may be, a certain fixed appre- 
 ciable punishment to that criminal, rich or poor ; that, while the 
 penalty of the law should be as certain and the same to the 
 rich as to the poor criminal, means should exist for compelling 
 the prosecution of both alike. 
 
 I am sick of hearing the cases of Paul, Strahan & Co. pointed 
 at as proofs of the majesty of our law vindicating itself, for who 
 of us is ignorant of the fact that as a set-off to the conviction of 
 those and a few other well-to-do criminals case after case may 
 be quoted where men of higher position and equal guilt have 
 been screened from prosecution and afterwards whitewashed 
 through the efforts of powerful and rich relatives ? 
 
 The police set in motion are capable of detecting most great 
 crimes, but in the cases of wealthy delinquents they are allowed 
 by those who should claim their help to be at rest. 
 
 We should aim in the nature of our punishment at the refor- 
 mation of the criminal, and justly joy over and encourage his 
 penitence ; but I am satisfied it is in the end as baneful to the 
 criminal class as it is to society at large to make the penitence 
 shown in prison a ground for remission of one atom of the sen- 
 tence. It seems to me very like offering to a knave a premium
 
 336 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. April 8, 1856 
 
 for hypocrisy, and placing him in the very best position to 
 practise it. 
 
 If crime was, as the rule, the result of want of education, one 
 might have some hope that it would soon show some diminution. 
 That it is more often detected and punished among the unedu- 
 cated is quite true, but that the experience of life proves to us 
 that mere learning bars out vice I utterly deny. We are pro- 
 mised a session of great reforms ; may we hope among the 
 number for some measures which may allow of our going to bed 
 in the rural districts, or for a walk in London, without justifiable 
 fear of being found the next day a spectacle for a coroner — a 
 subject for the post mortem investigation of the how and where 
 the knife went or the bludgeon struck which did our death ? I 
 may be comforted with the assurance that the late Police Act 
 will soon be in force throughout all the rural districts. I ac- 
 knowledge the fact with gratitude ; it is a step in the right 
 direction, for I am firmly persuaded that a well-organised police 
 force, well managed, is one of the most powerful agents we can 
 invoke in aid of the reformation of the criminal classes ; but I 
 have my doubts whether provincial jobbing may not give the 
 chief appointments to incompetent men ; whether false economy 
 will not stint the number of constables ; whether, if the force does 
 its duty, it will receive that support from ancient local authori- 
 ties without which its best efforts will fail to do the good so 
 much to be desired. It is, I fear, a great mistake to suppose a 
 real good national police force can work well if the different 
 counties are to act each independent of the other, more espe- 
 cially when many of the constables are recruited from the popu- 
 lation among which they are to act. 
 
 Wherever the remedy for the present reign of terror in many 
 districts may be eventually found, at present it seems to lie in 
 each man being prepared to defend his house as he would defend 
 his life, by his own use of whatever arms he may possess.
 
 Jan. 8, 1857 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 337 
 
 Crime and Criminals. 
 
 January 8, 1857. 
 
 I think, Sir, there can be little doubt but that the subject of 
 our present system of punishing criminals will be early pressed 
 upon Parliament. There seems to be a conviction in the public 
 mind that something must be done to make the penalties due to 
 offended laws more certain and effectual. With your permission 
 I will now, after my own view of the matter, make a few obser- 
 vations as to who are the criminals who have raised the strong 
 feeling now existing ; and then I would add a few suggestions 
 as to the nature of the punishment most likely to affect the 
 class to which they belong. 
 
 One great popular mistake is, the meaning given to the word 
 ' felon.' Nervous and hasty people look on every convicted 
 felon — i.e. every man convicted of felony— as a Bill Sykes ; 
 their one idea of a felon is connected with a long apprenticeship 
 to crime of the worst kind. They think a felon must either be 
 an adept at forgery, a proficient in burglary, a master of the 
 garotte and life-preserver art, or, at the least, one so thoroughly 
 hardened in villany that he lives but to do evil ; an associate o\ 
 thieves, known to every detective — just as a polecat is known to 
 a gamekeeper, when seen near a ' preserve,' to be on the prowl 
 for spoil. 
 
 That these and men such as these do form a well-known 
 species of the genus felon, I admit ; but I assert that our gaols 
 contain a very large mass of convicted felons of no such marked, 
 hardened character. The goose and fowl stealers, the sheep- 
 stealers, the fuel thieves of rural districts, are of a very different 
 species. Poaching may have led to drinking, the beershop 
 offers a market for poultry as well as game ; from the hen-roost 
 they may have graduated to the higher crime at the sheepfold, 
 but there is nothing of the Bill Sykes' type in these men. They 
 arc clodlike, not metropolitan, in their vice ; they are of village 
 earth, most earthy ; they don't, as the rule, live by roguery, but 
 make roguery supply the supplementary luxuries of a clod's life. 
 In the villages to which they belong they worked just as others 
 did, though known to be wild in after-hours, and to have free 
 VOL 1 Z
 
 338 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 8 
 
 notions as to the outlying property of their neighbours. It is 
 rare that they commit a burglary of any more heinous nature 
 than the forcible entry of a larder or cider cellar ; in my own ex- 
 perience I never knew but one set of this species who really took 
 to serious housebreaking. 
 
 Of these criminals I will say at present nothing further, than 
 that they must not be confounded with all those whom the law 
 stamps as felons ; that I believe they might be very often re- 
 formed, even after two or three convictions ; that they do very 
 often become so, after one sentence has given them a taste of 
 gaol discipline. Their home connections may not be good, but 
 still in country villages a moral force is brought to bear against 
 a perseverance in overt acts of serious crime that does not exist 
 in the case of the higher-bred town criminal. 
 
 A good deal is said and written about the wretched temporal 
 life of the evil-doer, how he is for ever subject to fits of remorse, 
 for ever a prey to the fear of detection. This is theory. In real 
 practice, I believe the class of men we are now considering have 
 a great deal of enjoyment in the life they lead, no drawback to 
 it from any question as to its being a right or wrong life ; the 
 danger of detection sustains the interest of the peculiar existence 
 they have made their own ; they play a game of hourly attrac- 
 tion ; they know the worst they can incur from loss ; each fresh 
 successful ' business ' done gives them renewed satisfaction, fresh 
 stimulus to further exertion. They have access to newspapers, 
 and read assize and police news — it is their ' racing intelligence ; ' 
 they gather from it who on their own course has won, who has 
 lost ; they thus collect, for their own particular edification, fresh 
 knowledge of the risks they may run, but at the same time no 
 little instruction as to how they can best hope to diminish those 
 risks. We have to bear in mind that with these men life is not 
 simply now and then stained with crime, but its entire normal 
 colour is crimina it is for them to be for ever digesting fresh 
 criminal schemes, to be ever aiming to circumvent justice, just 
 as it is the aim of the legislator, magistrate, and policeman to 
 weave a mesh in which they may be entangled in their evil- 
 doing. 
 
 Do detectives strive to know them — they also take care to
 
 1857 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 339 
 
 know the detectives. Whatever society can plan for its own 
 protection as against their class, it is their safety and interest to 
 study well that they may defeat it. 
 
 The man who is only occasionally dishonest lives with the 
 honest, and, naturally, his is a life of distrust ; the man to whom 
 dishonesty is his daily bread and meat and gin, to whom it 
 affords all the coarse enjoyments of the life he loves to pursue, 
 harbours only with those of similar tastes ; he is one of a brother- 
 hood, leagued together by the bond of common enjoyment, 
 common interest, common danger. Liable each day to be be- 
 trayed, to be subject to the penalty of the ' information he has 
 received ' of a detective, he has well weighed the full result of 
 detection. To him the sentence of the judge or magistrate on a 
 companion at once translates itself ; he knows exactly how much 
 at the worst it may mean, how much by cunning can be evaded ; 
 nay, the gallows itself has often been taken into account by him 
 and his own circle. Such a one ' has done it at last ' simply 
 means that the said individual has ' run against the tree ; ' is ' in 
 for the sheriff's company ; ' anglice, is sure to be hung. It was 
 on the cards with him, it is on the cards with his brotherhood, 
 and they know it, always have known it, and risked it. 
 
 To a life spent as is the life of these men I am satisfied the 
 gallows has but a small share of real dread. It deters lesser 
 scoundrels to that degree that they will not take life willingly in 
 their robberies ; but to those hardened proficients in crime who 
 go for great stakes it has comparatively little in it to make them 
 hold their hands. They know men will take life in defence of 
 their own, that many will take it in protecting their property. 
 Prepared to meet the revolver, they go armed themselves ; aim- 
 ing at great spoil, they feel the risk to life in its attainment ; 
 they count on the loss of life if they take it from another and 
 chance to be detected ; as for the ignominy of the gallows, it is 
 sheer folly to talk of that having any weight. 
 
 These men have no ties of kin, they have no home. Living, 
 as the rule, in adultery, they support the partner of their guilty 
 life by guilty gains ; they know she but too often betrays them ; 
 mere animals, they still as such seek this evil partnership, take 
 it with all its risks. The excitement of their profession is only
 
 340 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 8 
 
 equalled by the riotous orgies that follow each successful ' busi- 
 ness.' They are ever shifting their lodging, but never changing 
 its foul aspect ; they must herd together, for isolated they would 
 be too easily observed. Where they herd they collect around 
 them everything which can morally vitiate the atmosphere. 
 They can obtain no locality to so vitiate but one so physically 
 impure that all who can live elsewhere shun it. It is these men 
 and their shameless companions which give the tone to those 
 blind alleys, those back lanes, and crooked narrow passages 
 which are festering nurseries of every conceivable crime. The 
 wicked seek and find their shelter in such places, and the tradi- 
 tions of each generation serve to still further stamp infamy on 
 the locality, to still increase the foul crimes of the inhabitants. 
 
 Say all this is granted me, how, it may be asked, are these 
 men to be deterred from their evil courses, how are these nests 
 of infamy to be suppressed ? Foxes will have earths ; villany 
 will make to itself a habitation and give it its name. Attack 
 the villains with all the power law and right can give. Cease to 
 regard the reformation of the criminal as the first aim of the 
 law ; make that aim to be the protection of life and property by 
 swift, certain, severe, enduring punishment. Punish the guilty 
 so as to deter men from becoming guilty — not simply to visit 
 crime on the criminal. 
 
 You must, I fear, still have your capital punishments ; where 
 you determine that it is due, let it as the rule follow, but reserve 
 it for well-defined, extreme cases ; give the judges some discre- 
 tion, but let the final result be with them. 
 
 Imprison for life every convicted felon whose life has become 
 clearly one which, unfettered, is against the lives and property 
 of others. Imprison for long terms of years, certain fixed terms, 
 criminals whose antecedents may give some hope of their yet 
 being one day weaned from crime. For many of the minor 
 crimes now dignified as felonies keep your shorter fixed sen- 
 tences, leaving to the judges power to order flogging in the gaols 
 where there have been previous convictions. If the principle is 
 good in the gaol, that felons by meritorious industry can shorten 
 he sentence, surely it is good that repeated convictions should 
 entail increased penalty even for the same offence.
 
 1857 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 341 
 
 I am satisfied one or two large prisons, with high walls, 
 enclosing a great space, closely guarded, jealously inspected, 
 were it known that their gates once passed for life would never 
 be repassed alive, would have more effect, be cheaper, and far 
 easier of management than any system of transportation. There 
 are many species of hard work, of work of all kinds for the 
 Government, which might be done within them, if not to a profit 
 at least to a sensible diminution of their cost. 
 
 If the prisoner for life can be reformed, find him indulgence 
 within the walls, but never let him leave them. It is my firm 
 conviction these prisons might be conducted so as to ensure all 
 safety, all health, everything conducive to the convicts' real 
 welfare here and hereafter, and, at the same time, from their 
 external aspect and the knowledge that they were life prisons, 
 be what we now sadly want — a real terror to evil-doers. 
 
 Once thus separate — for good — year by year, large numbers 
 of these men from the ' schools ' and localities to which they 
 belong, you would open out in those localities ground for those 
 who now seek to reform less hardened criminals. As matters 
 are now, to the criminal punishment is a lottery — he takes his 
 ticket when he commences his career ; when he may draw his 
 lot depends on the chance of his detection, the chance of his 
 sentence, his own chance after it of by cunning yet evading it. 
 
 Many attempts to strangle made by thieves — termed garotters — 
 were made in the winter of 1862-63. In July 1863, an Act to punish 
 those crimes by flogging was passed. It proved effectual. S. G. O. 
 did much to crystallise public opinion on the subject by his sturdy 
 common sense. 
 
 December 9, 1862. 
 
 In answering the question, 'What shall we do with our oft- 
 convicted felons ? ' we have to consider the nature of the being 
 with whom we have to deal, and our object in dealing with him 
 at all. 
 
 The men whose crimes of repeated violence now so seriously 
 attract public notice are the chiefs of their class ; they are accom- 
 plished villains ; they have mastered, as they have for years 
 practised, all the lessons of violence against person and property.
 
 342 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 9 
 
 Their thoughts, their language, the society in which they live, 
 their places of resort, all are consistent with the calling to which 
 they are devoted ; they are beasts of prey, herding together, 
 drawing on each other's experience how to best secure their 
 spoil. Society at large is their hunting-field, the property of its 
 members the day and night object of pursuit. 
 
 Police, magistrates, gaols, are to them simply so many of the 
 keepers and traps the criminal law puts into use to take and 
 retain them — to remove them .from their hunting-field and 
 punish them more or less, according to the circumstances of that 
 particular act in the perpetration of which they were detected, 
 and their own known previous character. 
 
 They are as familiar with every feature of arrest, accusation, 
 committal, trial, as they are with every shade of complexion in 
 the lawless life they lead. They have had to study locks, 
 shutters, gratings, house and shop architecture, in every step by 
 which modern science has sought to make these safe as against 
 themselves. Sir R. Mayne cannot study with more anxiety how 
 to improve the police force than these men study, for their pur- 
 pose, every police improvement. 
 
 No man can speak with greater authority upon the nature of 
 hospital practice as regards the patient than he who has entered 
 a hospital for some serious operation, undergone it, then passed 
 months within its walls, until convalescence sets him free of it. 
 He can tell you of the consultation on his limb, its decision, his 
 removal to the operating theatre, what he there underwent, his 
 return to his bed, the daily visit of the surgeons, what they did, 
 what they ordered, how he was ' dressed,' ' physicked,' nursed, 
 &c. 
 
 The men who pounce upon you in the street, pull and choke 
 you down, by blows make you insensible, then rob you, are, after 
 all, no mere quacks ; they are professional practitioners of long 
 practice, knowing what they are about, their own responsibility, 
 and the risk to yourself. Their detection and apprehension they 
 have taken into account. They bet this against you ; they set 
 their arrest against their success ; it is a question of odds. As 
 they ' go in for a good thing ' — your watch and purse, obtained 
 by simply throttling or stunning you, to them a matter of little
 
 1 862 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 343 
 
 exertion — they are only ' down upon their luck ' if they are 
 taken. 
 
 From the moment the man in close-buttoned blue has them 
 safe at the police-station they know all the rest. It is an old 
 routine — there are to be examinations, remands ; their own, to 
 them, stale history is to be of course recounted by gaolers and 
 detectives ; they are to have their own police paragraph ; they 
 step into the well-known van, are driven where all is familiar to 
 them, and resort to the aid of the particular attorney on whose 
 well-known services to other rogues they had looked for fresh 
 service to themselves. They know whom he will retain ; they 
 enjoy the ingenuity of the counsel they fee ; the day's trial is a 
 1 day out,' — nothing more. They can calculate on their sentence ; 
 it neither surprises nor disturbs them ; it is the ticket of admis- 
 sion into the law's hospital for diseased morality. 
 
 They know thoroughly the whole economy of their treatment 
 during their sentence ; there is nothing to them of novelty, 
 nothing to dread in it, for they have gone through it all, and 
 counted on having thus to go through it again. Imprisonment,, 
 penal servitude, is to them a disagreeable method of paying a 
 lost ' bet.' Society won, they lost ; their hope, like that of all 
 gamblers, is ' better luck next time ; ' they don't grumble, but 
 set to work now at a fresh speculation. They have to stake 
 prison penitence, prison obedience, the prisoner's teachable, sub- 
 missive spirit, against so many months or years of the duration 
 of their sentence. They know the game well, play it well, and 
 win it. 
 
 What is solitude, separate confinement to these men ? In 
 my belief, of all possible methods, the happiest idea for their 
 utter debasement. They are, when at large, a class most self- 
 indulgent. Industry is continuous, and working hours, and the 
 health and character which steady work demands, forbid a life 
 of debauchery. The felon's life is one of secret scheming to get 
 now and then good spoil, to be spent in continued animal indul- 
 gence, until its exhaustion compels him to fresh risk to get more 
 capital. No amount of vicious indulgence, no moral degradation 
 affects him in his own branch of intermittent industry. When 
 not at work he lives with the worst of men, in the worst localities ;
 
 344 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 9 
 
 the lowest scenes of noisy riot are those of his enjoyment, the 
 vilest of women his chosen associates. He hears it nightly dis- 
 cussed who is taken, who has escaped, what officers are after 
 particular thieves. Assizes and sessions, executions— all afford 
 to his 'society' never-failing objects of deep interest. It is not 
 that these men are insensible to all that is right ; many of them, 
 again and again, have gone through religious instruction in gaol. 
 As a tablecloth goes under the roller of a mangle and comes out 
 smooth, to be again creased and dirtied in use, so these men 
 have been placed in the reforming mangle ; schoolmasters, chap- 
 lains, books, tracts, chapel — all, month after month, did work 
 upon them, until they were sent back to the State as foul, rough 
 subjects cleaned, polished, with a ticket warranting the fact. 
 Yet here they are again in the fullest career of the lowest vice, 
 enjoying it and making no break upon it, but to go forth, rob, 
 murder, forge, do anything to get the money to return to it. 
 
 What must be the thoughts, the meditations of one of these 
 beings caged in a model prison, left, as is said, to wholesome 
 meditation on his past life? Will he think on the Ten Com- 
 mandments? Will the chapel prayers, the chaplain's earnest 
 advice, become to him so much food he gratefully takes and 
 tries to inwardly digest ? Does he not feel and regard all this 
 like the work, the diet, the nature of the cell, just as so much 
 machinery to which for a time he must submit ; and the more 
 submission he can show, the shorter that time to be ? 
 
 Left alone, the cell door closed, I will defy pen to portray 
 such a man's real thoughts. Separated from all female society, 
 perhaps for years, is he unsexed ? Because he cannot get strong 
 drink, is he shut out from the society in which every tale was a 
 villany, every assertion garnished with an oath, in which nothing 
 was too bad to be concealed, nothing too foul to be spoken, can 
 it really be thought that he will not riot over that, in thought, 
 from which his whole inner being has taken its character ? In 
 solitude, such men are driven to live a life of dreaming, waking 
 dreams, as well as the dreams of sleep. They do this to a 
 degree that makes them wicked masters of their solitary hours ; 
 they force into those hours a continued dwelling on the past, 
 until it, after a sort, substantiates that on which they meditate.
 
 1862 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 345 
 
 Of all methods by which religious teaching can be imparted, 
 there is none in which it more fails in effect than that which 
 forces it upon the individual who is submitted to it. It has, 
 indeed, a poor chance when, as in the case of one of these felons, 
 it is made to him as a part of penal discipline. He regards the 
 chaplain as a warder out of uniform, performing a paid-for duty, 
 doing it conscientiously as a branch of the official work of a gaol, 
 just as he sees the warders and gaoler attending chapel with the 
 prisoners, and going through it with the decorum they exact 
 from himself. 
 
 It is hard to give to a man on whom every hour of the day 
 enforces the fact that he is treated as a dangerous beast, that 
 tone of mind which will make him forget the images of carnal 
 delight on which he delights to dwell, and devote himself to the 
 acquirement of a knowledge, not only affording to his depraved 
 nature no pleasure, but requiring of him a child's mind to learn 
 its very alphabet. He has entered gaol again, as he before left 
 it, regarding religion as that thing of churches, chapels, parsons, 
 and Sundays known to himself and all his class as in existence, 
 but as that which from his childhood had never in any way 
 alleviated his own lot, contributed to his life, or touched on any 
 one feature of it. Its truest value to him he has found to be in 
 that result of patience under it, and that seeming acquiescence 
 in it, in prison, which goes to swell ' marks ' and shorten sentence. 
 Let all due honour be given to the really good men who seek to 
 preach to these lost spirits in prison ; that they do so often fail 
 is from no want of skill in the workman or power in the instru- 
 ment, but simply because the material and the workman are not 
 in the proper disposition and of proper fitness for the work. 
 
 The man who garottes A to-night took his mid-day meal 
 with men and women who have taken the gaol degree and come 
 out with its testamur ; neither he nor his companions suffered so 
 much, or were imprisoned so much, that they are afraid or 
 ashamed of felony. They were good prisoners — will be so 
 again ; they are utterly bad men because they love crime, and 
 the love of it outweighs all they have learnt of the suffering 
 which follows on detection. 
 
 I believe you could not manage Chatham, Portland, Dart.
 
 346 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 16 
 
 moor, or even Pentonville, except you had a greater force of 
 officers, unless on this plan of buying obedience by payment in 
 abridged confinement. I say, go to any expense for staff. Let 
 the sentence of the judge be carried out to the day. Avoid long 
 sentences, but in diet and discipline be severe. Transport with- 
 out mercy those on whom it is clear that home penal treatment 
 has failed. If, however, you will persist in giving tickets of 
 leave, let every ticket-holder be directly under the supervision of 
 the police. Let him be known as a felon, allowed to try and be 
 honest, content to be watched in the effort. 
 
 It would be far better to flog twice in a three years' sentence 
 than to degrade a man by keeping him as a pampered wild 
 beast for five years, pretending all the time that you are reform- 
 ing him by making his patient submission a merit. I own I 
 think the separation from the other sex, the iron repression of 
 all intercourse but what is called ' guarded ' with those of his 
 class for a long period of years, fatal to all that is valuable in 
 
 humanity. You make the hard harder. 
 
 A Justice. 
 
 Twenty-two years after the following letter was penned, the Royal 
 Commission to inquire into the Condition of the Housing of the Working 
 Classes was appointed. To the writings of S. G. O. on the subject is 
 partly due the creation of public opinion which roused the conscience 
 of Ministers, and led to the appointment of one of the most important 
 Commissions of recent years. 
 
 The ' Guilt-Gardens! 
 
 December 16, 1862. 
 As it now appears probable that we shall take fresh measures 
 to repress crime, not only by employing a greater force of police, 
 but by making punishment more certain and more severe ; 
 having arrived at the conclusion that our present prison system 
 is only a very costly failure — that it neither reforms nor deters 
 — is it not as well to look a little to the question how and where 
 these men of violence and prey are bred ? The fully developed 
 convict has clearly baffled social science ; he has been submitted 
 to the most carefully devised cleansing process, and yet returns 
 again and again to the prison ever worse than he left it. It 
 must be a strange animal, this, which wears the form and features
 
 1 862 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 347 
 
 of a man, and yet defies all human power to reduce the practice 
 of his life into the commonest deference to the enactments of 
 human law, or the commonest observance of man's duty to his 
 fellow-creatures. 
 
 Were you to trace back the whole life of one of these 
 thoroughly hardened men, you would, as the rule, find it to have 
 been a very consistent life. At the bar of the Central Criminal 
 Court he is only, after all, the plant in full flower which has all 
 along been cultivated to produce that full blossom of violence 
 and guilt it now displays. Where are our ' Guilt-Gardens ' ? 
 Where and how do we raise the seedlings and nurture the young 
 of this species of man-plant ? Under what system of cultivation 
 has villany arrived at its present desperate perfection ? 
 
 The police, Sir, can show you the ' Guilt-Gardens ' of our 
 large towns ; they are just as well known to them as the gardens 
 of Veitch or Rivers to the floricultural world. In them the 
 culture of the sucker thief, the growth of the felon nursery plant, 
 the maturing of the aspiring convict, may be studied thoroughly. 
 There is, on the spot, no secret as to the process. 
 
 We will call the locale Larceny Court ; there are hundreds of 
 such in London and some other large towns. From end to end 
 of this said court there is probably not a dwelling which contains 
 one honest man, one woman of the least pretension to what we 
 call virtue. Every dwelling is as full of life as life will bear. 
 Whether any one soul in it ever had a name given in baptism, I 
 know not ; but name-giving is the rule of the place, and every 
 human being in it has a name — as the rule, a short one, and, 
 almost as the rule, not the name by which he or she is known 
 elsewhere. The men vary very much in appearance, but one 
 expression is common to all — a reckless kind of cunning look, 
 that tells of a life spent in the daring pursuit of evil— a life, in 
 that pursuit, ever driven to the utmost exercise of guilty craft. 
 
 Where men in regular industrial employ live, you will see 
 them going to and fro with a certain amount of regularity ; you 
 will easily trace, from their dress and what tools they take with 
 them, the nature of their calling. In Larceny Court, in any one 
 regular Guilt-Garden, you would soon observe that the goings 
 and comings of the working hands are most irregular ; there is
 
 348 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Dec. io 
 
 no hour of the day at which they may not be seen going to their 
 business ; there is no hour, night or day, when they may not be 
 seen or heard returning from it. Their dress gives no indication 
 of their calling ; whatever it may be, they don't show the tools 
 it requires. Wives have they, and many of them have families 
 of children. If it is difficult to conceive of the children that 
 they were ever submitted to baptism, or to any one act of inter- 
 course with a God-believing society ; it is more so to believe 
 that these wives are, of any Church, of any real form, married. 
 Anyhow, the fact is patent — from these full-grown growths of 
 this Guilt-Garden came the children to be seen at the breasts of 
 women whose dress, dirt, oaths, and foul language prove them 
 to be of the very lowest, of the most depraved. From them 
 came that numerous, mixed brood, of all ages and both sexes, 
 tumbling about, screaming, quarrelling, rioting at the gutter- 
 sides, at every entry, over every portion of this foul, crowded 
 court. 
 
 These women are the mothers of the children of men whose 
 calling it is to rob, to prey on person and property, to get the 
 means to support these mothers, these children, and themselves 
 by any method short of wilful murder— not always with that 
 limitation. They go forth to plunder ; they seek to do so with 
 all the cunning caution long experience has given ; they are 
 ready to act singly or in combination ; they are at home only 
 so long as to enjoy what they have stolen while it lasts, then to 
 go forth and get more. 
 
 Their language is quite consistent with their life, and that of 
 those with whom they live. In such a spot, amid such a people, 
 no language is shameful ; for who among them ever knew 
 shame? They not only call everything by name, knowing 
 nothing of which they may not so speak, but they foul every- 
 thing that should be nameless by the very names they use. If 
 there is no tale so horrible that they will not yet tell it openly, 
 there are no oaths, no blasphemies too horrible wherewith to 
 grace the narration. Can children be called sinners who are 
 bred in this soil of utter guilt ? They are at the feet of parents, 
 drink it all in from the fount of parental lips— they who bore 
 and reared them, they from whom they may have had blows and
 
 1 862 CRIME -ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 349 
 
 curses, but yet have had also caress and kindness after a sort, 
 the only sort they ever knew. These are their examples ; from 
 them they learn their language, from them they drink in guilt ; 
 but, as they never heard or saw anything of virtue, how is it 
 guilt in them ? 
 
 Conceive childhood, maturing into boy and girlhood, in such 
 an atmosphere as this ; it baffles our power to define the process. 
 You cannot say these boys and girls are becoming thoroughly 
 polluted, for that assumes they have once had some purity. 
 Why should you denounce them for their language, their utter 
 defiance of all decency in word and deed ? How could they 
 have been better ? Nay, how — yes, with propriety — could they 
 have been anything but what they are ? They are remarkable 
 instances of childhood developing into manhood without one 
 single drawback from the full force of parental teaching and 
 home influence. 
 
 Godless, repulsive, guilty according to their power, patiently, 
 under much privation, and at times many blows, qualifying them- 
 selves for more advanced guilt — what then ? Is not this just 
 what they were bred to ? Who could have taught them one 
 lesson of God's which could have weaned them from all they 
 had learnt from infancy ? It requires a few years of life to take 
 in, to the least profit, even the early lines of belief. With these 
 children, the page had been blotted with the Devil's lore from the 
 moment the mind could receive one single abiding impression. 
 
 Bred, reared thus, in Larceny Court, a seeding-bed of guilt's 
 great gardener, the Evil One, behold the nursery trees now 
 quickly preparing for transplanting — the females to become, by 
 slow, foul degrees, as their mothers ; to be early and late at the 
 gin-palace, ever ready to aid in guilt and make life out of it ; 
 the young men to steal, pick pockets, get money for riot, in 
 youthful imitation of their parents ; to go through a course of 
 summary convictions, to learn their ways in future life by early 
 study of the scenes of which their parents have so often talked 
 — police cells, police vans, houses of ' detention,' ' correction,' all 
 the ' small goes ' through which the young of our Garden have 
 to pass before they further qualify for assize trial by one or two 
 appearances at sessions.
 
 350 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 16 
 
 Your nursery gardener assures you his trees will grow when 
 moved, because they have been moved so often. The productive 
 industry of crime is ever moving its productions, keeping them 
 still in the soil of guilty association, but never permitting them 
 to root too long unemployed in any one portion of the criminal 
 field. There is a time, however, when trees are too old to trans- 
 plant ; so with the criminal. At last he is fully developed, an 
 accomplished, oft-convicted felon, thoroughly read in all the pro- 
 cesses of detection, trial, conviction, and penal servitude ; he is 
 also as thoroughly hardened against all he has ever known of 
 the consequence of detection as he is desperate to defy the law 
 to reclaim or repress him. He must live by plunder. If you 
 make burglary too difficult, too dangerous, you drive him to the 
 simpler process of garotte ; if, by your increased police patrol, 
 you make this in London impracticable, you will only drive him 
 further afield. 
 
 I quite admit that a change in prison discipline, recourse to 
 the 'lash,' worse diet, harder labour, less of that maudlin 
 sympathy which seeks to make the convict patient with pity, 
 instead of enforcing obedience because it is an element in a 
 justly deserved punishment — that these expedients, with also a 
 stern infliction of the full sentence passed, and, if practicable, a 
 wise, firm resort to transportation, would reduce crime thus far 
 — these old convicts would become economists, and make one 
 reaping last longer. I cannot see how it is to do more, for they 
 must live with old associates, having no other quarters open to 
 them ; their address will still be this or that floor in this or that 
 guilt-crammed dwelling, in some one or other of the very many 
 Guilt-Gardens. 
 
 Surely, Sir, it is time for us to thoroughly explore and 
 expose the real nature of the dwellings into which the honest 
 and dishonest working classes are now, in London, forced to 
 dwell. The honest workman can scarcely get decently, healthily 
 lodged, though he pays a high rent regularly ; it follows that 
 the ' Larceny Courts,' all the vilest, worst-drained, worst-built, 
 never-repaired dwellings to be found in the most out-of-the-way 
 places, are inhabited throughout by nests of criminals, of all 
 ages, both sexes.
 
 1 862 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 351 
 
 In ready communication with these are the receivers of stolen 
 goods ; in and about them are the lowest class of beer-houses, 
 gin-shops, and night-houses. The demand has begotten the 
 supply ; whatever the vicious, massed together, can require for 
 the indulgence of their depravity — in whatever way traders can 
 possess themselves of the fruit of the toil of those who live by 
 plunder — all is supplied, all done for the purpose. 
 
 Ragged schools, shoeblack brigades, the bold efforts of those 
 hosts of pious volunteers who are ever attacking the vice of 
 London wherever it most abounds, deserve all honour ; they are 
 doing, have done, great, good work. The ' mudlarker ' seeks for 
 silver in a sewer — sometimes gets a thimble or a spoon ; he toils 
 on, heedless of the black filth he treads, or of all he smells, and, 
 smelling, tastes. So do good people in London go soul-hunting 
 in these Guilt-Gardens. Gentlemen, ladies, people of refinement 
 scarce less than their zeal, here seek to save the smallest item of 
 humanity possessed of the smallest ray of knowledge of good. 
 Year after year they tread these courts as though they had no 
 eyes, ears, smell, or taste that moral pollution could offend. If 
 they can pick out and save one child, separate and soften one of 
 these from-birth-hardened girls, they joy over this lost piece of 
 silver ; they set about to clean it ; with God's help they do often 
 succeed. But still there runs the sewer ; there, daily and nightly 
 sending up to Heaven the rank incense of the very offal of 
 metropolitan vice, is this seething mass of guilty, guilt-hardened 
 humanity. There is the convict-breeding ground, there the 
 great crime tank, from which flow the violence and the crime 
 which cost so much in public tranquillity, in police, prisons, &c. 
 
 In my opinion, you will never make head against the criminal 
 population until you cease to force them so to mass, and so seek 
 the shelter that is a mockery of a home, that they must live as 
 brutes even if they do not live by plunder. You are improving 
 your streets, adding to your warehouses ; you are doing this 
 forgetful of the fearful driving of the poorer classes to more and 
 more crowded localities, long since condemned as overcrowded. 
 Let us persevere to amend the criminal law, but, at the same 
 time, let us see whether something cannot be done at the 
 criminal-breeding grounds.
 
 352 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 21 
 
 December si, 1862. 
 
 I have all my life been asked, ' Why lift these horrid veils ? 
 Why spoil good, quiet people's breakfasts with the exposure of 
 what they neither wish to see nor hear ? ' I answer, it is the 
 least any humane man can do for these poor wretches to let their 
 habitat be known. I read yearly column after column of earnest 
 eloquence for spiritual, moral aid to people whom I only know 
 of from my atlas. I know well, few know better, the great and 
 noble cost at which English piety tries to add to foreign Christian 
 folds. I know the zeal in which this vast machinery is begotten ; 
 it would compass the earth to gain one soul ; may it reap its 
 millions ! I have pored many an hour over the wonderful 
 yearly exhibitions on paper of what, as a nation, we do in the 
 way of national education. The figures which represent the 
 cost astound me ; the evidence of the nature of the learning 
 given, its bulk, its quality, is quite beyond my poor mental 
 power to comprehend. 
 
 Loud each year ring the bells of missionary enterprise, 
 loud sound the trumpets of educational success ; we have our 
 'jubilee' for this or that great religious institution, and we 
 shriek forth our transports at our rival achievements. Here are 
 the notes of conquerors, here the paeans of triumphant assail- 
 ants of mundane vice. Heaven hears it ; I trust Heaven will 
 bless and reward the gallant hosts who thus joy at sin pursued, 
 overtaken, hunted to the world's confines, there grappled and 
 mastered. 
 
 What is it also that Heaven hears besides — not at a May 
 meeting, not at any annual autumnal performance of a Social 
 Science professor, not on town platforms, in Chapter-rooms, at 
 Convocation ; not at any annual exhibition of the balance of a 
 year's battle with sin or ignorance at home or abroad — but ever, 
 all the year, in all years, from morn to night, through night to 
 morn ? Take a cab and learn for yourself. Go where cursing 
 never intermits, where the child curses, and the old, dying, 
 curse ; where blasphemy is language, not subsidiary to it ; where 
 harlotry scarcely exists, because the harlot elsewhere is an 
 exceptional character — here the female is born and bred to
 
 1862 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 
 
 353 
 
 impurity, and therefore never can be said to stray ; where no 
 language we know can describe, translate, give, either the depth 
 of meaning or depth of infamy of the common language of the 
 place. Think of the God of heaven ever hearing, ever seeing all 
 this, looking with the eye that comprehendeth all space on this 
 bubbling up of a hot well of heathenism and crime, in the very 
 midst of space said to be Christian, over which the same eye 
 sees cathedrals, churches, chapels, cropping up in every direc- 
 tion ; in which Christian legislators enact just laws ; in and 
 about which human industry, zeal, and science are ever in full 
 toil to produce, reproduce, and improve all the rich wonders of 
 art and use with which the very streets become as ' Exhibitions.' 
 
 I shall be told, ' All this is unavoidable. Every city must 
 have its refuse ; humanity in mass must precipitate certain foul 
 dregs.' Alas ! there is some truth in this. But we have learnt 
 to disinfect, at all events to deodorise, our sewage ; we are 
 spending a million or two in conveying it from where it is pro- 
 duced, and is hurtful, to where we hope to utilise it. 
 
 Must it be that at this season we are to proclaim the o- od 
 tidings of Heaven's message to all, and yet have a quiet rese.ve 
 in our own breasts, admitting that in the very heart of the richest 
 city of the world, the chief city of a Christian kingdom, there are 
 thousands of our fellow-creatures whom this message cannot 
 reach, or, reaching, cannot touch, because we have allowed them 
 for many a generation to live as beasts of prey — plunder their 
 aim from birth, human creatures living to be pests to humanity ? 
 
 We have no right in this matter to seek ( a sign,' to demand 
 of Heaven miraculous aid to help in work in reality of a very 
 commonplace character. You would discharge the scullery 
 maid whom you saw wiping out a sink with a dinner napkin. 
 Can any religious power, however aided by Church and Dissent's 
 highest united pressure, hope really to prevail over the hearts 
 and habits of people forced to dwell in these foul lanes and 
 alleys ? I declare I have been, in one city, in places so vile that 
 I should have felt a Bible as much out of place as a pack of 
 cards in a pulpit. Religious zeal, by Heaven's aid, may steal a 
 soul or two now and then from these Guilt-Gardens, but the mass 
 you never will affect until you disperse it. 
 
 VOL. I. A A
 
 354 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 2 
 
 I call out for rigid inquiry into the actual state of these 
 places — honest evidence how they came to be what they are, 
 for whose profit they are sustained. I ask, in the name of com- 
 mon humanity, on what principle of justice ground is to be for 
 ever covered with dwellings for the rich while the poor of our 
 towns, who must exist in a certain proportion to those dwellings, 
 have no provision made for their physical or moral healthy 
 existence. 
 
 Our Convicts. 
 
 January 2, 1863. 
 
 There is one truth as to the treatment of oft-convicted felons 
 which no one seems to me to like to speak out — viz. that they 
 are systematically dealt with as men on whom obedience is not 
 to be too much enforced ; they are kept by force in captivity ; 
 they are more coaxed than forced to submit to the discipline of 
 the prison. It would be amusing, if it were not very irritating, 
 to read in the blue-books on convict prisons how the officials 
 congratulate themselves on the amount of submission they secure 
 by indulgence. We are told how cheerfully the prisoners endure 
 their sentences when they find that a certain amount of prison 
 goodness will shorten their term of confinement. The advan- 
 tages of prison life are so naively set forth ; all the little social 
 sugar-plums are so paraded — the lectures on a model of the 
 Tabernacle, from diagrams of telescopic and microscopic dis- 
 coveries — the beautiful quiet of the schools, showing to visitors 
 such a lovely picture of contented pursuit of knowledge — all go 
 to prove that the great object is to enable each prisoner to get 
 through his sentence in the most cheerful, contented spirit. 
 Excellent diet, light work with little exposure to bad weather, a 
 so-called cell — in fact, an exceedingly convenient, well-lighted, 
 warmed, and ventilated cabin, full of contrivances to secure com- 
 fort, with literature, sacred and profane, free of cost ; most 
 respectable attendance, all work to the one end — the inducing 
 the villain, like a good fellow, just to be quiet and good, that he 
 may not only shorten his sentence, but make its days those of 
 pleasantness to himself and his warders. 
 
 We wonder it don't answer ; the felon class would very 
 much wonder if it did. The great mistake has been the confu-
 
 1863 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 355 
 
 sion of the two things— punishment and reformation. We go 
 through the farce of passing a sentence of penal servitude for so 
 many years, or for life. It is only a blow from the fist of justice 
 with the padded glove ; it is a hard blow so far as regards the 
 penal hitting power, but then we have muffled the penal hand, 
 That sentence neither really bruises nor draws blood ; the felon 
 at the bar is neither punished severely nor frightened ; it is the 
 bark of the judge, not the real bite of the gaol. He knows what 
 it means at the very worst— that the Government will be glad to 
 get rid of him out of prison at a date far short of the sentence if 
 he will only be — a good prisoner. 
 
 It is clear to me that at Portland, Dartmoor, and Chatham 
 the warders are more to be pitied than the prisoners. They 
 have harder work, they never know a moment free of anxiety, 
 their pay is low for the nature of their service, their numerical 
 force not sufficient to secure their own safety and the safe custody 
 of the convicts, except by the system of making things as 
 pleasant to those gentlemen in difficulties as possible. It never 
 would surprise me to hear of convict mutinies far more serious 
 than any we have ever yet known. I am convinced, if the diet 
 were changed for the worse, if the sentences were worked out to 
 the full, and real work enforced, it would be madness to keep 
 the staff of warders at its present weakness. You may keep up 
 a species of separation which shall defy conspiracies extending 
 to large numbers of the prisoners, but the knowledge of their 
 united strength, if brought to bear upon any one common object, 
 is in itself a fearful element of danger. 
 
 Let me now give my idea in this matter of convict treatment, 
 only dealing with it generally, avoiding close detail. I would 
 never have large masses of these dangerous men assembled in 
 any one locality. I intend only to speak of the oft-convicted, 
 hardened class. The buildings for their reception should be 
 strong in material, but fitted within and without upon the prin- 
 ciple that only safe, healthy custody was the object. The pre- 
 sent gaols are really beautiful penal toys, the perfection of 
 lodging-house for single men architecture, achieved with no 
 respect to cost. In a better situation Pentonville would sell well 
 as 'chambers ' for bank clerks and M.P.'s of limited income. I 
 
 A A 2
 
 356 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 2 
 
 would never have more than 300 convicts in one prison for firm, 
 severe, penal treatment ; always relying far more on a strong, 
 well-armed force of well-paid warders than upon locks and kcys ? 
 chapel and school, lecture-room and kitchen, to preserve dis- 
 cipline and enforce labour. Separation should be the rule at 
 night, association in small parties by day ; but no party ever 
 left without the presence of at least two warders. The actual 
 prison building should be constructed on a principle affording 
 easy complete supervision ; as I have said, strong, but I would 
 have it in all its details rough — i.e. with as little of the comfort- 
 able ornamental dwelling as possible. It should aim simply at 
 this end — the sheltering in health and keeping in safety men 
 who are under a sentence of punishment, not under a compulsory 
 system of reformation. 
 
 These buildings should, with all necessary accessories, be in 
 the centre of a large space of ground, walled in with very high 
 walls, with but one or, at the most, two entrances. To the out- 
 side world I would show nothing but these walls and the strong 
 entrance gates ; all else should be matter of conjecture, not 
 sight. No free labourer should ever go within the gates ; repairs 
 I would have done by a staff kept by the Government for this 
 s^le purpose. I would call these prisons, ' Prisons for Severe 
 Penal Servitude ; ' in these should be worked out to the last 
 hour the sentence passed by the judge. I would offer religious 
 teaching and schooling, not to give the character to shorten the 
 sentence, but to fit the criminal for a better life when his sentence 
 is over. I would have the sentences never to exceed seven 
 years ; as the rule, to be short of this, except, of course, in those 
 cases of capital crimes where life servitude saves from execution. 
 I am satisfied short severe sentences are better than long ones. 
 There are arguments which will not bear public discussion 
 against a too long separation from all the outer world of male 
 convicts. It is my firm belief that solitary confinement for any 
 length of time is altogether unjustifiable ; insanity is, to me, the 
 least of the evils it produces. In every case in which the 
 prisoner, on a second committal for felony, has been proved to 
 have used personal violence, I would invariably have him flogged 
 at the very commencement of his sentence. As to the nature
 
 1 863 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 357 
 
 of the work on which these men are to be employed, it is a 
 matter of detail. I will only say it should not be the learning a 
 trade, but simply hard, tedious work enforced. 
 
 I do not advocate some such system as this instead of 
 transportation, but, as a matter of experiment, to diminish the 
 number of those whom we must at last thus get rid of. I know 
 it will be called inhuman, unchristian. I am too old to care for 
 misconstruction of motive. I am satisfied that humanity to the 
 peaceable and well-behaved and Christian feeling for criminals 
 lead me to wish the number diminished. I claim for all men, 
 garotters included, fair play. I want to make them better ; the 
 present petting system makes them v/orse. One of the chap- 
 lains of a convict establishment in a British settlement I see 
 wants to stop the prisoners' grog ; but he clearly sees why he 
 fails — it might cause a mutiny. 
 
 As to tickets-of-leave, not one of these men should quit the 
 gaol but under license for one year ; this should be part of 
 every sentence. Under that license he should be under police 
 supervision, and obliged to report himself from time to time. I 
 am quite satisfied many an employer Would give a man from 
 prison a chance of getting a character for industrv when he 
 knew the police would watch him, who would never take on^ 
 who had been a convict unwatched. 
 
 I am wedded to my own small penal gaol plan, or I should 
 admit myself wholly a convert to the Irish system. I will only 
 add, I would have the diet full, but coarse — all that is necessary 
 for health, but nothing more. I have faith that a few such 
 prisons, of small cost, would work a penal revolution. 
 
 The virility of S. G. O.'s mind rarely allowed him to blend compas- 
 sion with weakness. Towards crime he was stern, resolute, and im- 
 placable ; hut from capital punishment he recoiled. His grounds for 
 shrinking from the extreme sentence of the law are stated as follows : — 
 
 December 31, 1863. 
 It is day by day becoming more important that the insanity 
 which is to procure the acquittal of a murderer should be deter- 
 mined on some principle the public can understand. It is also 
 much to be desired that we should know the principles which
 
 358 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Dec. 31 
 
 are to regulate the mercy of the Crown as to the reception of a 
 plea of insanity to bar ' execution ' after sentence of death has 
 been passed, the jury having rejected this plea at the trial. 
 
 A poor man, one with friends without means, has no power 
 to search out all the evidence of that hereditary taint of insanity 
 which, in the hands of the experts he cannot fee, and the counsel 
 he cannot retain, might save his life. If condemned, he has not 
 the assistance that a rich man has in still seeking mercy by 
 powerful and persevering appeals through the press to the 
 public, by urgent private pressure upon the Secretary of State 
 exercised by those who have the ' means ' to get up a case and 
 the influence to secure a hearing. 
 
 The judges now severally lay down to juries the legal prin- 
 ciple which at a conference of the whole Bench was long since 
 arrived at, the greatest consideration having been given to the 
 subject. It was ruled — ' Before a plea of insanity can be allowed 
 undoubted evidence ought to be adduced that the accused was 
 of diseased mind, and that at the time he committed the act he 
 was not conscious of right and wrong.' 
 
 It is, then, quite clear that, to sustain legally the plea of in- 
 sanity in the case of a murderer, his counsel must produce clear 
 proof that he was a man whose mind previous to the murder was 
 in a diseased state ; in other words, he was not mentally sane ; 
 that at the actual time of the commission of the murder this in- 
 sane state had such influence over him that he did not know the 
 deed of murder to be a wrong or illegal deed. 
 
 Let me here observe that this ' ruling ' seems to exclude 
 altogether the plea of intermittent insanity. It does not allow 
 an act of an insane man, done in a lucid interval, to be excused 
 on the ground of his general insane state ; it narrows the ques- 
 tion to the moment of the deed — ' Did he then know he was 
 doing wrong, he being beforetime proved to be insane ? ' 
 
 It appears to me that this ruling of the judges is, after all, 
 the only sound one at which they could arrive. It was necessary 
 to come to something clear on the point ; it was impossible to 
 arrive at any thing which could satisfy the plain requirements of 
 justice and, at the same time, meet all the theories of psycholo- 
 gical science
 
 1863 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 359 
 
 The point I wish here to press into notice is that this ruling 
 sets aside the question — Could the prisoner control his will? 
 Had he at the moment an impulse towards an evil act, whicfr, 
 knowing it to be evil, he yet could not govern ? The judges 
 decline going into a question so impossible to prove ; they fall 
 back upon that which generally will admit of proof: 'Whether 
 he could or could not control his purpose, did he know that pur- 
 pose to be illegal — one the carrying out of which would make 
 him amenable to the law's penalty ? ' 
 
 This, then, being the point to which evidence of insanity as 
 a plea to save at the trial of a murderer is narrowed, we see 
 clearly that all evidence after conviction should still be within 
 the same limits if put forth to arrest execution. 
 
 We may be told that at the trial there was evidence which 
 proved the strong probability that the prisoner was not sane at 
 the time he committed the murder ; but his conduct after the act 
 and at the trial afforded no proof that his mind was so diseased 
 that he did not know right from wrong ; the jury, therefore, did 
 right in their verdict of ' Guilty,' but since the conviction the 
 prisoner has shown just that proof of insanity which, could it 
 have been proved at the trial, would have saved him. This plea 
 for mercy after conviction needs careful consideration, for, in my 
 opinion, it goes for more than its advocates avow. 
 
 To respite on the ground of insanity on this post conviction 
 evidence you must admit that the present proof of insanity 
 satisfies justice ; that in this particular prisoner insanity — ab- 
 sence of knowledge of right and wrong— existed at the time he 
 murdered ; that then reason ruled again for a while, but now the 
 former state of disease governs the actions and perverts the 
 mind. Without at all disputing that this may be so, to make it 
 a just plea for mercy we ought to have some time fixed after 
 sentence to test the convict's sanity, to see how long it will last. 
 We might hang a man on the Monday who on the Tuesday 
 would have clearly developed that exact evidence of his insane 
 state which the experts in insanity declared to be in abeyance, 
 which they had sworn he was inevitably liable to from time to 
 time, in which at the time he committed the murder, he, in their 
 opinion, acted.
 
 360 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Dec. 3T 
 
 One of the most useful writers on the subject of medical 
 jurisprudence says: 'It is impossible to give any consistent 
 definition of insanity ; a medical witness who ventures on a 
 definition will generally find himself involved in numerous in- 
 consistencies ; no definition can possibly comprise the variable 
 characters which the malady is likely to assume. The power 
 which is most manifestly deficient in the insane is generally the 
 controlling power of the will.' I do not believe anything more 
 like common-sense than the above can be written on a subject 
 which no living man can wholly master. The human brain 
 dealing with the brain human, not only finds its equal, but 
 something more ; it is the battle of intellect with intellect ; but 
 the battle-field is such, so wonderfully constructed, so curiously 
 guarded, the disposition of its forces, where understood, is so 
 complex, and so much is yet hidden of them, that men with the 
 wisest brains stand as fools when they seek to define the brain's 
 action in others. 
 
 We may as well hope to photograph the dreams of a dis- 
 turbed night as to reduce to rule or expose for exhibition the 
 real action of brain matter upon the will, the passions, the 
 reasoning powers of our lives. A great deal has science done to 
 solve some of the mysteries of physical and mental life ; year by 
 year we add to our store of knowledge as we study closer physi- 
 cal and mental cerebral phenomena ; but as yet the space gained 
 is as nothing to the vast field of inquiry still daily opening out 
 to us. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the really insane are very 
 deficient in power to control the will ; that they are driven to 
 action very often when they knozv the action to which they are 
 thus irresistibly impelled is %vrong It is equally true that persons 
 most clearly insane have very often a perfect sense of right and 
 wrong. It is indisputable that there is no disease more heredi- 
 tary than insanity. It will not be denied that what are called 
 ' mad doctors ' are, very many of them, most able, conscientious 
 men ; that from their constant study of mental disease we are 
 wise in conceding to their opinions great weight. 
 
 As the law stands, as the judges have ruled, all this may be 
 granted, and yet a judge be fully justified, nay, legally bound,
 
 1 863 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 361 
 
 to tell a jury that, whatever may have been urged by counsel, 
 whatever proved in evidence, however great the authority of that 
 part of it given by the medical witnesses, still the whole question 
 lies in this — not what the prisoner may have been from the 
 antecedents of his birth, not what he is now before them, not 
 whether he could or could not control his will at the moment of 
 the murder, but did he know he was about to do a murder, that 
 the doing it was wrong, and would, if detected, bring him to the 
 bar where he now stands for acquittal or conviction ? 
 
 The real truth, Sir, is, the ruling of the judges lays down 
 principles which are in direct antagonism with the dicta of 
 medical science. The judge has to make the knowledge of good 
 and evil the rule. The mad doctor adds to this — knowing the 
 good from the evil, the prisoner, being insane, could not compel 
 his will to avoid the latter ; he was as helpless in mind to with- 
 hold his hand as a palsied man is to move his limb. 
 
 The misfortune is that this conflict between the science which 
 comes forward to defend our poor brains from the consequences 
 of their liability to disease, and the law, which must seek to pro- 
 tect life by plain rules, capable of being understood by common 
 juries, concerns an issue which is in each case soon beyond 
 further aid from argument. The hanged man can no longer be 
 helped by law or medicine. 
 
 Our only comfort must be that we have done our best to 
 arrive at that rule in the matter which is the least exposed to 
 abuse. Some ' ruling ' must protect us from a too great reliance 
 on the speculative theorists whose opinions can always be ob- 
 tained where a life is concerned ; and theory has so much to 
 urge. The ' rule ' at present laid down puts the poor man and 
 the rich at least as nearly in an equal position as is possible in a 
 world where wealth must ever be a source of power. 
 
 There is something very painful to every thinking mind in 
 the fact that we do for ever hurry out of this world beings for 
 acts which are declared on oath, by men of high character and 
 deep study of the diseases of the mind, to be acts the commis- 
 sion of which they, from mental disease, could not avoid. Be- 
 cause some of those skilled in mental science have given utter- 
 ance to rash and unreasonable theories, we are not justified in
 
 362 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 7 
 
 lightly rejecting the great truths which psychological science has 
 arrived at. 
 
 The fact that the murderer has sent his victim, without any 
 preparation, into eternity, is in itself no justification for our 
 doing the same by him, with the little alleviation that we do 
 give him a few weeks to prepare for his violent end. 
 
 Let any man suffer his mind to rest on what is taught from 
 every pulpit as the law of God as it affects the soul which dies 
 in unrepented, unatoned-for guilt ; let him regard the man to be 
 hanged for murder, with just the chance of being brought to a 
 state of sound hope in the condemned cell in those numbered 
 days ; failing this, as sent violently, by man's sentence, to meet 
 that eternal sentence the nature of which, as it is preached, is 
 so dreadful that all shrink from the ideas it but too literally 
 'presents. 
 
 Who among us would not pray to see the day when some 
 way of escape may be made for us, by which we may hope to 
 deter from murder without sending the murderer into eternity 
 not only with so limited a preparation, but, alas ! sometimes with 
 a doubt left on our minds whether from disease of brain, obscure 
 but all-powerful, he was before God guilty of this act, though he 
 has gone before Him loaded with other guilt ? 
 
 I know the fair, patient trial given every prisoner ; I have no 
 maudlin pity for the manslayer ; but when I look at what Reve- 
 lation declares to be the sinner's fate, I shrink from the contem- 
 plation of a man with this guilt sent so quickly to the last Judge 
 of all. 
 
 George Victor Townley, who murdered Miss Goodman through 
 jealousy, was convicted and sentenced to death, but escaped execution 
 through a certificate of insanity too hastily signed. He committed 
 suicide in prison, February 12, 1865. 
 
 January 7, 1864. 
 
 It may be said that a prisoner is rightly condemned because 
 he committed murder, at the time knowing right from wrong, 
 but that after his conviction it is made plain that he is a man of 
 such peculiar ideas of what is right, what wrong, one who sets 
 his own judgment so above all that Revelation or reason lays 
 down as good or evil, that to hang him is to hang a man who,
 
 1 864 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 363 
 
 acting according to his own conscience, is found not to have 
 the ordinary conscience of a human being, and therefore to be, 
 according to all rational human estimation, not in a sane mind. 
 
 If this is to be the law or the practice to set aside law, I shall 
 never wonder at the increase of murder, for I feel satisfied there 
 are a great number of people who scoff at all idea of Revelation, 
 who regard laws as so many restraints on man's free action, the 
 result of the combination of men of particular ideas to rule all 
 who differ from them. I think I know where to go to find the 
 published opinions of men who, if they don't go this full length, 
 at least go very little short of all I have read of this man Town- 
 ley's ideas of right and wrong. If men with this independence 
 of idea, this bold, determined spirit to carry into practice their 
 contempt of death, their utter negation of all the laws of civilised 
 life, are too mad to hang, it is time we were taught the fact by 
 positive law, not left to gather it from occasional proofs that it is 
 so held in quarters where there is power to set aside the law's 
 sentence. 
 
 If this reprieve is justifiable — I do not say it is not — let us 
 know, from authority, its exact grounds. I trust at the meeting 
 of Parliament the Government will be forced to show the whole 
 correspondence ; to print for public use, for public consideration, 
 a truthful statement of everything said or done on which this 
 murderer has been taken from the gallows' foot to the asylum 
 for the insane. There may be a good case for the executive ; 
 but in my opinion the best case which can be made will still 
 leave the impression that, if this man is rightly saved, many 
 have been wrongly hung who had not the means to command 
 the interest in their behalf that he had. 
 
 The fibre of S.G.O's mind was such as to compel him to assail cant 
 and fraud on all occasions, and without respect of persons. His con- 
 tempt for wrong in high places energised his pen with something of 
 ancient Hebrew fire. He seizes an opportunity of exhibiting to the 
 public mind the guilt of rich knaves in a letter containing a moral on a 
 well-worn theme, but not the less forcible because the theme itself was 
 
 not new even in the days of Jeremiah. 
 
 August 23, 1864. 
 
 A great and wise step has at last been taken in the amend-' 
 ment of the law dealing with criminals a r ter conviction. There
 
 364 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 23 
 
 is no longer any premium offered for religious and moral hypo- 
 crisy. Prison discipline will enforce the order and decent con- 
 duct prison rules require of prisoners. The endeavours to make 
 them better men, to Christianise them, will not be relaxed ; but 
 mere religious profession, or even a fair indication of real moral 
 amendment, will be of no account as regards any shortening of 
 sentence. It is not easy to deceive in the matter of industry, 
 and this alone will now avail to obtain any reduction of the term 
 of detention. Up to a certain point, every sentence will be 
 carried out to its letter ; beyond that point, and only then, can 
 any amount of ' marks ' aid the convict to obtain remission of 
 any part of his sentence. The diet of prisoners will now be no 
 better than what is absolutely necessary to sustain health. 
 
 The knowledge of these alterations in our dealing with con- 
 victs, when it once reaches that class of old offenders against the 
 laws to whom it will be so little palatable, will, I have no doubt, 
 have a good effect. They will, from their experience of the old 
 system, be excellent judges of the consequences to themselves of 
 a renewed acquaintance with penal discipline. The ' ticket-of- 
 leave ' they now know can only be hoped for after a fixed time 
 of severe discipline and continued industry. They will also fur- 
 ther learn that even this ticket, or license, to be so hardly 
 obtained, will only be held on the condition that they keep 
 themselves under police inspection ; that if thus free under 
 license they indulge in crime they will be returned to prison, 
 there to work out the remainder of that sentence the remission 
 of which had cost them so much. 
 
 With regard to ' life sentences ' passed on atrocious crimi- 
 nals, they are, except under special circumstances, to be literally 
 the penal seclusion of the prisoner for the whole remainder of 
 his existence. 
 
 It is to be borne in mind, also, that nine months under every 
 penal servitude sentence is to be spent in separate confinement. 
 
 I think the general public have now no cause to complain 
 that the particular portion of the community who live by depre- 
 dation are, when convicted, dealt with in too lenient a spirit. 
 
 I, Sir, have no sympathy for a thief. I have long been con- 
 vinced that we ought not to forget that Bill Sykcs can say, ' Am
 
 1 864 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 365 
 
 I not a brother ? ' But then, I argue, it is for the good of these 
 our brethren that they should be deterred from evil-doing. I 
 argue, we should not punish in a spirit of revenge against the 
 criminal, but in mercy to him, in mercy to all whose lives and 
 properties his calling endangers. We hope to make the indi- 
 vidual Sykes better ; failing this, at least for a time, to prevent 
 his becoming worse. Stealing is bad for him, being robbed is 
 bad for us. We impose suffering on the thief in the hope that 
 he will not only thus be frightened out of a course of crime, but 
 that also, while suffering, he may be taught to see that his true 
 interest here and hereafter lies in the direction of honest 
 industry. 
 
 Still, there is one ground on which, I own, I find some space 
 for sympathy with the professional stealer. He way well argue, 
 ' You law-makers detest the thief, hunt down the thief, offer 
 rewards for his detection ; maintain, at enormous expense, an 
 army to watch him ; treat him as above when you catch him 
 and convict him. But then you have such very peculiar ideas as 
 to what is stealing. You war against the man with the jemmy, 
 the crape, the list-shoe and lucifers, with whom your police are 
 familiar, as having been bred to housebreaking ; you are very 
 indulgent to the very large class — " stealers " — to whom a 
 policeman touches his hat when accosting them.' 
 
 Thieves read newspapers, and thus for ever read of first- 
 class ' stealings,' the work of swindling companies, individual 
 swindlers. They know it is a hard and perilous day's work to 
 net two watches or a haul of plate ; they also know that three 
 or four or more gentlemen well dressed, with an excellent secre- 
 tary and as good a luncheon, with police in their pay to watch 
 their offices, may almost daily be found, in many an 'office,' 
 quietly and comfortably concocting false balance-sheets, false 
 prospectuses, conspiring to abstract the money of thousands, 
 after a sort as clearly stealing it as if they robbed tills, picked 
 pockets, or broke into houses. 
 
 The gentlemanlike, well-bred stealer who appears in the 
 Bankruptcy Court may be subject to a few days' infliction from 
 the Linklater who has to prove him a rogue ; but having no fear 
 of cropped hair, prison fare, and penal retirement, he takes it
 
 366 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Aug. 23 
 
 quietly — nay, very often answers the questions which extort his 
 villany with a quiet smile. He knows very well the indignation 
 of the opposing counsel is just as much a distillation from his 
 brief as the plaintive pleading of his own counsel in mitigation 
 of his villany is according to his ' instructions.' He feels quite 
 satisfied that, after all, his ' world,' the ' world ' in general, will be 
 very merciful to him ; that he will go quietly back to it — to 
 begin again. His stealing is not vulgar theft ; no, for such there 
 is penal servitude ; his appropriation of other men's money is of 
 that condoned nature, so common, so commonly successful, that 
 respectable gentlemen join him over his claret, and only call his 
 failures or detections misfortunes. 
 
 Thieves attend racecourses ; they watch the congregations of 
 * the ring ' and ' the corner.' They have, I think, some title to feel 
 a little hurt if they should overhear an experienced turfite point 
 to a noble lord getting off his horse, and say to a friend, ' Now, 
 in my opinion, that is the biggest thief of the whole paddock.' 
 Thieves know the slang of thieves ; they are also well aware 
 that so common are the ' thievings ' committed on the turf, that 
 for every separate dodge to obtain winnings dishonestly there is 
 a slang term as well recognised by turfmen as the language of 
 magsmen is by all of their own order. I say that the feelings of 
 the stealers the police hunt are with some justice aggravated by 
 the very barefaced way other stealers, whom the police do not 
 pursue, intrude their peculiar ' stealing ' upon their notice. 
 
 After a life of great trouble, a professional stealer of the 
 baser sort retires ; he has worked out his last ticket-of-leave, 
 shaken hands with his last prison officer ; a happy coup or a 
 chance inheritance has made him ' a man now living on his own 
 property.' From the horse he drives, through every article he 
 uses, to the very reel of cotton from which his shirts are mended, 
 can he acquire any one, and not have to take great care, exer- 
 cise grievous suspicion, lest he be ' robbed ' ? Does he not, once 
 the thief of low life, now the gentleman of middle life, very soon 
 discover that the most orderly and respectable of the scenes of 
 commercial life are scenes of fraud and theft, equal in reality — 
 i.e. in taking money dishonestly — to those of any lane or alley 
 in which he spent the days of his disreputable former life ?
 
 1 864 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 367 
 
 I agree with Sykes ; we hunt down the offensive, vulgar, 
 violent 'stealer,' but all the time a very great proportion of 
 what we call commercial enterprise and noble sport is ' stealing ' 
 and nothing else. It is the use of means directly dishonest to 
 obtain possession of the money belonging to others for our own 
 immediate gain and pleasure. 
 
 I must also add that I think the class of the ' guilt-gardens,' 
 now to be so stringently dealt with, have daily before their eyes 
 the proof that we can scarcely really so desire their religious 
 reformation as we profess. Chaplains exhort them, warn them, 
 seek to lead them to see the better road to a better world, in 
 honesty, purity, and sobriety ; they come to their cells as 
 missionaries go to the heathen, to tell them tidings of that 
 virtue the world outside feels they should be taught. They go 
 back to that world, and what learn they there ? Simply this, 
 that while as against the baser sort of sinner every denunciation 
 of vice is made, and to them earnest appeals to virtue are made, 
 while home missionaries, active ministers, for-heaven-working, 
 kind, honest men and women enter their vilest abodes to try and 
 wean them from evil and teach them good, no such zeal, no such 
 work is really sought to be done among the rich and well-to-do, 
 whose gilded licentiousness and prosperous ill-doing is just as 
 patent as their own. 
 
 There are ' stealers and stealers,' ' wicked and wicked.' 
 Thieves convicted, thieves condoned ; vile men and women re- 
 buked, preached to, sought out for saving ; just such men, such 
 women are there left by the parson, the missionary, to their own 
 devices, as if what was true to the poor vile had no application 
 to rich sinners. 
 
 We are improving penal discipline, raising hundreds of thou- 
 sands to aid the preaching to and teaching the poor bad. We 
 shall never prevail in this field till we acknowledge that stealing 
 is stealing under any other name ; that claret or port insobriety 
 is no better than gin drunkenness ; that what is guilt on one 
 side of Temple Bar is equally guilt on the other side. Is the 
 action of the Bishop of London's Fund to be confined to those 
 quarters of London where the rogue is a poor man ? Charity 
 begins at home ; arc the alms of the wealthy to be given to
 
 368 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Aug. 5 
 
 morally enrich the poor, they themselves to be left just as they 
 are ? 
 
 Charlotte Winsor was a child murderer convicted on the evidence 
 of an accomplice in July 1865 and sentenced to death. On account of 
 legal irregularities in her trial, her execution was long deferred and her 
 death sentence was commuted on May 23, 1866. S. G. O. adopts the 
 case as a text for a lay sermon on infanticide. The Infant Life Protec- 
 tion Act was passed in 1872. 
 
 August 5, 1865. 
 
 I am glad to see that you have called public attention to the 
 trial for the above crime in which the woman Harris gave evi- 
 dence against her accomplice, Winsor. It is certainly one of the 
 most horrible criminal exposures we have known for many years. 
 It is my firm belief that it exhibits a state of things not at all 
 uncommon. 
 
 Child murder has throughout the rural districts, and, for all 
 I know to the contrary, in large towns, long ceased to be con- 
 sidered in the light of other murder. It is a crime to which 
 there is very great temptation. It is one which for many years 
 those who administer the laws have viewed, with the greatest 
 indulgence. 
 
 I have again and again sought to call the attention of the 
 public to it ; I have conversed with the highest authorities about 
 it ; I have never met with one single official who would deny 
 that it is a crime fearfully on the increase, and yet one that 
 neither judge, jury, nor magistrate seems disposed to treat with 
 any real severity. The present assizes have shown in more 
 than one case, that when the evidence as to the slaughter of a 
 child by the mother is so clear that if it had been the murder of 
 an adult her conviction would have been certain, the most ques- 
 tionable speculations of medical men and others are received as 
 evidence to qualify the crime, and secure conviction for the lesser 
 crime — concealment of the birth. 
 
 It is quite true that a child coming into the world with no 
 help but that of the mother, who brings it forth under circum- 
 stances making it most important to conceal its birth, is exposed 
 to circumstances which may cause its death by pure mischance- 
 This being the case, and all juries being very rightly charged to
 
 1 86s CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 369 
 
 give the accused every benefit of any real doubt of guilt, it 
 follows that a large number of acquittals of the capital offence 
 must take place. There is no question in the minds of those 
 who are conversant with the business of criminal courts that 
 grand juries always try to throw out the bill for murder — lean 
 towards the construction of the evidence in that direction ; that 
 the prosecuting counsel, and the solicitors who give them their 
 instructions, if a bill for murder does come down from the grand 
 jury, show no real zeal to procure the conviction of the prisoner 
 for that crime. The counsel for the defence knows well the sort 
 of evidence he can extract from the mouths of the medical wit- 
 nesses ; he can get from them almost in every case admissions 
 of the possibility of this or that mischance at the birth, if the 
 child was known to have been ' separate ' and yet alive, tending 
 to prove that the contusion on the head or the black mark on 
 the neck might have been the result of accident. Then there is 
 the old question of the inflation of the lungs — had it ever lived 
 at all ? — when there was no evidence to prove directly that it 
 had. Again, the jury are men ; being men, the jury lean to the 
 condoning of one who stands at the bar accused of a crime with 
 which, without man's guilt in the first instance, she would not 
 have been charged. 
 
 It must be a very young counsel who cannot successfully 
 appeal to the feelings of a jury in these cases ; the dust he throws 
 in their eyes is just what they desire. An old practised counsel 
 knows he need not take much trouble in the affair, for he is 
 quite satisfied the judge will so frame his charge to the jury, in 
 accordance with the feelings of every soul concerned in the pro- 
 secution or defence, that they will have no difficulty in accepting 
 his ' ruling ' as one for an acquittal. 
 
 The real truth is — we all know it — that the sentence for 
 murder being death, even if there were twenty convictions for 
 infanticide of the ordinary character in any one assize, not one 
 woman would the publid'bear to see hung for the offence. 
 
 It is high time some new Act of Parliament was passed with 
 regard to this crime. ■% If the deliberate murder of her own child 
 by a mother, immediate upon its birth, is not murder, let it have 
 some other name — be liable, as a crime, to some other penalty — 
 
 VOL. 1. B H
 
 37o 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 5 
 
 than that of murder. As the law now is, I have seen again and 
 again women dealt with more severely for cruelty to children a 
 little advanced in life than they would have been had they mur- 
 dered them as soon as born. The present system appears to 
 me a mockery of all justice, an insult to our common humanity; 
 in truth, I must add, it leads to a large amount of direct immo- 
 rality. 
 
 It is as well for us, now and then, to try and take a common- 
 sense view of some of those questions which, as the rule, are 
 viewed but too much in a very false, sentimental aspect. That 
 a woman should bear a child, not being a wife, is an offence 
 against society, against the chastity religion enforces. Human 
 nature, however submissive to social rule and religious impres- 
 sion, is, after all that can be said in the matter, as a ' subject ' 
 under an authority against which it is ever liable to be roused 
 into rebellion. Neither all men nor all women can marry when 
 they will ; in neither sex is there power to suppress all inclina- 
 tion at all times to do so. The loving too well, but not wisely, 
 leaves the man with little disgrace if it is discovered — leaves the 
 woman with every probability of great disgrace, and, what is 
 worse, the pains and perils of a condition which, safely passed, 
 throws on her the burden of a child's support, with none who 
 can help her to share it. 
 
 Poor married mothers, with strong, healthy bread-earners as 
 husbands, have trouble enough with their infants ; but they get 
 a sympathy from their neighbours, get help from the charitable, 
 which the ringless mother knows she will not get, has no right 
 to expect. Put the matter in what point of view you will, 
 brought up as the majority of the women are who are tried for 
 infanticide or concealment of birth, it can be no great matter of 
 wonder that they have sinned ; that female nature—the instinct 
 of attachment to some one of the other sex — has made them 
 easy victims to a ' ruin ' which in their ' society ' was considered 
 as very common, against which any religious principle they had 
 ever really had was powerless to resist the temptations to depart 
 irom it in which they had been bred. 
 
 As to ' shame,' in the true sense of the word, being the cause 
 of these murders, it may sometimes be so, but, in the majority
 
 1 865 CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 371 
 
 of cases, I don't believe it is. The great majority of marriages 
 in the rural districts are ' late ' — some so ' late ' that the baptism 
 of the infant follows very closely on the mother becoming a wife. 
 This has long ceased to be held as shameful. It follows, then, 
 that a large proportion of children are born legitimate, because 
 their fathers kept a promise, not because they sought to be the 
 husband in esse before they became father in posse. We all know 
 full well that promises, under most circumstances, are apt to 
 deceive ; under no circumstances do they oftener do so than 
 where a woman trusts her good fame to the truth of her seducer. 
 
 The old law of affiliation was liable to such abuse, and was 
 so abused, that its alteration became absolutely necessary. No 
 man was safe under it. The woman's oath, if it failed to saddle 
 him with the money cost of imputed paternity, was sure to affix 
 a stigma to him for life. It was made a means of the grossest 
 extortion. As the law now is, it requires corroborative evidence 
 in the case of a crime, of all others, the one where it must neces- 
 sarily be very difficult to obtain it. If the woman does now 
 affiliate her child, gets an order on the father for its support, and 
 he fails to pay the allowance ordered, she will not be the party 
 to send him to prison. We have made our workhouses gaols to 
 such women ; if they will not then give up liberty to obtain the 
 support of their bastard children, it is only open to them to fight 
 a battle of life for themselves under a condition most penal. 
 
 I not only do not wonder that so many infants are slain at 
 birth, or wilfully neglected to death afterwards, but I am sur- 
 prised that so many of these poor children are ever allowed to 
 live. It is not, in my opinion, any pressing sense of shame 
 which induces these women to try all possible means to hide 
 their fall. In the great majority of cases they know full well 
 that in their own rank of life they may be considered unfortunate, 
 but not guilty. But ' the love child ' is in itself a real affliction ; 
 it prevents their going to service ; it makes them when received 
 at home most unwelcome, as they entail expense upon those 
 already very poor ; they are crippled in their own power to earn 
 bread for themselves, and have yet to provide for another mouth. 
 
 Again and again have I heard the wish expressed, by those 
 who should have desired the infant's life, ' that it would please 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 5 
 
 God to take it ' — an expression we have learnt to translate into 
 the intention of themselves doing nothing that can be avoided 
 to save it. There are few districts in which women are not to 
 be found ' sage ' in these matters. They are consulted by the 
 young who begin to suspect their sin will find them out. They 
 have all knowledge of the ways by which exposure may be 
 saved their clients, if they are applied to in time. They are 
 ready, if not to play the bold game of Mrs. Winsor, to play a 
 game of their own, and often with perfect success, by which 
 these expectant mothers are saved exposure beyond their own 
 immediate circle. 
 
 I am well aware that the popular idea of maternity is that 
 which poets are so fond of apostrophising. I have lived long 
 enough in the world to have come to the conclusion that where 
 the mother's interest in life is seriously affected by her having a 
 child, the maternal instinct of love for offspring is very often a 
 mere feather in the scale. I am quite satisfied there is no 
 human being requiring the law's protection more than the illegi- 
 timate child does — from its own mother. 
 
 Cold philosophy argues it would lead to worse evils if the 
 law were made more penal against the fathers of these children, 
 and real efforts made to ascertain who they are. Plain justice 
 seems to me to say that the being who causes the burden which 
 the law seems content to think is so great as almost to justify 
 its destruction should not escape all penalty, and leave the 
 weaker partner of his guilt in all the temptation to murder out 
 the evidence of it, then to go through a trial for murder, only to 
 escape its penalty by the lax interpretation of evidence, a deli- 
 berate perversion of justice, connived at because to be strictly 
 just would be cruel, in that you would condemn the woman and 
 take no steps to secure the punishment of her seducer. 
 
 So long as infanticide is held to be the one crime to discover 
 which, and prosecute the offender as a murderer, is to be avoided, 
 Mrs. Winsors will exist, and women will seek their aid. If infant 
 life has not the ordinary value of human life, let the law say so. 
 If it has that proportion of such value which should make it to 
 be a thing worthy of protection, make that protection a reality. 
 Do not, by making an offence capital which you at the same
 
 1 86j CRIME— ITS ORIGIN AND TREATMENT 373 
 
 time think venal, and are determined to treat as such, hold out 
 the present premium to child murder. If not found out, the 
 mother escapes the consequences natural to her sin ; if it is dis- 
 covered, she goes through a mock trial for murder, secure that 
 her sentence will be the light one passed on those who simply- 
 concealed the fact of their having given birth to a child. 
 
 Of all the dissolving views fashion ever yet exhibited before 
 the eyes of those who watch its scenes, I know none so strange 
 as that which converts the moral scenery of provincial upper 
 class life, as exhibited to country neighbours, into the London 
 picture, as shown by the same class, for the season, to all who 
 care to go and look at it. I don't wonder that country servants 
 get into terrible perplexity as to which code to follow — the 
 sober morality of the country, church-going, prayers-at-nine 
 rule ; or that which meets the eye and ear at every turn in 
 London. The witty Dean who said his squire went to town to 
 relax his country morality might have added, ' takes his servants 
 there, not to relax, but to lose all respect for it.' 
 
 Certainly, Sir, this is not an age so prudish that we need 
 abstain from the public discussion of means to preserve our 
 women from becoming infanticides, to discover some way by 
 which those we so tempt to evil may part with its result without 
 murdering it. When so much is done to provoke to a crime 
 which, once committed, is so lightly punished, there could be 
 little national disgrace if at some cost we provided these sinning 
 mothers with other homes than the grave for their offspring.
 
 374 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Aug. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 Maynooth College was founded by Parliament in 1795, for the educa- 
 tion of students intended for the Roman Catholic priesthood in Ireland. 
 The permanent endowment of this College was granted by Parliament 
 in 1845. The endowment of Maynooth occasioned much controversy 
 in England, a motion being made for its abolition almost every session. 
 The third Parliament of Victoria was dissolved on July 23, 1847. In 
 the ensuing general election many Protestant candidates evinced much 
 apparent zeal against the continuation of the Maynooth endowment — a 
 zeal S. G. O. regarded as sheer cant, and dealt with accordingly, 
 
 August 3, 1847. 
 
 The constituencies of England are showing an amount of 
 religious zeal really quite edifying. The whole country has put 
 on the appearance of a vast pro-Protestant, anti-Papal league. 
 The solicitors who manage the purchase of the borough seats 
 are forced to cram their candidates with a sort of theological 
 catechism, now published for the occasion, in which they are 
 taught where and what Maynooth is, and the awful sin of con- 
 tributing to its support. Further, from the same source they 
 learn how to proclaim in proper hustings language their attach- 
 ment to religious truth as held, pure and undefined from any- 
 Romish adulteration, by all true Protestants ; their utter abhor- 
 rence of the idea of endowing the Romanist priesthood of 
 Ireland, &c. 
 
 The newspapers teem with addresses to electors, all breathing 
 the same firm attachment to Protestant principles, all professing 
 the most intense love for the reformed faith : Protectionists, 
 Free-traders, Whigs, Radicals, and Conservatives, all unite in 
 expressing their devotion to the pure religion held by the 
 majority of Englishmen, their determination to preserve it from.
 
 1 847 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 375 
 
 any the least Romish taint. Now, Sir, far be it from me to say- 
 one word in disparagement of the Protestant faith, one word in 
 favour of those who would rob us of one particle of its full 
 possession ; I don't wish to advocate the Maynooth grant, or to 
 see the priests of Ireland for the present endowed by the State ; 
 but, Sir, I hate ' cant ' in any shape, and I do verily believe that 
 with a very large portion of the present candidates for seats 
 these professions are made in the spirit of the purest hypocrisy. 
 
 The grocer who told his apprentice to finish sanding the 
 sugar and then come down to prayers showed no greater 
 hypocrisy than a vast number of the present candidates do by 
 their present professions of love to pure religion. I should like 
 to know how many of these warm friends of the Church and 
 true religion are in the habit of attending regularly on the 
 services of the Sabbath. They have a horror of the mass that 
 makes them most popular with the pious electors they address ; 
 do they ever communicate at all in the form in which the 
 Reformed Church gives them opportunity ? Of all blasphemy, 
 what is more awful — of all hypocrisy, what can be more con- 
 temptible, than that which guides the pen of the man who makes 
 up his betting-book on the Sunday at Hyde Park Corner, who 
 makes the London Sunday a day of worse than worldly idleness, 
 who is known to be a profligate gambler, or at the best a mere 
 trifler in religious matters, and who yet pens an address to the 
 constituents of a borough or county he has purchased, or on 
 which he is forced by the owner, declaring his sense of the value 
 of Protestantism, his desire to see the multitude educated in the 
 truths of the reformed faith, his earnest intention to preserve to 
 the people the unfettered use of the Holy Scriptures ? To those 
 who know them, many of the addresses of the candidates would 
 be little worse than simply amusing for their unblushing effron- 
 tery, did they try to throw any other dust in the eyes of those 
 they address than that which they collect from the Bibles they 
 have never used. 
 
 Do the electors of England centre all religion in a horror of 
 Maynooth, a dread of paying priests in Ireland ? Does the 
 religion they wish to keep so pure enjoin no other duties on 
 the performance of which candidates should be questioned ?
 
 376 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Aug. 3 
 
 An infidel would gladly pledge himself against the endowment 
 of schools for priests of any sort. If, then, these pledges are to 
 be tests of worthiness, I see not why a Parliament might not be 
 chosen that should choose an unbeliever for its chair. England 
 might, indeed, hold her head up amongst the nations of the 
 earth if no worse outrages against the religion she professes 
 could be proved against her than the Maynooth grant. 
 
 I should like, Sir, toj add a few questions to the hustings' 
 catechism, immediately to follow those on the candidates' duty 
 to the electors, the Protestant Church, and the Nonconformists — 
 such as, for instance : — 
 
 Is the labourer worthy of his hire ? Ought he to be allowed 
 to earn a sufficiency of wholesome food by the sweat of his brow ? 
 Has he not a Scripture title to the gleanings of the harvest 
 field? 
 
 Is there no injunction in Scripture against defrauding him 
 of his hire by paying him in the refuse of the granary ? 
 
 Is it scriptural to foster a state of things which engenders 
 impurity of mind, and then to pass laws against bastardy, the 
 effect of which drives the woman who is ruined to the despera- 
 tion which leads her to hate, if not to destroy, her offspring ? 
 
 Is it scriptural to profess when corn was low in price that a 
 bushel of wheat and a shilling were the fair wages of a labourer, 
 and then when corn rose to 24/. a load to pay him, and that 
 grudgingly, 8s. or gs. a week ? (This question is adapted for 
 particular county constituencies.) 
 
 Is it scriptural to keep wages by combination so low that the 
 labourer is ever half a pauper, and then to treat pauperism as if 
 it was a crime ? 
 
 Does the pure Protestant faith prescribe the rearing of Eng- 
 land's bold peasantry in hovels in which ages and sexes are 
 confounded together each night in one mass of beings crawling 
 to seek rest in an atmosphere as impure as the circumstances 
 undar which they breathe it ? 
 
 Is it scriptural to build palaces for legislators to inhabit for 
 a few hours daily for a few months in the year, costing, with 
 their ventilation, &c, a few millions of the money paid in taxes 
 by the people, and yet to let session after session pass by with
 
 1847 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 377 
 
 no one Act passed to arrest the work of that death which slays 
 its hundreds of thousands yearly, by the agency of impure drain- 
 age, and the absence of sanitary laws ? 
 
 We have farmers' friends, the friends of trade, staunch sup- 
 porters of the Church, able advocates of Nonconformity ; mammon 
 first, and then God finds zealous partisans ; whilst the class who 
 produce the farmers' and the traders' wealth — the class who are 
 God's peculiar heritage — the most useful, the most enduring, the 
 most patient — yes, and the class in which there is the most of 
 pure religion, scarce finds one advocate who avows his love for 
 it, or one constituency that demands its protection from oppres- 
 sion ; and yet the walls, the newspapers, the hustings, all speak 
 attachment ' sincere,' ' devoted,' ' eternal,' to the religion of the 
 Protestant. Surely this is blindness of heart, it is pride, vain- 
 glory, and hypocrisy, it is uncharitableness ; may we be delivered 
 from it ! 
 
 If the endeavour to educate priests with the barest amount 
 of the necessary means to fit them to be gentlemen — if the idea 
 of making them dependent rather on Government for their 
 support than on the contributions of a half-wild people, who 
 will only pay at all so long as they are left uncontrolled in their 
 deeds of violence — if these things savour of danger to our re- 
 formed faith — I give no contrary opinion — if these things have 
 roused England to a sense of danger to her religious liberty, how 
 is it that the pure Protestant candidates and constituencies have 
 not yet hitherto bestirred themselves to force on the attention 
 of the bishops and the legislature the daily performance in 
 many a so-called Protestant church of service conducted in a 
 manner no one possessed of common sense denies to savour of 
 Popery ? Is there no approach, on each celebration of the 
 Lord's Supper at more than one fashionable London church, to 
 the adoration of the consecrated elements ? I am convinced 
 that were the goings-on at these places of worship, on any one 
 Sunday, taken accurately down and published, the public would 
 feel, as I do, disgust at this straining at the Maynooth grant 
 whilst the wicked folly of the ultra-Tractarian perversion of our 
 service is just as notorious as any other accompaniment of any 
 fashionable place of Sunday resort.
 
 378 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 23 
 
 For my own part, I fear far less danger to the Protestant 
 religion from any effort to make the Irish priesthood gentlemen, 
 as far as a liberal education can tend to that end, from any 
 measure putting their temporal interest beyond injury from the 
 caprice of their flock, than I do from the open assumption of 
 religion on the hustings by those who have none elsewhere — the 
 return to Parliament of men who play on the stage of their 
 everyday life a part the very reverse of that which, for the sake 
 of an object they covet, they are content to act till they obtain 
 it. I fear the degradation of our religion from the yielding al' 
 its kindest principles to the call of political expediency ; I dread 
 the fall of the Established Church far more from those who arc 
 taking the part of Judas within it, than from any help given to 
 the cause of him who assumes to himself the place of Peter 
 without it. 
 
 With the half-hearted revival of Convocation in the province of 
 Canterbury in 1852, S. G. O. expressed the contempt for that body which 
 he maintained to the end of his life. 
 
 October 22, 1852. 
 
 I earnestly hope the report to which you have alluded, viz. 
 that Lord Derby contemplates allowing the revival of Convoca- 
 tion, may prove false. The late election of proctors in very 
 many archdeaconries, I have reason to believe, was carried on in 
 a way which, the more it is revealed, the more it will reflect 
 discredit on the parties who were the chief movers. I know that 
 in my own archdeaconry all but those who were in the secret 
 were taken by surprise. These elections have ever been mere 
 idle forms, often carried out in a way which would justify the 
 term ' farce.' The real truth is, and the sooner the laity know 
 it the better, the bishops are very much under the guidance of a 
 particular clique of clerical busybodies, who get up the Church 
 meetings for them, and manage all advisable Church agitation. 
 These gentlemen, by means of Church unions and the clever 
 working of the machinery of what are called the Church societies, 
 have opportunity to concoct any amount of ecclesiastical mischief. 
 The bishops give them all the importance they can, though they 
 take care not to commit themselves to all their doings and
 
 i8 52 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 379 
 
 sayings. There are few dioceses which have not from time to 
 time had to rue the working of these mitre parasites. 
 
 Now, so long as they only wore a particular dress, patronised 
 particular societies, and were great at meetings which no one 
 else now cares to attend, the great body of the clergy and laity 
 were quite right in enduring them ; but, if these silly innovators 
 think that we are going to let them in Convocation call them- 
 selves the representatives of the Church, they are very much 
 mistaken. 
 
 The Lord Mayor's dinner is postponed, I believe, until the 
 funeral of the Duke is over. It was felt that such an affair 
 would be out of keeping with the nation's hour of mourning. 
 The Convocation meeting at this time for serious business would 
 really be so great a farce that its indecency as regards the nation 
 would exceed its folly as regards the Church. For my own part, 
 I care not how soon the crisis arrives which is to determine 
 whether the Church to which I belong is purely protestant 
 against the errors of Rome, or only a make-believe opponent of 
 that Church. I think Convocation may hurry that crisis, and 
 the result, I believe, will be to raise a feeling which will purge 
 the bench and the priesthood of those trifiers with the real pur- 
 poses of a Christian Church, who for years past have conspired 
 to enslave the laity under a yoke forged at Rome, but bearing 
 the Lambeth or York mark. Let the word but go forth that 
 the present members returned to Convocation are to be trusted 
 with anything like the real functions of Convocation in the days 
 long since happily gone by, and I, for one, have no doubt but 
 that the great body of the laity will then let their voice be heard, 
 this monster folly will at once be crushed, and the Church saved 
 from an exposure of her weakness which would be the forerunner 
 of her ruin. 
 
 Bishops and Clergy. 
 
 November 3, 1852. 
 These are days which need plain language to set forth im- 
 portant truths. Permit me in this letter to give utterance, 
 without reserve, to observations on an important subject, which, 
 however just, I admit I can scarcely hope to make palatable. 
 Nothing can be more unsatisfactory or prejudicial to the real
 
 380 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 3 
 
 usefulness of the Established Church than the present relative 
 positions of her bishops and clergy. 
 
 Once in three years we have a visitation ; we are summoned 
 to a neighbouring town to meet the bishop ; we follow him to 
 a morning service in the church, and hear one of our brethren 
 preach a controversial sermon ; our names are then called over ; 
 we stand before the communion rails, within which the bishop 
 sits ; he, from his chair, proceeds to read a long essay on Church 
 matters in general, his own views regarding them, and the par- 
 ticular legal measures on Church matters which have been passed 
 since the last visitation, or which may be expected before the 
 next. We receive his blessing, and disperse — until the hour of 
 dinner. This space of time is spent by the clergy in general 
 either at the bookseller's shop-door, discussing the Charge and 
 the sermon, or in taking a walk into the country. A small knot, 
 however, generally contrive to get quietly together, and, with 
 the bishop's chaplain, determine as to the policy of certain con- 
 templated measures of clerical agitation, to either commence or 
 be furthered a stage by the getting petitions signed at the 
 dinner. 
 
 The bishop in the meantime sees some half-dozen curates or 
 new rectors, to whom he wishes to put some commonplace in- 
 quiries, or, perhaps, to administer some gentle rebuke ; he then 
 takes up the inn ' Times,' and waits with patience the hour of 
 the next stage of the visitation — the dinner. At last all are 
 seated who intend to dine with the bishop ; poor curates and 
 indifferent rectors are gone home — the former cannot afford to 
 dine — the latter it would bore ; they know the routine by heart, 
 and gladly avoid its repetition in their own presence. The 
 chaplain and the preacher, and some of the rural deans, are the 
 bishop's neighbours ; the dinner is an inn dinner, and in general 
 a very good one ; at its conclusion the waiter comes round for 
 its cost — 8s. ; the rural deans come for the contribution to the 
 Clergy Widow Fund — 10s. The bishop's health is drunk, and 
 he is thanked for his admirable charge, and requested to print 
 it ; he is modest in his reply, and acquiesces. If the chaplain's 
 sermon has been very strong either way, his friends stay to 
 dinner ; when his health is drunk, they request him also to.
 
 1852 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 381 
 
 print ; he blushes, thinks how it will please his wife, and con- 
 sents. After some small ecclesiastical talk at the episcopal end 
 of the table, and some good stories from the secretary at his 
 end, relished by his less awed neighbours, a petition or two for 
 or against something is handed round, and gets a few signatures ; 
 the bishop rises, bows to all, and goes away for another three 
 years. A neat London-built brougham, with his lordship and 
 the chaplain inside, the episcopal mace in the swordcase, and his 
 butler, who has acted as macebearer, on the box, soon takes out 
 of the sight of the assembled clergy and the boys in the street 
 their right reverend chief and counsellor. 
 
 The clergy get into their ' four-wheels ' and go home. Rural 
 Dean Rubricus tells Mrs. R., ' The Charge was able, but evasive. 
 He wants courage, my dear, to speak all he feels about our 
 need of Convocation. The sermon was a sad exposure ; a Dis- 
 senter might have preached it.' The Rev. C. Lowvein, rector of 
 Gorhamville, tells Mrs. L., with a sigh, ' The Charge was able ; 
 his lordship is very clever ; but it was very unsound. It is evi- 
 dent he leans towards Exeter. But, my dear, we cannot be too 
 thankful ; Octavius Freeson preached the truth as boldly as if 
 he was on the platform of a C. M. meeting : we have asked him 
 to print it.' Dr. Oldtime, the aged rector of Slowstir, tells his 
 curate the next day, ' It was a slow, dull business ; the bishop 
 prosed, the preacher ranted, the Red Lion sherry has given me 
 a headache.' 
 
 The next episcopal appearance among the clergy is at the 
 confirmations. This is a hurried affair ; eleven o'clock at Pump- 
 ford, three o'clock at Market Minster, and so on for a week or 
 two in each year ; travelling some twenty-five miles a day, being 
 so hurried that he is forced to transgress the rubric by saying 
 that to four children at a time which he is ordered to say to each 
 one : it is no wonder that his clergy see but little of him on 
 these occasions. Some few may meet him at dinner, wherever 
 he may stay to dine and sleep ; but they find him fatigued, and 
 he has to play the guest to his host's family ; he could hardly be 
 expected to do more. 
 
 The next usual rencontre of a country curate, vicar, or rector 
 with his bishop is at the meetings for the P.C.K., S.P.G., A.C.,
 
 3 S2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 3 
 
 and C.B. societies, these letters, in the ecclesiastical literature of 
 the day, standing for the lengthy names of those societies for 
 which Queen's letters are granted, and in aid of which Church 
 Unions are very active. At some of these meetings the bishop 
 takes the chair in person, arriving the night before at the rectory 
 of some well-to-do active rector. Of late years they are but 
 scantily attended by male laity ; the chief part of the audience 
 in the body of the hall consists of the wives and relatives of the 
 clergy on the platform. The breakfast at the consecration of a 
 new church is another opportunity afforded to the clergy and 
 laity of seeing the bishop. 
 
 I may be asked — could a bishop do more than this ? I at 
 once admit that when I regard the great extent of the several 
 dioceses, and the peculiar position of the bishop, it is hardly to 
 be expected — nay, hardly possible, that he could. I know very 
 well he has to get his information about the real details of his 
 diocese through archdeacons, some of whom know even less, 
 for they move about less than himself; and through rural deans, 
 who are but too often chosen, not for what they can see and tell, 
 but for how they will tell of what they choose to see. My 
 sketch is that of an ordinary diocese with an ordinary bishop. 
 In an extraordinary diocese, with an ultra Anglo-Catholic ritua- 
 listic bishop, there would be some alteration in the details. A 
 communion at the church ; a sermon on symbolical architecture 
 or consubstantiation ; a charge full of invective against latitu- 
 dinarianism, i.e. everything which is not Church first; a deplor- 
 ing of the degeneracy of the day, and imploring the accession 
 of a time when the Church should be purged of untrusting 
 children, have her own Convocation, and by her synodical action 
 repress schism and advance her pure apostolical system, &c. At 
 the dinner the clergy would be dressed like Roman Catholic 
 priests ; the waiters like orthodox Protestant parsons. So far 
 as any real useful end being answered by the occasion, there 
 would be little difference between the two visitations. 
 
 A palace — house in town — seat in the Lords — the metro- 
 politan charity sermon duty of each London season — a large 
 income, with its attendant snares and cares, — these are elements
 
 1852 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 383. 
 
 in the present episcopal position which seem to me to defy the 
 bishop being to the clergy what he ought to be, and what he 
 must be, if the Church is ever to be active and yet at peace 
 within herself. The bishop of our day is far too elevated above 
 the heads of his clergy. Superior as many even of the curates 
 of his diocese may be to him in general scholarship, and especi- 
 ally in theological learning, they can never feel quite at ease in 
 his company. If they call upon him at the diocesan palace, or 
 
 at his house in Belgravia, or his suite of rooms at Hotel, 
 
 they are uncomfortably awed. The spiritual peer is too obvious 
 to them ; they cannot at their ease venture on the homely 
 parochial topic on which they would seek advice. There is a 
 very large amount of duty a bishop could do in his diocese 
 were he a less great man, which he now is but too glad to leave 
 to those clerical volunteers whom he can well pay with a smile 
 on public occasions, or an annual invitation for one night to the 
 palace. 
 
 I am willing at once to admit that, considering the grounds 
 on which, in bygone years, bishops have been appointed by the 
 Crown, the Church has fared well in that she has fared no 
 worse. To have been a bold and unscrupulous advocate of an 
 unpopular measure ; to have had a relative who had spent 
 10,000/. in contesting an important county on the ministerial 
 side ; to have been tutor to a Minister, or to his son ; to have 
 been an active partisan, on the right side, in a university elec- 
 tion ; to be an actual relation of the Minister — these, and such 
 like, it is well known, have been the claims most powerfully 
 acknowledged in the appointment of bishops. We have had, 
 and may have still, bigots bad and bold in their bigotry. The 
 bench has, even of very late, shown in some of its members a 
 deplorable mercenary spirit. A spirit of nepotism has at times 
 been very rife, and we have had very worldly men, but I cannot 
 call to mind one offensively bad man. 
 
 What we really need, Sir, is more bishops, but of a very 
 different worldly position. The public do not know a tithe of 
 the ritual and other antics played in out-of-the-way places by 
 some of the clergy to the injury of religion. The state of the
 
 384 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 3 
 
 churches, in very many places, is quite shameful ; within half a 
 mile of where I am writing there is one, belonging to the Chap- 
 ter of Salisbury, in a condition as unsafe as disgraceful. 
 
 Divide the dioceses into manageable districts, and have what 
 I will call ' gig bishops ; ' men of learning, of piety, of some 
 parochial experience, whose incomes should be, say, 1,500/. per 
 annum ; men who would visit the clergy in their own houses, 
 keep up a regular acquaintance with them, become known, in 
 some measure, to the congregation of each village church ; men 
 who would come to the rectory on a Saturday in their gig or 
 four-wheel, stay the Sunday with us, wish for nothing better 
 than the rectory's best room, and what the rector's limited 
 establishment could afford, without fuss ; preaching in our 
 churches on the Sunday, going to the Sunday-school to en- 
 courage our wives and daughters in their task there ; had we any 
 very sick and dying, going with us to the bedside of such 
 sufferers, kneeling with us to seek the blessings from above 
 the poor creature before us needs ; quietly discussing over the 
 Sabbath cold dinner plans of parochial usefulness ; kindly 
 touching on the duties we might yet add to our work ; as kindly 
 warning us, or even admonishing us, as to observances omitted 
 to the injury of our flocks, or rashly innovated to their offend- 
 ing. The Monday would give time to the ' gig bishop ' to look 
 in at the day-school, to delight and encourage the teachers ; to 
 call on and also delight the churchwardens ; carefully to inspect 
 the church, and all this without preventing him moving on by 
 an easy drive to the next scene of an episcopal kindly visit. 
 He would thus gain a real knowledge of the state of his diocese, 
 and the peculiarities of character among his clergy. He could 
 make himself their confidential friend, and gaining, as he would, 
 so much practical experience, he would become a valuable 
 adviser. Temperately and firmly opposing Tractarian treason 
 to the Church's Protestantism on the one hand, he would, on the 
 other, equally repress the opposite extreme, of a wild contempt 
 for all order. Whether on the week-day or the Sabbath, all 
 would be glad to see him ; his visits would be as gratifying as 
 useful. He would get a pride in his clergy, and they would be 
 the more easily ruled as they would be reproved in private, and
 
 1852 RELIGIO.X AND THE CHURCH 385 
 
 affectionately advised in a pious and humble spirit, and dealt 
 with in a way which must win their love. 
 
 I feel satisfied that to some such ruling machinery as this 
 we must come, if the Church is ever again to have any episcopal 
 supervision in which the laity will have confidence, and to 
 which the clergy would give allegiance. Thus, I should hope we 
 should get rid of scandals which attach to the bench, to the 
 hurt of the whole body of the clergy. My ' gig bishops ' would 
 be working men, practically acquainted with their work, and in 
 a condition to follow it out under far less temptation to error or 
 to idleness than now besets the spiritual peers with their 8,000/. 
 a year. We should then get rid of plotting Church unions ; 
 we might be spared the, in many dioceses, useless office of 
 archdeacon. 
 
 At present few clergymen really know or are known to their 
 bishop, except as mere acquaintances, unless, indeed, they are 
 active agitators. The laity are left to the mercy of endless, 
 ever-changing forms, ceremonies, and rules for divine service. 
 They see large sections of the clergy meeting at clerical socie- 
 ties, some to conspire to exalt the forms of the Church far 
 above her spiritual teaching, others to throw contempt on all 
 form and decent order by their neglect of it. They hear brother 
 rail at brother — they know not which way to turn ; there is 
 no quiet, no peace. They hear of a bishop's riches, and the 
 fallacies of episcopal accounts ; but they seldom ever hear of or 
 see a bishop acting as a friend among his clergy, treating all in 
 a spirit of love, trying to reconcile their differences, and improve 
 their practice. 
 
 I am satisfied, Sir, that within these next two months the 
 Church will shake off many a rotten branch, Rome's priests will 
 pick them up — I would they had had them sooner ; but far 
 worse will follow, unless some means are taken to show the 
 laity that unprotestantising bishops cannot be borne in a Pro- 
 testant church. We are saved from a Convocation which would 
 have made our sores yet more public ; let us now hope that the 
 good sense of the country may look for measures which shall 
 heal, not aggravate, those sores. 
 
 Let who will proceed to the work, Church reform must be 
 
 VOL. I. C C
 
 386 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 12 
 
 worked by lay aid, and the less the bench have to deal with it 
 the better ; all mistrust them. 
 
 Forty years ago that which is now known as the Sweating System 
 lived and thrived, and was termed the Slop System. Sub-contracting 
 was generally one of the elements of the Slop System, and, as applied 
 to curates, was the subject of scornful reference. S. G. O. was very 
 good to his own curates, and never failed to practise what he taught. 
 
 Poor Curates and Old Clothes. 
 
 November 12, 1852. 
 
 The sympathy of the public has of late years been a good 
 deal directed to the evils of what is called ' the slop system.' 
 Poor Hood and others have done much for overworked ill-paid 
 seamstresses and tailors ; the contrast, however, between capital 
 in cash and capital in sweat and toil does still, and I fear ever 
 must, present many painful features. There is, Sir, a class of 
 workmen to whom little sympathy has as yet been afforded, but 
 whose condition deserves all sympathy, and I think is capable of 
 amendment — I mean those unfortunate gentlemen who as 
 curates do a good deal of slopwork for the Church capitalists. 
 So far from the field of labour in which their strength is ex- 
 pended being overstocked — so far from it being the fact that at 
 the gates of the Church vineyard there stand masses of men 
 waiting to be hired — we are told that there is a cry from its 
 highest bench for more workmen. 
 
 To be a curate at all, a man must have passed some years of 
 his life in the process of acquiring a costly education at some 
 one of the universities ; he must possess testimonials as to his 
 piety of the very highest character ; and he must have not only 
 passed the ordeal of a university examination for his degree, but 
 a further examination at the hands of a bishop or his chaplain 
 as to his theological attainments. According to the bias of the 
 bishop's mind will be the particular line of examination for 
 orders. In some dioceses things would be held to be orthodox 
 and scriptural which in others would be anathematised as un- 
 scriptural, unauthorised. The would-be curate, if a conscien- 
 tious man, has then to look for employment in the particular 
 diocese with whose bishop his opinions may accord. If he is of
 
 1852 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 387 
 
 the histrionic school, he has a very limited number of dioceses 
 open to him ; if of the old-fashioned orthodox, he has some 
 chance in any diocese ; if of the evangelical school, he has 
 scarce a chance in one or two, a slight chance in a few, a good 
 chance in many. 
 
 Behold him ordained — through the diaconate now — a priest. 
 In what does he differ from a bishop ? Of the same raw mate- 
 rial, he has gone through the same ecclesiastical fabrication ; he 
 possesses even the same property. He may appear before the 
 public eye in the old ironmouldy surplice of a neglected rural 
 parish, or in the well-cut monogram-buttoned white robe of a 
 modern Belgravian chapel ; he is still simply a man in the full 
 orders of the Established Church ; the Crown can find no superior 
 matter out of which to make a bishop. It is true, the bishop 
 can ordain, confirm, consecrate a church, churchyard, or a 
 brother bishop elect, and has certain authority in matters of 
 ecclesiastical discipline, with a seat in the House of Peers ; but 
 he is, after all, nothing but a fortunate priest — a promoted, 
 exalted curate. 
 
 The Established Church is the nationally authorised instru- 
 ment for the promotion of Christianity within the realm — the 
 supposed best instrument in the nation's eye for that purpose — 
 and on this plain ground it is protected and cherished by the 
 State. It would be a church without this connection with the 
 State, but it is adopted by the said State as its own peculiar 
 church— the one it has chosen in preference to all others, as its 
 great spiritual machine for advancing the eternal good of the 
 people. 
 
 The curate of a parish can do for the souls of the people 
 every single necessary thing that the rector can do, or even a 
 bishop, for I do not assume that many think confirmation neces- 
 sary to salvation. The curate is often left in sole and entire 
 charge of a very large parish ; he represents in that parish all 
 the Church offers, all the State demands, for the cure of souls in 
 it. The rector or vicar may be drawing from 300/. to 800/. per 
 annum from the said parish as master spiritual workman of it, 
 and this net, clear of all deductions ; the curate — the slop hand — ■ 
 is doing the work at a salary of from 80/. to 120/., with unavoid- 
 
 c c 2
 
 388 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Nov. 12 
 
 able calls upon that income, seldom leaving to any curate a clear 
 four-fifths of the nominal payment to him. We hear with truth 
 of the wealth of the Church ; we know now what have been, and 
 still are, the incomes of the bishops ; we know something of the 
 amount of money falling into the hands of the Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners ; we know how they have aided in building 
 palaces, and been blind to knavery in highly reverend quarters. 
 Will the public believe the fact ? — for years past there has been 
 a society whose aim is to collect cast-off apparel for — poor 
 curates ! I have read with my own eyes the letters of curates 
 and their wives, full of gratitude for gifts of worn-out clothing, 
 giving painfully interesting details of how they worked up our 
 old things into their own and children's best apparel. If merit 
 should ever lead to promotion, I can quite conceive the possibility 
 of a gentleman stepping into Fulham as its rightful occupant who 
 had lately worn gratefully the cast-off trousers of the late bishop, 
 and made Sabbath coatees for his children of the worn-out 
 gowns of his wife. Why, Sir, ladies' maids and valets have a 
 right to complain that charitable ladies come to master or mis- 
 tress and beg for poor parsons the perquisites of their order. Let 
 me tell those fortunate domestic officers of the great laity, or 
 hierarchy, or rectorate, that the same charitable pirates will 
 gladly, for the same purpose, accept clothing they would blush 
 to wear any longer. 
 
 The hour of Church reform is, thank God, I trust at hand. It 
 is my firm belief that a comparison between the pay or profit of 
 the sinecurists, dignitaries, pluralists, and well-endowed incum- 
 bents with that of the curates and poor clergy who do the work 
 in the Church's hardest posts, will prove a case utterly disgrace- 
 ful to us as a body. It would be a just and good application of 
 some of the fund in the commissioners' hands if it were applied 
 to the buying out the existing pluralists ; they evidently hold on 
 for the money — give it them, and then give the wages to the 
 men who earn them. If the property in the custody of these 
 commissioners was fairly applied, who can doubt but much of 
 the disgrace of the present state of things would be removed ? 
 
 I know that to talk of taxing good livings or chapter pro- 
 perty in aid of poor working clergy is to raise a storm on all
 
 1852 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 389 
 
 sides : we cannot help storms in the world of nature, they 
 are inconvenient and injure a great deal of private property ; 
 we may as well try to forbid gales of wind as try much longer 
 to obtain toleration for the present amount of Church abuse. I 
 can conceive no higher object of just ambition in a statesman 
 of the present day than one which shall aim at restoring the 
 affection of her members to the Established Church, by reform- 
 ing, at any cost, her palpable abuses. Let who will suffer, this 
 must be done. 
 
 If a curate has the responsibility and work of a vicar or 
 rector, he surely should in justice have something like his 
 emoluments ; but to starve him into debt, and to send ladies 
 about to beg old clothes for him — this is simply disgraceful, 
 undeniably unjust. 
 
 The Bishop of Oxford requests me to state that he never 
 told anyone that the Queen would license Convocation. In 
 my letter of the 26th of last month I gave my informant's 
 words ; I did not think that anyone would be so simple as to 
 believe that the Queen had made any personal communication 
 to the bishop ; I took the word ' Queen ' in the sense usually 
 taken in matters of State — i.e. as a term used to represent the 
 Minister of the day. The bishop, however, denies that he spoke 
 of Convocation being licensed in any way. My informant can 
 only admit he wrote under a misconception ; from inquiry I 
 have made, I believe this may have been the fact. 
 
 Church Reform. 
 
 June 25, 1853. 
 
 I see in your report of the debate upon the bill of the Mar- 
 quis of Blandford for the prevention of future chapter and 
 episcopal peculation, Mr. Phillimore remarked that ' pluralities 
 were rapidly disappearing, and, under existing regulations, could 
 not be renewed.' Now, Sir, one of the evils of pluralism was 
 non-residence. Is this the Mr. Phillimore who, as chancellor of 
 the diocese of Sarum, is legal adviser to the bishop of that 
 diocese ? If so, is he the legal authority who advised that the 
 Bishop of Sarum could not refuse to institute a man of eighty, 
 many years past duty, into a large and most important bene-
 
 390 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. June 25, 1853 
 
 ficc, it being notorious that the octogenarian nominee of the 
 patron was only put in to enable the said patron to sell the next 
 presentation at a great advantage — further, that the old man in 
 question had for years, though beneficed, been allowed to non- 
 reside, on the ground of incapacity ? 
 
 Let me tell Mr. Phillimore, if he is ignorant of the fact, that 
 this rector of Spetisbury, so instituted, as the bishop says, on 
 good legal advice, has never resided, nor I believe has the re- 
 motest intention of doing so. 
 
 I am truly glad that the axe is to be applied to the root of 
 that baneful avarice which has turned to selfish purpose so much 
 of the property of the Church, for which there was just demand 
 of the highest character. But, Sir, Church reform must not stop 
 here ; there is other jobbing besides that which perverts the 
 revenues of the Church. 
 
 Talk of the milliners and their workwomen ; why, the recto- 
 rial dealings with curates utterly shame them. I have given up 
 answering and am sick of reading letters from curates, working 
 on salaries starving at best, but, as the bishops well know, even 
 then imaginary, for the evasion of the payment is notorious. 
 
 I have a list before me of offers made by rectors, &c, for 
 curates, the highest salary in which would not retain the services 
 of a whipper-in to my neighbour's hounds. 
 
 Since I wrote to you on the subject of the supply by charity 
 of cast-off clothing to pious clergymen, I have been inundated 
 with requests to know where such men can obtain such 
 clothing. 
 
 We are making bishops important articles of colonial export, 
 and sending out yearly more than 200,000/. to uphold the Church 
 and spread Christianity in other lands ; and yet who is bold 
 enough to deny that, so far as episcopal superintendence goes, 
 this our home land has a very stinted allowance ? and, as to 
 heathenism and infidelity, why we may count in millions those 
 who have no real knowledge of God, no real opportunity of 
 being brought to it. 
 
 You are right, Sir ; the Church must adjust itself to the 
 necessities of each period it is called on to meet. There is, I 
 believe, more desire to work in its behalf at this moment than.
 
 July i, 1853 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 391 
 
 there ever was ; but what between the suspicions fairly engen- 
 dered of the honesty of many of the hierarchy, the evident proof 
 of their incapacity to fulfil their duties, the strifes on trifles, and 
 the neglect of essentials, we are in a fair way to ruin ; and so 
 let it be, rather than that we should survive our claim to 
 respect. 
 
 Simony. 
 
 July 1, 1853. 
 
 I have this morning been favoured with a copy of the 
 « Simony Law Amendment Bill ' brought in by Dr. Phillimore 
 and Viscount Goderich. I have also seen the notice given by 
 Mr. Butt of an intended amendment to defeat it. 
 
 I do not, for one moment, believe that it can be carried, for 
 it would effect a deterioration or destruction of private property 
 sufficient to raise an opposition quite certain to upset it. It is 
 difficult at all times to get at the common sense of an Act of 
 Parliament ; the neatest and most minute operations of che- 
 mistry are easy compared with the task of getting at what is 
 intended out of what is recited in legal language. As far as I 
 can understand the measure in question, it aims at placing all 
 persons in the position in which the statute of the 12th of Anne, 
 c. 12, has placed ordained priests. When this Act is passed no 
 layman or clergyman possessed of ecclesiastical patronage will 
 be able to sell, directly or indirectly, the next presentation to a 
 benefice. The sins of certain patrons — moral, if not legal — in 
 manoeuvring to make gain out of vacant benefices, by filling 
 them up in such a way as to ensure a speedy vacancy, are to be 
 visited on all proprietors of Church patronage. There is no pro- 
 vision declaratory of the law as to whether a patron can force a 
 bishop to put in a dying or an incapable man (I do not think 
 such a provision was necessary) ; but this new Act simply con- 
 templates the arrest of all sales whatever of next presentations. 
 
 Now, Sir, it has been decided long since by Chief Justice 
 Grey, that the sale of the advowson of a living at the very time 
 when seller and purchaser both knew the existing incumbent to 
 be in extremis was not simony. I can find, however, even in 
 the pretty full records of Church malversations, no case of a 
 patron being held justified in nominating to a vacant living a man
 
 3Q2 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July t 
 
 either hi extremis from disease or approaching the very extremity 
 of life from old age, in order that he might at once sell well the 
 advowson or next presentation. The judges seem to have held 
 that, as far as regards the action of disease, it was not for them 
 to take a plea that the incumbent was so near dead that he 
 could not be considered alive ; their common sense forbids their 
 laying down any opinion as to recovery from any, the worst 
 state, in the case of a living incumbent. 
 
 I do not believe that a patron could now be tried for simony 
 who put a man in the last stage of phthisis into a living, with 
 the avowed intention of selling the next presentation well, even 
 if it could be proved he dressed his proffered bargain with medi- 
 cal certificates to the fact. But I do believe, if the bishop knew 
 the truth of the case, he could in all legal discretion reject the 
 appointment, provided examination proved that the nominee of 
 the patron could neither reside nor do the duty. 
 
 Now, let me take a case, and not a very uncommon one, 
 where this endeavour to excuse the want of firmness in bishops 
 or their advisers by an indiscriminate attack upon all holders of 
 certain property would tell most unjustly. A clergyman is in 
 most cases desirous that one or more of his sons shall follow his 
 own profession. He has no interest with those who have Church 
 patronage ; he looks about him and finds certain next presenta- 
 tions to livings to be sold ; he takes the ages of his sons into 
 calculation, with the ages of the existing incumbents ; he buys 
 a presentation to a living, the possession of which he can reason- 
 ably expect to come to his own hand or that of his executors 
 about the time when one or more of his sons will be qualified to 
 take it. He has a right to argue : ' If my son is qualified in 
 the eyes of the bishop, according to what the law and spirit of 
 the law of the Church require, he will be appointed.' He thus 
 considers he has done a just and prudent thing. Who will 
 question it ? And yet this can be done no more if the new Act 
 passes. 
 
 Laymen often buy advowsons and presentations on exactly 
 the same calculation. Laymen and clergymen often inherit 
 advowsons and next presentations ; they were bought by the 
 money of those who went before them, and are as much bona
 
 1 8 53 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 393 
 
 fide good saleable property as any other freeholds they may 
 inherit. A man may have no relative to serve with a presenta- 
 tion ; he may be too poor to give what he has a right to sell ; or 
 he may be a Dissenter, and not like to have the presentation to 
 a living thrown upon him ; his heir or heirs may be Churchmen ; 
 he may think it, therefore, unjust to alienate the advowsons he 
 has inherited ; he is informed that the incumbent of one of his 
 livings is very old — is he to be forbidden to sell the next pre- 
 sentation, or must he be forced to sell the advowson ? I will 
 give a case somewhat notorious : A rector died in the occupation 
 of two livings ; he left the advowsons (he was patron of both) to 
 his heirs. His eldest son was in orders ; he could not, under 
 the existing Acts of Parliament, hold both preferments, as his 
 father had done. The family were not left in a condition to be 
 wantonly generous ; he could not sell either living while it was 
 vacant ; both must be filled up within six months. What was 
 he advised to do ? That which he did : presented himself to 
 benefice A ; was instituted ; sold the next presentation to that 
 living ; resigned it in time to present himself to living B. In 
 law I believe this was perfectly justifiable. 
 
 I am well aware of all that can be said about these sales of 
 the cures of souls, as I am of all that can be said of the whole 
 system of patronage. If the whole principle of Church patron- 
 age is to be gone into, so be it — I shall be the last to regret it ; 
 but I do protest against inroads being made into matters of 
 small comparative importance, when the graver matters are to 
 be passed by. At a board of guardians, if a candidate for a 
 medical district has passed ' the Hall ' and ' College,' he may be 
 elected without challenge by a majority, even though a still 
 greater majority of the electors may know he is a very weak and 
 perhaps not over-skilful man. This is a thing for ever happen- 
 ing ; all law can do is to see that certain qualified examiners 
 have tested the knowledge of the candidate ; if he has got 
 through that ordeaL no matter how, he has a right to all the 
 privileges of his profession ; but the veriest set of poor law 
 jobbers would never dream of electing an armless, or blind M.D., 
 or one from age utterly incapable of duty. If they did, just 
 perhaps to keep the post open until some guardian's son was
 
 394 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July i, 1S53 
 
 qualified, the Poor Law Commissioners would not sanction the 
 appointment. 
 
 A chapter will, without scruple, let the great tithes of a 
 parish for a term of years, although they know from old experi- 
 ence that the consequence will probably be that the tenantry 
 will be screwed, and, as I have seen, the chancel left to decay : 
 to my poor mind this is quite as scandalous to the Church as the 
 custom of the sale of next presentations ; hay, more so, for what 
 with a bishop to see to the fitness of the presentee, to episcopise 
 or overlook him afterwards — what with archidiaconal and rural 
 diaconal machinery, there is reason to suppose the nominee will 
 be fit for his post and kept to his work, whereas the lessees of 
 chapters pay, I dare say, punctually, but seem effectually to defy 
 all interference from those who should see they do their duty 
 towards the Church property. 
 
 However much I desire a most thorough Church reform, I 
 can regard this Simony Law Amendment Bill in no other point 
 of view but as an injurious attack upon private right, with no 
 ground of defence on the score of real public benefit. The pre- 
 sentations to chapter livings are, I believe, generally offered in 
 turn to the privileged members, either for themselves or their 
 nominees. Now, no one would venture to predicate of an eccle- 
 siastical corporation, any more than they would of a civil one, 
 that the individual members would ever be men deeply im- 
 pressed with the responsibility of Church patronage ; they are 
 elected to their own chapter positions as qualified for them ; it 
 is charitably supposed that they will make no appointments but 
 of qualified men ; and yet I will venture to say, that the pre- 
 sentations to Church preferment bought in open market will bear 
 the strictest comparison with those of any existing chapter. 
 
 The one and only safeguard that exists to protect parishes 
 from hurtful abuse in the appointment to their cure is the 
 power of the bishops to reject for ordination or institution im- 
 proper persons ; if they have not this power, let it be given ; the 
 presentee can only then choose from a qualified list of persons ; 
 how he may get his right to make the choice will be compara- 
 tively a matter of small import.
 
 July 26, 1853 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 395 
 
 A Paralytic Warming-pan. 
 
 July 26, 1S53. 
 
 A very short time ago I received a letter from a clergyman, 
 giving me a particular and succinct account of the following 
 transaction. Although I took some pains to ascertain that my 
 correspondent was in a position to be well informed in the 
 matter, I still could hardly give my belief to so extraordinary a 
 narrative ; I therefore procured the assistance of a third person, 
 of equal respectability, to ascertain for me whether I could rely 
 on the information I had received. I am now in possession of 
 his answers to my queries, and am compelled to yield my belief 
 that the story I now relate is true. 
 
 There is in Cornwall a certain parish called St. Ervan. In 
 or about the year 185 1, by the death of the then incumbent, the 
 living became vacant. The patron wished to sell the said living 
 (the next presentation or the advowson, I am not informed 
 which) at the highest price he could obtain. A gentleman was 
 found, very infirm, paralytic, utterly incompetent to do the duty, 
 and giving every prospect, from his state of health, of affording 
 to the purchaser speedy possession. To this gentleman the 
 living was given. It was some time before he was brought to 
 the spot for induction, &c. ; he had then to be supported up the 
 aisle by two persons ; jelly and wine, says one informant, wine 
 and water says another, were supplied him at the reading-desk. 
 He was not able to get through reading the Thirty-nine Articles 
 in the morning ; becoming very unwell, he was removed from the 
 desk to the inn in an almost fainting state. In the afternoon, how- 
 ever, he was again brought down to the church, and did succeed 
 in finishing the reading of the said Articles. Another clergyman 
 from a neighbouring parish had been sent for, to be ready to 
 finish the service, in case this new incumbent should through 
 weakness fail to do so. 
 
 So fatigued was the poor man with the effort that he was 
 detained in the neighbourhood under circumstances causing 
 great apprehension for his safety. He never resided ; within 
 these feiv zveeks the living has become again vacant. ' The whole 
 scene,' says my correspondent, 'was one calculated to inspire 
 unqualified disgust.'
 
 396 THE LETTERS OE S. C. 0. Aug. 15 
 
 The Institution of Clerks. 
 
 August 15, 1853. 
 
 I have just received a copy of a letter from Mr. Barnes, legal 
 adviser to the Bishop of Exeter, addressed to his lordship, in 
 answer to mine, published in your columns, exposing the St. 
 Ervan case. It appears to me to contain matter of the highest 
 importance as affecting the Established Church. 
 
 Mr. Cox was, it seems, instituted to the living of St. Ervan 
 by the bishop's commissary at Exeter, by virtue of a flat ob- 
 tained from his lordship. Mr. Barnes says, ' At the time of his 
 institution Mr. Cox appeared to be very infirm, but I have no 
 recollection that there was anything indicating his being para- 
 lytic. Of the truth, however, of the details which are stated in 
 Mr. Osborne's letter of what occurred at the time of Mr. Cox's in- 
 duction, shoiving his incapacity personally to discharge the duties 
 of the parish, I entertain no doubt.' Now, Sir, I might rest satis- 
 fied with this almost entire testimony to the truth of my state- 
 ment, but in such a case I was bound to be careful as to the 
 positive truth of each separate averment. I am bound, then, to 
 re-assert my belief that Mr. Cox was affected with paralysis, 
 and to add, that I purposely suppressed certain minor offensive 
 details, which would have made that day's work at St. Ervan 
 appear a far more aggravated pollution of the Lord's Day, ser- 
 vice, and house. 
 
 Mr. Barnes concludes his letter in these words : — ' May we 
 indulge the further hope that one effect of the publicity of this 
 case may be to put an end for ever to a practice of which it is 
 not possible to speak in terms of too earnest reprobation ? ' 
 
 I am, Sir, truly thankful to you for having allowed me to be 
 the instrument of obtaining such a prayer from so influential a 
 quarter. 
 
 But, Sir, on what grounds do the public suppose Mr. Barnes 
 defends his client for having allowed institution to this poor 
 man ? In the early days of the episcopate of Dr. Phillpotts, a 
 very aged clergyman, deaf and of great bodily infirmity, was pre- 
 sented to a benefice for the purpose of enabling the patron to 
 sell the advowson to the highest advantage. The bishop at first
 
 i853 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 397 
 
 refused to institute. On consulting high authority, he was in- 
 formed there was fear whether his refusal could be sustained in 
 law. He does not tell us whether this superannuated cripple 
 went through the farce for which his holy services had been 
 purchased ; but we are certainly left to the conclusion that he 
 did, and that the bishop, in his next charge to the clergy, ex- 
 pressed his indignation at the circumstance. Mr. Barnes now 
 tells us that the Gorham case cost the bishop 3,000/., and there- 
 fore, unsuccessfully as that sum had been spent, he (the bishop) 
 could hardly have been expected to incur fresh expense by liti- 
 gating with the patron in the St. Ervan case. 
 
 I know quite enough of the reputation of Mr. Barnes for all 
 the qualities required in one who acts as legal aide-de-camp, 
 even to such a bishop as Dr. Phillpotts, to satisfy me that he 
 knows as well as I do, that a writ of quare impedit in the St. 
 Ervan case would have been as mere waste paper against the 
 justification he and his client could have put in. 
 
 We all know, Sir, the amount and versatility of talent possessed 
 by the present episcopal bench ; I believe the whole bar could 
 produce no abler special pleaders than some of the bishops have 
 proved themselves. From the depths of abstruse doctrine to 
 the breadths and depths of minute financial transactions, they 
 have proved themselves apt and skilled in making out appa- 
 rently strong cases on evidently weak foundation. How, in the 
 name of offended decency I ask, is it that these same able men 
 have been dumb in Parliament on the point which Mr. Barnes 
 now prays may receive its solution by publicity given at my 
 poor hands ? 
 
 With some ability, considerable cunning, and not a little 
 courage, the bench conspired to give episcopal and priestly 
 power a vigorous impulse in the colonies. They must have 
 known that in the House of Commons the move would meet 
 exposure and receive its quietus. Why not have brought in a 
 short declaratory Act to strengthen their hands at home against 
 these worse than simoniacal cases ? 
 
 Is there a lower idea to be formed of human nature than 
 that which gives us men, ordained as holy ministers of the 
 Gospel, who, for a brief enjoyment of a little more income, take
 
 39 8 THE LETTERS OF S. G O. Sept. 2 
 
 their bodily weaknesses, their age, their near expectation of 
 death, into the market ? I can form one lower idea. It is that 
 of those who lend themselves to seal the contract, for fear of 
 money costs, or private animosity, and who yet, having the op- 
 portunity to prevent this pollution of our Church at its very 
 heart, have been content to toy with such matters as the resto- 
 ration of poor defunct Convocation, or the infliction on the 
 colonies of a spiritual burden they would soon reject. 
 
 A relative of the late rector of St. Ervan's wrote to the ' Times ' to 
 deny the imputation of paralysis. To him S. G. O. replies as follows : — 
 
 September 2, 1853. 
 A relative of the late rector of St. Ervan's has in your 
 columns given him a very high and, for all I know, a fully 
 deserved character for amiability and general devotion to the 
 duties of his profession. He has also passed some severe cen- 
 sures on myself. I am not disposed in any way to take offence 
 at his having done so ; under the circumstances, it is only 
 
 natural. 
 
 He distinctly denies, however, that his relative was paralytic 
 at the time of his induction. I did believe it, because I had it 
 so in writing from a source I would not suppose to be mistaken 
 on the point. I am now, I presume, called on to believe that 
 that distressing bodily debility, which was so evident as he 
 passed to the reading-desk, while he was in it, after he was 
 taken from it — which was the general theme of observation 
 during the time that the illness induced by the efforts of that 
 day detained him in the neighbourhood — was the result, not of 
 paralysis, but of general physical prostration. I can have no 
 object in refusing my belief to that supposition. If I hesitate 
 for one moment to do so, it is out of deference to my original 
 informant, and because I feel that, so far from that view making 
 the whole exhibition less disgraceful, to my sense it would make 
 
 it more so. 
 
 The whole facts of this unhappy case have now become 
 notorious on other authority than mine. Mr. A. Cox may com- 
 fort himself with this consolation, such as it is — that, though 
 there are clergymen who hold with me, that the receiving a
 
 1853 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 399 
 
 living by a man of shattered health, for the purpose of increas- 
 ing its saleable value by advertising the probability of an early 
 vacancy, is the sale of one's infirmities, the putting a price on 
 one's near prospect of death, there are very many who hold it 
 quite justifiable to do so, who would do it to-morrow, had they 
 opportunity. In this case of St. Ervan's I have some reason 
 now to suspect the transaction will fail as to its intention ; it is 
 said, the late rector died so prematurely that it is doubtful 
 whether the sale is legal. It will be no subject of regret to me 
 if this is true. 
 
 I again repeat, let the sale of advowsons and presentations 
 be made legal at all times, whether the benefices are void at the 
 time or not ; leave to the bishops the full responsibility of seeing 
 that capable presentees only are instituted ; thus, and thus only, 
 can I see any way of escape from that shame on the Church 
 which the present state of things entails. 
 
 If I have in any way been the means of calling the attention 
 of those in authority to the necessity of some alteration of the 
 law, I can easily bear a little more of that which I have borne 
 with for many years — the misconstruction of my motives. 
 
 Pensions to Resigned Bishops. 
 
 July 15, 1856. 
 
 Two bishops are about to retire on the ground of infirmity, 
 the natural result of advanced age — what Churchman can lament 
 the fact ? There is a third, known for his curious commentary 
 on foolscap paper, who might join his wiser brethren and give us 
 additional ground of satisfaction. While, however, these two 
 wise episcopal abdications command our respect, and the third 
 case to which I have alluded may yet, I trust, speedily do so, I 
 think we may be permitted to compare the lot of the working 
 clergy, when worked out, with these brighter lights whose oil is 
 failing. 
 
 If the rector of Broadbean-cum-Appleton survives his next 
 birthday, he will be eighty-one. His income has been, for the 
 forty-eight years of his present incumbency, a nominal 400/. a 
 year, subject to all manner of outgoings. If he retires, i.e. 
 resigns, he is a beggar at once, and out-relief is all he could by
 
 4oo 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. July 15 
 
 law obtain, and this only as a favour from the board of guar- 
 dians, who respect him highly. They know his circumstances. 
 It is no secret that he could not afford the 12/. to the gentleman 
 who fixes false jaws ' without springs,' though he desired it from 
 his heart, that he might be more distinctly heard by his congre- 
 gation. He has insured his life for the benefit of the excellent 
 woman who has so long shared his cares and toils, should she 
 survive him ; the only hope his old maiden — because portion- 
 less — daughter has of future subsistence is also from this insu- 
 rance, and the sale in prospect of his library of ancient Fathers. 
 If he retires, how is he to keep up his policy of insurance ? 
 
 As the bill for the future support of the Bishops of London 
 and Durham is brought in by what is called ' the present Govern- 
 ment,' I have every hope that it will follow the fate of other 
 measures so unfortunately begotten to be ultimately deserted ; 
 otherwise I think I could easily undertake to show that it is in 
 principle as unjust as at this moment it is in policy most 
 inexpedient. 
 
 With what consistency can Church or State be taxed to give 
 high pensions in these cases, on the simple ground that the pen- 
 sioners are aged, infirm, or even altogether incapable ? Is age — 
 is infirmity — nay, is incapacity good ground for the retirement 
 on pension of a bishop ? If so, surely it is as good ground in 
 the case of such a rector as I have described above. But then, 
 if the bench admit this, how is it that they do not hold extreme 
 age, positive infirmity, evident incapacity to be grounds on 
 which to refuse the institution of clergymen to livings? 
 
 A Bishop of London or Durham is to be pensioned and re- 
 leased from further toil on account of the very physical and 
 moral causes which have within these few years made, and may 
 yet make, many a clergyman most eligible for an incumbency. 
 
 Should my friend of Broadbean-cum-Appleton resign from 
 positive exhaustion that cider-famed benefice, I think I could 
 give him yet one chance to escape parish pay, or the dole of his 
 sympathising brethren. A mercenary patron or some conscien- 
 tious executors may need an old failing man, to put into a 
 benefice they must sell, but which being vacant they must first 
 fill up.
 
 1856 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 401 
 
 This shame on the Church and the State I long since ex- 
 posed in your columns ; in certain quarters I was promised that 
 it should not much longer exist. Not one step that I am aware 
 of has yet been taken to remove it. Neither Lords nor Com- 
 mons, nor their cassocked shadow, Convocation, have cared or 
 dared to interfere in the matter. True, a mitred friend has told 
 me, ' it is a most delicate business, requires much consideration, 
 great caution, &c.' I never knew a system of jobbing to 
 approach which did not require all this and much more ; and 
 yet I have lived to see many of these delicate matters, when 
 boldly taken in hand, become strangely easy of solution. 
 
 Ladies'-maids declare they — in the season — lose as much 
 sleep as the wretched working hands in the dressmaking busi- 
 ness, to whom sleep at all is a mere dream of rest. I don't 
 believe it ; even if they did, I could strike a strange balance 
 between the suffering in any one year of the well dressed and 
 fed and paid women, who sit up, or lay up, to take off the 
 dresses of their mistresses, and that of those poor creatures who 
 toiled to make them. 
 
 I don't dispute that a conscientious bishop is hardworked at 
 certain seasons ; but when I compare the circumstances which 
 surround him in his toil with those of many a harder-worked 
 curate or incumbent, and bear in mind that both, for original 
 ordination, required the same qualifications, I must say that I 
 think, if pensions are to be the order of the day, it would be but 
 fair to offer them first, where 6,000/. a year would give honour- 
 able, well-earned retirement, to some twenty men who have 
 worked life out in the deep ground of the vineyard, rather than 
 to one man who may have worked as long, but at far lighter, 
 better sheltered, higher paid, and more world-honoured work. 
 
 Preaching — ' The Working Men.' 
 
 January 12, 1858. 
 I have all my life been partial to that class of my fellow- 
 creatures known as ' the working men ; ' I don't mean the 
 'roughs' of society, but mechanics and such like — men who to 
 gain their bread need thinking heads to guide practised hands. 
 I have seen a good deal of this class, and, though I cannot 
 vol. 1. D l>
 
 402 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 12 
 
 say I think them as a body what is called ' religious,' 1 must 
 say I do not think them in moral conduct at all inferior to 
 their employers, or those who are the customers of the said 
 employers. 
 
 The working men are not, I think, an ungrateful class ; they 
 may not esteem themselves the race of unbelievers whose pecu- 
 liar infidelity is said so earnestly to call for the monster efforts 
 making to preach it out of them ; still their powers of observa- 
 tion are great, and they do, I have no doubt, put a charitable 
 construction on the rather questionable humility of some of 
 those great men who are so fussy about their conversion. They 
 are quite content to be preached at with any amount of decla- 
 matory force that so-called Church or truly called Nonconformist 
 zeal can bring to bear upon them. It is true, as yet, they have 
 not cared to struggle with believers who are not ' working men ' 
 for seats at the great preachings ; still, a great many do go, I 
 am told, and I am sure the whole body must feel the sympathy 
 shown for them in the great ' movement ' for their spiritual 
 good. 
 
 The crusade is against the working man's unbelief, at least 
 so the working men say ; I would pray from my heart for the 
 success of any and every attempt made to bring men ' to 
 believe ' ; my fear is that, in this mania for high-pressure preach- 
 ing of ' faith,' the duty of ' practice ' is too much lost sight of. 
 The working men may, I do not say they do, believe less than 
 the higher orders ; how is it as to practice ? Judged by the 
 1 Gospel,' they may appear very deficient ; judged by the ' Ten 
 Commandments,' are they worse sinners than other folk ? The 
 leaders of the preachers came from the ' West,' the working men 
 are expected from the ' East ; ' is the West more pure, more 
 honest, more really moral than the East ? 
 
 Among ' working men,' men who wear flannel jackets and, 
 perhaps, paper caps — pure artificers, there are, as all the great 
 employers know, many very able and, in their way, very elo- 
 quent men. I am quite certain some of these would by their 
 strong common sense, aided by a plain, earnest delivery, be able 
 with little effort to hold the attention of large assemblages of 
 the highest educated of the land on such a subject as their
 
 i8s8 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 403 
 
 mutual social condition ; it is one of never-ending discussion 
 among them, and one on which their various callings have given 
 them great opportunity for observation. 
 
 We of the upper crust of social life have taken immense 
 pains to spy out and declare the various points in which the 
 working man is most degraded, and we have fully illustrated for 
 the world's contemplation the sources of that degradation. The 
 penny theatre, the ginshop, the small pawnshops, the beershops, 
 the low ' hells,' the low night-houses, &c, have all been pen-o- 
 graphed ad nauseam. How are we prepared for a working 
 man's crusade on our end of the town ? How, if the men of the 
 hammer, chisel, brush, and needle, should set to work to unfold 
 our sins, their scenes, their results ? Does not the Mormonism 
 of the clubs support the same sin that is said in its lower grade 
 to curse the pavement in its richer guise in which it adorns 
 those dancing rooms where the beauty of the music can scarce 
 be surpassed, and into which, while an enforced decorum reigns 
 as the rule, no woman enters whose character has not been 
 sold or is not now considered to be on sale ; a scene where, 
 strange to say, fathers and sons are sometimes seen together, 
 where the police will civilly point out to the astonished country 
 visitor many a public man advanced in years, holding a position 
 in the State which would seem incompatible with so flagrant an 
 exposure of want of principle ? 
 
 Are the low gambling resorts at Mile-end worse in their 
 blasphemy, nightly riot, nightly rascality than those at the 
 West-end, into which are seen to enter men of all ' ages,' ' posi- 
 tions,' and possessions ? 
 
 Who imports French guilt to minister to the tastes of Eng- 
 lish sinners ? Not the working men, but the wealthy customers 
 of their employers. 
 
 Are churchwardens and clergy now roused in earnest to seek 
 some means of cleansing the streets of that flood of bold, 
 aggressive sinners who have so polluted the principal thorough- 
 fares that they arc closed to every man who cannot shut his 
 wife or daughter within a carriage ? Is this working man's 
 work ? Arc there in the East worse evidences of greater moral 
 degradation producible ?
 
 4 o4 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Jan. 12 
 
 Say that working men are fascinated by ' sweeps,' by the 
 speculation offered in the low betting-houses ; that thus many 
 are ruined ; does not a spirit of gambling eat, year by year, 
 as a foul moral cancer into the very life of educated, wealthy, 
 ennobled society ? 
 
 Give to the working men the use of the Royal Exchange 
 and the Horse Bazaar in Baker Street, or Exeter Hall, for three 
 evenings in the week through the season ; secure that none but 
 believing men — Christians of their class— shall hold forth ; let 
 the invitation to hear be to the men and their families who have 
 this world's rank, this world's wealth, education — who are of 
 those who live by the brain, not by the hand. Let the peers 
 come, the rich commoners, the bankers, the merchants, the pro- 
 fessions, the flourishing tradesmen. I will venture to say, we 
 should soon see the tables turned ; London west would not 
 endure three such preachings as would then be heard. It would 
 be voted the rankest Radicalism ; clubs, mess-rooms, drawing- 
 rooms, chambers, the turf, the exchange, wherever men or 
 women of wealthy or hitherto privileged guilt do congregate, 
 there would the cry be loudest against this vile democratic 
 lifting of a curtain behind which ' the working man ' had no 
 business to peep. I say this would be the result, even if the 
 'working ' preacher was limited to the 'Ten Commandments' as 
 the ground from which he was to extract the wholesome food of 
 reproof he was to offer. We all know it would ; and yet oh how 
 we weep over that poor working-man class, because as yet they 
 seem so ill to appreciate the efforts we would make to bring 
 them to Christ — to make them moral ! 
 
 Surely, Sir, the end and aim of all preaching, founded on 
 God's Word, is the reformation of sinners, the turning the wicked 
 man — as a man — from his wickedness ; in the sight of Heaven 
 all are of the working-man class, for all have the work ordained 
 from Heaven to do. Why should we murmur if the West- 
 minster Abbey special services attract sinners in broadcloth and 
 silk, instead of cotton and fustian ? The preacher has the same 
 message of peace to both, and the Decalogue has an equal claim 
 on both. When a powerful preacher, fresh imported from the 
 provinces, is ushered to his rostrum or preceded on the platform
 
 1858 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 405 
 
 by men of rank and note, if he is honest he will not forget them 
 in his discourse. True, they may have besought him to adapt 
 his style and matter to the comprehension and the moral or 
 immoral condition of ' the working men.' They may have 
 schooled him beforehand in the statistics of working-man vice ; 
 but I repeat, if he is a true servant of the Great Preacher, he will 
 hesitate to denounce the sins of his supposed working-man 
 audience without also warning those noblemen and gentlemen 
 ushers of his train whom he well knows to belong to a class ust 
 as amenable to the commands of the Decalogue, just as hopeless 
 without the simple faith which leans on that ' Atonement ' he 
 delights to preach. 
 
 It is my firm belief that the seats at these special services 
 cannot be better filled than by the wealthy and educated and 
 noble of the metropolis. It would be the most hopeful of all 
 ways of reaching the working classes if it was known to them 
 that there were great weekly preachings addressed to, and faith- 
 fully aiming at, the notorious vices of the wealthy and privileged 
 class. They can now buy the penny copy of a sermon warning 
 themselves against the very sins in the East which they see to 
 flourish unrebuked in the West. Let them buy an equally cheap 
 copy of bold, straightforward, earnest eloquence, rebuking the 
 harlotry, the gambling, the Sabbath-breaking, the fraud, the 
 wanton extravagance, which none can deny as prevalent among 
 the more favoured class, and they will begin to believe that 
 preachers are in earnest, and that what they preach comes from 
 one who is no respecter of persons. 
 
 It is clear to me that at present the working men are likely 
 to regard this movement as a mere tournament or passage at 
 arms between parties in the Church, and the Church as a party 
 against all comers. The antagonists have chosen a common 
 field ; they would fight the devil where he fights for souls among 
 the commonalty. They think preaching will expel him from 
 the mechanic, and so they get the best preachers they can, and 
 invite the working man to give them a chance of trying their 
 power of words upon him. The Surrey Gardens begat Exeter 
 Hall, Exeter Hall has begotten Westminster Abbey ; the Bap- 
 tist body began it, the Evangelical Church party took it up, the
 
 4c6 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Jan. 12 
 
 Nonconformists fell in when these were interrupted, and now 
 High Church and Low Church have occupied Westminster 
 Abbey, give some promise of St. Paul's — still for ' the working 
 men ' : why for them only? 
 
 I would not undervalue faithful preaching ; I am not blind 
 to the value of such preaching, ever enhanced by an earnest, 
 eloquent delivery ; but I am alive to the great danger of the 
 lofty patronage given to pulpit declamation as directed against 
 the vices of one class, and hitherto restricted to men of one 
 party in the Church. Itching ears too often belong to those who 
 have idle knees ; a craving for the best of preaching does often 
 exist in those who listen but to forget. There are politics in 
 faith nowadays which make men the blindest of partisans ; 
 they will revel in the doctrines that should condemn their own 
 sins, simply because, as doctrines, they are hateful to — the other 
 side. 
 
 For my own part I think the preaching which is to win the 
 working men should have less of parade about it, must seek them 
 in their own neighbourhoods, and this the Bishop of London 
 rightly perceives. I also think that the time is come when 
 preaching should be less exclusive ; I am not aware that any 
 man was ever ordained to deal with working men only, and I 
 have yet to learn that it is just to scourge vulgar sin and leave 
 refined guilt to go free. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that 
 the past year has recorded an amount of flagrant crime, of 
 cunning, accomplished villany, among the favoured in purse and 
 in intellect which can scarcely be equalled by the most careful 
 gleaning from the discovered crime, fraud, and robbery of the 
 lowest classes among us. 
 
 If the Church is to hold on as the specially authorised 
 exponent of God's will and Christ's Gospel ; if the Noncon- 
 formists are to preserve their position, as free to expound 
 and declare the same holy will and message, let them not 
 overlook the working man's need of teaching, or the rich 
 man's need of warning. The one may sin in ignorance, the 
 other does sin, knowing better. We shall have plenty of wran- 
 gling for freedom to assault the vices of the lower millions. 
 In common justice let some zeal be shown as against the same
 
 1858 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 407 
 
 vices when seen in more refined guise among the ' upper ten 
 thousand.' 
 
 We rush unbidden into the poor man's house to assault his 
 sins, if we can discover them ; we invite the poor to come in 
 masses, for their souls' sake, to our monster preachings. Why- 
 give Lazarus this high feeding in spiritual matters, with peers to 
 wait on him, bishops and deans to prepare the food, and leave 
 Dives to the prose of an inoffensive sermon at his comfortable 
 church, or to a dull Sunday at his club, or a rather too lively one 
 at Richmond ? 
 
 The St. Leger and Poor Curates. 
 
 1861. 
 
 Mr. Pollock, of St. George's Hospital, invites me to plead 
 the cause of a particular suffering class — clergymen in absolute 
 want. Some years ago I did this in your columns. I have 
 always felt that there can scarcely be a more pitiable case than 
 that of a man of education, irrevocably bound to one of the 
 highest of all professions, and yet either starving in it or gaining 
 scanty bread in a state of physical and mental suffering which 
 utterly incapacitates him from the proper performance of its 
 duties. 
 
 I have known many such cases ; there are, I have no doubt, 
 many hundreds to be found. I know as a fact that to many a 
 hard-working clergyman the cast-off clothes of a butler would 
 be a gift gratefully received. 
 
 I have, however, never heard of a more pitiable case than 
 that on which Mr. Pollock has addressed you. I have taken 
 care that, at least for a short time, he shall not continue in this 
 state of want. 
 
 Who has won the St. Leger ? W T hoever it may be, if he or 
 any other so fortunate a being will send me 50/. or 100/. for this 
 poor man, I will see it safely to his hands. 
 
 Why appeal to a worldly turfite ? I think I hear it said. I 
 answer, because I have learnt of late years that in men whose 
 pursuits I hate, and in women whose calling invokes the world's 
 scorn, there is often a charity, when appealed to, for which to 
 4 better' people we often appeal in vain. They like, however, to 
 do their good quietly.
 
 4 o8 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. April 14 
 
 The following letter on the indelibility of orders was published 
 anonymously. 
 
 Mr. Bouverie's Bill. 
 
 April 14, 1862. 
 
 The doctrine of ' once a priest, always a priest,' is a mere 
 mockery of all decency when we come down to the fact that 
 men are made priests, ' once and for ever,' with scarce any pre- 
 paration to qualify them for the duties of the priesthood, at an 
 age when they have not the knowledge of the world about them 
 which could teach them on what they really enter when they 
 become a priest. You may tell me of the solemn ordination 
 service; all the deliberate preparation, by 'examination;' the 
 test of fitness, from testimonials : I admit it all, I admit we were 
 examined for orders, and grave men testified of us in terms 
 which in many a case would indeed have astonished our friends 
 and relatives, had testimonials any real value ; all I argue is — 
 was the fact of our real desire for orders ever proved, our fitness 
 for orders ever ascertained ? I go further ; I say — of what 
 young man of twenty-three, fresh from the university, can it be 
 safely predicated that he is fitted to be bound for life to a pro- 
 fession — the noblest, where fitness is given from above ; but 
 alas ! one most humiliating, where life's struggle in vain seeks to 
 overtake a fitness for duty for which mind and body may be 
 alike constitutionally unfit. Mr. Walter is right ; the age at 
 which the layman is irrevocably made a clergyman is far too 
 early an age. It would be an early one at which to make any 
 of life's vows : but who, in common sense, dares to say that, at 
 this age, any one man in an hundred is really fitted by reflection 
 and by life's discipline to take upon himself to be the soul's 
 guide to the living, and the pilot through the disturbed or calm 
 passage, as it may be, of the soul dying its way from the body 
 into eternity ? 
 
 Give the clergy, at least, a locus pccnitenticB, some stage in life 
 at which they can stay hand and voice, and say, ' I have erred, 
 let me return to laism ; for, though I would not forsake the 
 temple, I feel unfitness for its priesthood.' Offer no inducement 
 to the waverer, but do set the honest sufferer free ; exclude him, 
 if you will, from the bar, from the House of Commons ; bid
 
 1 862 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 409 
 
 him, if you will, quit orders and starve, but do give him the 
 choice of penury, if it must be, with ease of mind, rather than 
 a competence for the body, with daily sacrifice of the mind's 
 peace. 
 
 Many a man has gone into orders for fear of, or out of the 
 purest love, for a parent who demanded that sacrifice, thinking 
 little of it, which the son has, too late, found to be great indeed. 
 Many entered orders on a false idea of what the work was ; 
 very many chose the clergyman's life because, poor fellows, they 
 thought it would give them position ! How many a parent has 
 half starved his daughters to make the one son a gentleman, i.e. 
 a clergyman ; but too late finding that the said son would have 
 had a higher position in the white of his father's flour mill than 
 in the black which ordained him a gentleman, with scarcely the 
 food of a butler, and with but too often less respect from the 
 footmen of the squire's household. 
 
 There is no question about the fact that the Church as a 
 profession has now great difficulties in her recruiting service. 
 Rectors won't have dull drones for curates ; patrons won't give 
 livings to men who only have the uniform and the enlistment of 
 the corps, with none of its real esprit or efficiency. 
 
 Why not allow men to admit that they are failures ? Why 
 not permit a man who reads badly, can with difficulty preach at 
 all, who is nervous with the dying, who feels himself at every 
 ecclesiastical trial utterly devoid of power, and with little will to 
 stand up against it, to retreat at once, spare himself — spare the 
 people, who love him for everything but what he is ? 
 
 Alas ! Sir, I know — I foresee all the arguments which will 
 be used to still chain the few bound to the pile of a burning 
 conscience, rather than permit the sanctity of orders to be 
 scorched in one hair. 
 
 The old world-worn delusion will prevail, — the office has set 
 apart the official, the Church would be scandalised if it was 
 proved that any of her ministers could be good men, but yet 
 feel she has not made them altogether good for her purpose. 
 
 For my own part, seeing, as I do, how men with ' diplomas,' 
 the prizes of long study and continued schooling for the M.D. or 
 R.C.S., do often prove utter failures— do sometimes, in conse-
 
 4 io THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. March 3 
 
 quence, take orders — that these arc not irrevocablj/ bound to 
 
 set fractures, amputate limbs, and prescribe drugs, when they 
 
 have the good sense to admit that they can do nothing of the 
 
 sort conscientiously — I cannot see why the most solemn of all 
 
 professions, and the one the least prepared for, and undertaken, 
 
 at the earliest moment, as to its full practice, should be made the 
 
 one profession from which there is no escape, except by the 
 
 door of gross misconduct, or, as it is now offered, by assuming 
 
 you dissent from the Church because you feel unfit to be one of 
 
 its priests. 
 
 A Weary but Resigned Rector. 
 
 Over the signature of ' Gravestone ' he writes on ' Godly Discipline.' 
 
 March 3, 1864. 
 
 Constitutionally indisposed to take any active part in contro- 
 versy of any kind, wishing, as an old member of the Established 
 Church, to take Church matters as easily and as quietly as I 
 take the teaching of my rector's sermons, ever since, after a 
 wholesome breakfast, I had read your leading article on the 
 proposed restoration of godly discipline in the Church, I have 
 been in that state of mental irritation which can only be allayed 
 by pen-and-ink aperient. 
 
 Some clergy, it appears, are liable to conscientious disturb- 
 ance when compelled to express, in the language of the Burial 
 Service, future hope for the soul of the dead before them, such 
 dead, in their belief, having lived in, and left, the world offering 
 no grounds to those who knew them on which to build this hope, 
 perhaps having evidenced in their way of living a state of mind 
 opposed to all we are taught to be consistent with a sure and 
 certain hope. 
 
 Well, I have been at a large number of funerals, have seen 
 men and women of every rank in life, of many different religious 
 denominations, of every degree of ' character,' committed to the 
 grave. Over all the same Church Service was read ; in my 
 recollection I never met with but one case in which the clergy- 
 man expressed himself warmly as to the condition of the dead 
 man just buried, and, as he expressed it, ' the mockery it was,
 
 1 864 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 411 
 
 reading the words of the service over him.' It was a bad case, 
 a most deplorable one ; and yet I saw nothing in the after part 
 of the day in the conduct of my reverend friend and certain 
 others who shared his feeling to make me think he and they 
 
 really believed Joe was, as they had intimated, ' really 
 
 burning in hell/ while they had heard the service express some 
 charitable hope in the other direction. There was none of the 
 depression of spirits I should have expected in an earnest clergy- 
 man, and several most pious and kind ladies, who were talking 
 over the condition of a late neighbour, one who used to shoe 
 their horses, make little hoes for their children, always had a 
 kind word for them as they had for him, though, poor wretch, 
 he did swear, was very often drunk, and showed no affection for 
 the church, except as a ringer entitled to certain perquisites at 
 Christmas. 
 
 I suppose it was my sad, apathetical disposition which did 
 
 not suffer me to be convinced that Joe was worse (he was all 
 
 I have said above) than old , who never missed church, was a 
 
 very loud responder, occasional — when quite convenient — com- 
 municant ; and yet, after he had been duly buried as a most 
 respectable churchman, before the order could be given for the 
 stone which was to hand down his integrity and confirm his 
 hope with a text at an extra ?s. 6d., he was discovered to have 
 forged deeds which had enabled him to gamble away the inheri- 
 tance of certain young orphans, leaving them beggars on earth ; 
 he having, at the same time, forged the character which gave 
 him, in the ears of those who heard ' the Service,' a sure inheri- 
 tance in Heaven. 
 
 Somehow, I have settled down, or at least never could be 
 roused up, out of the belief that we men are poor judges about 
 the dead, utterly incapable of saying, where one man is saved 
 another man is damned. There are so many sorts of sins, so 
 much of degree in sin — the sin of some seems so much the result 
 of breed, rearing, and temptation ; the sins of others seem so 
 wilful, so against knowledge. The poor can hide sin so little, 
 the well-to-do conceal it so easily, that I have always thought 
 no judge or jury at the church gate could, in nine cases out of 
 ten, say how far the coffined corpse, waiting their verdict, was
 
 412 THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. March 3 
 
 sufficiently guilty, or sufficiently the reverse, to make the words 
 of the Church Service applicable beyond all doubt. 
 
 When I say to my rector, 'How about the Marriage Service? 
 Is your conscience never sadly wounded by its mockery when 
 read evidently very late ?' 'Ah,' he says, 'yes, that is sad ; but 
 then it is of everyday occurrence, and it is better, after all, to 
 marry them.' Well, Sir, I may be wrong ; but I think if we, 
 as is the case, marry all comers, we should act in an equally 
 catholic spirit in the case of those brought to the grave ; — as we 
 do not call for a jury of matrons to decide how far the service 
 will be in harmony with the condition of the bride — a thing 
 capable of proof — why not, still in charity, bury those without a 
 murmur whose utterly hopeless state can scarce be said to be 
 capable of proof 'by any human power ? 
 
 Godly discipline, prevenient in action, is, it appears, to be 
 invoked, to save the consciences of very scrupulous clergymen. 
 Churchwardens, with the clergyman, or the latter without the 
 former, are to ' present ' for exedmmunication the godless of the 
 parish, that these, being made excommunicate, may know the 
 Church won't bury them. This does rouse me. It is enough to 
 rouse dispositions more ecclesiastically dormant than even my 
 own. Is the being a communicant to be the test of godliness ? 
 Is this to be the claim for Christian burial ? I knew a rector 
 who gave the alms away — at least, a large portion of them— at 
 the rails after the Lord's Supper to the poor who attended it. 
 The number was very large, the characters of many very question- 
 able ; it was not at all questionable that many came only for 
 the money they were sure of, not for the grace they might seek. 
 He gradually limited the distribution ; the number of these 
 communicants diminished. He left it off altogether, and there 
 was almost open rebellion ; there was open confession on the 
 part of many, ' They never should have come but for the plate 
 money.' 
 
 In small parishes vicious life is very open to observation ; 
 the rector knows our peccadilloes as soon as anybody. If he 
 acts impartially I can easily conceive cases where, if he is to 
 present the frail of the cottage, the free liver of the farm, he will 
 have to add to the list the noble lord or esquire of the ' great
 
 1 864 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 413 
 
 house,' perhaps his patron, his occasional host, the source from 
 which come necks of venison, game, and asparagus. I can't see 
 how a strict programme for godly life can be laid down, subject 
 to the penalty of this proposed godly discipline, which would 
 not catch some fish in the net with whom the rector and church- 
 wardens could only deal to their own certain discomfiture. Mary 
 Jane, Bill and Bob Fustian, could be safely anathematised ; 
 banished church and yard they would go to ' meeting' for doctrine, 
 and trust to the nonconforming half of the nearest cemetery for 
 burial ; peers, baronets, squires, and yeomen would, I suspect, 
 despise the order that banished them their pews and deprived 
 them of their death right in the vault in the churchyard ; the 
 Church might call them the hard name ; I suspect they would 
 soon convince the Church these are not the days when they 
 would allow any such tyrannical power in the hands of any 
 such strangely constituted body as the said Established Church. 
 
 Great folk nowadays are birds of passage ; they hibernate 
 in the moral climate of their provincial residences ; they in spring 
 and summer wing their way to the less pure climate of the 
 metropolis. Small folk are necessarily rare goers from home ; 
 they live under the rectorial and churchwardenian eye ; their 
 evil is ever before their own neighbours. Fair play demands 
 that godly discipline should go up to the ' season in town ' with 
 the squire and peer and their households, if it is to keep watch 
 over the smaller Church fry of the estate at home. Godly 
 discipline, I presume, will not deal in indulgences, and give the 
 peer and his children a season-ticket, making them free of ex- 
 communication for certain months ; assuming that, going where 
 Convocation sits, they must, as good churchmen, be all that 
 awful body would have them to be, that they may be buried as 
 their forefathers were. 
 
 The conclusion at which I have arrived is this : this is not the 
 day in which to revive any discipline which shall make incum- 
 bents and churchwardens attorney-generals to indict the non- 
 communicants of their parishes and seek their excommunication. 
 Such a power in such hands would be either a contemptible 
 farce, if it was really sought to put it in force, or, if allowed to 
 remain as the rule a dead letter, would still leave room for the
 
 4M THE LETTERS OE S. G. O. Sept. 12 
 
 exceptional exercise of the silly judgment of weak men, or the 
 malicious spirit of bad men. 
 
 It would be far better to let the Prayer-book alone than to 
 try and support its integrity by any such extraneous bigotry. 
 
 Gravestone. 
 Chnrcli Help for Colonists. 
 
 September 12, 1864. 
 
 The four archbishops have made use of language in their 
 ' Address ' for which, in my opinion, they have little justification. 
 They assert that if we fail to plant the Church of God — by 
 which term I presume they designate the Church of England — 
 in the colonies, the large number of our poor who emigrate will 
 lapse into heathenism ; that it is obligatory on us to do this for 
 the sake of the heathen people — the natives, I conclude — among 
 whom our emigrants settle, and to whom they inevitably carry 
 the contagion of our diseases and of our sins. 
 
 I altogether deny that the poor emigrants who now for so 
 many years have left us for the colonies are a class whose 
 religion was so dependent upon access to the worship, &c, of 
 the Established Church that for want of it they would become 
 heathens. I know that it has been a fair source of complaint 
 among employers that the greater part of these poor who have 
 emigrated has consisted of the best single labourers, and the 
 families of the most industrious of the married. 
 
 It tells but a poor tale for the English Church at home that 
 her poor will become heathens as soon as they are beyond her 
 jurisdiction. I have not lived to see that the Established Church 
 has been so successful, in town or village, with our poor that it 
 is at all safe to assume that without her aid we should have 
 been a nation of heathens. I have lived to see that with all 
 the energy and means, not only of the Church, but of every 
 denomination of Christians, a very large proportion of our popu- 
 lation at home are, as yet, quite as far from a true knowledge of 
 God as any heathen can be. 
 
 Our ' poor emigrants ' have been a very fair sample of the 
 better part of our labouring classes ; considering how they were 
 bred and reared, they, to be as good as they were, must have 
 shown no little power to resist temptation.
 
 1 864 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 415 
 
 But, Sir, we are told that these poor emigrants ' inevitably 
 carry the contagion of our diseases and of our sins.' Whose 
 diseases ? whose sins ? Do the archbishops, asking for money 
 to support colonial branches of the English Church, describe the 
 nation under the wings of that Church as so wicked, so vile, so 
 morally and physically corrupt that those who go forth from it 
 inevitably carry with them moral and physical contagion ? If 
 they do, may I not venture to ask whether they are quite sure 
 that a Church the children of which at home are so bad is the 
 right sort of Church to found elsewhere? It would be a poor 
 puff of a pill for dyspepsia in the colonies to say that it was the 
 English pill, but at the same time to confess that wherever the 
 English went they inevitably were found dyspeptic. It would 
 ruin the market, for would not the pill be open to the suspicion 
 of itself causing the disease it professed to cure ? 
 
 I deny that the gin, the gunpowder, the cheap muskets, the 
 novel diseases and vices, brought into heathen countries by those 
 who have colonised them, were so brought by the poor emigrants. 
 I think any such assertion made to a Maori convert would be at 
 once denied. He would quickly tell us that these curses came 
 upon his land from a very different class ; not a class which left 
 England uneducated, poor, and owing all religious knowledge to 
 Church charity and love, but a class well endowed in mind and 
 means — men of pews, not of free seats in the Church at home — 
 men quite equal to the burden of founding churches for them- 
 selves in the colonies if so disposed. 
 
 It is true that the accounts sent home of the amount of 
 demoralisation in some of the chief towns of our colonies are 
 most lamentable, but it is not true that this licentiousness and 
 its contagious result is that of the poor emigrant class, although 
 very many of that class are doubtless seriously affected by it. 
 
 In pushing for subscriptions to aid Church objects, it has 
 become too much the fashion to ground the appeal as one made 
 for the sake of the poor. I sometimes am inclined to think that 
 the Church authorities are of opinion, either that the souls of the 
 rich are, as such, by riches saved ; or else, that the task of saving 
 them at all would be so great an one that the Church feels no 
 strength for the attempt. The cry always is — the poor man's
 
 416 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Sept. 12, 1S64 
 
 soul is in danger ; and now this cry comes through the channel 
 of this Address, a cry from colonial bishops, archdeacons, &c, 
 all to the old tune : — 
 
 ' Your poor in the colonies are soul-starved ; more of us 
 officials are wanted, more clergy for us to work, more money to 
 pay for both. You send us poor emigrants, men, women" and 
 children, from your Church-nurtured land ; they come to us 
 dependent, for their very souls' lives, on still having the teaching 
 of our Church ; they come with disease, with vice in their train, 
 to pollute our natives. Bishopless, churchless, without archi- 
 diaconal superintendence and clerical service, they will be lost 
 themselves, destroying the poor natives also, as they are them- 
 selves destroyed.' 
 
 I can understand money being wanted for the societies which 
 find funds for this colonial ecclesiastical enterprise. The public 
 have had too much reason to suspect that the object may be 
 not so much to propagate our common faith as to extend the 
 system of a particular Church. The subscribers to the company 
 are hardly satisfied as to the intentions of the directors. 
 
 God forbid we should live to see the day when England's 
 heart is closed to a cry for spiritual help from the heathen of 
 any land ; but with the great demand we have for Church work 
 among the heathen of all classes at home, we are but prudent 
 when we seek economy in our charity, and expect the end at 
 which we aim to be sought with no more than necessary expense. 
 We have a right to expect that those in the colonies who can 
 afford it should find their own Church, as we have also a right 
 to question whether, for the poor colonist, the poor heathen, a 
 Church establishment in all respects like our own is the best 
 instrument to advance the knowledge of God and the practice of 
 godliness. Is there no danger, also, lest in establishing these 
 distant churches we, by their failure from local causes, bring 
 contempt upon the very system we advocate ? 
 
 When so many colonial bishops are always to be found in 
 England it is hard to believe that the need of the colonies in 
 spiritual matters for episcopal machinery is so very pressing. 
 However that may be, I am quite sure that, while the Christian 
 public will never let working missionary societies want for funds
 
 Oct. 20, 1866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 417 
 
 so long as they are earnest and prudent in their work and 
 accurate in their accounts, there may be some doubt whether 
 appeals may not be too urgent for money to start little ' churches,' 
 with second-rate bishops, to be supported at very great expense, 
 and in the matter of converting heathen, or preserving religion 
 to those who already love it, not doing more, if so much, as a 
 less costly, less pretentious form of missionary work. 
 
 His dislike of sacerdotal pretensions is nowhere shown more strongly 
 than in the two following letters. 
 
 Ritualism. 
 
 October 20, 1866. 
 
 Your leading article on Ritualism in the Times ' of yesterday 
 will be read with sincere satisfaction by a very large proportion 
 of those who believe themselves to be members of the Reformed 
 English Church. There is a point, however, connected with the 
 subject on which you have not touched ; it is one of the gravest 
 importance to a large number of your readers. The Church is 
 a profession, and one of most peculiar character. It requires 
 an education of a peculiar kind ; it differs from all other pro- 
 fessions in this feature — once chosen and entered it cannot 
 be left. Men, as yet mere youths, go into it at an age which 
 has known little of worldly experience. There is, therefore, the 
 greater necessity that what it is, and what it requires, should be 
 clearly known. Parents of future clergymen are rarely men of 
 large fortunes. When a son in put into training for the Church 
 as the profession of his future life, his father has not only to con- 
 sider his moral fitness for it, but at considerable expense to 
 provide him with the education the performance of its duties 
 requires. As the young man will be ordained when very young, 
 it is of the highest importance that the demands the duties of 
 his future life's profession will make upon him should be so far 
 clearly defined that he can readily understand them. As matters 
 are now, it seems to me utterly impossible for a parent to say 
 whether his son can be made by any course of instruction a good 
 clergyman, or that any young man can predicate what will be 
 required of him to do and believe in the English Established 
 Church. 
 
 VOL. I. F. E
 
 4I 8 THE LETTERS OF S. G. 0. Oct. 20 
 
 If the Church Congress at York has done anything for the 
 Church at large it has made confusion worse confounded. There 
 were present an archbishop, and several bishops, among the 
 latter that great episcopal platformist, the Bishop of Oxford, the 
 Bright of all Church demonstrations, who, in the House of Lords, 
 was so thankful that ritualistic folly did not exist in his diocese. 
 Now it appears that at this congress there was a sort of Tussaud 
 exhibition of ecclesiastical millinery. The Church Millinent 
 displayed the contents of its wardrobe. Every parent had op- 
 portunity to study the kind of trousseau he might yet have to 
 provide for a son about to take orders. Besides this, the out- 
 ward demonstration of the garments of ritualism, there was what 
 is called ' daily celebration ' and other unquestionable exhibition 
 of the development of the doctrine and practices of this class of 
 cleroy. Had we any proof whatever by word or deed that the 
 archbishop and bishops present at the congress disapproved 
 this open challenge of their sincerity as opponents of extreme 
 ritualism ? Is it not notorious that the ritualists proclaim the 
 contrary to be the fact ? It may be very true that these weak 
 people disregard the remonstrances of the bishops. It is my 
 belief that they are more wise in this than in anything else, for 
 I am convinced they are privately satisfied that the episcopal 
 remonstrants have little real sincerity as such ; that, in real fact, 
 some bishops should, if they dared, go a very long way with 
 them, that one or two are in private altogether with them ; that 
 of the few who really are opposed to them there are not above 
 two or three who have the courage to do more than offer a timid 
 remonstrance, which is very much of the nature of a compas- 
 sionate condonation of what they cannot approve but will not 
 condemn. When members of the bench, who on occasion are 
 eloquent to denounce this mischievous folly, are yet found ready 
 to preach in churches where it is in full vigour, when it is noto- 
 rious that in some dioceses the only road to episcopal counten- 
 ance — so much coveted by so many — is in the direction of this 
 extreme ritualism, how can we wonder that the thing increases, 
 that the extreme anti-Reformation party go on and on, until 
 they have become a pitiable misrepresentation of the Romanist 
 Church in a great deal, deliberate traitors to the chief principles
 
 1 866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 419 
 
 of their own Church, at least the one in whose service they 
 are ? 
 
 What, I ask, is a father now to do, who, being a Protestant, 
 has a son wishing to make the Church his profession ? Is the 
 ' Directorium Anglicanum ' to be accepted as a manual to be 
 studied, that the youth may be up in the business of the intra- 
 Church work ? There was a time when the wits of the day were 
 hard on what was called the cant of Clapham. The expression 
 of evangelical thought had certainly then taken a phraseology 
 to itself, which laid it open to much just criticism ; but, after all, 
 it was for the most part scripturally derived, and the earnest 
 men of that line of thought were great Bible readers. Naturally 
 enough, they spoke and wrote under the moving impulse whose 
 emotions, begotten of Scripture study, found their readiest 
 clothing in Scripture language. They might have shown bad 
 taste in their too common use of sacred words ; it was in no 
 hypocritical spirit that they spoke as their hearts moved them. 
 The so-called cant of Clapham could be understood if not ap- 
 proved. It offended taste, not faith. The ecclesiastical jargon 
 of the new party owes little to Prayer-book or Bible. Like turf 
 language, it is caviare to the external world. It is a thing of 
 postures and priestcraft, ceremonies, mysteries, doctrines sacra- 
 mental amalgamated with fashions vestmental ; it is a thing of 
 days and seasons, furniture, fastings and feastings, of music and 
 architecture, hymnals, church ornamentation, and decoration 
 according to ' days.' 
 
 With the general knowledge possessed of the doctrines and 
 practices of the Roman Catholic Church, it is easy to talk with 
 and understand an intelligent Roman Catholic priest or any 
 Roman Catholic manual. To the uninitiated the talkings and 
 writings of this new school are as difficult to understand as their 
 dresses and postures. We need much a glossary for their litera- 
 ture. Where are we to find an authoritative guide to their cere- 
 monial, any one generally accepted candid avowal of what they 
 really believe, what their real idea of the Established Church is ? 
 How, I ask again, is a parent to have a son prepared for orders ? 
 Is he to get up all the phraseology of mediaevalism, to study the 
 inventory of a large and ever-increasing church wardrobe ; to 
 
 E E 7.
 
 420 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 20 
 
 acquire by practice the posture, power, and accuracy of the best 
 Anglican examples, rejecting the plain teaching of Articles, 
 Canons, Catechism, as received for generations ? Is he to study 
 all the ingenious perversion of old accepted truth, ingenious 
 evasion of wholesome Protestant truth ? Is he to learn that the 
 imposition of the hands of a bishop gives him an authority which 
 is to command obedience from his parishioners, but leaves him 
 free to refuse subordination to the bishop, who is his own over- 
 seer ? Is he to study before ordination to the office of priest in 
 the Reformed Church all the literature which is put forth to 
 denounce the Reformation, and justify within the pale of the 
 Church opposition to the teaching and practice on which alone 
 it is accepted as Reformed ? Because it may have been dis- 
 covered, or is alleged, that in the day of Edward VI. some stitch 
 was dropped which was wanting to make the whole principles 
 of the Reformation faultless, is the young man to be prepared 
 for orders to believe in the days of Victoria that the people of 
 England are wrongly instructed when they reject what it is 
 clear — admitting the dropped stitch — they have for centuries 
 been in the habit of rejecting ? 
 
 A clergyman or layman may be well satisfied of the piety of 
 his son, that he is of an earnest mind, has every qualification to 
 fit him for the position of a parochial clergyman. Who among 
 us, clerical or lay, really feels that his son at the age of twenty- 
 four, with the ordinary education of an English Protestant, is fit 
 to become a spiritual director, claiming authority over the inmost 
 thoughts of every individual of his flock, hearing their confes- 
 sion, extorting under authority the exposure of their every mental 
 frailty ? The freedom of an English Protestant family is no 
 school of training for that awful assumption of authority which 
 this new school claims. Too much of the ordinary man is 
 known ; it is beyond the power of the family faith to believe 
 that ordination confers authority on mere youth, to offer the 
 sacrifice these men say they offer, or to dictate to the souls 
 of others according to their method of dictation, to pardon 
 as these men pardon. That they do hold transubstantiation 
 the honest of them will not deny, it has yet to be proved what 
 of Roman Catholic doctrine they do not hold, if the practice of
 
 ^66 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 421 
 
 their chiefs and the burden of their literature is to be accepted 
 as true. 
 
 If the present state of things must press heavily on the 
 hearts of parents, with sons wishing to go into the Church, it 
 presses with equal weight on every clergyman who is honest in 
 his appreciation of the doctrines and practice of the Church as 
 it was when he was, years since, ordained. I am quite prepared 
 to admit that very many of these ultra-ritualists are earnest, 
 pious, self-denying men. I do not deny in communion with 
 these are to be found many of the most devoted, charitable 
 people of the age. I should say as much of the various bodies 
 of Nonconformists, for I know well that they, in their fashion, 
 are as earnest, pious, self-denying, and charitable. No one who 
 has seen their work can deny that the Romish Church does 
 foster a large number of priests of the most sincere piety, active 
 in their calling, and in that calling the centres of great active 
 charity in others ; but the question at issue is, not whether this 
 or that form of religious belief is perfect, true, and the best basis 
 of good work, but whether a Protestant Church is as such so 
 loose in its definitions of what it protests against that a man of 
 ordinary Protestant ideas must be bound to act with, and believe 
 he is of the same Church as men who openly uphold all he has 
 been taught to protest against, and teach, as his Church's truths, 
 that which he was bred to believe it held to be false. 
 
 The time, Sir, is in my opinion come when the laity of the 
 land who are Protestants in any degree should decide whether 
 their Church — the clergy are but its ministers — is to stand on 
 the old truths, or be refashioned to suit this new school ; whether 
 they will be content to be ruled by a priesthood who claim that 
 they should interpret the Bible by the Prayer-book, and the 
 latter according to their priestly interpretation, or make a stand 
 for private judgment in the matter of Scripture, a common-sense 
 acceptation of the Prayer-book as it has been accepted by their 
 immediate forefathers. As to any reliance on the authority or 
 the good intentions of the bishops, it is leaning on a reed. The 
 bench stands committed to the movement by its long sufferance, 
 its weak opposition, its but too frequent connivance, not very 
 rare approval. I am quite satisfied in my own mind that the
 
 422 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 20 
 
 bench, as a whole, has never for one moment contemplated any- 
 real opposition to the movement. There is but too much evi- 
 dence that in the working of some of the societies with which 
 most if not all the bench are connected, and in the carrying out 
 some of the foreign and colonial work of the Church, which also 
 has so much episcopal patronage, a tendency to ritualism is 
 more likely to qualify a candidate for employment than the 
 reverse. 
 
 There are those who argue that it is better to bear and for- 
 bear to any extent than to so act as to endanger a large secession 
 from the Church. I am not of the number. I hold a sect 
 within a Church, which disowns all that has given it its name 
 and position, however large it may be, whatever influence it may 
 possess, is in a position as dangerous to that Church as disgrace- 
 ful to itself. It is said such a secession would so swell the 
 numbers of the Roman Catholic Church in England as to make 
 her power most dangerous. I answer, it is better to have an 
 open powerful enemy without than a treacherous friend within. 
 When the members of a Protestant family come in contact with 
 Roman Catholics in religious matters, or in ordinary society, the 
 position on either side is known ; when clergy and laity who 
 hold Roman Catholic views still mix with the world as Protes- 
 tant churchmen, there is no safeguard for the faith of the young. 
 It is true these people say, although you accuse us of causing 
 many perversions to Rome, you cannot deny we are the cause 
 by our own services and doctrines of retaining many who would 
 otherwise go. How poor the consolation to a parent, on one 
 son having passed through St. A.'s Romeward, to be told, 
 remember your other son, your daughters, &c, would follow 
 him, did they not find, with us, that for which they crave ! The 
 day may not be just yet, but, in my opinion, it cannot be far 
 distant, when, by some rash overt act, some of the leaders of 
 this movement will betray its real aim. I strongly suspect, if 
 the truth were known, that aim is no secret to certain members 
 of the bench. There will then, I trust, be a departure out of 
 our pale of the greater part of a body of men who must, in all 
 honesty, feel that they are unfitted to remain in it. We shall 
 probably have an Anglo-Catholic Church independent of the
 
 1866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 423 
 
 State. It will, doubtless, have many adherents, for novelty is 
 attractive ; to it, I have no doubt, certain colonial Churches will 
 affiliate themselves. It will have no real difficulty as to a head ; 
 there are those who say with confidence — one or more bishops 
 will join. 
 
 Ambitious of great spiritual power, utterly opposed to earthly 
 authority, aiming at the sort of union which would make the 
 priest of all lands powerful over all people ; starting on its new 
 independent life with the prestige of a kind of persecution, — 
 such a Church, independent of pope and king, has a fair field 
 for trying the question — whether, in a day in which men think 
 more for themselves than they ever did, are as jealous of eccle- 
 siastical as of political dogmas — in a day when even Romanism 
 is shaken to its centre, and Romish discipline has had to yield 
 to Royal mandate, England will view with anything but com- 
 passionate contempt the attempt to build up a permanent eccle- 
 siastical system out of material which disfigured the Church 
 from which it was taken, and has no one bond of union than 
 that of a common, all-pervading belief in its own self-sufficiency. 
 
 Priests and Priests. 
 
 October 27, 1866. 
 
 The claim now so openly avowed on the part of some of the 
 clergy, that the whole body should be considered as priests in 
 the very widest acceptation of the term, is one which fully justi- 
 fies some inquiry into the process by which they have arrived at 
 this their priestly condition. We must first regard some of the 
 most prominent of the features of the office as they exhibit them 
 for our consideration. 
 
 The parish priest is, as they assert, to be considered as a 
 man possessed of the highest conceivable authority in that 
 matter of our life itself the most important. He derives this 
 authority first from his ordination. This, it is avowed, gives 
 him positive apostolic power, a spiritual authority derived through 
 succession direct from the Apostles. No matter what he really 
 is before God, within or without, if he can compass his ordina- 
 tion by going through certain forms and examinations, he, once 
 ordained priest, has received a power divine not to be questioned
 
 424 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 27 
 
 and from which he cannot be separated. He is now appointed 
 by certain legal forms to a parish ; nothing but very gross con- 
 duct can force him to leave it. If he is suspended for such 
 conduct or disqualified from legally doing duty in the Church at 
 large, suspension, or unfrocking as it once was called, is a legal 
 disability to exercise the office of a priest ; but I am not aware 
 that it can obliterate, is ever held to do so, that change from the 
 secular to the priest life which was said to be wrought in him at 
 ordination. It seems to be now held that such a priest has 
 power not simply to perform certain Church ceremonies and 
 convey to the members of it the benefit of its most holy ordin- 
 ances, but that he can declare, and it is his duty to do so, that 
 he, by virtue of his office, is the direct agent of the Deity, quali- 
 fied to receive and to demand that in spiritual matters of the 
 highest import his teaching is to be held as indisputable. The 
 Bible is not to bind him except as the Prayer-book may explain 
 it, the Prayer-book is to be interpreted as the Church shall will 
 it, and he is to be held as delivering this, the will of the Church. 
 He claims in the Holy Communion, by virtue of his office, to 
 give to very simple elements, used in accordance with a Prayer- 
 book service of language ever simple in its devotional beauty, 
 the nature of a sacrifice, awful in the depth of its mystery, 
 claiming a faith in the recipient such as the greatest devotee 
 who ever yet existed, in a calm moment, must contemplate as 
 little short of miraculous. 
 
 The priest, it appears, having established this faith in this 
 his power within the church to effect this wonderfully holy act 
 of deep mystery, may well claim without the church an authority 
 not less extraordinary. Having by the office of his priesthood 
 brought home to the souls of his flock the fact that, in a conse- 
 crated building, he can by consecration work out the doctrine of 
 transubstantiation or consubstantiation, offering, as a correspon- 
 dent sets forth, the sacrifice of the Son as a reminder to the 
 mercy of the Father, he may well further claim power to hear 
 confession, and to follow it up by direct absolution. He does 
 this, and naturally enough, because he does so, exhorts his people 
 to come to him to confess, thus claiming to be their spiritual 
 guide not only in the pulpit and on all ordinary occasions of
 
 1 866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 425 
 
 general intercourse with them as their clergyman, the legally- 
 appointed incumbent of their parish, but in private, as their 
 priest, to be entrusted with the whole secret working of their 
 inner life. What no relative, however near or dear, what no 
 parent could do, he claims to do ; to him young and old are to 
 look as to one divinely appointed, Heaven's own special officer, 
 one to whom their hearts are to be made bare, by whom their 
 hearts are to be tutored, from whom they can receive and ought 
 to seek frequent absolution— a plenary forgiveness of all their 
 past sins. That any human being can be invested with this 
 wonderful authority, seek to live in its full exercise, and yet give 
 no extra-official proof that he is so, can hardly be believed. 
 
 We can conceive it possible to train men from childhood for 
 this assumption of spiritual prerogative. If from early days of 
 life the priest has been carefully nurtured in a moral atmosphere 
 specially adapted to further his growth in a belief that his whole 
 man-life is to be dedicated to the duties of an office which 
 requires the entire sacrifice of every natural feeling which shall 
 militate against it — a life which will demand of him the most 
 implicit continued obedience to his spiritual commander on 
 earth, the most perfect surrender of all self-judgment on matters 
 of doctrine, discipline, and practice — if thus reared to be a reli- 
 gious separatist, one who is to walk out life among his fellow- 
 creatures with a stamp divine upon him, giving him authority 
 over their souls ; if he is further, from a very early age, thoroughly 
 taught in all the tradition and rule of the body to which he is to 
 belong, initiated by degrees in all its most mysterious tenets, 
 gradually qualified for the performance of its most sacred offices 
 — I can easily understand one so educated becoming a firm be- 
 liever in the fact that his ordination has transformed him from 
 the ordinary nature of a human being into that of a being inter- 
 mediate between that nature which is of the earth earthy, and 
 that which is to be of heaven heavenly. Such a being I can 
 well understand to hold and enforce doctrines as true which men 
 not so reared could not believe. Familiar in his younger life 
 with all the pomp and circumstance of priestly celebration of 
 religious worship, its vestments and its instruments are but so 
 much of necessary material for its proper performance, the savour
 
 426 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 27 
 
 of incense is but as that of a garden in which he has been bred 
 to work. He long since surrendered, if indeed he ever possessed, 
 any idea connected with private judgment. It is not that he 
 does not venerate the Bible of his Church, but that he regards it 
 as so much revelation, to be construed by so much tradition, or 
 to be at any time explained and re-explained, as the spiritual 
 head of his Church shall ordain, he being in this infallible. He 
 is taught to consider himself so much a being of imparted holy 
 authority over men's consciences, so thoroughly qualified and 
 authorised to be the physician of their moral ailments, he has so 
 learnt the confessor's duty, has been himself so confessed, that 
 to him the laying bare of human frailty is just as much a matter 
 of course as the surgeon or physician's questioning. As these 
 must put questions few would like to answer to anyone else, 
 but few shrink when necessary from answering to them, so he 
 considers, and with much justice, that his 'separate' life, his 
 whole life's training, combined with the holy authority of his 
 office, must remove all difficulty, on his own side or that of his 
 flock, in the way of his searching inquiries, and their candid, 
 however painful, replies. To receive confessions and give abso- 
 lution is purely a professional matter, and he has been trained 
 to the profession of a confessor, as he has been to that of a 
 sacrifice-offering priest, and be it remembered he has no special 
 local tie, no special abiding home, no family for ever observant 
 of him ; he is only a spiritual father. Where he is ordered to 
 go he goes. Wherever he officiates, he does so anywhere, every- 
 where, under one clearly defined rule of conduct. Wherever his 
 services are accepted, they are so with no question as to ability 
 or experience ; he is a priest, hence his power ; his Church binds 
 him to think in its thought, to speak its language, to act simply 
 as its instrument. 
 
 Now, Sir, I may and do altogether reject as true that there 
 is authority for such a priesthood, sufficient to exact my belief 
 in it. But I readily admit that if there be any such authority, 
 there is wisdom, thorough knowledge of human nature, in the 
 training of such a priesthood, their separation in much from all 
 other men, their self-renunciation, their implicit obedience to 
 their spiritual head on earth. For this alone could preserve to
 
 1 866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 427 
 
 them the obedience of the laity who accept the doctrines of their 
 Church. Such a training effects all that is possible to keep in 
 subjection the pride so great a power would be likely to produce. 
 To such men all the splendour of the scenes in which they act a 
 part is no matter of self-exaltation. The properties of that theatre 
 of action are in harmony with the whole tone and object of their 
 existence. They start on a priest's life in a self life ready 
 formed to it. 
 
 Is this the case, can it be, with those who seek to act out the 
 priest, having been bred in Protestantism, in school and college, 
 to the very day of their ordination, having lived a life purely 
 secular ? The personal identity of the man is but the develop- 
 ment of the boy. His surroundings in youth leave their impress 
 on his whole life. The stroke oar of the college boat, the merry- 
 hearted genial partaker of all that social family society can offer, 
 becomes by ordination a priest of the National Church. There 
 is no profession for which a youth or grown man can have been 
 educated from which he may not pass into the Church. No 
 matter how little he may have studied the depths of theological 
 controversies, have acquired knowledge of his fellow-creatures 
 necessary to make him the recipient of the burden of their 
 hidden trials and failings, let him but be one, with no deep moral 
 taint, certified formally to have qualifications very easily acquired, 
 he is ordained and soon becomes in orders — a priest. Within 
 his own family, he is thoroughly known in what he was ; with- 
 out it, he has been living a wholly secular life, in nothing differ- 
 ing from those around him ; he may or may not be a man of 
 earnest piety, anxious to do his duty in his calling, but does 
 ordination affect to himself or to others his old personal iden- 
 tity ? At the age of twenty-four is one so reared in any one way 
 qualified at once to assume the authority now claimed, to per- 
 form the offices now said to be his duty ? Can he at once recast 
 his whole nature, and really believe that gaudy vestments, prac- 
 tised postures, an atmosphere of incense in a temple rich in 
 decoration, can make his fellow-men believe that the genial man 
 of a year ago, so light-hearted, so social, so open to observation, 
 so free to observe, has surrendered his soul to the direction of 
 fellow-men, given up his judgment, made his Bible a book he is
 
 428 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Oct. 27 
 
 free to read, but, reading, to receive as a teacher with no appeal 
 to his own reason, to be explained and accepted according to 
 the whim or disposition of the Church as it may at any time 
 determine ? Does ordination so fetter reason that the learned 
 priest is to sacrifice the result of study, the unlearned only to 
 study in mental fetters ? He has donned a new dress, is life- 
 bound to a profession, has closed the door by which he can 
 retreat and again become a layman. How much less does he 
 feel he is yet secular ? Has the imposition of hands so wiped 
 out the past, so obliterated all secular nature, that he, the Mr. of 
 yesterday, the Rev. of to-day, feels himself already qualified, 
 calmly, stonelike, to listen to the confessions of the young, to 
 use the manuals which tell him the searching questions he is to 
 put to them ? Has he no feeling for the degradation of the 
 penitent girl, called to whisper to his, a mere youth's ear, her 
 failings ; can he exercise himself, unmoved, the power to extract 
 more and more from her ? What is he, what has his life been, 
 that he should be fit to say, ' Go in peace, I absolve thee ; thou 
 art absolved of Heaven ' ? Nominated by interest or by pur- 
 chase to an incumbency, very often where he has been known 
 from a boy, his sphere of action is the parochial boundary. 
 Within this, can it be that he expects his own family, his neigh- 
 bours, any around him will believe that at his hands the miracle 
 of the altar can be worked at the table of the communion ? 
 
 The clergy are, under the impulse of this modern movement, 
 much given to processional exhibitions. It is no rare thing for 
 a bishop to walk with the crozier carried before him, followed 
 by a long train of incumbents and curates. It is a good occa- 
 sion for common sense to review the brigade ecclesiastical, 
 especially as these processions in general co-exist with a great 
 deal of that ultra-ecclesiasticism which is very often but an early 
 stage of advanced ritualism. What is the effect in a cathedral 
 town or elsewhere of one of these processions ? Has it one real 
 feature in common with what it evidently mimics— a procession 
 of Roman Catholic priests ? Does it in any way impose upon 
 the beholders to the extent that they regard it with reverence ? 
 I believe it does not. The processionists are far too easily indi- 
 vidualised ; their everyday identity is in no way affected by
 
 1 866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 429 
 
 their processional incorporation. The bishops are well known, 
 so well that the bystanders justly smile at the attempt at effect 
 the bearing of the crozier before them and the tailing of the 
 clergy behind them produce. An ordinary procession of Odd 
 Fellows with their insignia, or Foresters in their costumes, raises 
 much the same feeling ; it is only Jones in his apron, Brown in 
 sylvan attire, Robinson uneasy on horseback — it is simply so 
 many ordinary individuals, of many dispositions, calling attention 
 to their holidays by this display of their insignia, &c, aided by 
 a brass band. The clergy never size well ; it is evident on the 
 face of the thing that they are not up in this sort of work. As 
 they pass, do the lookers-on feel as men would feel who beheld 
 their priests thus engaged in some solemn religious demonstra- 
 tion ? Are they so many spiritual fathers, the confessors and 
 directors, of the people ? Do men look with reverence on this 
 very assembly of men as that of those who have forsaken all 
 else that they may become what they are, the celibate celebrants 
 of awful mysteries, direct descendants of the Apostles, men in 
 whose breasts are the secrets of fathers, wives, sons, and daugh- 
 ters ? No, they are for the most part recognised in a very 
 different way — owners of four-wheelers, or even, perhaps, a 
 brougham, the fortunate possessors of glebes, heads of families, 
 the lesser powers of country and town parishes ; so-and-so lately 
 married, this one said to be about to marry so-and-so' s daughter, 
 or lately refused by her ; there is one great as a farme* ; another 
 famous as an antiquary, the man who gives such long prices for 
 old oak chairs ; then there goes the man who wins prizes for 
 flowers, walking with another who is great on the subject of 
 bees ; then there is the man who never will let the farmers alone, 
 and that other who all thought would be the last archdeacon ; 
 so on to the last curate. The men are but clergymen after all, 
 doing a kind of holiday demonstration, excellent fellows most of 
 them, with their families making a great part of the staple of 
 the pleasant social life of their respective localities, as such more 
 or less respected ; but as priests, in the now asserted sense of 
 the word, does one man in a thousand who may look on the 
 exhibition for one moment heed them, or would he do so even 
 if the bishops wore mitres and they and all their following were
 
 430 THE LETTERS OE S. C. O. Oct. 27, 1866 
 
 attired according to the full fashion of the days of Edward the 
 Sixth ? 
 
 It is quite possible all this may be changed, but in my poor 
 opinion the whole English character, and, therefore, its entire 
 social condition, must change before that day. I know it will 
 be said that I libel the laity of England when I declare I believe 
 them in the mass to be Protestant. I may be rash in the 
 avowal, but I do assert my respect for the good Yorkshire squire 
 who so openly and solemnly declared ' he believed in the Holy 
 Protestant Church ' ; if he yet lives, he will pardon me if I add 
 my own conviction that, as things are now, a few years more of 
 life would make his confession one laying him open to the 
 charge of easy credulity. 
 
 I cannot believe that what was won with such cost, has 
 existed for such good, is yet to be so treacherously dealt with 
 as to now, in this our day, fail us. No, I am hopeful that the 
 good sense of the laity may compel the heads of the Church to 
 take such action as shall convince this new sect that the Estab- 
 lished Reformed Church of England will not suffer her ordained 
 officers to preach doctrines she has repudiated, to act within her 
 temples a travesty of Roman ceremonial, clad in garments long 
 since wisely cast off, and now worn in supposed defiance of their 
 spiritual superiors. Were we to re-adopt these doctrines, re- 
 establish this ceremonial, I have a higher opinion of English 
 good sense than to believe we should have a priesthood of the 
 materials of which we form our clergy. We could not in these 
 thoughtful days believe that men to have such power should 
 not have the rearing, the teaching, all the preparation that its 
 exercise would demand. The worst thing a man can put out 
 for cleansing is a foul heart. It is a work, of all others, requir- 
 ing to be done within. But if it is to be so put out, if our 
 brother man is to examine its every stain, if he is to be accre- 
 dited with power to cleanse it, the least we should require of 
 such a man would be far more than we could hope to find in 
 men brought up as laymen till they are on the threshold of 
 manhood, and then made priests by bookwork and the mere act 
 of ordination, at the hands of one who has been lucky in his 
 profession.
 
 Nov. 9, 1866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 431 
 
 The Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. Hamilton) publicly denounced the 
 foregoing letter as ' ungenerous, undutiful, inaccurate,' and rebuked 
 S. G. O. in a long communication which appeared in the ' Guardian ' 
 in November 1866. 
 
 S. G. O.'s rejoinder to his Bishop deals with the presence of ' the 
 Scarlet Woman ' in the Church of England. 
 
 November 9, 1866. 
 
 The Bishop of Salisbury has published in the ' Guardian ' a 
 letter of remonstrance and rebuke he thought it right to send to 
 me. He has done this, I presume, without waiting for my 
 answer. He was at perfect liberty to do so, and I have given 
 him full liberty to make any use of that answer. The ' Guardian ' 
 may, for all I know, be the gazette for episcopal rebuke, and he 
 may have felt there was no time to lose. At all events, there 
 the matter rests as between him and me in my more private 
 capacity. I have withdrawn no word of what I wrote. I hold 
 to every opinion I expressed in the two letters on Ritualism. 
 
 In those letters it was my endeavour to show the danger to 
 which principles dear to all Protestants were exposed by the 
 practice and doctrines of the ritualists. I tried to bring common 
 sense to bear upon the nature of their pretensions to priestly 
 power. I sought to prove, that whereas clergymen were made 
 out of the ordinary material of human nature, and thus made at 
 a very early age, and with little, if any, preparation for an office 
 which is now said to give them miraculous power — power to 
 hear confessions and absolve sins by Divine right — it was next 
 to impossible to believe that ordination, according to the Esta- 
 blished Church, could really aim at giving such power. 
 
 I pointed to the fact that after all was said and done which 
 could be done or said at their ordination, they remained to the 
 world at large, to their families and friends, men, with an identity 
 of disposition, altogether unchanged, and that, therefore, they 
 could not be socially qualified at once by virtue of ordination to 
 claim that dominion over souls, that power to work a miracle, 
 which is now claimed by so many of them. 
 
 It was of no importance to my argument whether some of 
 the men ordained were more or less devout, earnest, learned. 
 The same office was used in every case ; whatever power it
 
 432 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 9 
 
 conferred on one it gave to all. I declared my belief that the 
 party within the Church claiming these extraordinary powers 
 and gifts was preaching doctrines and pursuing practices directly 
 opposed to the teaching and practice of the Reformed Church 
 to which they belong. I made no secret of my hope that, if 
 they thus held to be true what the Church at the Reformation 
 shook off as false, their secession was to be desired. 
 
 I have seen no one denial of the charges I brought against 
 these clergymen. I have now far more reason to believe that, 
 as I hinted in a previous letter, the millineristic proclivities and 
 Roman Catholic doctrines of these men have been so condoned 
 by the long sufferance of the bishops, so connived at, if not 
 encouraged, by some of them, that there seems no reason to 
 doubt that to expect any serious resentment against this trea- 
 chery to the principles of our Church, any vigorous attempt at 
 its suppression on the part of the bench, is vain. 
 
 The letter of the Bishop of Salisbury to myself is conclusive 
 as to the fact that members of the bench can hold much of the 
 doctrine I denounced as held in opposition to the Established 
 Church view of what is orthodox. As the ceremonial and vest- 
 ments of the ritualists are avowedly used as a proper accom- 
 paniment of such doctrine, I feel I have a right to assume that 
 where a bishop can sanction the teaching he would only consider 
 the vestments and ceremonial as so much of accessory element 
 in the matter necessary to give it its full dignity. The Bishop 
 of Salisbury is not, as I believe, a man who would use words for 
 the mere purpose of concealing thought ; he would not choose, 
 as some do, phrases capable of double interpretation, and there- 
 fore always offering a way of escape. He distinctly avows that 
 the form of words used at the ordination of a priest is to be 
 taken literally, and it therefore follows that then and there the 
 gift of the Holy Spirit is conveyed by the imposition of hands, 
 accompanied with a power to bind and loose — in fact, something 
 very like the power of the keys ; that, in addition to this, the 
 priests then ordained are right and justified in believing 'that 
 they have committed to them the same powers which the priests 
 of the rest of the Catholic Church, both in the East and West, 
 have ever claimed as their inheritance.' He considers it as one,
 
 1 866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 433 
 
 not the least, evil of my letters to you that I may disaffect many 
 thoughtful and still attached members of our Church who have 
 so rightly believed. 
 
 Now, Sir, if the words of the Ordination Service are to be 
 accepted thus literally in that portion of it which at the mouth 
 of the bishop gives the Holy Spirit to the priest, and with it a 
 power over the spiritual life of the souls of others — a power to 
 bind or loose, such as the first apostles had — I assert we are 
 bound to construe the words of the candidate for orders as 
 literally in that portion of it in which he answers certain ques- 
 tions. In the case of the deacon, he says he trusts that he is 
 moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon him the office. In that 
 of the priest, he thinks he is truly called according to the will of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. Will any bishop have the courage to 
 say that, in nine cases out of ten, men enter the Church either as 
 deacons or proceed to the higher office of priest, this moving and 
 calling being their only or their chief motive for doing so ? Is it 
 not a fact beyond all dispute that the Church, as the rule, is 
 entered as a profession, just as men enter the law, army, or 
 navy ? That there may be some exceptions only goes to prove 
 the general rule ; no one more rejoices than I do when I hear of 
 youths, pious, zealous for God's cause and man's good, seeking 
 ordination to advance both, as their chief inducement ; but I 
 must blot out the experience of a long life if I am to credit these 
 exceptions as true samples of the whole bulk of those who seek 
 ordination. Has the hope of worldly provision nothing to do 
 with it, the will of parents, unfitness for or a dislike of other pro- 
 fessions ? That it is the noblest of all fields of life's work, that 
 the fact of its being one from which, once undertaken, there is 
 no withdrawal, should make it with every man a matter of 
 solemn consideration before he enters on it, I admit ; but, hold- 
 ing as I do man to be ever but human, and as such, in this 
 world of ours, ever liable to regard bread, more or less of it, 
 position, be it higher or lower, as a great element in life's action, 
 I see it as no matter of wonder that men should seek to be called 
 to the Church, just as they may be called to the bar, as a means 
 to an end, that end being the obtaining employment, the returns 
 for which shall give them the advantages ever sought in a pro- 
 
 VOL. I. F 1
 
 434 
 
 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 9 
 
 fession ; and this is the more the case in the Church than else- 
 where, for all men hope for an incumbency, which is the posses- 
 sion of a fixed income for life. 
 
 The bishop suggests to me, as I have said above, that I am 
 cutting away no small portion of the ground on which the 
 Church of England rests her protest against the exclusive claims 
 of the Church of Rome, that I may thus disaffect many thought- 
 ful and still attached members of our Church, who have rightly 
 believed that she justifies those she ordains in claiming all the 
 power that the Greek and Romanist priests claim. Now, I 
 cannot see how there is much, if anything, of a protest against 
 the exclusive claims of the Romish and Eastern Church in the 
 fact of our Church claiming, as he says she does, to give powers 
 to our priests identical with those they give to theirs, and on the 
 same grounds — that of inheritance. To my poor understanding 
 such a statement conveys a consent to what those Churches 
 profess, not a protest against their exclusiveness. It seems to 
 areue that these Churches are identical with our own insomuch 
 that the only protest Rome or Russia could make would be 
 against our abstaining from direct union with them. Certainly, 
 in one sense, his words hold good, if we assume that these 
 Churches, knowing we have this identity of belief with them in 
 the power of ordination, exclude us from their communion, on 
 the ground that going thus far with them we ought to go a great 
 deal further, and take to ourselves their entire system. We are 
 so closely approximating in practice and doctrine to the Church 
 of Rome that it can hardly now be said she has much reason left 
 to consider her exclusion of us a barrier against union which can 
 exist much longer. We are fast cutting away all grounds for 
 exclusion ; it is hardly worth while to go out of our way to pro- 
 test against what we are so rapidly removing. 
 
 The inheritance the bishop speaks of includes, I presume, all 
 priestly power, said by the Romish Church to be derived by 
 succession from the apostles ; not merely power to loose and to 
 bind, to leave man in his sin or release him from its penalty, but 
 the claim by masses to relieve souls in purgatory who may not 
 have been relieved here, the claim to work out the sacrifice of the 
 mass, to give to Scripture a dogmatic interpretation as the 
 Church may ordain. I deny that the powers of an inheritance
 
 1866 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 435 
 
 of this nature can be held in part, or rejected in part, at the will 
 of the heir. If our powers are the same as those possessed by 
 these priests, the binding and loosing power comes to us so bound 
 up with all the rest that it would be less sin to lavishly use them 
 as prodigal sons than to leave some unused, and to choose what 
 we would use, as it may suit some worldly end. Men who can 
 hold these views seem to me to have more reason to sorrow that 
 they want the courage to join the Church of Rome than to pro- 
 test at her claiming powers from which they are excluded. 
 
 I cannot in silence allow one part of my letter to you to be 
 misconstrued. I consider a curate lucky in his profession who 
 obtains a living, just as I consider the barrister fortunate who is 
 made a county court judge. I hold the incumbent to be lucky who 
 is made a bishop, just as I esteem an attorney-general fortunate 
 who becomes lord chancellor. I may be told, and with truth, that 
 all things are ordered for us ; but this does not change the nature 
 of the language we apply to the ordinary events of life. A child 
 and a dog may both fall out of a window, the dog on a stone 
 and be killed, the child on a flower-bed and escape unhurt. We 
 certainly should speak of the poor dog as unlucky, of the child 
 as most fortunate. If a man who would have been a bishop 
 dies a rector because Earl Russell goes out of office, I hold him 
 to be a rector out of luck ; if a Conservative rector is made a 
 bishop by Lord Derby, I should call him, and I think he would 
 proclaim himself, very fortunate. But I do think it wise to avoid 
 the frequent reference of ordinary events to the direct interposi- 
 tion of Providence. In my letter to you I never contemplated 
 that the use of the words ' lucky in his profession ' should be 
 applied to any one particular bishop. 
 
 I never yet could understand how men are to regard clergy- 
 men as apostles when the process of their allocation to their 
 fields of duty is taken into view. I can hardly conceive it 
 possible that men with this Divine power would be subject to 
 such accidental allotment of the field for its exercise. I think 
 solicitors, clerical agents, and patrons would hardly argue that 
 the labourers come into their particular vineyards under any 
 especially Divine direction. Nor can I understand how the 
 power to bind and to loose can be submitted to parochial bound- 
 ary. Parish A may have a priest with strong views on some
 
 436 THE LETTERS OF S. G. O. Nov. 9, 1866 
 
 sins, parish B one with very different views ; those left in bonds 
 in one parish might have them loosed in the. other, and vice 
 versd ; if the effect of the power is so vital, it is strange that its 
 use is liable to so much which is accidental. Again, how is it 
 that bishops and clergy, who claim in the same flesh as the 
 apostles to hold apostolic powers, do so for ever differ from 
 each other ? I cannot accept the fact that all this mysterious, 
 heaven-born power can co-exist with the differences on points 
 called essential, not unnatural in ordinary men, but certainly 
 very unaccountable in those who have in common a spirit from 
 above, adapted to rule ordinary men's souls in the most moment- 
 ous concerns of time and eternity. 
 
 No man, Sir, can regard with more grief than I do this pre- 
 sent controversy. But no fear of rebuke, no power of remon- 
 strance, can induce me to be silent when I see daily the growth 
 of this attempt to destroy what our forefathers established at so 
 great a cost. I will not submit in silence to be a member of a 
 Church whose every principle is being steadily undermined. I 
 am fully satisfied that unless the laity make the cause of truth 
 their own the evil will increase, until it gets to such a pitch that 
 the question will arise whether, for the sake of religious liberty, 
 for the sake of Scriptural truth, a far stronger course must not 
 be pursued to compel the bishops to their plain duty than I hope 
 is now necessary. 
 
 Begotten of an earnest, misled fanaticism in some, in the 
 mere pride of power in others, we are soon likely to have a sort 
 of bastard form of worship which no existing Church will own 
 — of which any Church with the slightest pretence to consistency 
 would be ashamed. Far better would it be to dismiss to Rome 
 a thousand or two of those who clearly love her better than us, 
 and serve us with a traitorous service, than to allow tamely the 
 spread of a poison which, carefully adapted to youthful, weak 
 tastes, snares our children into a creed which palliates the deceit 
 that covers the belief of the Papist under the clothing of the 
 Protestant. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 SJ>ottiswoode & Co. Frintcrs, Ncw-strcet Square, London.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 Tos Anareles 
 
 QmiTu C r,H niversity of California 
 305 D^ M HER n REG ' 0NAL LIBRA RY FACILITY 
 305 De Neve Drive - Parking Lot 17 . Box 95-n«ft 
 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095 13 8 8 8
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 789 771 3