; -ni - \ X) KY TI1K ATTHOK OV Till-'. BLOKY AT? 13 MHA.MK O I-' K . v (1 l,.\ >' I > V D .K K > .1 v II. (l. LAHOI.KY THE CONDITION AND FATE ENGLAND. " We think it would be a vast advantage to the public in general, if ingenious opticians would turn their attention to a remedy for that long sighted benevolence which sweeps the distant horizon for objects of com- passion, but is blind as a bat to the wretchedness and destitution abounding at their own doors." Blacfacood. " For a people to be free they have only to tcitt it." BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE GLORY AND SHAME OF ENGLAND. 1 IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. L NEW-YORK: J. &. H. G. LANGLEY, 57 CHATHAM STREET. MDCCCXLIII. Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1842, by C. EDWARDS LESTER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. STEREOTYPED BY SMITH AND WRIGHT, COR. FULTON AND GOLD STREETS, NKW YORK. CRAIGHEAD, PRINTER. Stack' Annex 5014973 TO HON. JOHN C. SPENCER, THE FRIEND OF POPULAR EDUCATION, THESE VOLUMES ARE INSCRIBED BY HIS HUMBLE FRIEND, THE AUTHOR. ANALYSIS VOLUME I. MM BOOK THE FIRST. The Power and Magnificence of the British Empire, with reference to the feudal age. - 15 BOOK THE SECOND. General Condition of the British People in past ages, then- Burdens and Sufferings. - 41 BOOK THE THIRD. The Present Condition of the British People, and the Burdens which Oppress them. - 75 BOOK THE FOURTH. The same subject continued, includ- ing a short reply to " The Fame and Glory of Eng- land Vindicated." ------- 173 BOOK THE FIFTH. Some Glances at the Suffering and Crime, the Ignorance and Degradation caused by the Oppressive Burdens laid upon the British People. 235 PREFACE. A brief glance at the contents of these volumes will best explain the author's design. BOOK THE FIRST. Embraces a view of the Power and Magnificence of the British Empire, with illustrations of the spirit of the feudal and of the modern age. BOOK THE SECOND. The General Condition of the mass of the British People in past ages their burdens and sufferings, during centuries of unre- lieved oppression. BOOK THE THIRD. The injustice the wrongs the oppressive laws and cruel enactments under which the majority of the British People are now struggling. BOOK THE FOURTH. A continuation of the same subject, containing a reply to a recent publi- cation entitled, " The Fame and Glory of Eng- land Vindicated," by an anonymous libeller of the democratic institutions of the country, writing over the signature of " Libertas." Vlll PREFACE. BOOKS THE FIFTH AND SIXTH. The sufferings and crime, the ignorance and degradation, which have been caused by these oppressive and un- paralleled burdens laid upon the people. BOOK THE SEVENTH, Glances at the woes and the struggles of Ireland, under the tyrannical power of England, and her only hope of relief. BOOK THE EIGHTH. The feelings of the people in view of the deep injustice they have so long suffered, and their determination to endure their slavery no longer. BOOK THE NINTH. The opposition of the aristocracy to the liberties of the people, and their determination still to keep them in subjection. BOOK THE TENTH. The progress of the Demo- cratic Principle throughout the world, and espe- cially in Great Britain. BOOK THE ELEVENTH. The final issue of this conflict Reform or Revolution. In illustrating and proving these separate points, I have paid no regard to the criticism which might be -made that the work contains too many extracts, for it is absolutely necessary to appeal frequently to unimpeached authorities to defend the state- ments I have made. In my former work I en- PREFACE. IX tirely omitted, or only slightly referred to the sub- jects I have here discussed at length. The general favour with which that work was received, I attributed to its defence of that Demo- cratic Principle on which our Institutions are founded, and which recognizes man's right every- where to freedom and self government. Works defending this great principle cannot be popular except in a nation, where the altars of freedom are thronged with true hearted worshippers. Some may object that I have dwelt entirely on the dark portions of the picture, and hence have not rendered England justice, or given a correct view of her in her state of blended good and evil. I am not insensible to the greatness or the virtues of England, but these are now entirely over- shadowed by the great and growing evils that present themselves to the eye on every side, and which are alone to be consulted, by him who would know what awaits that haughty and cruel government. England is every day becoming an object of greater interest. Morally and politically she oc- cupies the centre of the earth. In her fate is in- volved the fate of many other nations. When she changes the world will change. Her history X PREFACE. has been unique. From a small island she has be- come an empire that reaches round the world. From every storm that has swept the face of Europe and blotted out nations, she has emerged with added strength and more extended dominion. Thus she has gone on, augmenting her power, till her Will has almost become the Law of the world. Does she want the Indies? she takes them. Would she humble China ? her war ships darken her coast, carrying desolation to her cities. Would Russia add Turkey to her dominions? she enters the Bosphorus and bids her retire to her northern home. The overthrower of empires, the dispenser of crowns and thrones, she takes and chains on a lonely Isle, and " bids the world breathe free again." Holding such power, and sustaining such rela- tions, and more than all laying her moulding hand on the millions of half civilized men in every quarter of the globe, she must be an object of in- tense interest to every thoughtful man. Seeing how the fate of her countless subjects and other governments is connected with hers, he will anxiously inquire, whether the law of growth, maturity and decay, to which other nations have been subject, belongs to her, whether she be now PREFACE. XI advancing, balancing, or receding. And more than all will he seek to know whether the claims her people are now uttering so loud and piercingly in the ears of the world, are to be disregarded forever, or at length granted. To answer these questions is all I propose in speaking of the " Fate" of England. I do not profess to be equal to the task of writing her future history. No one can do this. But what each man knows and feels he may utter. His errors others may correct ; his truths they may use. I speak confidently only of the present and of the inevitable crisis England is approaching Reform or Revolution. C. EDWARDS LESTER. New York, Aug. 16, 1842. THE FIRST BOOK. POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE OF ENGLAND. " That power whose flag is never furl'd " Whose morning drum beats round the world." " THE future historian of a decline and fall hereafter, not less memorable than that of Rome, will probably commence his work with a corresponding account of the power and extent of the British Empire under William the Fourth and Clueen Victoria. What Rome was in its influence over the destinies of mankind in the 1st century, England is now in the 19th ; while not merely in regard to rank in science and civilization, but also in the territorial extent of its possessions, on which the sun never sets, England occupies a prouder position than ancient Rome." Westminster Rsv. Ap. 1842. VOL* I. CONDITION AND FATE OF ENGLAND. BOOK FIRST. POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE OF ENGLAND. IN England or out of England, one is every- where met with evidences of her greatness. Whe- ther he stand in the centre of London and feel the pulsations of that mighty heart which sends its life blood to the farthest extremities of the British Empire, or enter her palaces and manufactories, or walk along her docks, or travel the world, the exclamation is still, " Great and Mighty England !" Her power seems omnipresent, her ships circle the pole, and " put a girdle round the earth." Her cannon look into every harbour, and her commerce flows into every nation. She has her word to say in every part of the habitable world. Scarcely a nation projects an outward scheme without first looking up to behold the aspect which England will assume toward it. Nineteen hun- dred -ears no-o the Roman standard first floated 16 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE on the shores of Britain. Then a race of barba- rians, clothed in the skins of wild beasts, roamed over the uncultivated island. The tread of the legions was then heard on the plains of Africa and Asia, and the name of Rome was written on the front of the world. Nearly two thousand years have rolled by, and Julius Csesar and all the Cae- sars, the Senate, the people, and the Empire of Rome have passed away like a dream. Her po- pulation now only a little exceeds that of New- York state, while that island of barbarians has emulated Rome in her conquests, and not only planted and unfurled her standard in the three . quarters of the globe that' owned the Roman sway, but laid her all-grasping hand on a new continent. Possessing the energy and valour of her Saxon and Norman ancestors, she has remained uncon- quered, unbroken, amid the changes that have ended the history of other nations. Like her own island that sits firm and tranquil in the ocean that rolls round it, she has stood amid the ages of man and the overthrow of empires. A nation thus steadily advancing over every obstacle that checks the progress or breaks the strength of other governments ; making every Avorld-tumult wheel in to swell its triumphal march, must possess not only great resources, but great skill to manage them. Looking out from her sea-home she has made her fleets and her arms her voice. Strength and energy of charac- ter, skill, daring, and an indomitable valour ex- OP ENGLAND. 17 erted through these engines of power, have raised her to her present proud elevation. Her navy embraces six hundred vessels. Be- sides these she has fleets and steamships and pack- ets so constructed as to be easily converted into war ships. In the short space of two months she could send 150 more steam frigates well equipped to sea, making in all 750 war vessels ; so that she could stretch a line of battle ships from Liverpool to New- York, each separated only four miles from the other. Twenty-seven millions of people in the three kingdoms sit down in the shadow of her throne. In the East 150,000,000 more come un- der her sway, beside the vast number, civilized and uncivilized, that inhabit her provinces in every quarter of the globe. The Liverpool Times, in announcing the birth of the Prince of Wales, thus sums up the vast extent of the empire : " Salutes in honour of his birth will be fired in America, on the shores of Hudson Bay, along the whole line of the Canadian Lakes, in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, in the Bermudas, at a hundred points in the West In- dies, in the forests of Guinea, and in the distant Falkland Islands, near Cape Horn. In Europe, in the British Islands, from the Rock of Gibraltar, from the impregnable fortifications of Malta, and in the Ionian Islands. In Africa, on the Gui- nea Coast, and St. Helena and Ascension from the Cape to the Orange River, and at the Mauritius. In Asia, from the fortress of Aden in Arabia, at 2* 18 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE Karrack, in the Persian Gulf, by the British arms in Afghanistan, along the Himalaya Mountains, the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, to the Southern point of India, in the Island of Ceylon, beyond the Ganges in Assam and Arracaan, at Prince of Wales' Island, and Singapore, on the shores of China, at Hong Kong and Chusan, and in Australia, at the settlements formed on every side of the Australian continent and Islands, and in the Strait which separates these Islands of the New Zealanders. No Prince has ever been born in this or any other country, in ancient or mo- dern times, whose birth would be hailed with re- joicings at so many different and distant points in every quarter of the world."* * While the Glueen of England was giving birth in the pa- lace to her princely boy, some hundreds of English mothers, " made of as good stuff" as she, were undergoing the pains of accouchement in damp, cold cellars without attendants or phy- sicians, many of them, and some without food enough to keep them and their new-born children alive.. Merciful Heaven ! These mothers (fifteen hundred and sixty) sent a petition to the dueen for help, praying that while she was passing through the pains of child-birth she would remember the thousands of her humble sisters who would during the cold winter approaching be called to the same trial thousands too who through the cruel oppressions of the government are reduced to starving poverty. The dueen, it is believed, is kind-hearted : but what can she do 1 She is only an Imperial Pauper herself, although pretty well provided for. Her Ministers told these poor mothers to go home, for they could not help them. God help them ! If the dueen's baby has $150,000 a year, the operative's baby must starve, for money is not plentiful enough to provide for babies at this rate. OF ENGLAND. 19 After glancing o'er this catalogue of countries he might well inquire, where is there a spot where English cannon do not speak English power? Of her rejoicings at home we have nothing to say. Let her hail the birth of a monarch, who may be, with acclaims, bell-ringings, and the firing of can- non, till " the fast anchored isle" rock to the Ju- bilate the world may listen or not, as it pleases. But the echo of her guns north of Boston and New- York beyond the Rocky Mountains south of Florida and east of Charleston, has something startling and ominous in it. Along the St. Law- rence, Lake Ontario, Erie, and Michigan, one long booming shot rolls down over these free States, saying, " England is here and her cannon too." The wandering tribes of the western prairies and Guianian forests hear it and cower back to their fastnesses, for England is there. It sends terror through millions of hearts as it thunders from the harbors and fortresses of the East Indies. The vessels entering the Mediterranean turn an anxious eye to the rocks of Gibraltar, as the smoke slowly curls up their sides ; and the report of a thousand cannon say in most significant language, that En- gland is there. To the reflecting man there is meaning in that shot which goes round the earth. England sends her messengers abroad to every nation, and the insignia of her power are scattered among all the tribes of the great family of man ; while she sits amid the sea, as if her power was the centre of tides, whose pulsations are felt 20 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE on every shore, and up every continent-piercing river. To England we accord greatness; there is something in her name which awes mankind. The pressure of her hand is felt on every govern- ment, and her voice is heard at the council boards of every nation. To one who looks only on the territory of England proper, the extent of her do- minion seems incredible. That a small island should rule half continents is indeed strange. No other nation since Rome has so expanded herself, reached out such long arms, and with them grasped so much, and so strongly. How so small a body can extend and wield such immense limbs surprises those who calculate power from physical strength. It is the moral power of England that has carried her so high. Mind and skill multiply physical power a hundred-fold. It is as true of nations as of individuals. Every able-bodied man has two arms, and five fingers at their extremities, yet who estimates the power of the body so much as the power of the will that controls it ? An ox can draw more than fifty men, it may be, but a single man can set in motion machinery which wields a power greater than that of the fabled Cy- clops. China with her vast territory and exhaust- less population, can be brought to her knees by a few English ships and a few English cannon, guided and pointed by English mind. The few on one side are governed by mind ; the many on the other by ignorance. It is this which has ena- OF ENGLAND. 21 bled England so long to stand at the head of Europe, and send her mandates over the world. No throne since the world stood has had such in- tellects gathered round it as the British throne. The clear heads that encircled it have ever been her firmest bulwarks. The intellect of Pitt or Canning can do for England in diplomacy what Malta and Gibraltar cannot. English monarchs have in most instances been mere puppets the wires that moved them were in the hands of such men. It was this moral power alone that made America her successful antagonist. Hitherto she had met physical force with moral power, but when she made her onset here, then " Greek met Greek." In the conflicts of ignorant nations it is only a trial of muscles and bones, like the strifes of brutes, but in those of enlightened nations it is the struggle of the souls. England's soul, not her arms, has impressed itself on the world. It is the intelligence with which she speaks that swells her voice so far, and makes it remembered so long. It is the intelligence that guides her fleets and armies that renders them so formidable. Besides there is a humanity about her when not crushed out by pride and love of power. The Commons of England have often shown a stead- fast resistance" to tyrants that has blessed the cause of human freedom the world over. They have cut off one king's head, and can another's when ne- cessary. The yeomanry of England are superior to those of any other nation in Europe. Bold, m 22 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE intelligent, and upright, they ought to constitute no small share of her glory. Even amid the ter- rors and lawlessness of civil war they have acted with moderation and humanity. When king and commons, tyranny and aristocracy, were arrayed against each other, under the ascending star of Cromwell, civil law in England lost little of its sacredness. There is a love for the right and the true among them which equally resists lawless- ness and oppression. There is also a religious feeling pervading this class, which, mingling with the rough elements of the old Norman and Saxon character, gives double power to them as a body. It is the intelligence and morality of these men, which ought to be the foundation of the English government, that will assert their power when re- volutionary times come on again. There is no danger of the tyranny of British kings ever being re- establishedall oppression now proceeds from the aristocracy and the people are so fast advancing in a knowledge of human rights, and the con- sciousness of their power, which is always asso- ciated with intelligence, that the danger of the aristocracy is fast increasing too. It will be unnecessary for me to say much of the manufactures of Britain. Most of my readers know that her machinery accomplishes more every year than could be done by the entire population of the globe without it ; the machinery of England does the work and puts forth the power of six hundred million men, exceeding by one-third the OF ENGLAND. 23 entire number of men in the world. But I need not dwell on these facts for they have been told a thousand times. England's commerce adminis- ters to the wants and the luxury of the world finding 1 its way to the farthest limits of the globe. Her merchants, like those of old Tyre and Alex- andria, are clothed in scarlet and dwell in palaces. And every nation, and every tribe of earth's great family, pour into her lap the gold and silver and precious stones and luxuries of every clime. England also stands unrivalled in the great men and the literature she has given to the world. From Alfred who laid the foundation of British Glory, down through British history till now, she presents a galaxy of illustrious men, furnished in the annals of no ancient or modern empire. In her Milton she has more than a Homer, in her Bacon more than a Solon, and in her Shakspeare more than the earth has ever beheld in any other mortal mould. Her Literature has done more for human freedom and civilization than all the Lite- rature of other nations. Expansive in its nature it has given men more comprehensive views and uncovered the treasures of the human intellect. It has revealed the true sources of power, and taught men to know their strength. Bacon un- bound the earth and set men acting intelligently, or rather marching forward instead of beating time. Newton unbound the heavens, and bade them roll in harmony and beauty before the eye of intelli- gence. England has literally waked up the world. 24 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE Not satisfied with knowing and improving the present, she has hastened the future. In her im- petuous valour she has called on the tardy ages, as if in haste to meet their unknown events. But this she attempts no more. The future she invoked has come, and like Hamlet she starts at the spirit she has summoned forth. Having taught the people knowledge they are now sternly and intelligently demanding their rights ; having taught the people strength they are shaking the throne with its first experiment. Proud in her power, she has dared to do what no other nation has ever attempted she has given her people the book, of human rights, and yet told them not to ask for their own. She has told them they were free, and yet cheated them into the submission of serfs. In every other experiment she has been thus far suc- cessful but here she has overrated her strength. If it could be done England could do it. But it is attempting a contradiction, an impossibility ; and yet we can hardly see how she could escape the dilemma. Without being an enlightened nation, she could not have been great ; and being an en- lightened nation, she cannot exercise despotic power with safety. Yet starting on this broad basis, we cannot well see how she could have passed from it easily ; not that it would have been impossible had there been a will ; but taking into the account the prejudices of men, their love of power and wealth and pride, it is natural England should retain the form of government she adopted. OF ENGLAND. 25 even after its workings were seen to be evil. She could most easily have been a free and a great na- tion, when in the transition state to which Crom- well brought her, had a second Cromwell been found to take the place of the first. Here Macauley thinks England made her great mistake, " either Charles the First never should have been brought to the block, or Charles the Second never should have been brought to the throne." Had the great Hampden lived no man can say this consumma- tion would not have been perfected, it would most likely have been done. To do it now would be to wipe out at one stroke the long line of Kings bury the Peerage rend Church and State from their harlot-embrace fling the reins of government to the people, and bid them guide their own destinies, and relieve their own wants. This, King, Peerage, and Hierarchy will never willingly permit. To lay down their honors and ill-gotten wealth at the feet of the people, and be reduced to the painful necessity of acquiring them by industry and merit, is a task they cannot perform. Honors they must have, and opulence too. though millions perish as the price of obtaining them. Their rent-roll must be as great, though millions more fill the land with the cry for bread. To sustain the splendors of royalty, aristocracy, and hierarchy, there must be a per- petual drain of wealth from the people, to flow round the throne and privileged classes. This flow of wealth does not pass through the natural chan- VOL. i. 3 26 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE nels of trade. The people receive no equivalent for it. To go and take it from the poor man's pocket at the bayonet's point would be too bare-faced a robbery in the sight of the world. Hence inor- dinate taxation tithes, church rates, corn-laws, excise and custom duties, &c. must be employed to legalize the robbery. The mass of the people behold this stream of gold incessantly flowing from them towards their idle and profligate oppressors, while there returns not even a scanty supply of bread. Such a sight naturally awakens the keenest inquiry, and as the injustice of it all forces itself upon them, the strongest, stormiest passions of the human soul are aroused. The English government is a solid one, but it must be infinitely more so to sustain itself amid such a wild waking up of men to their rights. There is a glory round her throne and her peer- age, whose honors were laid in the days of Nor- man chivalry ; but it must be brighter than it has ever yet been, to dazzle the eyes of wronged and starving men, for the first time open to the true and only means of redress. The Church, with its long train of mitred bishops, led on by Royalty it- self, is an imposing spectacle, but it must invent some new majesty to awe a people that openly, boldly cry, " Give us more bread, and fewer priests /" The throne of England towers as ma- jestic as ever, but fearful shadows are flitting over it, the visages of famine-struck, hate-filled men. The chariot with its blazing coronet, and lazy OF ENGLAND. 27 lord within, rolls by as imposingly as ever ; but there is an ominous sound in the streets which the rumbling of its wheels cannot utterly drown ; it is the low, half-suppressed threat, YOUR TIME WILL COME ! Her cathedrals and bench of bi- shops retain their ancient splendor, but there are eyes looking on them with other purpose than to admire or revere. To the careless observer, England is as power- ful and magnificent as ever ; all things yet remain as they were. But there is an under-working power which gathers strength from the very ob- stacles that bar its progress. The tremendous power exerted to restrain it from bursting forth, cannot make it cease working. Instead of ex- pending its fires in eruptions, it slowly eats away under ground, hollowing out the whole moun- tain on which the throne, the aristocracy, and the church rest. The greatest, keenest-sighted men of England know this, and they begin to study these new and alarming appearances, as philoso- phers study volcanoes, not to see what they shall do with the volcano, but what the volcano is go- ing to do with them. And yet after all, we think England could make as great an exertion (in certain directions) now as ever. In a crisis which should call forth all her resources she would ex- hibit as much strength as she has ever done. A common danger would unite for a while all her jarring interests. No outward force, we imagine, can subdue her. Her provinces might be cut off 28 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE in a general war, but her throne she would hold against the world. Her danger lies where the ex- ertion of physical force would only increase it. Not abroad, but at home, are the elements of trou- ble. Not hostile armies, but her own subjects have become her greatest dread. She has reached that crisis from which most governments date their decline -her foes have become they of her own household. In many respects she resembles the Roman em- pire. Her own population being but a small pro- portion to the number of her subjects ; like Rome her external growth has been more rapid than her internal ; or rather, while she has been ex- tending her dominion abroad, the elements of de- struction have been gathering at home. Like Rome, too, her arms have become too long for her body. Even had not the Northern barbarians swarmed down on her, " like a giant drunk with wine," Rome soon would have reeled to her downfall.. Nothing but a regeneration of the peo- ple could rescue her from the approaching ruin. But England is not threatened with this evil ; her superstructure does not totter because it stands in the midst of a depraved people, but because it is based on millions of "agitated human hearts. It vibrates not so much because it is drunk with sin, as because the bowed necks on which it has so long rested, begin to erect themselves. England's greatness is in the past, not in the future. She looks back with pride, forward with shuddering. OF ENGLAND. 29 This truth was illustrated to me most forcibly as I passed from the crowded streets of London into the TOWER, that grand and gloomy treasure-house of England's feudal and military glory. It was founded by William the Conqueror as a fortress nearly eight centuries ago, and it speaks, to us of modern times, in the voice of the feudal age. As I entered its pondrous gates, crossed the ditch, and stood before the massive buildings, made gloomy by the terrible part they have played in the histo- ry of England, the past rose before me, crowded with its majestic figures. For awhile the misery of England was forgotten London was to me as though it were not I stood in the shadow of past centuries. It is not my object to describe the Tower, but to listen for awhile to the language of this old home of the English monarchs. In one of the great chambers of the Tower,* (the Horse Armoury,) were arranged, in regular and chrono- logical order, twenty-two equestrian figures, many of them the most celebrated kings of England, with their favorite lords ; all of them with their horses, in the armour of the ages in which they lived, surrounded by the insignia of their rank, and the trophies of their conquests. In passing slowly along this royal rank, I saw first, the figure of Edward I. clad in armour he wore 600 years ago, with hauberk, and sleeves, and hood, * The destruction of a large part of these valuable treasures of antiquity in this building by fire in 1841, was subsequent to the date of the visit here referred to. 3* 30 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE and chausses of mail. Next came Henry VI. with his battle-axe in hand, and his knightly cap on his head. Passing Edward IV. and Henry VII., I stood, with a strange feeling, face to face with Henry VIII. in his gilt plate armour. As he scowled down on me in his battle-array, I wanted to whisper in his ear the names of his murdered wives and disinherited daughters. I imagined the change that passed over that kingly face when he read the letter of the incomparable Ann Boleyn, written to him from this very Tower, a little be- fore she was brought to the block. Though his heart had become harder than the mail that co- vered it, there were daggers in these dying words of a faithful wife that found their way to its core : " Let not your Grace ever imagine that your poor wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a fault, when not so much as a thought thereof ever preceded. * * * Try me, good King, but let me have a lawfull tryall : and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and judges : yea, let me receive an open tryall, for my truth shall fear no open shames. * * * g u t if you have al- ready determined of me, and that not only my death, but an infamous slander must bring you the enjoying of your desired happiness, then I de- sire of God that he will pardon your great sin therein, and likewise mine enemies, the instru- ments thereof, and that he will not call you to a strict account for your unprincely and cruel usage of me at his general Judgment Seat, where both you OF ENGLAND. 31 and me, myself, must shortly appear, and in whose judgment, I doubt not, (whatsoever the world may think of me,) mine innocence shall be openly recorded and sufficiently cleared, &c. From my dolefull prison in the Tower, this 6 of May. Your most loyall and ever-faithful wife, ANNE BOLEN." To that judgment he has gone, and the King of Kings has made inquisition for the blood of the pure and the innocent. As I looked on this long line of kings, sitting motionless on their motionless steeds, the sinewy hand strained over the battle-axe, the identical sword they wielded centuries ago flashing on my sight, and the very spurs on their heels that were once driven into their war steeds as they thun- dered over the battle plain, the plumes seemed to wave before my eyes, and the shout of kings to roll through the arches. The hand grasping the reins on the horses necks seemed a live hand, and the clash of the sword, . and the shield, and the battle-axe, and the mailed armour, rang in my ear. I looked again and the dream was dispelled. Motionless as the walls around them, they sat, mere effigies of the past. Yet how significant ! Each figure there was a history and all monu- ments of England's glory as she was. At the far- ther end of the adjoining room sat a solitary " Cru- sader on his barbed horse, said to be 700 years old." Stern old grim figure ! On the very trap- 32 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE pings of thy steed, and on that thick plated mail, has flashed the sun of Palestine. Thou perchance did'st stand with that gallant host, led on by the wondrous Hermit, on the last hill-top that over- looks Jerusalem ; and when the Holy City was seen lying like a beautiful vision below, glittering in the soft light of an eastern sunset, that flooded Mount Moriah, Mount Zion, and Mount Olivet, with its garden of suifering, and more than all, Mount Calvary, thy voice did go up with the mighty murmur of the bannered host, Jerusalem I Jerusalem ! On that very helmet perchance has the scimetar broke ; and from that mailed breast the spear of the Infidel re-bounded. Methinks I hear thy battle-shout, " to the rescue ! " as thy gallant steed is borne into the thickest of the fight, where thy brave brethren are struggling for the Cross and the Sepulchre. But Crusades and Crusaders are well-nigh for- gotten. For centuries the dust of the desert has drifted over the bones of the chivalry of Europe. The Arab still spurs his steed through the forsaken streets of ancient Jerusalem, and the Muezzin's voice sings on the Sepulchre of the Saviour. I next passed into Queen Elizabeth's Armoury, where the rusty blades and enormous shields, picked from a hundred battle-fields, were gathered. The old glaive and bill, the boar-spear, halberds and pikes, the battle-axe, the mace and the cross- bow, with a thousand instruments of war and de- solation were piled around the room. Here also OF ENGLAND. 33 were all the hideous apparatus of torture, the thumb-screw, the collar of torment, the bilboa, and there the beheading-axe, which is said to have se- vered the neck of the beautiful Ann Boleyn. Omitting a thousand interesting objects, the visitor at length entered the Small Arm Armoury, a magnificent room 345 feet in length, which has been well called " a wilderness of arms." Here were seen arms for over 100,000 men, all new fh'nted and ready for immediate use. In the Jewel Room were preserved the Crown Jewels, the Re- galia, the Royal communion service, &c. The room was dark and these superb jewels were seen by lamp light. It was a blaze of diamonds the eye was dazzled with the glittering wealth scat- tered around. In other apartments I was every- where met with emblems of England's power; here she has clustered the crowns and jewels of whole races of kings. Wearied and overpowered with the feelings such objects conspired to awaken borne over so many battle-fields, and startled at every step by some unexpected figure rising in my face from the past, scowled down upon by kings on their war steeds, shaking their battle-axes over my head I was glad to escape into the pure air, and take one long look up into the far spreading quiet sky. From the Tower I ascended the Monument, which is near by, to look around upon the World of London, heaving with its excited, busy millions, like a stirred ocean. I once more looked on the 34 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE actual and the real. The rolling of ten thousand carriages, the sound of its mighty population going up in one ceaseless, confused roar to heaven, con- trasted strangely with the silence and solitude of those fearful cells and chambers. " This then," I exclaimed " is England !" In a few moments I had passed from the feudal age with its darkness and gloom, to the turbulent scene of action in our own times. England's Glory is in the past, her shame in the present, and her danger in the future. Proud of victories she has achieved, vain of her splendor, she stood fairly represented in those trophies and jewels. And yet, who, of the thou- sand half starved wretches that moved in such masses below me, ever think of the Tower ! The feudal age has gone by forever. That distant manufactory is greater than the Tower, for it is a living thing. That powerful steam ship is an ob- ject of deeper interest than the relics of a thou- sand victories, for it does something. Meii can no longer fall back on the past for support they must move with the onward flow of the present, or fall and be crushed by the trampling tide of the millions whom it were idle for them to dream of stopping or staying. The aristocracy of Eng- land regard the Tower as they do the halls of their ancestors ; they gaze on its treasures, and hug with greater tenacity the more it is assailed, the spirit of feudal times ; they feel there is some- thing ominous to them in the activity and rest- lessness of the present age. OF ENGLAND. 35 As from this height I looked down on miserable habitations of the poor, and cast my eye over dis- tant Spitalfields and thought of the 150,000 who knew not where they were to sleep that night of the myriads crying for bread within sight of so much splendor how that Tower sunk in my sight. It had but an hour ago stirred my heart like a trumpet-call, but now as I saw its white turrets against the sky, I hated its grandeur. What were its emblems of greatness 1 emblems of tyranny. The power that once wielded those in- struments for self-aggrandizement, now used for the same purpose the sweat and toil of the poor. To gather these treasures the blood of many thou- sands of England's subjects had been spilt. To sustain the pomp and royalty they minister to, tens of thousands now pine in ignorance and die of famine. Give me that Jewel-room to convert into bread, and I will send a shout of joy over the land that never before shook England. Give me the useless diamonds that glitter on from age to age by lamplight in that dark and narrow cell, and before to-morrow night there shall go up more thanksgiving from London than ever before rose from its receptacles of woe. Convert these monuments of royal vanity into money which shall clothe and feed the naked and the hungry, and in one single day, they will purchase more happiness, than they will impart though they shine on for a thousand centuries. How strong must be the love of pomp, when it can overcome, 36 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE not only sympathy for the suffering, but the fears and dangers of a mad and desperate population. Yes, I exclaimed, England's magnificence is based on suffering hearts, formerly purchased by blood, now by tears formerly won in the hot fierce fight that filled hundreds of villages with mourn- ing now in the darker conflict of tyranny with liberty at home of the few with the many the rich with the poor, and which leaves the land fill- ed with pallid poverty, wan famine, and scowling hate. War of some sort England must wage to sus- tain her privileged classes war with other na- tions, or war with her own subjects. Spoils she must win from somebody, or her oligarchy or hierarchy go to the ground. To support so large an unproductive, and yet spendthrift class, money must be obtained by unjust means. The spoils of war or the spoils of home oppression, it matters not which, if they can but lay their hand upon them. Slothful and luxurious, they will not pro- duce ; they only spend. Let another Tower be erected to trumpet forth England's magnificence, and all the trophies of it gathered there. Let the relics be picked from any battle-field where the people's rights have fallen, and piled within. Place on his appropriate pedestal, (a straw couch,) that wan and haggard man who died for want of the bread which the Corn Laws had placed beyond his reach. Close by him arrange the squalid fam- ily in the damp, foul cellar, famishing because an OF ENGLAND. 37 honest father can find no work. Arrange in im- posing groups the corpses of children that have perished in her manufactories. Bring in the men, women, and children, chained together naked in her coal mines. Let the rags and tatters be the Crown jewels, and take Pomp through the Mu- seum, and bid her behold her appropriate trophies. Such a Tower would fill all London. Yet it would be more appropriate, more significant, than the other for England's present wealth and gran- deur grow as really out of this suffering and desti- tution, as it formerly did out of her armies and na- vies ; or in other words, out of the sufferings and destitution of foreign foes. Idle and profligate pomp must live on open or secret spoils ; but spoils are not to be got without inflicting wrong and suffering somewhere ; and indeed a greater sacri- fice of life is now demanded to sustain the feudal spirit and worthless magnificence of England, than when whole ranks were mowed down by the scythe of war. But one who looks at England as she now is, must be struck with the moral change which is so rapidly working throughout her population. The reverence for symbols is fast passing away. The people no longer shout when the coronet flashes by. They will no longer fight that a lazy lord may wear another star or ribbond. A feudal chieftain can no longer lead his vassals like sheep to the slaughter, to gratify his pride, or appease his revenge. Men begin to think for themselves : of VOL. i. 4 38 POWER AND MAGNIFICENCE every project of government the subjects ask " Cui bono ?" Even they, thick-headed as their oppressors would fain have us believe them, are able to perceive some inconsistency in such piles of wealth being got without labour, and squander- ed without profit, while they who slave in sorrow die without bread. Before this cry for bread titles and symbols disappear. Want sweeps dis- tinctions to the grave. Famine is the greatest le- veller on earth. Its hand will strike a lord as quick as a peasant. It will send its cry into the very heart of the palace as soon as into a hovel. Men dare ask for bread any where of any man. When men have abundance they want glory; when they lack bread glory cannot satisfy them. England seems now to stand as the representa- tive head of the monarchies of Europe, and she is leading the van in the solemn conflict through which each is destined to pass the conflict which is to decide whether governments shall be for the few or the many, the rulers or the ruled. In that conflict which no earthly power can long delay, thrones are to sink, the long lines of kings dis- appear, and titles and estates vanish away. It is well England is thrown first into this great arena, for she will pass the trial with a mo- deration and a firmness we could not expect of other nations ; and when she comes forth from it, the question will be settled for the continent and the world. BOOK THE SECOND. EMBRACING A VIEW OF THE GENERAL CONDITION OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES THEIR BURDENS AND SUFFERINGS. In past ages, the People never having conceived the idea of a social condition different from its own, and entertaining no expectation of ever ranking with its chiefs submitted without resistance or servility to their exactions, as to the inevitable visitations of the arm of God. DC Tocqueville. The Poor were not the authors of the system which has mined their freedom, their industry and their morals. Edinburgh Review. The sternest Republican that ever Scotland produced, was so struck with this reflection, (the increase of pauperism, ignorance and crime,) that he did not hesitate to wish for the re-establish- ment of Domestic Slavery, as a remedy for the squalid wretched- ness and audacious guilt with which his country was overrun. Quarterly Review. BOOK SECOND. GENERAL CONDITION OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES THEIR BURDENS AND SUF- FERINGS. I HAVE somewhere seen it stated, that the great Hampden, just before he died, remarked, while conversing with a friend on the condition and prospects of the English Nation, " with how much astonishment will the men of future times read the history of the injustice and oppression of Kings and Tyrants." A striking fulfilment of this prediction is fur- nished in our own age. As the darkness which gathered over the human mind in former centu- ries passes away, no inquiries become so earnest as those which relate to the rights, privileges, and destiny of man ; rights of which he has always been robbed ; privileges he never dared to hope for, and a destiny of whose glory he never dreamed. Every age has what is called its great princi- ple or motive, which more than all others controls 4* 42 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE the minds of men, and which by universal consent is adopted as the indisputable axiom of the time. The grand motive of one age has been policy, of another valor, and of another truth. The times of Justinian aiford an example of the first ; the age of Feudalism of the second, and the Reformation of the. last. During the reign of the Roman Emperor, when the public mind had become enervated by luxury, artfulness and finesse were the qualities most admired, and the only means of self-elevation. But during the long and gloomy period when Europe was under the sway of the Feudal Baro- nies, military accomplishments were the chief objects of ambition, and the surest road to honor. Chivalry was the reigning spirit of the age. The people followed, not principles, but men. All other considerations were lost in enthusiasm for the personal heroism of their leader. If you wished to rouse the energies of a nation to move in some great enterprize, you had but to point to a gallant knight, accomplished in all the warlike virtues of his time, and uncounted thousands burning with enthusiasm would flock to his stand- ard. This spirit gave birth to those heroic actions which fill up the brilliant legends of the old cru- saders. It was a far more enterprizing and stir- ring principle than had hitherto guided the world. When turbulent Europe settled back to its repose after the crusades were over, it had assumed an entirely new aspect. The human mind was BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 43 now prepared for higher achievements. For the heavy tread of those indomitable masses of living valour, that fought for the Holy Sepulchre, had hardly died away on the ear of Europe, before the trumpet call of the Reformation was sounded from the woods of Germany by the Monk of Erfurth, and a new principle took possession of the civilized world. Resting from its bold struggles with the infidel hosts of the East, the exploits of heroism were no longer the theme of universal admiration, and the hero and his deeds were forgotten together. Other and higher objects of contemplation filled the minds of men. They began to gaze dimly through the dust of ages after truth long-buried Religious Truth truth that would satisfy the wants of man's higher nature truth descended from Heaven for the soul, and yet hitherto de- nied it. The awakening truth-seeking world no longer cares for the Politician, the Crusader or the King. It boldly asks whence the mitre derives its sacred- ness the Pope his infallibility 1 Where are the Records of God's Prophets and God's anointed Son ? "What has obscured their pages ? Who has dared to hide them from the sight of man ? This new love of Truth which inflamed the souls of the Reformers, spread from hamlet to hamlet, and province to province, until it well nigh emancipa- ted Europe from a spiritual despotism that had been consolidated by the slow growth of ages. Then followed the controversial age, and the 44 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE world became weary in the fruitless effort to settle upon a creed that should unite the religious opinions of mankind. One grand result however crowned these efforts. The foundations of Chris- tianity were carefully examined and found to be firm and immovable ; and although little approxi- mation was made towards a unity of belief in unessential matters, yet a solid and secure lodge- ment was gained in the human mind for the great principles of Christianity, which in their turn, gave birth to civil freedom, and settled in the human soul a conviction of the equal rights of man, and imparted a firm determination to possess them. A spirit of inquiry has gone abroad over the world peculiar to our own age. Everywhere men are becoming restive under oppression. Some- thing of the greatness and value of man, of the sacredness of his rights as a creature of God, and the grandeur of his destiny, is dawning on the human mind. The truth of Hampden's words is written out in clear bold characters upon the institutions, the changes, the endeavours, and the spirit of this generation. Man is beginning to be understood that which " hath been the riddle of ages." His rights are beginning to be respected, and the few guiding minds of the world to whom God has committed the ark of human liberty, are rallying the innumerable host of their down-trod- den brethren, to lead them forth from a worse than Egyptian bondage. They are teaching them the great lessons of liberty, and inspiring them with BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 45 the hope of becoming free. " Blessing on thee, Man ! Sacred, venerable thy name ! Thou shalt live the divine germ of thy nature shall yet ex- pand and grow and bear celestial fruit, God's own Freedom and Truth and Love God speed the rescue." To millions now humanity has become a charmed word, and the most careless observer of the spirit of his time must discern that this spirit is rapidly gaining sway. If a great change is proposed in the structure of society or the administration of power, hu- manity is alleged as the reason. The press talks of ignorance, of oppression, of suffering ; it urges no reason for their removal but sympathy for the sad condition of fellow men. Even religion is not now urged so much as a duty and a truth, as a remedy for man's suffering, bruised nature a consolation amid the ills of life, and a hope in the dying hour. It is this high Humanity that forms the pretence, the basis, the motive, to all great un- dertakings of the age. It is even a better, a higher principle than truth ; truth can but discern the duty of man and the means of alleviating his con- dition ; but humanity gives enthusiasm to the ex- ecution of that duty and the relief of that condi- tion. Truth, like the daylight, only shows the mariner struggling with the waves ; it never prompts the bold adventurer to plunge in and res- cue him from death. When Truth has performed its office, a greater principle must come behind to 46 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE complete the work. The heart of man must prompt him to act when his intellect has taught him to understand, In the appearance and diffusion of this humane spirit in modern times, is treasured up the hope of the world. Intelligent philanthropy is now watching over the interests of the people, and the time has come when even they are looking back with a nobler feeling than idle curiosity, on the past history of the race. The story of oppression excites indignation against the oppressor, and a firmer purpose than ever to work the regeneration of man. There has never been a time when in this country and in Europe, so general an interest has been exerted in favour of the working classes ; or when inquiries into their condition, have met -with such universal favour. It will be necessary, before we consider particularly the present condi- tion of the lower classes in Great Britain, to be- stow a few thoughts on their condition in past times. It will, however, be impossible, as well as unnecessary, in such a work as this, to enter into the inquiry very minutely. The entire space al- lotted to these volumes would not contain a full picture of the wrongs and the sufferings of the British people, even since the times of Cromwell much less from the origin of the British govern- ment. In another part of this work I shall review the history of the suffering and wrong Ireland has endured at the hand of England. That BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 47 subject is of too much interest to be crowded into the brief limits of this chapter. We must content ourselves with some general statements of the burdens and injustice that have pressed on the poor of England up to the present time, and the introduction of a few specific facts for illustration. It is probably well known to every reader, that in all ages the great majority of the British people have been entirely subjected to the control of the throne and the aristocracy ; that their rights have been disregarded and trampled down ; that neither they, nor the tyrants who made their fetters, seem ever to have thought that the great object of go- vernment and civilized society should be the greatest good of the greatest number. In tracing back the history of England, AVC find that in the early ages, the people were in a state of abject slavery. At the Norman Conquest, the Feudal System, which had been partially introduced into England, was fully established, and continued for several centuries in all its vigor and despotism. A false conception of the Feudal System seems very generally to prevail, even at the present time. All the charms of romantic legends have been thrown around this grand, but gloomy structure ; and in the gorgeous array of Chivalry, Crusades, Knights, and Tournaments, the imagination of the reader is dazzled into forgctfulness of the unin- structed, neglected, degraded masses, the story of whose wrongs no one has been found willing to tell for we find it no where written. 48 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE After one of the victorious battles of the Ameri- can Revolution, as Washington and Lafayette were walking over the field of blood, the Father of his Country, with one hand resting on the shoulder of the young French soldier, and the other pointing to the dead bodies of his brave men, said : " My brave Marquis, the time will come when the memory of these fallen men will be an inheritance worth more than gold to their descend- ants. It seems to be the decision of God that his- tory should preserve the names and the remem- brance of patriots who die for liberty and their country, while those who fall in conquests of blood and ambition shall be forgotten. The memory of these men who have fallen to-day will never be forgotten." How few of those who have died in battle have fallen in the cause of liberty ! All through the dark ages the people of England were driven from their homes to shed their blood, not in the defence of their freedom, but in gratifying the ambition of their rulers. Few things are more lam- entable in history than this tyrannical power the few have exercised over the multitude. The game and policy of war is well described by the humane Carlyle ; " What, speaking in quite unofficial lan- guage, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain 'natural enemies' of the French, there are succes- sively selected during the French war, say thirty BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 49 able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own ex- pense, has suckled and nursed them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to man- hood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdu- pois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected, all dressed in red, and shipped away at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. And now, to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty -similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like man- ner wending ; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition ; and thirty stands fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'fire!' is given ; and they blow the souls out of one another ; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest ! They lived far enough apart ; were the entirest strangers. Nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then ? Simple- ton ! their governors had fallen out and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." This is a real pic- ture its like has been seen on many thousand battle-fields. What cares the master for the sacri- VOL. i. 5 50 POWER AND CONDITION OP THE fice of his slave, if it but gratify his ambition. Human life is dog-cheap till he comes to sell his own. It is surely lamentable enough to think how the mass have always been made " hewers of wood and drawers of water," to those who hap- pened to possess the power at the time. We have not space to speak at length of serfs and vassals who composed the large majority of the people, and who had no appeal from the will of their masters. So deeply were the millions de- graded, that " the serf," we are told by De Tocque- ville, " looked upon his own inferiority as a con- sequence of the immutable order of nature." How grinding and lasting must have been the tyranny that brought him so low. Man has never yet been rightly estimated. Those who are familiar with the forest and game laws, know the comparative value English kings have placed upon a man and the game of the woods. William the Conqueror, " not satisfied with sixty-nine forests, lying in almost every part of the kingdom, such, and so many, says Evelyn, as no other realm of Europe had, laid waste a vast tract of country in Hampshire, and created another, thence called New Forest, because it was the last added to the ancient ones, except that of Hampton Court, the work of Henry VIII. Such was the origin and extent of the ancient royal fo- rests of England ; all preserved and maintained for the especial and exclusive pastime of the kings. Truly the state of a king was then kingly BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 51 indeed. Sixty-nine forests, thirteen chases, and upwards of seven hundred and fifty parks existing in England. There were in Yorkshire alone in Henry VIII's time, two hundred and seventy-five woods, besides parks and chases, most of them containing five hundred acres. Over all these the king could sport, for it was the highest honor to a subject to receive a visit from the king to hunt in his chase, or free warren ; while no subject, ex- cept by special permission and favor, could hunt in the royal parks. These sixty-nine forests of immense extent, lying in all parts of England, and occupying no small portion of its surface, all stood then for the sole gratification of the royal pleasure of the chase, and supplying the king's household, and few persons have now any idea of the state, dignity, and systematic severity of this great hunting establishment of England, main- tained through all succeeding reigns to the time of the Commonwealth, and some parts of it much longer." During one of my rides through Essex, in the summer of 1840, 1 took up an ancient book on the Game Laws of England, which I found in turn- ing over the antique library of my host, from which I gathered the following information. Wil- liam the Conquerer decreed that the eyes of any person should be pulled out who killed either a buck or a boar in the royal hunting grounds. Rufus had any man hanged who stole a doe. 52 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE Several successive kings made no distinction be- tween him who killed a buck, made to be killed, and him who killed his brother man, although at one time there was this distinction, the killer of the game died without benefit of clergy, or the game either, which latter was probably of more consequence to the hungry serf than the mum- mery of the priest over his grave ; and the man- killer could have his crime commuted by a fine of a few shillings paid to the lord of the estate where the deed was committed. Thousands of hungry serfs had their eyes put out, their legs chopped off, their arms torn from their bodies, for taking small game which ran at large over the island. Any man in the kingdom could be summoned to attend on the chase, and have his property con- fiscated if he did not attend. He might have a good excuse for staying away ; his wife might be dying, and he wish to hear her last request, and then close her eyes in death's sleep; but what cared the king for any such operation until it was likely to be performed on himself? Old John of Salisbury, who was quite apt to have " a mind of his own," and a free tongue withal, had no very exalted opinion of this Game Code. He says : " what is more extraordinary is, that it is often made by law criminal to set traps or snares for birds, to allure them by springes and pipes, or use any craft to take ; and offenders are punished by forfeiture of goods, loss of limbs, and BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 53 even death. One would suppose that the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea were common to all ; but they belong to the crown, and are claimed by the forest laws wherever they fly. Hands off! keep clear ! lest you incur the guilt of high treason and fall into the clutches of the hunters. The swains are driven from their fields, while the beasts of the forest have a liberty of ' roving,' and the farmer's meadows are taken from him to increase their pasture. The new-sown grounds are taken from the farmer, the pastures from the grazier and shepherd, the beehives are turned away from the flowery bank and the very bees are hardly allowed their natural liberty." This sounds very like Chartism ! A man must be made of strange stuff to read of such outrages on his race without indignation. But what have we in these times to do, some one will ask, with the game laws of the Norman Conqueror? Much every way. Humanity has been affected by them much, as stocks are on 'Change by failures. Think for a moment what would have been the condition of the race in this age had they never been crushed under the wheels of despotism ! How much loftier would have been its elevation in intellect, science and religion ! And how much more valuable would existence have been to every man. He would have commenced life under fairer auspices. He would have called to his aid the genius of millions who had enlarged the bounds of science, and made the world better and brighter. He would have been 64 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE saved the fruitless experiment and endless blun- dering that have cost the happiness of whole generations. The hoof of oppression has trampled out in its ruthless stampings many a Milton and Newton and Bacon and Shakspeare that would have lighted up the ages through which man has made his dark pilgrimage. In wandering by fancy over this wilderness he has travelled, where the wrecks of humanity have been strewed, we can adopt the touching lines of Grey, ' Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood." Power has hitherto " shut the gates of mercy on mankind," this is its History. THE CRIMINAL CODE of England, which remained in force even till our own times, was probably the most bloody that ever obtained in any nation, savage or civilized. Holinshed states that no less than seventy-two thousand persons died by the hands of executioners during the reign of Henry VIII. Sir William Blackstone mentions it as one of the most melancholy facts in the world's history, that " among the variety of actions men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 55 by act of Parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy ; or in other words, to be worthy of instant death." What language can convey to the mind of a modern so striking a picture of the estimate the aristocracy of England have always placed upon man, as is found on the statute book (Geo. I. C. 22, and 31, Geo. II, C. 42,) where the punishment of death is to be inflicted on the man who shall break down the mound of a fish pond, whereby any fish shall escape, or cut down a cherry-tree in an orchard ! One such inhuman law is as good as a hundred, to show the spirit of English legis- lation in past ages. What must have been the tyranny of power, or the condition of its victims, when to steal a loaf of bread, or a bit of meat, worth twelve pence, even though the wretch might, be starving with his wife and children, condemned him to death ! THE POOR LAWS. Much has been said on all sides, of the " English Poor Laws," " Poor Laws, indeed," said the Irish orator, " they are rightly named," for it seems to be the opinion of very many persons well qualified to decide, that although they have been sustained ostensibly for the benefit of the poor, they have been to them a great curse ; that in all their forms and varia- tions they have only been a complicated machine of despotism. As my views of this subject may 56 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE not correspond with the opinions of many other persons, lest I should be thought singular, I refer the reader to a number of papers on the Corn Laws, in the Edinburgh Review, and particularly to an able article in the October No. of that Jour- nal for 1841, in which will be found a full con- firmation of my views and statements. The writer of this paper, which appeared in October, 1841, does not hesitate to say, in speak- ing of the origin of these laws : " We believe that the English Poor Laws originated in selfishness, ignorance and pride ; we are convinced that their origin was an attempt substantially to restore the expiring system of slavery." And on the sup- position that they were designed by their founders to effect benevolent designs, the writer says, " they have in scarcely a single instance attained their objects, and in most cases have produced ef- fects precisely opposite to the intentions of their framers ; that they have aggravated whatever they were intended to diminish, and produced whatever they were intended to prevent." I have often noticed high commendations of the Poor Laws in American publications of es- tablished character, and from statesmen of some fame. Such commendations would probably have been withheld had the truth been known. It appears that this benevolent legislation, so far from ameliorating the condition of the English poor, robbed them of what little liberty the ini- quitous laws had hitherto spared them. BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 57 From the middle of the reign of Edward III. to the Poor Law Amendment Act, these laws " confined the labourer to his parish ; they dic- tated to him who should be his master ; and they proportioned his wages, not to his services, but to his wants. Before the Poor Law Amendment Act, nothing but the power of arbitrary punish- ment was wanting in the pauperized parishes, to a complete system of predial slavery." (Ed. Rev.) " The 23 Edward III. requires all servants to accept the wages that were usually given five or six years before ; and to serve by the year and not by the day ; it fixes a positive rate of wages in many employments ; forbids persons to quit places in which they have dwelt in winter, and seek employment elsewhere in summer, or to re- move, in order to evade the act, from one county to another. A few years after, in 1360, the 34th Edward III. confirmed the previous statute, and added to the penalties which it imposed on la- bourers or artificers, absenting themselves from their services, that they should be branded on the forehead with the letter F." " Twenty-eight years after, in 1388, was pass- ed the 12th Richard II., which has generally been considered as the origin of the English Poor Laws. By that act, the acts of Edward III. are confirmed ;" and fresh and severe penalties enacted, " and ' because labourers will not, (says the law) nor for a long season would not serve without 58 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE outrageous and excessive hire,' prices are fixed for their labour, and punishment awarded against the labourer who receives more, and the master who gives more. Persons who have been employed in husbandry until twelve years of age, are pro- hibited from becoming artizens." This law makes no provision for the impotent poor, nor is there a clause in the whole act intended to benefit any person except the land owners who made the law. If the provisions of the act could have been en- forced, the agricultural labourers, and they form- ed probably four-fifths of the population of Eng- land, though nominally free, would have been as effectually ascripti glebce, as any Polish serf. And to make a nearer approximation to slavery, in the next year (1389) the 13th Richard II. was passed, which directs the justices of every county to make proclamation every half-year at their dis- cretion, according to the price of food, what wages every artificer and labourer shall receive by the day. This act, with some intervals, during which the legislature attempted itself to fix the prices of labour, remained substantially in force until the present century. A further attempt to reduce husbandry labourers to a hereditary cast of serfs, was made by the 7th Henry IV. cap. 17, (1405,) which, after reciting that the provisions of former acts were evaded by persons apprenticing their children to crafts in towns, ' so that there is such a scarcity of husbandry labourers, that gentlemen are impoverished] (this is an honest confession, BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 59 to say the least) forbids persons not having 20s. a year in land to do so, under a penalty of a year's imprisonment. The first attempt on the part of a person dependent on his labour for his support, to assert free agency by changing his abode, or by making a bargain for his services, or even by re- fusing to work for ' bare meat and drinkj render- ed him liable to be whipt and sent back to his place of birth, or last residence for three years, or according to some statutes, for one year, there to be at the disposal of the local authorities. The second attempt subjected him at one time to sla- very for life, ' to be fed on bread and water, and refuse meat, and caused to work by beating, chain- ing, or otherwise,' and for the third he was to suf- fer death as a felon" " In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, was passed a statute (5th Eliz. cap. 3, 1562) inflicting the usual penalties, whipping, slavery and death, on sturdy vagabonds," i. e. able-bodied men seek- ing employment, or in the words of the writer from whom I am quoting, " those who, having no property but their labour, presumed to act as if they had a right to dispose of it." In 1572, another law was enacted, " aggrava- ting the penalty by subjecting the offenders (that is, all persons who would not work for what jus- tices decided as wages) to whipping and burning for the first offence, and to the penalties of felony for the second." " The 43d Eliz. deserves neither the praise nor 60 GENERAL CONDITION OP THE the blame which have been lavished on it. So far from having been prompted by benevolence, it was a necessary link in one of the heaviest chains in which a people calling- thmselves free have been bound. It was part of a scheme, prosecuted for centuries, in defiance of reason, justice, and humanity, to reduce the labouring classes to serfs ; to imprison them in their parishes, and to dictate to them their employments and their wages." " The industrious labourer was not within the spirit or the words of the act. This was indeed the complaint of Lord Hale. ' The plaster,' says his Lordship, ' is not so large as the sore. There are many poor, who are able to work, if they had it, and had it at reasonable wages, whereby they might support themselves and their families. These are not within the provisions of the law.' " The reader is prepared, after glancing at the fla- grant injustice of such legislation, for that true but caustic remark of Dr. Burn, in his history of the Poor Laws, where he says of these barbarous enactments, " They make this part of English history look like the history of savages in Ame- rica almost all the severities have been prac- tised except scalping." The 8th and 9th William III. cap. 30, which recites that " poor persons are for the most part confined to live in their own parishes, and not permitted to inhabit elsewhere, though their la* bour is wanted in many other places," kept BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 61 these laws against their removal in force until 1795, when a law was passed, which enacted, that no poor person should be removed from a parish into which he had gone, " until he became charge- able to his parish," and then he must go. The scenes of barbarous cruelty witnessed under this system have been forcibly described by Dr. Southey, see Espriella's Letters. Says Mr. Simon, in his Journal of a Tour in Great Britain, (1815.) " The poor are repulsed from one place to another, like infected persons. They are sent back from one end of the kingdom to the other, as criminals formerly in France, de brigade en brigade. You meet on the high roads, I will not say often, but too often, an old man on foot with his little bundle, a helpless wi- dow, pregnant perhaps, and two or three bare- footed children following her, become paupers in a place where they had not yet acquired a legal right to assistance, and sent away on that account to their original place of settlement in the mean- time, by the overseers of parishes on their way." (Vol. i. p. 224.) In the House of Commons, March 25th, 1819, Mr. Sturges Bourne, in proposing his bill to regu- late the settlement of the poor, spoke with great indignation of " the notorious practice of sending back old paupers to their original parish after they had spent their youth and labor elsewhere, tear- ing them from their friends and neighbors." He dwelt with deep feeling on " the extreme hardship VOL. i. 6 62 GENERAL CONDITION OP THE of paupers who, having resided many years, and formed connexions, were sent home to their pa- rishes, and separated from all friends and conso- lations, to die in a remote poor-house." Let it not be thought that only a few persons could have suffered from this system, and therefore I magnify its evils, for in the year 1803 the number of per- sons thus removed was no less than one hundred and ninety-four thousand. I select the year 1803, because it is the only year I am able to as- certain the number removed. I have seen it stated that the average number of removals was not much short of this for v many years ! It will readily be seen by the reader, that these oppressive enactments for ages recognized no dis- tinction between innocent and culpable vagrants. "Innocent and culpable vagrants," says Colqu- houn, " are confounded together ; and the virtuous and the vicious mendicant are subject to the same punishment." They not only made poverty a crime, whose dreadful penalty was exile from home and friends ; but these Poor Laws rendered poverty the necessary and unavoidable lot of the working classes, for they limited their wages to the lowest possible rates, and punished the bene- factor who gave them more. Our next inquiry refers to the GENERAL CHA- RACTER OF THE POOR HOUSES to which gener- ations of the poor were driven. BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 63 Colquhoun says "In many places they will be found to be the abodes of misery, which defy all comparison in human wretchedness" More than one Parliamentary Report has styled them, " hot-beds of vice and wretchedness." When the able Report of the Poor Law Commissioners was laid before Parliament, in 1817, Brougham fear- lessly declared, that " it unfolded a state of society extraordinary and deplorable, beyond the utmost stretch of the imagination, in a country which laid any claim to civilization ! " It is unnecessary to multiply extracts. No person who has any re- putation as an author to lose, will deny that the picture I have drawn of the Poor Laws, and their oppressive tendency, is not only true, but that facts could be accumulated, almost without number, proving that a state of things existed worse by far than almost any other ever known in the civilized world. It should not be forgotten too, that the de- sign of these laws, for more than 400 years, was to perpetuate the existence of a slave class in the country, by excluding them from every avenue to wealth, education, and honor. They impoverished the mass of the people by making them work for a bare subsistetice ; treated their poverty, which had been created by the laws, as a crime ; and then scourged the poor victims of tyranny to the disgusting and loathsome home of the pauper, to end an existence filled with suffering and covered with gloom. The whole system of legislation in England 64 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE has always been fatal to the morals and the hap- piness of the lower classes. The poor man loses his self-respect, and all motives to exertion, when the reward of industry is taken away ; when, by a false and unnatural order of things, his condition in life is rendered no better by industry, effort, and morality, than by indolence and crime. He ceases to prefer virtue, unless it rewards its possessor, for he knows as well as the priest who fattens on the fruits of his toil, that virtue would be no better than vice, if it did not secure the happiness of its followers. Under the paralysing effects of unjust laws, multitudes, who have toiled on in want, have at last lost all motive to effort, and fallen upon the parishes for support, where, although their priva- tions were increased, they were saved the trouble of providing for themselves. Here the last salu- tary influence was withdrawn ; what little self- respect may have lurked in his bosom, leaves the Pauper as he steps on the threshold of the work- house ; and in that gloomy confinement, shut out from the glorious objects of creation, his soul, into which the spirit of aspiration arid greatness had been once breathed by the eternal Father, is smothered and debased ; its existence is almost blotted out ; and when it leaves its abused and lacerated house of mortality, the world does not feel the departure, for it has met with no loss. His death is unfelt, unless it may be some brother of misfortune there has had his heart drawn out as to an only friend, and even he is glad when his BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 65 pilgrimage is over. The pauper dies his spirit flies, " no marble tells us whither ;" and when he is buried, only the few he left behind knew that he ever existed in a green world, where "God has made everything beautiful in his time." One more illustration will answer our pur- pose, and I select it from the "CHIMNEY-SWEEP CHILDREN'S" history. At different periods the attention of Parliament has been called to a most brutal practice that has extensively prevailed for a long time in England, of forcing small children into the cruel task of sweeping chimneys. For proof of the barbarities committed, and their extent, I refer the reader to evidence laid before the House of Commons, with which he may be already familiar. From this evidence it appears that a vast num- ber of children, some of them purchased, many of them stolen, and more obtained from the parish workhouses, have been tortured into premature graves by this terrible business. Says one of these Reports " These children are oftentimes stolen for this purpose. They are very liable to cough and inflammation of the chest, from their being out at all hours, and in all weathers ; these are gene- rally increased by the wretchedness of their habi- tations, as they too frequently have to sleep in a shed, exposed to the changes of the weather, their only bed a soot-bag. They are very subject to burns, from their being forced up chimneys while on fire, and while overheated ; and however they 6* 66 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE may cry out, their inhuman masters pay not the least attention, but compel them too often with horrid imprecations to proceed. They are some- times sent up chimneys on fire ! It is in evidence before your committee, that at Hadleigh, Barnet, Uxbridge, and Windsor, female children have been employed. It is also in evidence that they are stolen from their parents, and inveigled out of workhouses; that in order to conquer the natural repugnance of these infants to ascend the narrow and dangerous chimneys to clear which, their labor is required, blows are used ; that pins are forced into their feet by the boy that follows them up the chimney, in order to compel them to ascend it ; and that lighted straw has been applied for that purpose ; that the children are subject to sores and bruises, and wounds and burns on their thighs and knees and elbows, and that it requires many months before the extremities of the elbows and knees become sufficiently hard to resist the excoriations to which they are at first subject. But it is not only the early and hard labor, and spare diet, wretched lodging, and harsh treatment, that is the lot of these children, but in general they are kept almost entirely destitute of educa- tion and moral and religious instruction." And this state of things continued with greater or less abuses, and the government slept over it till eight- een hundred and forty, when some measures were at last taken for its suppression ; but from what I have been able to learn, I fear with little success. BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES 67 I have thus glanced at the physical condition of the lower classes with what minuteness my space would allow. During these long centu- ries of degradation and suffering among the poor, what has the government done for their EDUCA- TION? In one word, nothing ! In " Colquhoun's Treatise on Indigence," (1806,) an authority indis- putable almost on this subject, it is said, " It has been shown that above one million of individ- uals (1,234,768) in a country containing less than nine million of inhabitants r have descended into a state of indigence requiring either total or partial support from the public." And he attributes the great proportion of this destitution to the igno- rance, and consequently deep degradation and crime of the people. He says also that " a pro- digious number among the laboring classes co- habit together without marriage, and again separ- ate when a difference ensues, and their miserable offspring from neglect are rarely reared to ma- turity. It will be seen also from late publications, that after making very large allowances, at least one million seven hundred and fifty thousand of the population of the country, nearly one fifth at an age to be instructed, grow up to an adult state without any instruction at all, in the grossest ig- norance and without any useful impressions of Religion or morality." The London Quarterly Review, which has never represented the suffer- ings of the people worse than they really were, presents the following gloomy picture. 68 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE After stating on the authority of Parliament, the number of children in London, without any means of education, at one hundred and thirty thousand, " several thousand of whom are let out to beggars and trained up in dishonesty," it says, " children are daily to be seen, hundreds and thou- sands about the streets of London, brought up in misery and mendicity, first to every kind of suf- fering afterwards to every kind of guilt ; the boys to theft, the girls to prostitution ; and this, not from accidental causes, but from an obvious defect in our institutions. Throughout all our great ci- ties, throughout all our manufacturing counties, the case is the same as in the capital."- " Two- thirds of the lower orders in London," (a great majority of the people) said Sir Thomas Bernard, " live as utterly ignorant of the doctrines and du- ties of Christianity, and are as errant and uncon- verted pagans as if they had existed in the wild- est part of Africa." In quoting this remark into the 29th No. of the Quarterly, the Reviewer says, " The case is the same in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield, and in all our large towns ; the greatest part of our manufacturing populace, of the miners and colliers, are in the same condi- tion, and if they are not universally so, it is more owing to the zeal of the Methodists than to any other cause." When we read such horrible state- ments, we forget not, that many million pounds were during this same period wrung from the English people to support a National Church, BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 69 whose funds would have richly maintained schools, churches, and missionaries, for the education of these pagan millions. Neither is it to be over- looked, that this same organ of the church, from which we have taken these statements, was and is still, for ever talking of the necessity of an es- tablished religion for the moral and religious edu- cation of the poor. It is an acknowledgment of some value, coming from such a source, that the only instruction the poor despised classes enjoyed, was from the despised Methodists a body of Christians whom this same High Church Tory Magazine thinks they never can abuse enough ; that with these heathen orders the established clergy had nothing to do. And yet this same Re- view has,loudly clamoured for church extension, with a clergy which, on its own confession, does little or nothing for the instruction of the poor, to whom the Gospel was specially sent. Well might this Quarterly acknowledge, as it did only twenty- five years ago, that " the lower orders of Eng- land are more ignorant of their religious duties than they are in any other Christian country." These are the fruits of oppression. So much for a legislation in which the people have had no voice. Truly " the people are not the authors of the system which has ruined their freedom, their industry, and their morals." We can only judge of the feelings of the poor of past ages by their feelings now. There must have been " thoughts of agony, that scorpion-like have stung to mad- 70 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE ness" the souls of millions into whose wretched hearts the very iron of despotism has been driven. But could we behold the tears of wretch- edness that have drenched their pillows seen only by God the limbs that have rotted in dungeon chains the " withered forms, that in Botany Bay have been doomed to perpetual exile from their country for offences against arbitrary and unjust laws " could we see the parting scenes upon the shores of England where thousands of these poor wretches have been torn from their wives and children amidst their entreaties to be suffered to go with their husbands and fathers ! could we see them go and commit crimes that they might be condemned to the same now joyous fate could we hear the cries of hungry and oppressed gene- rations of the poor could we glance but for once on that dark scroll of tyranny and wrong perpe- trated in England, that will be unfolded in the great day of final assize what tears could we find worthy of being shed over such a spectacle? " But this eternal blazon cannot be to ears of flesh and blood." And while this deep wail of sorrow and suffer- ing, that we can even now hear coming up through the vale of ages, was falling on the ears of successive races of nobles, hierarchs, and kings, where were " the successors of the apostles," the ministers of Jesus Christ, paid by the state ? Col- lecting tithes ! To the man who will suffer himself to think of BRITISH PEOPLE IN PAST AGES. 71 such weighty matters as these, while his heart beats one hundred times, what mystery is there, that in England, where all this wrong has been perpetrated, all this suffering endured, "gaunt millions with their hungry faces are now stand- ing up to ask, as in forest roarings, these wash- ed upper classes, after long, unrelieved centu- ries, these questions. How have ye treated us ? How have ye taught us fed us while we toiled for you 1 The answer can be read in flames over the midnight summer-sky this is the feeding the leading we have had of you EMPTINESS OF POCKET, OF HEAD, AND OF HEART !" BOOK THE THIRD. EMBRACING A VIEW OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE AND THE BURDENS WHICH OPPRESS THEM. In the sense Adam Smith uses the word poor, " living from hand to mouth," nine tenths of the English people are poor. Edinburg Revieiv, Oct. 1841. In the road which the English labourer must travel, the Poor- house is the last stage on the way to the grave. Quarterly Re- view, No. 29. There is a mighty evil connected with the condition of the working classes in this country, which has to be met, exposed, and overcome. Westminster Revieio, Jan. 1842. The men of England are treated by the landed interest worse than their dogs and horses, which are fed in proportion to their toil. Mr. Cobrfen's speech in Parliament, Feb. 22, 1842. Under the present Corn Law, aided by the Poor Law, which is expressly intended to beat down the standard of comfort, and BO degrade the labourer, the bulk of the working classes, both in the agricultural and manufacturing districts, are reduced on ordinary occasions to the lowest stage of existence, and a bad season is a sentence of death to many of the suffering poor. London Sun, Nov. 17, 1841. The Corn Law is the master infamy of the world the land- lord's curse on the poor man's industry. There is, however, no hope of relief for the people, unless in a Reform of the Reform Act, so that the working classes may be represented in Parlia- ment. Mr. Wakleifs speech in Parliament, Feb. 18, 1842. VOL. I. 7 BOOK THIRD. A VIEW OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE AND THE BURDENS WHICH OPPRESS THEM. In England, the empire of despotism has not yet passed away. The monarch and the privileged classes are still born to opulence, luxury and power, while want, suffering and oppression, are the bitter heritage of millions of the people. Suc- cessive generations have been robbed of their liberty by laws, in the making of which they have had no voice, and over whose administration they have had no control. This state of things still continues. When the people ask their rulers for equal, humane, just legislation, they receive the same answer always given them" the swinish rabble have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them." In the House of Lords there are but five men found to vote for the repeal of those barbarous laws which tax the bread of the poor. In the House 76 PRESENT CONDITION OP of Commons, on whose table, so late as February last, had been piled up within a few weeks the prayers of one million three hundred thousand men, that they might no longer be compelled to pay one third of their toil-purchased wages into the pockets of the rich, a majority of three hun- dred and three voted not to grant them relief. And when three and a half millions of people sent up their great petition on the shoulders of sixteen men to the doors of Parliament, praying that they might be suffered to tell their grievances to the representatives of the nation, by an overwhelming majority their request was denied, and they were sent back to their cheerless hovels to hunger on. And to show the feeling that prevails not only among the Tories, who have always been the enemies of the people, but the Whigs themselves, it is necessary only to state, that this immense petition had no sooner been brought into the Com- mons, and a motion introduced by Mr. Duncomb, to hear the counsel of the petitioners at the bar of the House, than Thomas Babington Macauley led off in a long and powerful speech against the motion. It is well known he was one of the champions of the Reform Bill, and has been re- garded as the warmest and most eloquent advo- cate of popular rights in the British House of Commons. Shielded as was his bitter attack by numerous and bland expressions of sympathy for the people, yet in opposing the petition of the Chartists, he spoke like a Tory advancing the THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 77 same arguments against universal suffrage that the enemies of Republicanism have always done the incapacity of man for self-government, the danger of committing power to the people, and the ruin that would desolate the land if they ever gained possession of these rights declared by the founders of the American Republic to be inalien- able. And further, to show that the great Reformer, in his opposition to liberty, was governed by the same spirit that has always obstructed its advance- ment, he boldly told the petitioners to give up all hope that the day would ever come when their prayer would be granted. " I will not," he said, " go into the minor points contained in the peti- tion, because there is one point so important a point which in my judgement forms the very essence of the charter which if withheld, will have the effect of creating agitation, and which, if granted, it matters not one straw whether the others are granted or not, and that point is UNI- VERSAL SUFFRAGE. Having a decided opinion that such a change would be utterly fatal to the best interests of the country at large, I feel it my duty manfully to declare that / cannot consent to hold out the least hope, that I can EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, support such a change." He said he was " in favor of the admixture of the aristocratic element in the constitution of the country." It was quite unnecessary to say this after so fully committing himself to the aristocracy. 78 PRESENT CONDITION OF lie thought " universal suffrage would be fatal to all the objects for which a monarchy existed, an aristocracy existed, or even a well-ordered Repub- lic existed, and that it was incapable of co-exist- ing icith the extension of civilization." This ground was certainly bold enough to sat- isfy the most ultra conservatives, and it did satisfy them. Their leaders were in ecstasy, and rose in quick succession to eulogize the man they had pronounced a Jacobin in the Reform days of 1832, for thus "manfully" defending the time-honored principles of the aristocracy of the realm. Although Macauley had in this speech virtually surrendered the ground on which he fought and conquered in the troublous times of the Reform agitation, yet the great majority of his party went with him, uniting with the Tories in an attempt to crush the hopes and the determinations of more than two millions of wronged, suffering, but goaded and re- solute men. The future will show what success will crown an effort so hostile to the spirit of the age. An impression has gone abroad over America, that the Reform Bill effected the political emanci- pation of England. The British people themselves were, for a time, deluded into this belief. But they have since discovered their mistake, and gone about rectifying it, with an earnestness and deter- mination which leave no room for doubt, that the heavy burdens which have been accumulating upon them for ages, are soon to be thrown off for ever. THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 79 It will be necessary here to glance at some of the circumstances attending the Reform Bill. It is well known that the corruption of the govern- ment, in all its branches, had become too intoler- able to be borne any longer. George the IV., one of the most dissolute and tyrannical monarchs who had filled the throne since Charles the II., had incensed the people by a life of crime and profli- gacy, and they felt more joy than sorrow when death put an end to his debauchery. It was a gala day in London, and throughout all England business was suspended, when George the IV. was buried. The Thames was covered with pleasure boats and steamers, carrying dense gay crowds into the country. Parties were fitted out to every resort of pleasure, and the nation gave vent to its unfeigned joy, that a heartless tyrant, who had persecuted the beloved Queen Caroline to the grave, and outraged the liberties of his sub- jects, htid at last been called to give up his account at the bar of the King of Kings. " There was reason for hope," says an English writer, " but no cause for sorrow. A vain, self-engrossed old man had at last found his true level, in 'dust to dust, and ashes to ashes ! ' One more obstacle to the changes essential to progress was removed, and a better future appeared in prospect." A crisis had now been reached by some of the principal nations of the continent, and their affairs were afterwards to flow in a different direction. "The bell on St. Paul's, when it tolled to announce SO PRESENT CONDITION OF that George the IV. was gathered to his fathers, startled Europe from its repose. Almost before its tones had ceased to vibrate on the ear, a shock came as of an earthquake, and the dynasty of the elder branch of the Bourbons was seen to pass away like a dream. Ten days after the remains of the English monarch had been interred at Windsor, the celebrated ordinances of the Polig- nac ministry appeared in the 'Moniteur.' The Revolution of July followed, and Charles the X. was an exile in England. By the people every- where the events of the Three Days were hailed with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. An impulse had been given to the progress of great public or national questions, which it was seen nothing could then resist. Its results were imme- diately manifested in the separation of Holland and Belgium, the revolutions of Poland, Spain, and Switzerland ; and in the modifications introduced into the constitutions of various German States. In England its fruit was the Reform Bill." When the Whigs came into power, soon after the accession of William the IV., an expectation became general that a great reform was about to be achieved. The largest portion of the people had always been disfranchised, and even the few who were not could not vote with freedom. The House of Lords and the landed aristocracy had complete control over the elections. Earl Grey declared, in 1793, when he brought his motion for reform into the House of Commons, that "307 THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 81 members of Parliament were returned, not by the collected voice of those whom they appeared to represent, but by the recommendation of 154 pow- erful individuals, who returned a decided majority of the House of Commons ; and that more than 150 members owed their elections entirely to the interference of the Peers." Thus the people re- mained disfranchised and unrepresented. Dissatisfaction with this state of things became more and more manifest as discussion increased, until at last the people awoke in their might, and shook the whole fabric of society. Interpreting, with no uncertain forecast, the signs of the times, the leaders of the liberal party did not hesitate to declare that the time had at last come, when no- thing could save the throne and the constitution from overthrow, and the whole empire from revo- lution, but a radical reform in Parliament. Com- mittees were appointed to inquire into abuses, and well did they perform their work. Meetings for agitation and discussion were everywhere held, and crowded with excited men. The Press brought its engines of power into the field, and scattered light over the ranks of the people. Truth was dragged forth from its hiding-places corruption was stripped of its covering aristoc- racy was laid bare, and a mass of rottenness and tyranny exposed to the gaze of the nation, which roused its deepest indignation. It became evi- dent to all, that " something must be done, or 82 PRESENT CONDITION OF something would soon do itself, and in a style that would please nobody." As the Reform Bill was first proposed, it em- braced many beneficial changes. It proposed the disfranchisement of sixty rotten boroughs, and that sixty others should, in future, return but one member. Representatives were to be given to all large towns, and every 10 householder was to have a vote. These were the general features of the bill, and " when they became universally known the following day through the press, the whole people gave themselves up to an intoxica- tion of joy. Three nights of public illuminations succeeded, the only illuminations," says the wri- ter, " we have ever seen, in which the middle and working classes spontaneously and universally adopted this mode of expressing their approbation of the conduct of their rulers. The public offices, the mansions of the aristocracy, the fashionable clubs were dark ; but every street in the commer- cial part of London and the suburbs, every lane of humble tenements, both banks of the river, from Chelsea to Greenwich, were a blaze of light, and the examples of public rejoicing set by the metropolis were followed, not only in the towns, but in the villages of the most obscure hamlets in the United Kingdom." But the hopes of the people were in a great measure destroyed. The bill was under discus- sion fifteen months, and before its final passage, it was deprived of some of its most beneficial fea- THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 83 tures. This was a greater misfortune, since as originally proposed it did not reach any considera- ble share of the evils which had called it into ex- istence. The joy of the people began to subside when they feared what has since proved true, that the Reform Bill, as finally passed, was only a temporary, but ingenious expedient to allay the agitation of the times. It was a radical defect in the Reform Bill, that it made no provision for securing any fixed and fair proportion between the number of repre- sentatives and the number of electors. A few rot- ten boroughs were disfranchised it is true, and the elective franchise somewhat extended ; but Man- chester, with 8,000 electors, and a population as large as New York, sends no more members to Parliament than Thetford, with only 160 voters. No distinction is made between Liverpool, with 12,000 electors, and Chippenham, with only 217. Harwich, with only 181 electors, returns as many members as the West Riding of Yorkshire, with 30,000. It is still an unequal and unjust system upon which the House of Commons is constituted, the mass of the people are still disfranchised, for of the total male population of the three kingdoms over twenty-one years of age, only one man in six is allowed to vote. From Lewis's " Four Reformed Parliaments," and the " Registration Returns for 1841," I find that the total number of electors in Great Britain and Ireland is only 994,731. A large deduction 84 PRESENT CONDITION OF should however be made, even from this number, Jor a plurality of votes, as the majority of free- holders have at least two votes one for the bo- rough and one for the county. This would very much reduce the number of electors. From the authorities I have quoted above, it appears that a sixth part of the constituency of the three king- doms, returns a clear majority of the House of Commons. While the entire constituency is only 994,731, THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-ONE MEMBERS OUT OF 658, ARE ELECTED BY 164,810 VOTERS ! The following Table prepared from these works, will make this clear to any reader. MEMBERS RETURNED. BY CONSTITUENCIES AS UNDER. 10 above 100 and under 200 28 - - - - 200 300 52 - - - - 300 400 22 - ... 400 500 28 - - - - 500 - - 600 34 - - - - 600 700 18 - - - - 700 800 26 - - - - 800 - - 900 26----900-- 1000 19 - --- 1000 - - 1100 14 1100 - - 1200 13 1200 - - 1300 10 1300 - - 1400 13 1400 - - 1500 7 1500 - - 1600 14 1600 . - 1700 9 1700 - - 1800 341 THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 85 Who does not discover the manifest inequality and injustice of such a system of representa- tives ? An English Magazine has well remarked that " it is a scheme cunningly devised to defeat its apparent object." And yet the British people were gravely told that the Reform Bill had brought the representation of the empire into such a state, they would remain fully satisfied with it it was so equal so just so free from abuse of every description. What equality or justice can 27,000,000 of people see in a system that commits supreme control over the empire to a govern- ment composed of a monarch who is taught from childhood, that kings rule by a divine right, and not by human suffrage a House of Lords, whose power is independent of the people, and whose princely fortunes are augmented just in proportion as they oppress them and a House of Commons, (the only branch of the government which the people can influence,) a majority of whom are elected by 164,810 voters, or only one hundred and sixty-fourth part of the entire nation ? What assurance have they, that their rights will be re- garded by a government thus constituted ? But still the nation looked for grand results from the Reform Bill, for it prostrated the Tory power for a while, and gave the Whigs complete controul over the popular branch of the legisla- ture. Large hopes had been excited by the re- formed cabinet. Earl Gray's majority in the House of Commons was 284, which gave the VOL. i. 8 86 PRESENT CONDITION OF Whigs the power of carrying any measure of re- form the ministry proposed. With a power no other cabinet had ever swayed before, or has ever controlled since, they had excited among the people the hope that the Reform Bill was only the commencement of that great change they intend- ed finally to consummate, which would make jus- tice accessible to the poor encourage commerce, by removing those burdens that pressed upon the springs of industry untax the poor man's bread introduce economy into every branch of the public administration cleanse the Church from her corruptions, to become a blessing and not a curse to the people open a school for the poorest child in Britain bring Ireland at last, after the deep eclipse of ages, forth into the sun-light of freedom. And finally, they were taught by their new rulers that it would not be many years before a final and complete emancipation would be achieved for a great empire. Feeling confidence in the Reformed Parliament, the people rallied with enthusiasm and gratitude around the throne and the ministry. Reform could now have advanced from stage to stage with acclamation. But the ministry were sufficiently popular ; the Whigs had worked themselves into power, and they complacently took possession of the spoils, supposing their old enemies the Tories had fallen never to rise. From that hour to their final downfall in 1841, (although they accomplish- ed some things worthy of a Reformed Parlia- THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 87 merit,) their legislation and policy, as a whole, were not only hostile to the interests of the people, but fatal to themselves. Their popularity and their power steadily declined, till at last, deserted by the people, taunted by the Tories, and despised by all, they have gone down into merited contempt to atone to liberty for having deserted her in the hour of her trial. WE WILL NOW GLANCE AT SOME OP THE ACTS OF THE REFORMED PARLIAMENT. The first bill Earl Grey introduced into the House of Lords, authorized the Lord Lieutenant to proclaim MAR- TIAL LAW in any district of Ireland he considered in a disturbed state. Of course the Tories would feel no opposition to such a measure, unless it might be to harrass the Whigs, and all parties united " wi' right gude will " in passing the law. The first act of the Reform Parliament was an out- rage upon liberty. And what excuse was pleaded in justification of such an act ? Why, 9000 crimes had been committed in Ireland in one year, among a population of eight millions, "not more than a quarter of whom are destitute of all food, and nearly half of whom have a potatoe a day ;" (Sidney Smith.) And yet Martial Law must be proclaimed in such a country, since one person in a thousand had perpetrated a crime once a year ! Crime in- creased fast enough under Martial Law, one would 88 PRESENT CONDITION OF think ; for we find that in 1840 the number of criminal oifences was 23,000, (or nearly three times as many as 1832,) more than a quarter of which were riots, breaches of the peace, and forci- ble rescues ! But nothing is said by Whig or Tory, in these days, about proclaiming Martial Law. The most obtuse Englishman has at last disco- vered, that from the Irish heart bullets cannot erad- icate that noble love of liberty which has ever dwelt in the green vallies of its land. Ireland has experienced little relief from the Whigs. A grand reform, as it was pompously styled, was proposed by them, in the Church in Ireland. Of this grand reform, a London Review not long ago remarked : " A little finger was laid upon the Irish Church ; but with a weight so gen- tle that the plethoric patient was scarcely conscious of the pressure, or the public of any relief from the burden it had endured. First-fruits were abolished, and the number of Irish bishops somewhat re- duced." But what cares the Irishman whether his tithes are extorted from him by the proctor, or the landlord ? It is as broad as it is long ; with this exception that now he is generally compelled to pay his tithe-money to the landlord before his pay-day for rent comes, whereas before he did not pay his tithe unto the priest, until the harvest was gathered. The " Reform " was a decided ad- vantage to the priests, if it did no good to the peo- ple; for the "successors of the Apostles" are now humanely spared the trouble of selling every poor THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 89 man's tenth pig of exploring the hen-roosts for every tenth chicken and egg of pulling up every tenth cabbage from the widow's garden and the very disagreeable, but apostolic job, of shooting widows' sons who take it into their insane heads to eat the egg, or chicken, or cabbage themselves. (See a History of the Rathcormac Slaughter.) But we must hurry through the ten years of the Whigs. No sooner was Melbourne elevated to the head of the government, than his party dis- graced themselves, by enacting one of the most oppressive laws ever framed a law wliich taxed knowledge, and made it a crime worthy of the most severe punishment to be found diffusing light and intelligence among the people. One would suppose the lower classes of England sufficiently ignorant already, if we can believe what is said about them, by their friends as well as their ene- mies. The Stamp Duty, which had so long existed, was felt to be a most severe and unjust tax, (Eng- lish readers must excuse an American for saying a word against stamps ; we have come honestly by our sensitiveness in this matter.) It imposed a tax upon an English newspaper, greater than the entire cost of the most expensive papers in New York. A laboring man could not purchase a newspaper in England after his work was over, without paying a larger sum for it than his wages often amounted to for the day's work ; 3}e?., or more than six cents, being required by the go- 90 PRESENT CONDITION OF vernment for every copy of a British paper print- ed ! The people assembled in large masses to discuss the question, and poured their petitions into Parliament for abolishing the tax altogether. A committee, representing a large and highly re- spectable meeting in London, waited upon the Prime Minister to plead the cause of intelligence. Popular feeling became too strong to allow the ministry to pass by the question in silence or con- tempt, and the statute was revised ; but the tax was only reduced, and not repealed. A stamp of from Id. to l^d. was laid upon all newspapers, (which made every copy cost from 2 to 3 cents more), and to guard against violations of the law, several very severe enactments were passed, which, as a London Review well says, " might have served as a good model to the French min- isters for the Fieschi code." The old law was continually evaded, and it was estimated that more unstamped publications appeared in Lon- don than paid duty. The new law devised a summary cure for this thirst for intelligence. It authorized the seizure of all unstamped papers and the presses by which they were printed, without the form of trial ; the simple affidavit of a com- mon informer could ruin any man engaged in in- structing the people through the medium of an unstamped press. This measure was forced through Parliament by the help of the Tories, who may always be relied on in such cases. But a fraction of the Whig party manfully lifted their THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 91 voice against it, declaring that a government which would commence its career by practically announcing that the people were unworthy of a free press, was not deserving public confidence and support. This was the first act of the Mel- bourne ministry, equally oppressive to England, as the Coercion Bill had been to Ireland under Earl Grey. This tax upon knowledge had no tendency to allay the feelings of a people who could not for- get that while Parliament had saddled upon the country a debt of four thousand millions of dol- lars in extending the foreign power of the em- pire, gratifying the ambition of political leaders, and in clothing the privileged classes in ermine and gold, it had never expended a guinea upon the education of the poor. The Westminster Review tells us, " Among the most influential sup- porters of the Melbourne cabinet, some of the most violent enemies of education were found." Even members of that cabinet have been heard to say in public companies, that " there was too much education in the country ; and defended their opinions by repeating the old worn out fal- lacy that books unfitted the laborer for the duties of life." What hope can the British people borrow from a government whose reformers talk in this way ? Too much education for millions of the Saxon race ! Too much education for civilized men anywhere \ Too much education for a being 92 PRESENT CONDITION OP made in God's image ! ! Even the Whig minis- try refused to do anything to promote National Education, (if we except a small pittance they granted to Ireland,) until the ^very last year they were in power. " They refused, by postponement, the opportunity of making an excellent begin- ning in establishing District Schools of Industry in connexion with the New Unions, in place of the schools now held in the Workhouses, under the most contaminating influences. A carefully digested plan for thus commencing the work of education, with at least 100,000 children of the lowest classes, and to which there would have been no serious opposition, was laid aside. Fi- nally a Board of Education was appointed for England, but not a Board independent of party, like that created for Ireland, ten years before, by Lord Stanley, but a political Educational Board, changing with every change in the cabinet." With what consistency can a government which has for centuries thus neglected the education of its people, talk about their not being intelligent enough to be qualified for the elective franchise ! How happens it they are not ? And how long will the present discipline of the government require to fit them for the duties of freemen ? From the day the Whig government came into power till the day they gave up their places, the lower classes have been praying for relief from the burdens that oppress them and they have prayed in vain. They have gradually been giving up THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 93 all hope of substantial help from either of the great parties, until the conclusion has been forced upon them, that justice never will be awarded to the mass so long as they are not represented in Par- liament. They have now turned away from kings, queens, parliaments and reform bills, from which they experienced so little relief; and fallen back with a confident and desperate resolution upon themselves, adopting the CHARTER for their rallying cry. We shall say nothing of Chartism in this place it deserves a place by itself, which it shall have in another part of the work. The Chartists have long ago been put down in the newspapers, but no where else. Says Carlyle, " the living essence of Chartism has not been put down." It is easy to believe this true when it has swelled its numbers, in three years, from five hundred thousand to three millions. WE SHALL NOW NOTICE MORE SPECIFICALLT SOME OF THE BURDENS THAT PRESS UPON THE BRITISH PEOPLE. These burdens I have no desire to exagge- rate. Would to God I could believe they have ever been exaggerated ! for it would then be other than with a feeling of sadness I have taken up my pen to write out the woes of some millions of the poor of our father-land. Before we could be prepared for a contemplation 94 PRESENT CONDITION OF of the distress of the lower classes, we must inquire into the laws which govern them, to ascertain Avhat agency these laws have in produc- ing suffering. If the British Government have not by unjust legislation incurred the guilt of distressing the disfranchised poor, let the world know it, that the blame may no longer be charged upon an innocent party ; and if on examination it shall appear the government have enacted cruel and wicked laws, that have enriched the few and impoverished the many, let the world know it. A thousand years have passed away, and during this long period the people have been the victims of unjust government. One race of kings after another has come and gone ; one generation of privileged classes after another has appeared on the stage, and moulded the constitution and laws of the empire to suit themselves. It would be strange indeed, if in the selfishness and pride of power they should not have forgotten the interests of the poor. In such an estimate as this, we must not pass by the NATIONAL DEBT. In the gratification of na- tional pride and ambition in the prodigal expen- ditures of successive administrations for the exten- sion of conquest, building palaces for monarchs and their favorites in the bestowment of estates and pensions on the privileged orders of society and in the maintenance of an immense military and naval force to extend the empire abroad and suppress popular rights at home, England has THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 95 since 1689, (when the government owed but 664, 263) accumulated upon herself the enormous debt of 792,306,442, for the payment of the interest of which a sum no less than 29,461,527, is drawn from the people every year. Yes every twenty-four hours nearly half a million dollars are wrung from a single nation to pay for the past extravagance of its rulers. Of this mighty aggre- gate, three thousand millions of dollars were ex- pended in a single war with their old enemies the French ! Well knowing it was impossible by direct or indirect taxation to raise the immense sums they demanded in the prosecution of these wars of ambition and plunder, the men who con- trolled affairs during the reigns of William and Mary, Queen Anne, George I, II, and III, craftily flattered each their own generation, that these wars were necessary for the public safety, and that it was too much for those periods to pay for their own defence. They not only appropriated all those times could furnish, but stretched out their hands and thrust them into the pockets of unborn generations, and compelled the nnbegotten to provide not only for their own time when it should arrive, but for the extravagance of their ances- tors. Thus these wily politicians at the clearing up of the storm of Europe, after the battle of Waterloo, had mortgaged England in an account current with herself, for civil and military purposes, with a debt whose annual interest brings a tax of 96 PRESENT CONDITION OF nearly six dollars a year upon every man, woman, and child in the three kingdoms. Before I have done with this great subject, it will be apparent to the reader, that every piece of bread the hand-loom weaver or the orphan child eats, is charged with a part of the expense of the victorious campaigns of Ramillies and Blenheim, by the Duke of Marlborough of the castle voted him by Parliament of the palace and estate vo- ted the Duke of Wellington of every pension given to the favourites of ministers; and a part of the price paid by England for maintaining that vast army, which for a quarter of a century mea- sured swords on the fields of Europe with the son of the public notary of Ajaccio, for to pay the interest on this debt thus contracted, heavier taxes are laid upon the labour of the working man of Great Britain than were ever laid upon the working man of any other nation of ancient or modern times. But even this sum, vast as it is, sinks into insig- nificance, when compared with that great amount of direct and indirect taxation which weighs down the people of England. Besides the interest on the national debt ($150,000,000) there is expend- ed every year over one hundred millions of dol- lars^ making the sum annually raised to adminis- ter the government, two hundred and fifty mil- lions of dollars. This is the first great division of English burdens I shall notice. It is raised in the most adroit, but after all, in the most oppres- THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 97 sive manner, that the ingenuity of man could de- vise. The people are not approached directly neither do the laws seem to take this sum from the labouring classes : but it is one of the plainest principles of true political economy that the bur- dens of every nation fall upon the working classes ; that wherever the tax is laid, it will in the end come out of the toil and sweat of the labouring man. It will be no difficult matter to show, that the protective policy of England, has long been car- ried to an extent oppressive to the people and in- jurious to the government ; that the manufactur- ing and commercial interests of the nation have already suffered from it most severely ; and that unless many of the restrictions placed upon com- merce be speedily removed, the day is already past from which England will hereafter date the decline of her commercial strength. In our inquiries it will not be so much a ques- tion of politics as of humanity. So long as Eng- lish warehouses are rilled with manufactured goods, and the markets of the world are already glutted with them, it would matter little that half the manufactures of Great Britain were for the time broken down by the present commercial em- barrassment of the nation, if this prostration was not so severely felt by the great multitude who are dependent upon their labour for daily bread. But when the suspension of a factory, involves the hunger and destitution of the operatives who VOL. i. 9 9# PRESENT CONDITION OF are turned away, we think less of the capitalist who leaves his business to collect his bills, and then goes to his country-seat, or up to London, to luxuriate upon his already ample fortune, until the times become better than we do of the gloomy crowds of operatives he has left behind him to starve. The question often arises in this country, why it is that in a nation of such abounding resources and opulence, millions should suffer for the ne- cessaries of life. Unless the world were so slow to learn wisdom, it would be too late in the day to attempt to prove what must be self-evident to every man who will think for himself, that either folly or injustice must characterize the govern- ment of a nation possessed of England's wealth and power, when such vast numbers of her people, strong, able-bodied, willing to labour, are suffering the pains of hunger. I do not pretend to say that it is possible for any government to prevent the recurrence of seasons of commercial and agricul- tural embarrassment ; these crises will occur un- der the wisest administration ; for they often de- pend upon causes beyond the reach of legislation. But I do say, that in a nation where so large a portion of the labouring class perpetually suffer for want of the necessaries of life, a great wrong must exist somewhere ; and that the entire eco- nomy of the British government has a direct and positive tendency to impoverish the working man, and reduce him and his family at last to THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 99 starvation. Even such acknowledgments are sometimes forced from the aristocracy themselves. Says the Quarterly Review, (No. 29,) " In the road that the English labourer must travel, the poor-house is the last stage on the way to the grave." And in glancing at the alarming aspect which every where meets the eye of an observ- ing Englishman, the same Review says, all this " is chiefly owing to a radical defect in the con- stitution of the British government." A brief review of the principal items of the crushing system of taxation to which the British people have long been subjected, will make it cease to be a matter of astonishment that such appalling misery prevails over the British islands. THE BRITISH TARIFF. " From a very distant period, customs duties have been charged on most articles imported into, or exported from England and though inconsiderable at first, they increased with the increase of civilization and commerce, till they long ago formed one of the most copious sources of the public revenue, and now have at- tained to an extraordinary magnitude." (M'Cul- loch.) In 1596, the revenue derived from cus- toms duties was only 50,000. In 1792, only 4,409,000; while in 1839 it had swelled to 22,962,610. The schedule of the last Customs Act (3 & 4 William IV. c. 30,) contained 1150 arti- 100 PRESENT CONDITION OF cles subject to duty ; and of this number seven- teen alone produced 21,700,630, in 1839 ; while the remaining number, 1133, produced only 1,261,980, or scarcely enough to cover the ex- pense of collecting the duties. The following list of these seventeen articles, and the revenue they af- ford the government, with other statistics here given , I derive from Sir Henry ParnelFs " Financial Re- form," fourth edition, London, and from the "Re- port of the Committee appointed by the House of Commons, to inquire into the Customs, &c. Folio, 1840." 1 Sugar and Molasses - - - 4,827,018 2 Tea 3,658,800 3 Tobacco 3,495,686 4 Rum, Brandy, &c. - - - - 2,615,443 5 Wine 1,849,709 6 Timber ...... 1,603,194 7 Corn 1,098,779 8 Coffee 779,114 9 CottonWool 416,257 10 Silk Manufactured Goods 247,362 11 Butter 213,077 12 Currants 189,291 13 Tallow - 182,000 14 Seeds 145,323 15 Sheep's Wool 139,770 16 Raisins 134.589 17 Cheese 105,218 17 articles producing 21,700,630 I shall not attach any importance in this esti- mate to duties chargeable on articles of luxury, or those that are pernicious. From motives of hu- THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 101 manity, I do not object to any duty, however high, upon wines, distilled spirits, silks, and similar arti- cles, for the comfort and morals of the poor receive no advantage from them. But when human laws infringe upon the happiness of large classes of men, and by increasing the price of the necessa- ries of life, inflict suffering on the poor, I cannot be silent. All such legislation is unjust. We must not only consider the effect upon the labouring classes, of the duties levied for the pur- pose of REVENUE upon articles of prime neces- sity ', but the effect of duties levied solely for PRO- TECTION ; for sustaining monopoly, and augment- ing the incomes of the favored classes, at the ex- pense of the rest of the community. Unless we extend our calculation beyond the amount col- lected by customs, we shall have a very inadequate idea of the real burden imposed on the people. For example ; the duties collected on the CORN imported in 1839, were only a little more than $5,000,000 ; but as it will hereafter be shown, (see First Book,) this was not one twentieth part of the bread-tax that very year for before one pound went into the revenue from the duty on corn, its price in England had risen to double that on the Continent. Of the seventeen duties mentioned, yieldingnearly all the revenue, only tea, tobacco, wine, cotton wool, currants, and raisins, were imported for revenue alone : the remainder were levied, not to protect domestic industry, but domestic and colonial capi- 9* 102 PRESENT CONDITION OF talists and land owners from foreign competition. In the schedule, "there are, first, 84 duties on foreign colonial productions" says the Edinburgh Re- view, (Jan. 1841 ;) " secondly, duties on foreign manufactures of cotton, silk, wool, flax, hemp, glass, paper, soap, earthenware, metals, jewelry, blacking, ink, and every other kind of manufac- ture, however trivial and unimportant ; and thirdly, duties on com, flour, hops, malt, butter, cheese, bacon, pork, tongues, beef, fish, tallow, horses and asses, spirits, beer, cider, perry, fruits, vegetables, hay, seeds, iron, copper, tin, lead, and the ores of these metals. The importation of cat- tle, sheep, and swine, is altogether prohibited. This last list shows with what zeal those who are invested by the constitution with the power of making laws, have used that power to promote, by every practical means, the interests of the own- ers of landed property. The object of each of these duties is to keep up the rent of land, by pre- venting the prices of agricultural produce from be- ing lowered by the importation of foreign produce." The same writer adds, with much force : "In what- ever degree the duties effect this, they injure those who live by industry ; because the higher price that is thus maintained, is paid either out of the wages of labor or the profit of capital, and they benefit only the proprietors of land and tithes. Nothing, therefore, can be more inconsistent with justice, than this scheme of legislation a scheme for the advantage of comparatively a few, at the THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 103 expense of nearly the whole community ; and with respect to the prosperity of the country in industry and wealth, nothing can be more inconsistent with all sound principles. Sound reform is clearly wanted. The public interest imperatively re- quires, that every nation should have liberty to send us every kind of food at the lowest possible price." If England's policy had been guided by such enlightened philosophy as this, we should search in vain for the evidence of decline and prostration, that now meet our eye wherever we look over the kingdom. THE DUTIES ON SUGAR, in 1840, were 4,465, 044., or twenty-two millions of dollars. The duty on sugar produced in the British Colonies is 24s. per cwt. ; the duty on all other sugar is 63s. ! mak- ing every pound used in Great Britain costjiftee?i cents more than it would without the restriction ! This has excluded all sugar grown by other na- tions, (except a trifle imported in 1841,) and giv- ing to the British monopolists the power of com- pelling the poor to pay them any price they please to ask, or to go without it altogether. " The loaf sugar," says Mr. Lechford, in the Report of the Committee of which I have spoken, " which I used to buy at 72s., I am now paying 114s. for ; and the moist sugar for which I used to pay 52s. I am now paying 84s. and 86s. for ; and we are in- formed the price will be still higher." We learn from this report, that in 1820 the 104 PRESENT CONDITION OF amount of sugar consumed in the United King- dom and Ireland was 92,301 cwt., more than in 1839, although the population had increased over four millions ! This Report states too, that the consumption of sugar in Paris and Vienna is dou- ble the amount consumed in England in propor- tion to the population. The reason of this differ- ence is apparent. The poor Englishman, or Scotchman, or Irishman can make no extensive use of sugar, when he is compelled to pay three or four times as much as it costs in the United States. The West India Islands export their sugar to New York, and after paying the small duty levied by our Government, sell it to us for 5, 6, and 7 cents per pound. They would do the same to England were it not for the enormous duty re- quired ! It is the opinion of the friends of free-trade in England, that the consumption of sugar would increase from 100 to 200 per cent., were the duties no higher than in this country. But what cares the British monopolist, if the poor man is deprived of the common comforts of life ? COFFEE. The revenue derived from this arti- cle in 1840, was 922,468, or four and a half mil- lion dollars. This Report states that the duties on Coffee are so high, " they raise the price of it 80 per cent, in England above its price in any of the states of Europe." The duty on the coffee of the British colonies is 60?. or 11 cents per lb., (equal to the entire cost of it in New York.) On THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 105 that of all other countries, Is. 3d. (or three times the entire cost of it in New York.) This makes every Ib. of coffee consumed cost 30 cents more in consequence of monopoly. There are 25,000,000 Ibs. consumed annually in the three kingdoms, but as most of it is brought from the colonies, upon which the duty is only 6d. per Ib., the reve- nue receives less than a million sterling. It fol- lows, therefore, that the consumer is compelled to pay as high a tax to the colonial monopolists, as he pays to the government for a duty. TEA. The revenue derived from this article in 1840, was 3,473,963, or about seventeen million dollars. The heaviest duties have for a long time been imposed upon tea. Under the reign of the East India monopoly, " the duty, was in fact, about 200 per cent, ad valorem" or three times as much as the original cost. The ad valorem duties in 1834, and at present the duties are charged as follows : On Bohea per Ib. 1 6 " Congou, Twankay, Hyson-Skin, \ n n Orange, Pekoe, and Campol j " Soushong, Hyson, Young-Hyson, ) Gunpowder, Imperial, and all > 30 others not enumerated - - j " If we compare the duties with the prices at New York and Hamburg, they will be found to be exceedingly heavy," (M'Culloch.) " The price of bohea in the 'New York market," says the American edition of M'Culloch, "in 1834, was 106 PRESENT CONDITION OF from 13, to 16 cents per Ib," or less than half the duty in England. " To impose such a duty on an article, fitted to enter largely into the consump- tion of the lower classes, seems to be in the last degree oppressive and absurd." (M'Culloch.) "VVe are not left to speculate on the effect of such extravagant duties in raising the price, and conse- quently diminishing the consumption, of these articles among the lower classes, the report fur- nishes us with facts. " The company, by reducing the price of tea from about 2s. 6d. to Is. 10:jd. per Ib., (which was of course accompanied by a corresponding reduc- tion of duty,) increased the consumption from 1, 873,881 Ibs. in 182223, to 6,474,838 Ibs. in 1831 32. Here we have consumption more than trebled by a fall of about Is. 3d. per Ib. And we have not the slightest doubt, that a further fall of Is. 3d. would by bringing the article fairly with- in the command of a vastly greater number of consumers, extend the demand for it in a much greater degree." (Report.) M'Culloch also has one remark on this subject worthy of special notice : " We may also add that nothing' would do so much to weaken the pernicious habit of gin-drinking, as a fall in the price of tea, coffee, &c." The committee spoken of, feeling that facts on this point were desirable, examined the keepers of five principal coffee-houses in Lon- don. There were only, they state, a dozen of these houses in London twenty-five years ago THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 107 their present number is nearly 2000, and increas- ing at the rate of 100 a year. The price varies at these houses from Id. to 3d. a cup for coffee ; and one of these keepers who charges ld. stated to the committee, that he had from 1,500 to 1,800 persons daily at his house. The following is the evidence of Mr. Lechford : " Does a man come and obtain breakfast ? Yes ; he comes in the morning at four o'clock, and has a cup of coffee, a thin slice of bread and butter, and for that he pays \~d ; and then again at eight, for his breakfast, he has a cup of coffee, a penny loaf and a penny worth of butter, which is 3d. and at dinner time instead of going to a public-house, at one o'clock he comes in again. Would a reduction in the duties on coffee and sugar be a great and important advan- tage to the classes of society that resort to your house? Most material. And that too in a moral point of view, as well as with regard to their pecuniary means ? Most decidedly. Then those societies which formerly met in public-houses, are now gradually resorting to coffee-houses ? They are, particularly at the east end of the town ; I believe that not one-third of my customers ever go into a public house at all. These witnesses complain bitterly of the pressure of the present high prices of coffee and sugar on their trade ; and say that if they continue, they will be compelled to raise the price of coffee ; and thus take a step which will have a very bad effect in checking the habit of drinking coffee in preference to beer and 108 PRESENT CONDITION OF spirits. They say, on the contrary, if the duties were lowered, the consumption of coffee would soon be five times greater than it now is ; and that this is not an extravagant anticipation, is shown by the fact, that in Ireland coffee is now sold in place of whiskey, in the public-houses in the districts under Father Mathew's influence." The Edinburgh Review, estimates that the con- sumption of coffee would increase from 25,000,000 Ibs. to 100,000,000, even if the duty 'were re- duced to 6d. : and that the revenue from it would also increase. But there are some economists who think that sugar, molasses, tea and coffee do the poor more harm than good arid it cannot be considered oppressive to place them by taxation beyond their reach ! What will such persons say of the taxes upon MEAT AND BREAD ? The importation of cattle, sheep, and swine, being prohibited, and heavy duties which amount almost to prohibition being laid on every other kind of meat, this great necessary of human life has been nearly placed beyond the reach of the lower classes. The English are called a beef- eating nation ; a portion of them are, but to apply this epithet to some millions of the lower classes, is as great a misnomer as can well be conceived; and as for the Irishman, why every body knows that his piece of beef generally turns out to be a potatoe. In giving his evidence before the committee, Dr. Bowring says : " I have made an estimate of THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 109 the probable amount of taxes levied on the people of this country, by the inhibition of the import of butchers' meat. I have grounded it on the only country where I have got any thing approximating as to consumption. Prussia consumes 465,000,000 Ibs. of butchers' meat, with a population of about 14,000,000. I estimate that the consumption of butchers' meat in this country cannot be less than 50 Ibs. per head, per annum ; it has been fre- quently estimated at double. Now, this in 25,000,000 of consumers makes a consumption of 1,250,000,000 Ibs. per annum. If the prohibition of foreign cattle, and foreign butchers' meat, only raised the price here one penny a pound, it will be found that there is an indirect taxation of more than 5,000,000 levied upon the community. If the added value is 2d. a pound, which I am dis- posed to think is nearer the truth, it will be then seen that 10,000,000 are taken from the commu- nity, in consequence of the prohibition of foreign meat ; and if that should appear correct, which many statisticians have considered as the average of consumption in this country, (viz.) 100 Ibs. per annum, that is, about one-third of a pound per day per individual if the consumption be as great as that, then a sum of 20,000,000 is levied annually upon the consumer, upon that article alone. 1 ' I have been assured by the largest dealers in pro- visions in New- York and Boston men who were familiar with the prices of every description of meat in England and in this country that they VOL. i. 10 110 PRESENT CONDITION OF could, after paying all the expense of transporta- tion, deliver all kinds of American meat in London at less than one-half its average price there for the last twenty years, if it were not for the heavy du- ties it is compelled to pay. If this be so, the tax paid by the British people, in consequence of the duty upon meat, is far greater than Dr. Bowring's highest estimate. The Edinburgh Review says that not less than a fourth part of every man's expen- diture on these articles that are protected, is paid to uphold the monopolists, besides that portion which goes to the revenue. CORN LAWS. I have so fully entered into the statistics of the Corn Laws in my former work, (see Glory and Shame of England, 2d. vol. p. 230,) and as I shall also have occasion to refer again to the subject in the Fourth Book of these volumes, that I will here only give the result of these calcu- lations. Those who are informed on this subject, as every person should be before he is qualified to give an intelligent opinion, will not charge me with extravagance, carelessness, or error, when I make the assertion, that the average price of wheat and all other grains in Great Britain, for the last thirty years, has been double the price in the Ame- rican and continental markets during the same pe- riod. This statement can be abundantly substan- tiated, by referring to M'Culloch's Statistics Par- liamentary Reports, containing the returns of the THE BRITISH PEOPLE. Ill Corn Receivers the Statistics of Mr. J. R. Porter, Mr. J. M'Gregor, Mr. J. D. Hume, and Dr. Bow- ring, than whom no men in the world have paid more attention to the subject, or had better facilities for arriving at the truth. These same authorities estimate that 12s. per quarter will pay all the ave- rage expense of transporting grain from the Ame- rican and continental markets to London. We have then the following result from these calcula- tions. Average Price of Wheat per quarter, in ) fi j London for 30 years, up to 1842 - $ Average Price of the 15 largest Corn Mar- 1 kets in Europe and America for the > 32s. same time ------ j 32s. Deduct Expense of Transportation 12s. Extra Price per Quarter by Corn Law Tax 20s. This Tax on 30 million Quarters of Wheat 30,000,000. This vast sum of $150,000,000 is paid by 27,000,000 of people, every year, to 30,000 land owners ! As we have already remarked, this is only the tax upon wheat. The number of quar- ters of barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, &c. consum- ed, is as great as that of wheat, and estimated at half the value. The Corn Caws apply to all kinds of grain, and have raised the price of all in the same proportion. It follows, therefore, that the tax upon them is half as great as that upon wheat, (viz.) 15,000,000 or $75,000,000. There are many other of the necessaries of life subjected 112 PRESENT CONDITION OP to a high Tariff, which has a most pernicious ef- fect in placing them beyond the means of the poor to enjoy. If we had space we should speak of them at length. Butter, cheese, cocoa, fish, eggs, fruit, honey, lard, tallow, maccaroni, onions, pearl- barley, pickles, potatoes, rice, sausages, tapioca, malt, tobacco, &c. J.QQ QQQ ings, &c. - - - - -.) ' " Oblations, Offerings, and Compositions ) on nnn for the Four Great Festivals - - J OUlUW " College and School Foundations - 682,150 " Lectureships in Towns and populous ) places - $ " Chaplainships and Offices in Public) Institutions - - - - -$ " New Churches and Chapels - - 94,050 Total Revenues of the Established Clergy, 9,459,565 Or $45,405,912 ! ! As the great proportion of this sum comes from tithes, and the value of tithes depends on the price of corn, the revenues of the THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 139 church must have been much greater for the last seven years for the price of corn since 1834 has been nearly doubled in England. Besides in this estimate, Mr. Colton has omitted several points. He says " If we add the church rates, somewhat more than half a million, which item has not been noticed, the cost of litigation between the people and the clergy, and the building of new churches out of the appropriation by Parliament of 1,500, 000 for this purpose, it will raise the sum to nearly or quite half of the expenses of the government ! J P I shall risk nothing by saying that no person can carefully and candidly weigh the evidence that has been accumulated on this subject by the Reformers in England, without coming to the conclusion that not less than FIFTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS are paid by the people @f England, Ireland and Wales every year to maintain the established church ! A church to which more than one half of Great Britain, and probably nine tenths of Ireland are utterly opposed ! A respectable authority in England a few years ago, exhibited a table of facts showing that the administration of the Church of England to six and a half millions of hearers, costs as much as the administration of all other forms of Christianity in all parts of the civilized world to over two hundred million hearers ! Again, I ask the question, who need be told that this prodigious amount is paid by the people and not by the aristocracy. The poor man who 140 PRESENT CONDITION OF raises ten bushels of wheat, must give one of them towards the revenue of a proud priest he never sets eye on. A tenth of the gross income of the people, goes into the pockets of the clergy. Captain Ross, a Tory, said this present year in Parliament to the evident uneasiness of his friends, that one fifth of the rent of the country went to the clergy. For it must be remembered that the tithe is a tenth of the gross income without any allowance for the expense of cultivation. If the poor man has any thing left, after being thus fleeced by his shepherd, and a child dies he must pay the curate a burial fee, and last of all a fee for the privilege of erecting a tomb stone over the ashes of his dead. While his earnings are thus taken from him, how does the prelate expend his income? In building palaces, and rivaling the luxury and magnificence of princes. This is the extortion of the clergy. ARISTOCRACY is its twin sister. The Bishops are ex-officio members of the House of Lords bear titles, use worldly civil power, and mingle actively in all the affairs of the state, as peers of the realm " It is no uncommon spectacle," says an English writer, " to see the Lord Bishops hurrying down to the House of Lords on what is called, ' a field day,' to vote down the liberties of THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 141 the people." As aristocrats of the land, they are every day becoming more and more opulent, while distress is overwhelming all the lower, and many of the middle classes. One and all they are firm defenders of the Corn Laws, which are urging the people into famine and revolution. They are allied in their interests to the land owners, whose wealth increases just in proportion as bread is taxed into starvation prices. They resist any proposition to make the necessaries of life cheap, for the splendour of their equipage the magnifi- cence of their dwellings, and pleasuring grounds depend upon keeping bread at a high price for a tenth of the produce of the soil coming into their pockets, and it matters very much that wheat shall be made to sell for 80s. a quarter, and not 40s. for the difference in price will double their income. Thus it becomes the interest of twelve thousand clergymen to bring all their influence to support the aristocracy of the Empire and we find the whole weight of the established church thrown into the scale of oppressive legislation. How wide asunder from the benevolence of the Gospel, is the organization of a church whose interests are so violently at war with the good of the people ! We confess that in searching for any- thing apostolic in the practice of the established church, we meet with poor success. Thus to sustain its princely dignity and continue its ex- tortion in the midst of general distress, it must resort to OPPRESSION. 142 PRESENT CONDITION OF OPPRESSION. The whole system of tithes and church rates is one of oppression. The London Times of July 25th, 1831, says, " If venality be imputed to any class of Englishmen, look not to the columns of a newspaper for your proofs look to the Red-Book to the Reports of Parliament to the list of pensions and sinecures to colonial functionaries to mercenary lords to pamphle- teering, jobbing, mitre hunting dignitaries of the church to the innumerable tribe of vermin bred within the folds of that poisonous mantle which has wrapped for ages and gradually numbed the Herculean power of England." Two years after the same paper said, " The church of Ireland is finally one which has for centuries in any mea- sure of severity, of exaction, of oppression, sig- nalized itself by more than concurrence with the tyrannical spirit of the civil government. It is felt at once to be a weight upon the country and a degradation." The church arrogates to herself the control of the universities where a son of a Dissenter is for- bidden to enter ; because he cannot subscribe to the thirty-nine articles, he must be shut out of the highways of learning. The church takes the property and the education of the land under her own control. Not satisfied with this, she claims the receptacles of the dead. A Dissenting minis- ter is forbidden to perform the funeral rites over his own dead in the consecrated burying ground. The child that has been baptized, educated, THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 143 brought to the truth by a Dissenting minister, grown up under his care ; been consoled by him in sickness, and cheered by him in the last fearful hour, must die with the certainty that he will be interred by a stranger, if he wishes to sleep in the old burying ground where his fathers rest ; or, (if no Dissenting burial place is near,) be buried on the world's wide common by his own minister. If his friends will consent to have the hours of their bereavement embittered by the presence of one who insulted and wronged their dead while living, and treats them in their distress with scorn, then indeed they can bury their loved and lost one in the old church yard. But if, as it often happens, the clergyman of the parish is a fox- hunting, wine-drinking, godless man, and the Dis- senter under the keen sense of oppression and in- sult, under the deeper consciousness of the man's unworthiness and heartlessness, refuses to have him minister at the burial of his child, if he would have him rest with the ashes of his ances- tors " with pious sacrilege," a grave he must steal. And if the minister who has prayed with him bound up his broken heart, and spoken the words of truth and earnestness to him, perform the services over the stolen burial, he is compelled to do it standing without the paling of the church- yard, while the suffering friends listen from with- in ! ! And this is the charity of the church of Christ these the shepherds of the flock, whose office it is, like their Great Master, "not to break 144 PRESENT CONDITION OP the already bruised reed !" This is Christianity ! The wild Indian of the wood has more humanity the savage of the desert shows more sympathy for bereaved men. They will not invade the dead ; even the jackals wait till the living have retired to their dwellings but not so with the church of Christ it casts out the dead before they are interred, in the very face of the living if they never subscribed to the 39 articles ! ! Dissenters are' obliged to sustain their own churches and clergy, and pay just as much to the established church as its own members. Hence to obey both his conscience and the government, the Dissenter must first pay a tenth of his entire income to the es- tablishment, besides being called on frequently for church rates, which are taxes levied for the pur- pose of keeping churches in repair, &c. to the ex- tent of about $3,000,000 per annum \ and finally, he must erect his own chapel and support his own minister. It is no small compliment to the Dissenters to say, that in addition to all these ex- penses, they raise more to support missionaries abroad and benevolent enterprises at home, than the churchmen of England. The author of the "Natural History of Enthusiasm," passes upon them the following just tribute of admiration : " The sums yearly raised by Dissenters for bene- volent objects, reflect a lustre upon England brighter than all the glory of her arms." I might here record many instances of generosity among Dissenters, illustrating this remark I will THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 145 only allude to one. I was told by two highly re- spectable maiden ladies, in Liverpool, that the va- rious sums they were required to pay annually to the Church and the State, amounted to $123 no inconsiderable part of this sum going into the pockets of the clergyman of the church, from whose ministrations they received not the least advan- tage, since they attended a Unitarian chapel, To me this seemed the more oppressive, for every shilling they were thus taxed for the Church, left them one shilling less to pay to their own minis- ter, who devoted himself with great fidelity to his congregation. These ladies had long maintained themselves by keeping one of the most genteel boarding-houses in the upper part of the town ; and although their means could not be supposed to be so ample as to admit of any large offerings to the cause of benevolence, yet I had occasion to know, that the poor who came every day to their door were not frowned empty away, and that they contributed generously to the support of their own minister. All this was done with a Christian spirit, inspiring two sisters, who stand alone in the world, to deny themselves, that they may know the lux- ury of doing good to others. I was sitting with them one morning, as a friend entered to solicit charity for a family in distress ; what they had was freely given. After the person was gone, they spoke of the trials to their feelings they often ex- perienced, of not being able to select for themselves VOL. i. 13 146 PRESENT CONDITION OF the objects of their benevolence, rather than have those objects dictated by ecclesiastical law. It often happens that Dissenters refuse to pay the taxes levied on them to support the Church, since they regard it as helping to uphold a worldly and corrupt institution. They then suffer dis- traint on property. Anything on which the offi- cer can lay his hands, be it the last means of sub- sistence, the last comfort procured for a sick family, is taken. The distress thus caused is often very great, and such scenes are witnessed every day. Last year a man by the name of John Cockin, suffered distraint on his property for refusing to pay Is. Wd. for Easter offerings, in addition to his tithes. He declared this was a tax never imposed on him before, and he would not pay it. The warrant for attaching his goods, process and all, swelled the amount to Us. lOrf. which the magis- trates took in dried bacon. This was done by the agent of the Vicar of Almondbury, Rev. Lewis Jones. The claims of the Church are never outlawed, although not enforced for years before. Unless they can be shown to have been abolished before the year 1180, they can be enforced with the cer- tainty of being collected. Thus any titheable pro- perty, that has been suffered to go exempt for a long period, can be subjected to the tax when the clergyman pleases. These clergymen cannot even pay for the washing of their own surplices even the poor Dissenting minister himself, is equally THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 147 subjected to all these taxes with his own people. Colton tells a story of a rector, who one morning made, what he professed to be a. friendly call, upon a Dissenting clergyman, who happened to reside in his own parish. The Dissenter was pleased to receive the call, since he hoped from the bland ad- dress of the rector, that he designed to open friendly intercourse with him, which had never before been extended, although he had lived for years in his immediate neighbourhood. The Dis- senter showed him his grounds, and took great pleasure in displaying his little premises, and giv- ing him a history of his improvements. " There is about half an acre here as you see," said the dissenting minister : " Half of it is ornamented, where I take pleasure with my thirteen children, and the other half furnishes vegetables to feed them. You would hardly believe it, but this little patch, under the culture of my own hand, goes a great way towards supplying the table of my numerous family." "Indeed, sir. And how many years has it been so productive ?" " Some half a dozen or more." The vicar confessed himself greatly pleased, and having ascertained all he came there to know, withdrew, wishing his dissenting brother a "good morning." Now for the result ! Immediately after, the rector's steward sent to the Dissenter's Study, a bill for tithes on the little garden of 6, or nearly $30 per year, for six years previous, and the same for the then current year, amounting in all to two 148 PRESENT CONDITION OF hundred dollars. The rector was a single man, and had a large salary. The dissenting clergy- man had a family of thirteen children, and a small congregation, who could afford him with the greatest economy but a slender support. But such is the tyranny of the English Church, there was no relief for the outraged man. To pay this large bill, was swept away every comfort he had gathered around him, and reduced his cheerful family to want and sorrow ! And yet this is " Apostolical !" Upon the poor dissenter, or the poor churchman, this system operates with great severity. There are a vast number of instances where a poor man, whose whole tithes do not amount to more than one or two shillings per acre, and yet subject him to have his cow, sheep &c., driven to pound six times a year for tithes liable each time to a charge of 2s. 6d. driver's fees, besides expense of impounding ! I said that titheable property must often pay church taxes, according to the ipse dixit of the clergyman, however unjust it may be. Says Raumer : In many parts of England, a lamb had from time immemorial, been reckoned at Wd. but a clergyman lately demanded it should be reck- oned at 1, 17s. d. or between $8 and $9. By this oppressive act alone, his income was increased 200 a year ! A farmer wished to take a cow and calf to market the tithe receiver forbade it, till the calf was old enough to be taxed, and could THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 149 live without its mother. Another refused to receive a tenth of the milk daily which the farmer might more easily spare, and demanded all the milk from all the cows every tenth day. In another case the individual was compelled to keep the strictest account of the eggs how many were laid how many were stolen by animals, and the number put to hatch. A tithe of five cabbages and three heads of cellery, was the cause on one occasion of an expensive law suit. Not long since, there was a sale of the private library of a Baptist clergyman of Waterloo Chapel, Waterloo Road, which had been taken on a war- rant of distress for the non payment of 16s. 6d. for two church rates. Mr. Francis, the Dissenter, refused to pay the rates from principle ; believing it both unjust and unscriptural, he preferred to suffer loss of property rather than sanction the law by his obedience. The first lot, contained a copy of Henry's Bible, 3 vols. Baptist Magazine 13 vols. and Ridgeway's Body of Divinity, 2 vols. As the " Bible" " went up" " the church rates" " the church rates" re- sounded through the room. At times it was almost impossible to proceed with the sale. Only one person was found to bid, and he was employed to do it. Yet even he was forced to make this confession, from the scorn that was heaped on him by the indignant spectators. After the sale was over, it was proposed to give three groans for 13* 150 PRESENT CONDITION OF church rates but this was prevented by the friends of Mr. Francis. But this is not all. The oppression of the church does not stop with warrants of distress, and legalized robbery of the poor. Not satisfied with taking what belongs to the dissenter, it often takes the dissenter himself when he refuses to pay the unjust, extortionate tax, she imposes on him. John Thorogood's is not an isolated case. A man by the name of Barnes, was imprisoned eight months, for persisting in this refusal : and his imprisonment was attended with all the indignity an incensed church dared heap upon an innocent man ; The Morning Advertiser of Dec. 31, 1840, says " the ink had scarcely time to dry which signed the warrant for Mr. Barnes' incarceration in Leicester Jail, when the Rev. Dr. Lyle procured the commitment of a poor widow of the name of Young, to Monmouth Prison, for an arrear of tithes of 3,105. What matters it to a tyrannical establishment, whether the victim be a man or a woman. The church is as devoid of gallantry as of generosity. Mercy even to a woman is regarded as a weakness. All respect for a woman is given up, if she have the misfortune to fall into the church's debt, Nor will it mend the matter, even though the unhappy oifender should, as in this case, happen to be a widow. Even for widows, clerical cormorants have no bowels of compas- sion !" Bad as were the cases of Thorogood and Barnes, they were mildness and mercy compared THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 151 with that of the widow, the victim of Dr. Lyle's cupidity. They refused from conscientious scru- ples, to meet the exactions of the church. They urged not the plea of poverty or inability for their non-payment. Sarah Young did not pay simply because she could not. So far from incurring the charge of contumacy, she distinctly intimated her willingness to pay, provided she had the means, and only pleaded for a little time. Her language was " have patience with me and I will pay thee all." " That mercy I to others show, " That mercy show to me " is a prayer which Dr. Lyle would not probably incur the danger of making ! It must be remarked also, that the courts from which are issued these warrants of distress and imprisonment are ecclesiastical tribunals. The clergyman is a civil officer, as well as a servant of God, and many an injured man can bear witness that " he beareth not the sword in vain." How does it look for a " successor of the Apos- tles" to issue a warrant for the imprisonment of a poor man on Saturday night, and on Sunday en- ter the temple of God as the only legitimate am- bassador of Heaven, and preach with the "woe" denounced by the Almighty against those " who oppress the poor" impending over his head. On Saturday night sending the man to jail for refus- 152 PRESENT CONDITION OF ing to pay him what he will squander in luxuries and on the Sabbath, pretending to lift up his voice against covetousness and hard-heartedness, in the name of the Saviour who preached the Gospel to the poor without money and without price ! In the language of another, " These ministers of the meek Christ speak like lambs and devour like dragons, anoint their lips with the oil of cha- rity and defile their hands with blood." No won- der an Englishman has said, " Every distraint had for Church rates, and every public sale for the like purpose, is- a nail in the coffin of the Church Establishment." In Ireland this oppression is not borne with so much moderation. England has been obliged to keep a large standing army there to execute her injustice. Lord John Russell declared that with- out this army, not a penny would be collected from a single Catholic in Ireland for the support of the Church. The Irish blood' is often too hot to submit tamely to these violations of home and property ; this enormous tax to support what they most bit- terly hate. Who that ever read it, has forgotten the slaughter of Rathcormac? Having procured a military force from the government, Archdeacon Ryder headed the troops himself, and led them down to the cottage of widow Ryan to force the collection of 5 tithes, which she had not paid because she could not. It was regarded by the populace as a barbarous cruelty upon a poor wi- THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 153 dow, and they pressed him to desist. " He gave orders first to draw swords, next to load, and at last tojire. He was obeyed. Nine persons were killed, and as many wounded." There were 2900 catholics in the parish and only 29 protestants, and half of these were mem- bers of the Archdeacon's family. The tithes of the parish were between $7000 and $8000 a year. The " Minister of the Cross" shot down more per- sons than his whole congregation amounted to, exclusive of his own family ! The heart-sicken- ing details of the widow searching among the dead bodies for her son, her finding him with his mouth open, and his eyes set in the fixedness of death, the closing of his eyes, and the arranging of the body in the decency of death, amid the blood were he lay, are all too terrible to be mi- nutely described ! Another widow had two sons killed in this ecclesiastical slaughter. " When their lifeless, but still bleeding bodies were brought into her house, she threw herself on them, and exclaimed in Irish, ' They are not dead, for they are giving their blood.' " And when the terrible truth forced itself on her that her noble boys were no more, she went mad ! This bloody massacre was to get 5 worth of corn due to the Archdeacon for tithes. Stanzas have been composed to commemmorate the bloody scene, which shall yet be sung at the funeral of the Church Establishment in Ireland. The last verse runs thus, 154 PRESENT CONDITION OF " The widow knelt, and she muttered low, " ' On the men of Rathcormac wo I wo ! wo !' " The curse of the widow who shall bear : " God of the childless hear her prayer !" He will hear it, or the Bible is a fable, and Hea- ven a lie. That song will be incorporated in the barbaric literature of the lower classes of Ireland. That fearful tragedy shall be handed down from generation to generation, making each Irishman a sworn Hannibal to the English Church until it is overthrown. It shall yet ring in their wild battle cry as they pour on their foes. That murder scene shall be emblazoned on their banners, and nerve many a heart to deeds of wilder strength, long after the descendants of him who committed it shall have crumbled to dust. Cowered by the tremendous physical force that continually frowns on them, they remain silent. Yet each of these deeds of oppression and murder are treasured up in their hearts, handed down from father to son, and wait the day of vengeance ! Whether Ire- land shall ever be free or not, we cannot tell, but that she will have a bloody reckoning with Eng- land unless her oppressive hand is removed, we cannot doubt. WORLDLINESS OF THE CLERGY. One half of the livings of the Church are in the gift of the aris- tocracy, and most of the rest are within the reach THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 155 of their influence. This influence is all wielded to sustain the wealth, magnificence, and power of the Church ; and to concentrate them in the hands of the aristocracy. The livings are held like other property, and bestowed according to the owner's pleasure. In this way it is no uncommon thing to see several livings given to one clergyman who either sells them out to the highest bidder, or hires poor curates to do the work for a small salary, and pockets the avails of the livings himself. Enormous revenues thus flow into the hands of influential families, which place humble indivi- duals on a footing with princes, when they are once elevated to the mitre. Says Colton, " The Beresford family, in all its branches, at the head of which is the Archbishop of Armagh, in Ireland, is said to realize annually from the Church, Army, and Navy, by patronage, principally from the Church, 100,000 or $480,000. Warburton, Bishop of Cloyne, a poor man at the beginning, left from his acquisitions out of his diocese, 120,000 or $575,000 to his children. It was stated by Sir John Newport, in Parliament, that three Irish Bishops, within fifteen years, had left to their families 700,000 or $3,360,000, average to each, $1,120,000. A former Bishop of Cloyne, as I have seen stated, went to Ireland without a shilling, and after eight years died worth more than 300,000 or $1,440,000. The late Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derby, resided twenty years abroad, without being nice in the choice of his com- 156 PRESENT CONDITION OF pany, and received in the meantime from his dio- cese revenues to the amount of 240,000 or $1,152,000. More than one-third of the incum- bents of the Irish Protestant Church are non-resi- dents ; some of whom, with incomes from 5,000 to 10,000, abstracted from the parishes, are living on the continent with their families. The Arch- bishop of Cashel has livings in his gift worth 35,000 or $168,000 annually ; those in the gift of the Bishop of Cloyne are quoted at 50,000 or $240,000 as their annual value; ditto, of the Bishop of Cork, at 30,000 or $144,000 ; ditto, of the Bishop of Ferns, a similar amount. Some reader may not understand what is meant by pluralities. Suppose a Bishop lived in New- York in one of the elegant mansions in the upper part of the town, with his liveried servants, out- riders, &c. on an annual income of $250,000. Being entitled to one-tenth of the income of six of the richest towns in Genesee county, this large revenue would easily accrue to him. This is what is meant by the term pluralities the income of several parishes going to one person, through the constitution of the church and the favor of politi- cal friends. But do you ask why the income of one-tenth of the annual revenue of six towns, or it may be fifty, is given to one man who lives three hundred miles distant, and who preaches but one sermon a year to the people from whose pockets this revenue comes? This is just the question the English people are now asking. It THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 157 is almost incredible, that such a system of extor- tion by a church, should be tolerated in an enlight- ened nation. Yet in England and Ireland there are several thousand clergymen who receive the reve- nues of parishes where they do not reside, and in which they perform no labour. And multitudes of the dignitaries of the church, and powerful members of the aristocracy, hold these livings in every part of the empire, and transfer them to their sons and near connexions. But to resume the figure if this Bishop in New- York should transfer the annual income of one of these Genesee towns, amounting to $15,000, to his son or son-in-law, who never re- sided in the parish, but sported away his time in Washington, this transfer would be called the gift of a living, and that son or son-in-law a non-resi- dent, because he would take annually the rich fleece of the flock presented him by the " succes- sor of the Apostles," without residing in his parish or bestowing upon it a single thought, except when the tithes came due. His office would be that of a sinecure, because it would be literally without care. One would suppose this would not often oc- cur, as it is such a gross violation of justice and religion. Yet it is so common, that not one half of all the clergymen of the church are found in those places any considerable part of the year per- forming the duties of their office. In Hansan's O Debates, (1103) quoted by Raumer, we find it stated, that there are only 4,416 clergymen who VOL. i. 14 158 PRESENT CONDITION OF live where their duty demands, while 6,080 are out of their places ! The number is stated to be still larger by some other authorities. But as if to make an experiment on the credu- lity and forbearance of man, not satisfied with such outrages on religion and humanity, these livings are often sold at auction to the highest bidder, like slaves in the shambles, only it seems more like sacrilege to speculate upon an ambas- sadorship from Heaven. These parishes are of course sold to the highest bidder without regard to his character or the use he will make of his power. They may fall into the hands of the rankest infidel or the vilest debauchee ; but this is a question the church cares little about. These auctions are advertised in London Jour- nals, in the same columns with stocks. The London Morning Herald, April 15, 1830, contain- ed the following : " To be sold the next presentation to a vicarage, in one of the midland counties, and in the imme- diate neighbourhood of one or two of the first packs of fox hounds in the kingdom. The pre- sent annual income about 580 ; subject to Cu- rate's salary. The incumbent in his 60th year." In other words, if there is a gentleman in the united kingdom who has money, and a son who has neither brains nor character enough for any thing else, let the good father come on and attend the sale. A curate can be obtained for 30. a year, to preach to the congregation, which could THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 159 assemble in a vestry and leave room for a few Dissenters, and then " one or two of the first packs of fox hounds in the kingdom !" Delightful in- deed ! The living is purchased, all hands pray most earnestly for the death of the present incum- bent ; " and in due time the joyful news comes, that he has gone off in a fit of apoplexy, or broken his neck in a steeple chase. After the season is over in London, the family go down to the vicar- age, the son procures a sermon from his pale cu- rate, (who, as in duty bound, says nothing about it,) preaches just 14 minutes and 45 seconds after which the circle of friends assemble at the parsonage to dine. The sermon is pronounced capital the wine finer still. In due time, under the inspiring influence of the Falternian, the old man becomes prouder of his son than he ever supposed he would be, and my Lord Patronage, who is present, becomes benevolent withal, and they really think the new incumbent is so clever, (i. e. gets such glorious dinners and has such re- spectable connexions) that he must not be over- looked, and my Lord Patronage agrees to mention his case to My Lord the apostolical- wire-puller, and together it shall all be arranged the path to ecclesiastical preferment is opened, and on the swimming, half-glazed eye of the young divine, the image of a mitre glitters in the distance. The chase is settled for the following day, and next morning, " Tally ho !" rings over the parish, and away go the hounds ! 160 PRESENT CONDITION OF " This is no caricature, it is a living reality," said Lord Mountcashel in the House of Lords, " I know an archdeacon in- Ireland who keeps one of the best packs of fox hounds in the country, ano- ther clergyman not seven miles distant from the former, has also a pack of hounds with which he regularly hunts ; and I know another, who after his duties in the church are performed, meets his brother-huntsmen at the communion table on Sunday, to arrange with them where the hounds are to start from the next day." Any one who will read the London Journals, particularly the Court Journal, will see the names of scores of church dignitaries, who figure largely at the races, dramatic fetes, theatres, balls, masque- rades, &c. The North Devonshire Journal of last year, Nov. 11, contained the following notice : " Clerical Dinner Party:'' " The sporting friends of the Reverend John Russel gave him a dinner on Friday Last, at the Golden Lion, in this town, Barnstable, en which occasion, they presented him with a picture by Mr. Lowden, of Bath, representing the Rev. gen- tleman, mounted on his favourite hunter, sur- rounded with his dogs. The likenesses are said to be faithful, particularly of his horse, and the execution as highly creditable to the rising artist. The picture was presented to Mr. Russel by his friends, as a tribute to his unwearied exertions in support of the sports of the field." THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 161 This is a fair specimen of not a few of the "successors of the apostles," in the established church. What kind of an appearance would Paul make '-mounted on his favourite hunter, surrounded by his dogs." " The unwearied ex- ertions of " Matthew, Mark, Luke and John," in supporting the " sports of the field." Why has not some " rising artist" thought of composing a picture of the apostles retiring from the Lord's table to the vestry, to arrange where the hounds are to start from the next day? Clerical fox hunters should patronize such designs ; they would help the common mind, which is so obtuse, to discovering the resemblance between the estab- lished clergy and the apostles. But seriously, if Paul had attended one of these auctions of liv- ings, or clerical dinners ? would he not most likely, in his bold, straight forward way, have had a word to say, and judging from his speech, would he not most likely have been taken for a Dissen- ter ? When Diodorus Siculus bought the Roman Empire at auction, wise men augured its speedy downfall. It was not long after the Jewish tem- ple was desecrated by money changers, that that gorgeous structure smoked with the ground. It may be so with the church of England. It may be said I select isolated facts to illustrate the general condition of the church, and therefore afford a distorted view of it. I do not suppose the clergy to be all depraved, worldly men. Nor do I suppose things are in quite as bad a state as 14* 162 PRESENT CONDITION OF they were when the good John Newton said, there were not three hundred among the ten thousand clergy of the establishment who preached the Gospel of Christ. But I am quite willing to risk the assertion, that at the present time not one half of them either preach evangelical doctrines, or profess to be serious Christians ! I should not be thought extravagant by the best judges, perhaps, should I make the number very much greater. The church of England has given to the world some of the greatest and best of men. Ever since the fires of Oxford and Smithfield were put out, there have been learned and holy men nurtured in the bosom of the English church. What age or nation beside, can open a scroll where you find such names as Butler, Brown, Stillingfleet, Tillot- son, Boyle, Law, Leighton, Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor and in later times what names are more honoured than those of Newton, Scott, Cecil, Legh Richmond, Buchanan, Henry Martyn and Simeon ? Are there better men than Baptist Noel, M'Neil, Melville and Bickersteth ? I have met with some of these last mentioned, and heard them preach, and I do not know that I ever listen- ed to any preachers with more pleasure. I only wonder that these men who acknowledge and la- ment the evils I have spoken of, should be so deeply wedded to the establishment ; since these evils have always existe'd in the church, and spring legitimately from it in its alliance with the state. On several occasions I heard Baptist Noel, and THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 163 of the two thousand in his congregation, I did not see one who did not seem deeply impressed with the truth. The congregation was made up chiefly (in his Chapel of Ease) from the humbler walks of life. The preaching was just what it should be. The most sublime truths of Christianity il- lustrated in pure and simple language, the most tender and affectionate appeals were made to the conscience, and the highest motives to holiness urged. The speaker convinced me that he had a message from God, and felt it in his own soul. When the assembly broke up, you could discover that many heads which had been bowed for an hour were bent in tears they went forth silently each had listened for himself not a word could be heard in the porch as the assembly separated. This, I exclaimed, is Christianity, pure and unde- filed. One loves to witness such scenes. I care not whether I worship in a spacious and magnifi- cent temple, with the pomp of a cathedral ser- vice, or in the log school-house^ in a clearing of the Missouri forest, so that I but hear a message of love and truth from my Father in Heaven de- livered by a man, whose earnestness, fervor, and simplicity tell me he feels the truth himself. One scene I may, perhaps, briefly allude to, which will not soon fade from my memory. I had the pleasure of attending a Sabbath School Jubilee at the house of Mr. Noel, near old Epping forest. A thousand Sunday-school children from London met there, according to his custom of gathering 164 PRESENT CONDITION OF once a year, all the scholars and teachers connect- ed with his church and chapel, to his house for an entertainment. There was a book, fruits, and a bouquet of flowers for every child. It was a beau- tiful sight. A thousand children could be seen o playing on the green lawn at the back of the house, nearly all dressed in white, and all wild with the excitement of pure country air, and rural sports. I passed an hour or two with Mr. Noel, walking over his grounds. He spoke freely of the Church, its abuses, corruptions, pride, and world- liness. I expressed great surprize that one who knew and felt all this, should consider it his duty to remain in the position he occupied. He wished me to make a proper distinction between the Church of Christ and its corruptions, for it was the real Zion, although its garments were soiled with the filth of the world. I inquired the feelings that existed between Churchmen and Dissenters. He replied, " Holy men, I find, are everywhere more attached to the spirit than the forms of religion, and there are many in communion with the Church, and more, perhaps, who dissent from it, who have heartily united in several noble, benev- olent objects, willing to acknowledge each other brethren of one common Lord. We feel that we cannot in any manner so effectually break down the walls that have so long separated the sympa- thies and hearts of Churchmen and Dissenters as by associating ourselves together in spreading the Saviour's truth. It softens the feelings and binds THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 165 the hearts of God's people together, to go forth hand in hand to win a triumph for holiness and philanthropy in the earth. Oh ! if Christendom could have turned her arms against the empire of darkness, and not have buried them in her own bowels, the world would long ago have been made bright as heaven. I am persuaded that sectarian jealousies have done more to obstruct the progress of Christianity than almost all other causes, and the Christian Church in all its branches must give up its bigotry, before she can expect the world to embrace the doctrines and spirit of the Saviour." Here, too, I met him who was for many years the curate of Legh Richmond. He related to me many interesting circumstances in the history of that illustrious man. These are the bright spots in the picture. In the establishment there are but few men like Baptist Noel. By the greater part of the clergy, such men are avoided and all we can say is that they are exceptions to the general rule the con- stitution and practice of the State Religion has no tendency to produce them. I have dwelt upon this point to show the reader that I am not insensible to the good things that do exist in the general mass of corruption. But I have unfolded the character of the church, first to show what the establishment tolerates, second, The abuses to which it is subject, and Third, that the rule among the clergy is worldliness, and holiness of life the exception. 166 PRESENT CONDITION OP A part of her clergy, disbelieving her creed but understanding her worldly policy, get rich by her spoils and perform her sacred functions as a means of obtaining them. A part make an open avowal of having no experimental religion. The younger sons of the nobility find the church with the patronage of their fathers the easiest path to wealth and a life of leisure. Another, and a very large and rapidly increasing class, deeply imbued with the reverence for forms and symbols, are retiring again to the doctrines and spirit of the Roman Catholic Church, and some have recently with- drawn to its bosom, where perhaps they always belonged. But the rapid increase of Puseyism in the establishment within five years, has surprized none but churchmen themselves. Neither Catho- lics or Dissenters have ever regarded them as very widely separated from the mother church, and have been astonished that they did not long ago go back into the arms of the papacy, from which they had wandered. It will not be long before one of two things takes place either Puseyism will win the laurels, the spoils and the power of the estab- lishment to its own hands, and introduce those slight changes necessary to constitute it once more a papal church, (with the exception perhaps of the acknowledgment of the absolute supremacy of the Pope,) or the half fought battle of the Re- formation must be again tried, and a final separa- tion rend the two parties asunder. So much of the moral power of the Church of England has THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 167 been drawn off to swell the ranks of dissenters, that it is considered questionable, whether it dare risk such a collision or whether even a majority of the church desire it. I have not thus dwelt upon the church as a separate institution, nor have I assailed it as a sectarian, I have had another object in exhibiting its principles and character. The church is inter- woven with the fate of England, hence it is neces- sary to know its strength or weakness, to come ultimately to a correct conclusion concerning the final result. In reviewing the preceding pages, we find the church had its origin in an amorous passion of Henry VIII that it has lived by extortion and oppression, which are always united with corrup- tion and that its clergy are a part of the aristoc- racy of the realm, and hence bound with them in the same interests and probably destined to the same fate. That a church of Christ should oppress the poor, is sufficient disgrace but that it should by its ecclesiastical courts lock up men and women in prison because they will not violate their con- sciences, is a fearful crime. These things cannot continue. This is too barefaced a lie, amid the multitude that see it, there will yet be found a Luther, or a Knox to speak. All reformers have risen from the ranks of the people. They are things which cannot enter into the calculations of legislators in providing for the future, nor come 168 PRESENT CONDITION OF within the scope of their jurisdiction when they appear. Heaven sent, they are heaven-guarded. With a message from God, they are protected till its delivery. The barriers of power melt to their touch. The ponderous gates of the prison house of humanity, swing open at their approach, for an angel is beside the Paul and the Silas. There is something about them that calls forth and concen- trates all the slumbering energies of the timorous and the doubting They constitute a central force, around which swing all the descendant elements, and separate parties that have been working for the same thing in not the same way. Their words are charmed words, combining and harmonizing multitudes in a moment. Their action and their language, authenticate their commission. The people feel it and in them behold the pillar of fire that is to guide them to liberty. They create a panic when they appear, which cannot be controlled a courage which cannot be resisted. Let England beware of such men. If her agi- tation and trouble do not yet throw them up, she will be an exception to the general law of nations. It will happen. The few who are carefully watching the motion of the tide as it rolls on are waiting for the crisis. One of them has said, in speaking of the incarceration of Baines " Be sure however of this, if there be really a soul in man, or a God in heaven, it cannot be, if church courts . are to continue, to commit men to prison, but that THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 169 some one or other shall rise up. who after admit- ting all that can be urged against a mistaken and erring man, shall yet speak such words of thunder on the mere fact of his ecclesiastical incarceration, and strike such flashes of fire from his chains, as shall startle the indifferent, and cure the dumb." VOL. I. 15 BOOK THE FOURTH. (The same subject continued.) A SHORT REPLY TO * THE FAME AND GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." The coarse inventions of Englishmen who have either visited us for the express purpose of manufacturing libels, or betaken themselves to this expedient on their return home as a profitable speculation by such men it is thought harsh and uncharitable to touch the sores and blotches of the British nation. Robert Walsh. The English boast of liberty ! But there is no liberty in Eng- land for the poor. Southey. The country blooms, a garden and a gravel Goldsmith. God knows that much evil much tyranny, much individual suffering must exist under our present political arrangements. London Quarterly Review, Dec. 1839. For many years, very scandalous attempts were made to dis- turb this good understanding between Great Britain and the United States, by miserable and wretched attacks upon the domestic habits and manners of the citizens of the United States * * * But the days of Anti-American pamphleteers, reviewers, and novelists have been numbered. The dynasty of the Trollopes has been overthrown. Abuse of America is now confined almost exclusively to the violent Tory papers; thus marking the quarters from which such abuse is likely to proceed, and the personages to whom it is presumed to be acceptable. Edinburgh Review, July, 1840. BOOK FOURTH. (The same subject continued.) A SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." IN a work of the title indicated above, a writer, contemptibly ensconced behind the screen of the anonymous, impudent misnomer of "Libertas," has undertaken to attack, not only my book, but myself with a malignity seldom exhibited even in political controversy. He has bestowed three hundred pages upon me I can afford him but a few in return, and even these are not for his sake, but for the sake of truth, and for the benefit of my readers. Although it may seem like digging up the dead, to bring before the public a book which was buried at its birth ; yet I wish to " wake it from its well merited oblivion," for the purpose of showing more clearly the spirit of English Tory- ism, as it manifests itself towards the Republican Institutions of America, and the progress of the democratic principle in Europe. For although 15* 174 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND the work in question is destitute of the talent, it is filled with the spirit of the bitterest of Tory writers. Had the writer's assertions been true, methinks less time and labour would have accomplished his object much less time and labour at least shall accomplish mine. In answer to the charge of plagiarism, I refer the reader to my letter to Mr. Greely, which will be found in the Appendix. The other charges rest solely on the unsupported assertion of their author. How far that can be relied on, I will show before I have done with him. In the few pages I devote to "Libertas," I shall attempt to prove three things, which will embrace all I wish to say. 1. THAT HIS ASSERTIONS ARE RASH, INDIS- CRIMINATE, AND OFTEN CONTRADICTORY. 2. THAT HIS STATISTICS ARE MANY OF THEM WRONG,. AND CANNOT BE RELIED ON. 3. TlIAT HE HAS NO REGARD FOR THE TRUTH WHEN IT COMES IN COLLISION WITH HIS PASSIONS. 1. His assertions are rash, indiscriminate, and often contradictory. They are rash, in that they make charges without proof, not only against me, but against men whose wisdom and integrity no one has before impeached. Judge Jay, for in- stance, is accused of "ignorance" Dr. Bo wring of "loose and exaggerated statements" a man who was thought by the- British Government bet- ter qualified than any other person, to travel over the continent to collect facts for the nation's use. Mr. Hudson, Gen, Tallmadge, Horace Greoly, the GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 175 gentlemen of the Home League, indeed all the il- lustrious statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, whose opinions or statistics conflict with his own, are treated with the utmost contempt. Now, for an Englishman under an assumed name, to sweep down by his single assertion, men so well known both in the political and literary world, I think even himself, in a cooler moment, will acknow- ledge to be somewhat rash. The repeated asser- tion that the incidents recorded in "The Glory and Shame of England" are false, is sustained only by such questions as the following " Now we ask if such vulgar nonsense could have been uttered ?" " It is our conviction that the whole is a tissue of falsehoods," " It cannot be true." I could write after each of his statements as he has after mine, " It is not true ;" but such things be- come only children. Again ; it is asserted that I " ought to be ashamed to say that the poor are op- pressed by the aristocracy of England/' Really, I do not know which excites my greatest astonish- ment, the effrontery which could make such a statement, or the credulity that supposed it would be believed. The first time I opened the book I happened to fell upon this extraordinary sentence, and meeting soon after one of the author's coun- trymen, I read it to him, and mark his reply. " No man," he indignantly exclaimed, " ever said that but a Tory, or a Tory's slave. Strange idea surely ! Why, the English aristocracy are not satisfied with taking a poor man's shirt, they must 176 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND have his skin /" The poor not oppressed by the aristocracy ! This is a discovery no other man has had the sagacity to make. Who then are they oppressed by ? The complaints that all over the land go up to Heaven from ^mtuug and desperate men the neglected workshops, the noiseless factories, the silent hand-loom, chartists' " petitions that have to be carted for their size" the voluntary exile of thousands from your shores every month for a free land, all declare trumpet-tongued that oppres- sion exists that in the language of the Edinburgh Review, " the wan and menacing face of hunger scowls on us every where." "England," says Sidney Smith, one of the founders of this Review, and one of the noblest philanthropists living " England is the richest country in the world ; but in no country is there so much individual suffering." In speaking of the oppressive charac- ter of the aristocracy, he says " they are opposed to the abolition of the corn law, as they have been to every measure calculated to promote the general good." From whose sweat, and toil and starvation comes the wealth that supports an idle, profligate and unproductive aristocracy? So long ago as 1819, the Marquis of Tavistock, (himself an exception,) said in Parliament, " Is it not grievous to reflect that the house has rejected with indigna- tion the income tax, and when other taxes are proposed which fall upon the poor and the dis- GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 177 tressed, they are passed with acclamation 7 How happens it that when the people call loudly and earnestly for retrenchment and economy, the ministers backed by overwhelming majorities, answer them by imposing fresh taxes, and increas- ing their overpowering burdens ?" If the informa- tion you display, were not so limited and peculiar, I need not tell you that Lord Brougham once said " one might plead justification for saying that the hierarchy and the aristocracy, are the natural enemies of the people, for they have always been their oppressors \" Ought not Sydney Smith, the Marquis of Tav- istock, and Lord Brougham, " to be ashamed to say that the poor are oppressed by the aristocracy !" It occurs to me now that it may have been foolish in me to utter in so many different forms a truth which every body but " Libertas," knew before. Another remarkable saying of " Libertas" is, that for me to declare " the operatives in Spitalfields, or any other part of Great Britain are oppressed, is utterly untrue." I doubt not an English Tory would differ very much from me in his definition of oppression. But if being compelled to sleep in damp cold cellars on the ground, to toil eighteen or twenty hours a day for less than will purchase food necessary to sustain life to suffer privation and want, till their groanings fill the land they enrich, and to have a part even of these hard earned shillings forced away by the bread tax to swell the income of the land owner ; if this be 178 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND not oppression in the name of humanity, what is? No oppression of the working classes in England ! I know not whether to attribute such assertions more to the ignorance or the depravity of the writer who could make them. If indeed he has ever been in England, which I am sometimes inclined to doubt, has he ever walked through the gloomy districts of Spital- fields or the lanes of Manchester, Leeds, Paisley, Bolton, Liverpool and London ? Hear the words that fell from the lips of the Premier of the realm on the 23d February last. " In the year 1836, the distress of the handloom-weavers was so great that a reference was made to it in a speech from the throne. A very great proportion of them (their number is over eight hundred thousand] were unable to obtain food of the cheapest de- scription, and were so badly clothed that they could not attend divine worship or send their chil- dren to the parish schools, few of them having any furniture in their rooms, and many of them sleeping on straw : and yet with all this suffer- ing, most of them having full occupation, and working sixteen hours a day ; and this distress occurring at a period when corn was cheaper than it had been for many previous years. 1 " And yet the poor are not oppressed ! Why the wild man of the forest ; the wandering hoards of the desert never " work sixteen hours a day," and yet who ever heard of their famishing for bread. And what is their boasted English civilization worth, GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 179 if it can elevate the few only at the expense of such enormous suffering and slavery among the masses. The stereotyped argument against American slavery is often summoned in " Libertas" to his aid. It affords us another exhibition of that " transmarine benevolence," so common in Eng- land at the present day, " which sweeps the dis- tant horizon for objects of compassion, but as blind as a bat to the wretchedness and destitution abounding at their own doors." These words I quote from Blackwood's Magazine, (Jan. 1842,) in which a humane and powerful writer, whose soul grown sick of the shallow philanthropy so current in English society, administers the following caus- tic reproof. It meets the present case with pecu- liar fitnesf!. It will do " Libertas" no harm to ponder it well. " England ! home of the free, asylum of the brave, refuge of the refugees, and so forth in heroic prose, and yet more heroic verse, what fine things may be said and sung on this self-glorify- ing subject, to the great joy of the gods and god- desses in one shilling and two shilling galleries. Something about slaves being free the moment they touch British soil, regenerated, disenthralled by the genius of universal emancipation, or some such trash ; it is truly delightful (?) to witness the ardour with which a British auditory, compliments itself upon its exclusive humanity, transmarine benevolence and free-trade philanthropy. There 180 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND is a disease well known to opticians, wherein the patient can see distinctly objects a great way off, but is quite incapable of distinguishing such as lie immediately under his nose ; the artist ap- plies a spectacle of peculiar construction to re- medy this defect ; we think it would be a vast ad- vantage to the public in general, if ingenious op- ticians would tuni their attention to a remedy for that long-sighted benevolence which sweeps the distant horizon for objects of compassion, but is blind as a bat to the wretchedness and destitution abounding at their own doors ; we confess we are of opinion that charity, though it need not end, should begin at home ; that it is time enough when severe distress has been relieved at our own door, to walk to the other end of the earth in search of foreign beggars." This, I conceive, to be a sufficient answer to that spurious philanthro- py that affects the sympathy of a brother for a negro slave, and lashes little girls naked into the coal mines. Our Tory author would have us believe the British government cannot relieve the distress of the working classes. The people have found it does not intend to make the effort, and they seem inclined to try their hand at it, well knowing that men who legislate for themselves never starve. If governments of modern times, with all the lights of Christianity ; the aids of science, and the rich volumes of the world's experience, cannot save their industrious honest citizens from starva- GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 181 tion, in a land of plenty, then let governments know they have no authentic commission from God to legislate for his poor. The groaning millions of Britain not oppressed by Britain's Aristocracy ! In the name of Eternal Justice, what then is oppression? Why even Sir Robert had just said the people can bear no more taxation upon the necessaries of life, leaving his auditory to infer what was entirely superfluous to say in words, " We have already taxed them in- to pauperism." The whole thing reminds us of a story told of the Irish barrister, who on being censured by his brethren for disgracing the pro- fession by taking so small a fee as a half-guinea, replied, " Why, what the devil, would you have me do, gentlemen, I took all the man had." The poor best know their own sufferings ; let us hear them speak. In the early part of October last, a working man rose in a meeting of the Norwich Society for the Propagation of the Gos- pel in Foreign Parts, and said, " I was six years in the West Indies, between St. Thomas and Bar- badoes, and I saw how the slaves ate and drank, and how they were treated, and I do standing here, say, so HELP ME GOD, I WOULD RATHER BE A SLAVE IN THE PLANTATIONS, THAN BE AS I NOW AM." Another working man said, " My condition is worse than that of the African slave, for I am whipped in my belly, while the black slave is only beaten on his fat back." Just before the election which brought the Con- VOL. i. 16 182 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND servatives into power again, Mr. Brotherton, who had represented Manchester in Parliament for ten years, said in addressing the working men of the town, " The landed interest have a monopoly which raises the price of food fifty per cent, higher in this country than in other countries, and this for the benefit of the Aristocracy. If a poor man goes to a grocer's shop to buy arti- cles that are taxed, the taxation is so unequal that out of every shilling the poor man lays out, 5~d. is tax ; but out of every shilling the rich man lays out, only 2kd. is tax. The Corn Laws rob every poor man of every third loaf, and their families are deprived of that bread in order that it may be given to support an insolent and rapacious aristoc- racy." I think even Libertas will hesitate before sweeping the authority of Brotherton to the ground. In assailing the political equality of American citizens, he says, " The political privileges of the United States have been readily and unwisely bestowed on these foreigners." If many of them cherished the despotic principles of the one whose insolent falsehoods extort the present reply, I might agree with him, for we cannot be too jea- lous of the invasion of tyranny. But most fo- reigners who come to our shores have been too effectually cured of all partiality for despotism by the tyranny which exiled them from the land of their birth, ever to wish to see it established among us. GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 183 But a writer who can defend the alliance of Church and State, and deny that oppression ex- ists in Great Britain, may well make war against political equality. I doubt not it offends his sight to behold the shackles fall from the ship- loads of his hitherto-oppressed countrymen when they reach our shores, to see them have a voice in the administration of the government which con- trouls their interests. To me I confess it is a pleasing spectacle. " They touch %ur country and their shackles fall." They who have always been bowed down under despotism, find when they stand upon the soil of the New World they are men. He also says, " These privileges are alike in- jurious to the holders themselves, and to the Union at large," and expatiates upon " the despo- tism of the majority," thinking it worse than the consolidated tyranny of the English Aristocracy. Now I am much of the opinion of the Irishman, who in signing an Anti-Corn Law petition, re- minded the landlords that when it seemed to him desirable he should die of starvation, he wished the privilege of starving himself, and when their assistance became necessary he would "just give them a call" This bugbear of the " despotism of the major- ity," which has been so universally harped upon by the enemies of Republicanism in Europe, is 184 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND thus disposed of by the Edinburgh Review, (Oct. 1840 :) " Yet neither ought we to forget that this lawless violence is not so great, because not so lasting an evil as tyranny, through the medium of law. The despotism, therefore, of the major- ity within the limits of civil life, though a real evil, does not appear to us a formidable one." The writer might have added, that our experience as a nation thus far, proves most conclusively that no form of government is so exempt from violent agi- tations and tumultuous riots as our own. Every English newspaper we take up contains some ac- count of riots and bloodshed. It is well known that during the last election in England, the island was the scene of numberless outrages, and that they were attended with savage ferocity. A stand- ing army and a numerous and vigilant police dis- tributed over the whole country, are unable to pre- vent these outbreaks they are constantly occur- ring, and they will continue, so long as the people feel that they are trampled in the dust. How was it during the Presidential election in this country in 1840 ? We have the assertion of the London Morning Advertiser, that although the excitement which attended that great struggle was unprece- dented, yet not a life was lost amidst the agitations of seventeen millions of people, nor even a serious disturbance witnessed. Aristocrats have always rung changes on the old adage of tyranny, that "the mass are not qualified to govern themselves." In reply to this, Sidney GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 185 Smith has a word worth your attention. " O happy Ireland ! what protecting angels have the aristocracy been to you ! Look at your bold peasantry ; not above a fourth part of them desti- tute of all food, and nearly a half that have a po- tatoe per day, and a few with 'point' into the bar- gain. Behold that noble contempt for luxuries, with which they export millions of quarters of corn, and pounds of butter, cheese, and ham, while they philosophically starve at home, under their own cabin and corn-bill, with none to make them afraid ; nay, with many to be afraid of them. See how plump and fat the Corn Law has made them. My friends it is a bitter mirth which rules us in thus treating this subject." One thing has been demonstrated by the experi- ments of past ages ; that if the people are not qual- ified to govern themselves, aristocrats and kings are not. How have the masses always been abused, stripped of their rights, oppressed, devour- ed ? What is history ? Blood, toil, agony, and tears ! What have earth's millions gained by the sweat and labour of six thousand years 1 And yet this has not been the doing of the people. Hitherto in the old world, they have had "nothing to do with the laws, but to obey them." Let their miseries then be laid at the door of the tyrants who have enslaved them. " The people not qualified to govern themselves?" How is this known? They have never had a chance to make the expe- riment ! 16* 186 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND But " Libertas " ventures some statements that have excited my astonishment still more than any- thing I have yet quoted. "When wages are nearly equal, the working man's money will go farther, and provide him more comfort in England than in America ;" and he asserts that our " government and laws have imposed heavier burdens on the working man here, than in the old country." (102 p.) The author must have either known these as- sertions to be false when he made them, or his ignorance utterly disqualified him to discuss the subject for such extravagant statements an intel- ligent man cannot believe. I shall say but a word in reply to them in this place : but in other chapters of the present work, he will find facts which no man in his senses will think of disputing; demonstrating that there is no country in the world where the working classes have such heavy burdens to bear as in Great Britain. For the pre- sent, let me quote a few words from British author- ities, for the illumination of this British writer. Says the Edinburgh Review, (Oct. 1840:) "Ame- rica is all middle class : the whole people being in a condition, both as to education and pecuniary means, corresponding to the middle classes here." Every man knows that this would not be the case, unless the same equality of rights and privileges existed, that we see in their condition. The Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, grandson of Lord Dunmore, who was governor of Virginia GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 187 at the beginning- of the Revolution, and who ex- perienced treatment from the sons of the Old Do- minion upon which his grandson would not be likely to look back with pleasure, in his interest- ing and candid work on the United States, says, " If a practical statesman were required to point out two principal a priori tests of the permanent prosperity of a nation, I think he could scarcely select any preferable to those adduced ; first, that every adult should be able to read and write ; se- condly, that every able bodied man, willing to work, should find employment at a rate of wages sufficient to ensure him the necessaries and con- veniences of life. Both these propositions, allow- ing for the exceptions necessarily incident to any broad political statement, may be generally af- firmed in respect to the United States. It is a fact no less surprizing than pleasing to record, that during two years spent in travelling through every part of the Union, I have only once been asked for alms, and that once was by a female who was very unwell, and who, although de- cently dressed, told me that she wanted a bit of money to buy some food." At a public meeting held in Liverpool last fall, an English gentleman who had jtlst returned from a tqjir through the United States, in contrasting the condition of the labouring classes in the two nations said " labourers in the West, who can do nothing but dig, earn a dollar and a half a day, and obtain board and lodgings for two dollars 188 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND and a half a week. Flour in New Orleans and Cincinatti is $3 and $4 a barrel, in Liverpool it is $10, and oftener higher." In speaking of Lowell, which had been in existence only fifteen years, and yet contained 25,000 inhabitants, and employ- ed a capital of $10,000,000 in manufactures, he said, " When I saw the female operatives come from the factories, I could not distinguish them from well-dressed young ladies ; their wages were from $1 50cts. to $2 50cts. clear of board and lodgings. This is not the state of things we find in our manufacturing towns. The first sight I saw on landing at Liverpool was a female picking up dung in the streets with which to buy taxed bread." A spectacle which presents itself to the stranger in every large town, and on all the great roads of the kingdom. It is said (page 244) that ' along with a few wicked and unprincipled men, called Chartists, I set up a whine about adding to the national debt.' The same as to say, that none but Chartists ob- ject to an increase of the national debt. The great liberal party, he well knows, have always been opposed to it, and he will find but few men in the nation who do not consider it the great ca- lamity of England. Even Sir Robert Peel thinks direct taxation, (seldom resorted to, except in time of war,) better than to augment the already enor- mous burden that presses upon the nation. And Blackwood's Magazine, certainly never charged with Radicalism, recommends that the head of GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 189 every Prime Minister who increases the debt, be made to roll upon the execution block. It says, " that debt is the great calamity of England ; the great source of those perpetual discontents which show the distempered state of the frame ; the se- cret of that strange and desperate poverty, which in one of the most fertile and lovely countries of the world, places the free peasant of England below the comforts of the foreign slave ; the fount of those unquenched subterranean fires which burst up in Chartism and Socialism, and the hundred other wild and ominous threateners of general evil. To what conclusion this formi- dable future may come, baffles all conjecture. But to diminish the public debt of England should be the grand object of every man who deserves to govern the country; and to suffer its increase should be rewarded with the scaffold. It is sub- stantial high treason to the empire /" My whine seems to chime in very harmoniously with the " whine" of the great organ of the Conservatives. It is something more than a " whine" from " a few Chartists" who happen to number at the pre- sent time THREE MILLION AND A QUARTER ON ONE PETITION TO PARLIAMENT. It IS a growl from this fourth part of the adult population of England. A very ominous growl ! If it were not too solemn a matter for burlesque, I should be tempted to indulge a moment of mer- riment over the grave assertion that all the people of England enjoy equal rights. It is too palpa- 190 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND bly false to need refutation, and too sad a theme for ridicule. In various parts of my work will be found evidence which it will require something more potent than the assertion of an anonymous writer, or even his statistics to overthrow, that although the working classes pay a vast sum every year to support the government, yet this sum falls far short of the grand aggregate wrung from them to enrich the aristocracy ! My sta- tistics on this subject will illustrate the humanity of that class of men you would have us believe to be so vigilant of the rights and interests of the poor. The remark is made by " Libertas," that I esti- mate the amount of grain consumed in Great Bri- tain too high by 64,000,000 bushels per annum. Possibly ; but it only places his " well-fed" " free," " happy," people, in a far worse condition than I supposed they were. He has said much of the comparative amount of bread consumed in Great Britain and the United States. Let us come to facts and figures. " Sixty million quarters," (or 480,000,000 bush- els) you say, " is all the grain of all kinds which can be made into bread. 1 ' This is the estimate of M'Culloch ; he says, " the annual average con- sumption of the different kinds of grain in the United Kingdom, cannot be estimated at less than 44 million quarters, (or 352,000,000 bushels,) ex- clusive of seed" estimating the population of the United Kingdom at 27,000,000, and we have 13 jV GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 191 bushels for every person. But if we deduct from this estimate, the amount consumed by animals, used in beer, spirits, and the various manufactures which Dr. Colquin supposes to be T \, and M'Cul- loch considers this an accurate calculation, it will leave less than eight bushels of grain for the aver- age yearly consumption of each person. A late number of Hunt's Commercial Magazine, which is perhaps as high authority as any other in the country, says that " by the returns of the United States Marshals, for taking the census in June 1840, it appears that over thirty eight bushels of bread stuffs for every inhabitant in the country were raised in 1839, in the United States after deducting all that is consumed by stock, manufactured, sown, and exported, it leaves over twenty bushels for every man woman and child in the union /" Is it possible that English- men have learned to subsist upon one third as much of the necessaries of life as Americans ? They must have reduced the art of starvation to admirable perfection. And yet with these facts before him, he attempts to show that because there is as much or more butchers' meat consumed in London in proportion to the population as there was ninety years ago, therefore the people are all well fed. This is a kind of logic "Liber- tas" seems to be particularly fond of. One ques- tion will dissipate all the fog he has gathered around his argument, by a mass of statistics. Who eats all this meat? He well knows that vast 192 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND multitudes of the British people scarcely even taste of butchers' meat from one year's end to another. I must here occupy no more space than is necessary for one extract, and then refer to the statistics in that part of this work in which I treat of the condition of the mass of the " beef-eating" countrymen of our author. Says W. E. Hickson Esq. in his report on the condition of the working classes. "But taking the whole body of agricul- tural labourers supposed to derive the greatest practical benefit from our corn-laws, beef and mutton as articles of food among- them are almost unknown from the north of England to the south." I quote from Mr. Hickson, because his authority is conclusive on this matter. Again, in speaking of emigration, "Libertas" says, " America is very jealous of the introduction of more paupers into the country she imposes a tax on all emigrants on their arrival, to cover the risk of pauperism." Can he blame us for so doing, when he considers that England is constantly casting upon our shores the contents of her work- houses, jails, hospitals and prisons? From all the statistics I have been able to gather, and from conversations with a large number of magistrates and judges, I have come to the conclusion that more than one third of all the crimes committed in the United States of every description are com- mitted by foreigners that one half of all the free people of the United States, who can neither read nor write are foreigners. A proportion of nearly GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED. 193 if not quite ten to one, when we consider the pro- portion which foreigners bear to our native popu- lation. And this I do not set down so much against the emigrants themselves, as I do against the government which has starved them into vice, and then exiled them from its shores. But for accurate information on the subject, I refer you to " the American Quarterly Review for 1834," which says " In the city of New York the following extracts have been obtained, illustrative of the comparative amount of poverty and crime as existing among native Americans and foreigners, from all parts of the United States. Penitentiary ... Alms House, (Adults) " " (Children) - Bellevue Hospital, (Sick) - " " (Maniac) City Hospital, (1833) - Actual State House of Refuge, (1833) - Actual State City Dispensary, Male In-door Patients - Female do do Male Out-door do Female do do Of the out-door relief bestowed by the city au- thorities, it is estimated by the visiters, that eight VOL. I. 17 TOTAL. FOREIGNERS. 593 203 over 3 1355 - 969 2 I 772 - 579 f 238 - 170 * 177 101 near 2 3 1983 - 908 i 2034 . 1000 i 121 72 over | 174 - 100 * 1126 - 563 | 1670 - 917 near | 5555 - 3666 over i 7875 . 4748 ! 194 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND out of ten are foreigners, and the same proportion may be fairly assumed for charity." If there is any truth in these statistics, the duty of self-protection manifestly requires us to " impose a tax on emigrants to cover the risk of pauperism," for it appears this risk is no small matter. " This is not done in England," he remarks. What, no tax imposed ! And is not England flooded with emigrants? We are, with a tax. Her ports are open then, oifering an asylum to the poor and the oppressed of other lands. It will be a long time, however, I fancy, before it will be ne- cessary to impose a tax to prevent the too copious flow of emigration to her shores. A tax is not ne- cessary to prevent men from crowding voluntarily to Newgate. The world's poor do not often flee into that glorious land, where " taxes are lower and rents cheaper than in America," where "the government watches with so much parental care over the interests of the poor." The most striking instances of this care, that now occur to me, have been in the government's providing a free passage out of the country, to citizens she had made pau- pers, and whom she could not conveniently sup- port any longer. It is a singular fact too, that the parental government of "Libertas" should have sent so many of them to this country, where if his statements are true, they were sure to be in a worse condition than they were before. " A government should represent a parent," says Bulwer : " with GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 195 us it represents a dun with the bailiff at his heels." What intelligent man, did this most reckless of writers suppose would believe him to speak the truth, when he said " that instances of cruelty in only two factories can be found in evidence laid before Parliament," by commissioners appointed to inquire into the abuses of the Factory System and that no overseer of the mills could ever have been allowed, " with impunity," harshly to treat children ? It cannot be that he is aware of the evidence laid before Parliament on the subject, or he would not venture such assertions. In his " England and the English," after extracting a portion of the " dark and terrible history of early suffering, developed in the evidence on the Fac- tory Bill," Bulwer says : " / could go on multi- plying 'these examples at random from every page of this huge callender of childish suffering" I might adduce multitudes of instances to prove either the ignorance or the insincerity of " Liber- tas." But this extract from Bulwer will probably suffice. But he more than insinuates that what little abuse is inflicted upon factory children, is not done with impunity; that the tyrannical perpetrators of these cruelties are always brought to justice. Now I make the broad assertion, that the debates and reports of Parliament and its commissions, prove hundreds, if not thousands of such cases to have existed, and the indignation of the humane 196 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND portion of the British nation burst forth, because they had been so often inflicted, and in nearly or quite every case, inflicted with impunity. Said Lord Ashley, who has distinguished him- self for the deep interest he has manifested for many years in the sufferings of the operatives, " Nothing has ever more deeply excited my aston- ishment, or my indignation, than the fact that these barbarous cruelties, of which we have heard so much, have been inflicted with impunity that the perpetrators of such unheard of barbarities have not been brought to justice." It will require something more than a simple denial, to disprove the statements I made in regard to the present sufferings of the Factory children. I said that the statutory restrictions of Parliament had produced little good that they had remained almost a dead letter. It will be seen from the ex- tract I make below, that Von Raumer holds the same opinion. And I certainly cannot appeal to a writer more deserving of respect, or one held in higher regard by all parties in England. He says in his work on England, " Many humane persons have maintained that the children who work in factories, are in a far ivorse condition than the apprentices were formerly, or even their Negro slaves. * * These children, say their advo- cates, though but from nine to fourteen years old, work from ten to sixteen hours a day. * * If the time of labour of the children were reduced, the wages must of course be reduced, or the price GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 197 of manufactured articles raised in proportion. But the latter is impossible on account of the competi- tion of other countries, the former must of neces- sity be resorted to ; in which case the condition of the workman must be rendered infinitely worse by this pretended relief. And so it has turned out. The i Factory Bill] for regulating the hours of labour, providing for sending the child- ren to school, fyc. has remained in a great measure a dead letter ; and the masters and work- men of manufactories form such arrangements with each other as they will or can." In the early part of July last, I was told by a man who had been for several years overlooker in Ives and Sons' large factory in Duckinfield, near Ashton-under-Line, that there never had been a time when the factory children, as well as all classes of operatives had been in such a state of distress, as within the last twelve months. " The laws in regard to factory children," said he, " have never been regarded, and they never can be. The children of the operatives are sent to the mills at as early an age as ever, and worked as many hours. All the provisions of the law are evaded. It will do no good to legislate against people working more hours than the health can bear, when they must do it or starve." I give the name of this person as I may wish to refer to him again. Thomas Timparly. The assertion of " Libertas" in regard to the factory children is about as consistent with the 17* 198 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND truth, as his repeated statements, that speculation and repudiation in America have been the princi- pal causes of the appalling distress that has pre- vailed among the labouring classes in England ! Distress from whatever source it comes, I trust will always awaken my sympathy, and although no man will give him any credit for such an as- sertion, yet I cannot but unite with the writer to whom I am replying, in utter condemnation of the outrageous violations of justice, honour, and truth which have characterized the acts of the re- pudiating party of America. All good men among us have lifted their voice against the unhallowed principle. The repudiation of the State Bonds has caused a certain kind and amount of distress in England. Many a family has felt its influence, and some few have been cast by it into the deep gloom of poverty and privation. But it is really amusing to see it referred to as the chief cause of that distress which had already become so awful in England among the lower classes before the repudiation of State Bonds was thought of. The cause of that terrible distress which is now wringing the hearts of the poor in England lies further back than Mississippi Bonds. So too, think our author's countrymen, attributing as they do this incalculable suifering to a long series of oppressive misgovernment in past ages, in which the rights and happiness of the many have been wickedly and wantonly sacrificed to the interests of the few. This has been made sufficiently to GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 199 appear in my former chapter on the Condition of the British People in past ages. " When," asks our author, with an appearance of great sincerity, " was there ever an instance in Britain of the people's petitions being rejected X" When, I would ask, was there ever an instance of the people's petitions being granted ? If in- stances can be adduced, they are few. How long, and how unsuccessfully have millions of DISSEN- TERS prayed to be delivered from the heavy bur- dens of a political Church ? For how many cen- turies has IRELAND insulted, trodden down, slaughtered Ireland, appealed to the justice, to the honour, to the tender mercies of England for relief? And she still prays on, half desperate, and famine-stricken, hoping that her prayers will' gain her what must otherwise be won by the revolu- tionary sword. How loud, and half frantic is the prayer of three millions of CHARTIST sufferers, to be heard in their defence at the bar of the House of Commons, numbering among their ranks two millions of disfranchised men, grown desperate by want, and many thousand tearful mothers, who can no longer give bread to their starving little ones. One would suppose such a prayer would be granted, if humanity had not quite left the world. Even the great champion of the Reform Bill, Macauley, unites with Sir Robert Peel in slamming the doors of the House of Commons in the face of these petitioning millions, and Parlia- 200 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND ment tells them to go home to their hovels and starve on ! How long since Parliament decided that when the ministry chose to levy a direct tax upon the people, the people should not possess the right of petitioning against it, unjust, and unnecessary though it might be? And their petitions were accordingly rejected, " unreceived, unheard, un- read and unreferred." How many times have the people gone with their prayers, humbly bending at the doors of Parliament, only to be turned away. " But their petitions were received," he says. Yes, generally, and if he had finished the sentence, he would have added, " and sent down to the tomb of all the Capulets," a tomb, by-the-by, from which they will come forth at no distant day. " In England, the jealousy of freedom, forbids all place-men from interfering in elections ! It would be well if " Libertas" had passed this matter by in silence. Before the passage of the Reform Bill, Earl Grey declared that a decided majority of the House of Commons were returned to Parliament through the patronage of one hun- dred and fifty four powerful individuals, most of whom were members of the House of Lords. Sheridan in a searching and sarcastic speech on the overwhelming power of the aristocracy, said with characteristic severity and truth, " all these things make & farce of an English Election." But this, it will be answered, was before the GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 201 Reform Bill, when seats in Parliament were so'd by their patrons to the highest bidder ! when Lord Cochran (June 20, 1817,) made his open boast in Parliament that " when he returned to England pretty well flushed with Spanish gold, he had found the borough of Houston open and had bargained for it and was sure he would have been returned had he been Lord Camelford's black servant or his great dog." The rotten boroughs have been disfranchised, it is true for the most part, but the whole representative system in England is rotten still : and bribery prevails to an extent so enormous, there is no freedom in an election, worthy of the name. " Libertas" knows, or at least ought to know, that a large majority of the House of Commons are elected entirely through the influence of the landed aristocracy. That only a small portion of the people are allowed to vote, and that only a frag- ment of those who do vote, can vote against the will of their landlords and patrons without being subjected to heavy sacrifices for their independence. He ought to know too, that the great proportion of the office holders of the government are most actively, although secretly, engaged in every elec- tion that frauds, threats, bribery, and every engine of corruption are pressed into the service of the parties struggling for power. Probably no one will deny this, who has read the develop- ments made in the House of Commons in refer- ence to the shameful, miserable, degrading truth, 202 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND that the representation of the English constituen- cies is systematically bought and sold. Mr. Roe- buck boldly charged bribery and corruption upon a considerable number of members, calling them by name, and exposing the base means by which they had gained their seats. "Among others more or less flagrant, was the constituency of Nottingham, which had been bought by Sir John Cam Hobhouse, the intimate friend and adviser of Lord Byron, and by Sir George Larpent, and sold to no less a personage than Mr. WALTER of the Times, who for a given sum of money, was to be permitted by his whig opponents to walk over the course," i. e. to obtain uncontested, the vacant seat. The TIMES has ever been foremost in endeavouring to bring discredit on Republican Institutions, by raking up from the lowest partisan Journals in the United States, the crimination and recrimination bandied about, among them, on the subject of " Pipe Laying," &c. &c., and publish- ing the details and evidences of the inevitable tendency of our system. Yet here we find the most prominent person connected with that paper buying a whole constituency like a flock of sheep" So much for the calumniators of Demo- cracy fine critics, such men, of American Poli- tics ! Mr. Roebuck unmoved by the opposition levelled against him from all sides of the House, manfully stood his ground, and amidst the writh- ings of Tories and Whigs, struck dumb by the exposure of their villainy, he " tore off" in the GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 203 language of the Dublin Freeman, " the hereditary mask from the strumpet face of aristocracy," he demanded from Parliament a committee of Inquiry to investigate this putrid mass of " honourable corruption," and when the names of that commit- tee were announced, Mr. Buncombe moved " that each member of the committee should subscribe in the presence of the speaker, a declaration that he had never himself or by his agents, been guilty of any act of bribery or corruption in procuring a seat in Parliament, or in returning any member or members. This gentleman declared, that, with a proper committee, he would undertake to prove that the great majority of members of the present house were returned by means of gross bribery or intimidation !" As may well be supposed, such a House would not vote for an exposure of their own shame, and although the Committee was granted, yet only seventeen members could be found in the whole House of Commons to vote for Mr. Buncombe's motion ! Most of the London Journals conceded that this was tantamount to a confession that there were only seventeen honest men in the lower House of Parliament. So much for all this hollow cant about the jealousy of freedom, pre- venting impurity and corruption in English elec- tions ! It is a gross insult to truth and the spirit of liberty, to say that the people are represented in the British Parliament. The House of Com- 204 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND mons is elected by the privileged classes ; and it legislates for them, and them alone. After expatiating at length on the immaculate purity of English elections and the unbounded liberty of the people, our author turns to America, to lament over ' the serious tax of their time consumed in elections ;" and this is one of the principal items in the load of abuses and burdens under which American working men stagger ! His argument then amounts to this, that the Eng- lish aristocracy ever solicitous for the good of the lower orders, cannot bear to see them waste an hour at the hustings, particularly when there is so much more work to be done than there are labourers to do it, and labour is so abundantly paid, and they have from these lofty and humane motives, kindly taken the administration of affairs into their own hands, and saved the people the trouble of having any solicitude about the mat- ter ! How grateful the people should be under these superabundant provisions of a kind and fatherly aristocracy ! Oh ! Liberty, what oppres- sive terms dost thou impose upon freemen in compelling them to chose their own rulers ! If " Libertas" will permit me to offer a word of advice, I would suggest that his help is greatly needed on the other side of the Atlantic just now. If his principles are correct, three or four millions of Chartists have made a terrible mistake ; so anxious are they to assume the tremendous burden of electing their own rulers, they seem pretty GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 205 much determined to upset the government, if ne- cessary, to accomplish their object. These men are wrong they are the victims of a destructive infatuation they need light and guidance. Had not our author better hurry back in the first ship that spreads its sails for England, and save the deluded Chartist millions from such a wanton sa- crifice of their present liberty and leisure, and their sans culotte children shall rise up and call him blessed ! Two of the most serious accusations brought against me in the book here under review, are, 1st. that I treated Hon. J. C. Calhoun and others I addressed on the subject of slavery, with cour- tesy. Li pleading guilty to this charge, I must defend myself by saying, that I have been taught to treat all men with becoming respect, and all strangers with courtesy, whatever may be their opinions. Southern men have long enough been plied with brick bats and insults ; it is time they were approached with candor and kindness, and from arguments addressed in such a spirit, they will not turn away. The second accusation is, that I did not fill my book with " the horrors and barbarities of American slavery." I had two good reasons for not doing so ; first, I saw more slavery in England than I could well describe ; and se- cond, " Libertas," and men of the like genus, had taken such special pains to pourtray these "horrors and barbarities," that other persons have been saved the trouble ! But I have already devoted too VOL. i. 18 206 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND much time to this portion of his work, and I pro- ceed to show II. THAT ITS STATISTICS ARE MANY OF THEM WRONG, AND CANNOT BE RELIED ON. ItS asper- sions of myself I care not for, its aspersions of my country will mislead no one, but its statistics may have blinded some honest though ill-informed reader, who by some casualty got through the book, which I fear I too much honour by the no- tice here bestowed upon it. I would correct its mistakes if the author knew no better, and expose his dishonesty if, as I am inclined to believe, he has attempted to deceive. He endeavours to show that the CORN LAWS have raised the price of grain in England only 3s. a quarter ! and, therefore, that the entire tax laid on the British islands, in consequence of the re- strictions on the corn trade, is only twenty-two and a half million dollars per annum. One would call this a tax of some magnitude to impose upon the poor for bread ! for it needs no argu- ment to show that a tax upon bread falls on the consumers, and you will not deny that the great mass of them are poor. By his mode of arranging figures, " Libertas " can prove anything that is false to be true. He goes to M'Culloch for statis- tics, and selects those years when wheat was at its highest price abroad, and then compares this price with those years when wheat was at its lowest price in Great Britain. In this way he could prove that bread is always dearer in the GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 207 United States than in England, because we have one year imported English wheat ! And the ar- gument would be just as candid. He appeals to M'Culloch and to M'Culloch we will go, and demonstrate that he has either blun- dered through M'Culloch's volumes without learn- ing his opinions or his facts, or that he has entered into a base attempt to deceive his reader, appealing to M'Culloch only to give currency to his own de- ceptions. I well know the ground I am standing on, and to my statistics I invite the severest criti- cism. In M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, Vol. I. p. 505 15, will be found the facts I give below. In order to ascertain with any accuracy the effect of the Corn Laws in raising the price of food, and to learn the comparative price of grain in Great Britain and foreign countries, we must find out its average cost in the great corn markets of England and of Europe since 1815, when the Corn Law was first enacted. Such an estimate accurately made out cannot mislead us. The average price of wheat in London, from 1815 to 1836, twenty-one years, was 62s. 8f e?. per quarter. Since then, as "Libertas" acknowledges, it has averaged much higher ; all kinds of grain in London being, in consequence of short crops, at starvation prices. Now let us inquire the price of wheat in the other great corn marts, during the same period. M'Culloch states that the price of wheat at Dantzic, for ten years, ending with 1831, (which 208 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND are the only years for which he gives complete re- turns,) was 885. 5d. per quarter, or 29s. 3d. less than the price in London. The price in Ham- burgh, during the same period, was 26s. \d. or a considerable less than half its price in London. The price in AMSTERDAM, during the same period, was 31s. &\d. or half the price in London. The price in ODESSA, for four years, ending with Jan- uary 1825, was only 18s. 3~d., and since then M'Culloch states that it has been even below that sum averaging not more than 16s. or only a trifle more than a quarter its price in London. The price in NEW- YORK, during the same period, at from 37s. to 40s. say 38s. lOd. Sir Robert Peel says its price, during the ten years embraced in one estimate, was only 33s. lie?, or only a little more than half the price in London. From this review of prices, at these four great corn markets on the continent and in New- York, for ten years, we find the average price of wheat has been only 29s. 3d., while it has been at Lon- don, during the same ten years, 61s. 8%d. (see Com. Die. 1 Vol. p. 517) or more than double the price. These are the most complete tables M'Cul- loch gives. By extending the calculation so as to embrace a greater number of corn markets, and by bringing the calculation down to 1842, which I should be enabled to do by referring to reports recently presented to Parliament, I could show that a greater difference has existed during the last ten years, between the price of wheat in Lon- GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 209 don and in other countries, than existed during the previous ten years. But since "Libertas" appealed to M'Culloch, I will confine myself to his calculations. Now to ascertain how much more the English- man pays for his wheat than he would if the trade in corn were left free, we must consider several things briefly. 1. The cost of transporting wheat to England from these great markets abroad. M'Culloch esti- mates that 10s. will cover all the expense of deliver- ing wheat from Dantzic, Amsterdam, Hamburgh and the United States, in London, and from 16s. to 19s. say 17s. &d. from Odessa. The average cost of the transportation then of foreign wheat to London, is 11s. W%d. The following is the result. s. d. Average price of Wheat in London, per quarter, ) /., Q for 10 years, ending 1831, - - - - $ 01 Average price of Continental and Amer- ) no* 3/7 ican Wheat during the same period J ' Cost of Importing to London - - 11 10 J Total Cost in London 41 1J Extract this from the price of London Wheat, ? on 71 and it leaves a balance of - - - - J * It follows then that every quarter of wheat consumed in England, for ten years ending 1831, cost 20s. 7\d. more than it otherwise would, solely in consequence of the exclusion of foreign grain, by the corn laws ! ! 18* 210 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND 2. The next important inquiry is this how does foreign wheat compare in quality, and con- sequently in value with English wheat ; M'Culloch is still our authority. By reference to his Com. Die. vol. 1. p. 504, will be found a table of the current prices of English and Foreign wheat, in London the 7th Oct. 1833; and by striking the averages, it will be seen Foreign wheat of all descriptions from fifteen continental ports, aver- aged 4c. more a quarter, than the average price of all descriptions of British wheat. This then settles the question about the comparative value of Foreign and English wheat. If Foreign wheat commands a higher price in London than English wheat, it is better. But the difference is trifling. Only it should be remarked, that at the time this table was made out there was no Ameri- can wheat in market, which would have made the average price of Foreign wheat greater ; for it is generally conceded that American wheat is superior to the best English, and indeed better than that of almost any other nation. Now by ascertaining the amount of wheat annually consumed in the United Kingdom, we shall ascertain the tax which the landlords of England have laid upon the people, for the single article of wheat. " Libertas" estimates the wheat annually consumed at 30,000,000 quarters, and the estimate is probably correct. Conclusion. Tax upon one quarter of wheat by Corn Laws, 20s. T\d. Tax upon 30,000,000 quarters - - 30,906,250 GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 211 We have then proved from M'Culloch's statistics that the prodigious sum of 30,690,250 sterling is paid for their wheat every year by the British people, more than they would be obliged to pay if it were not for the infamous com laws ! But we have not yet seen how tremendous is the bread-tax in England ; for we have yet only estimated the effect of the corn laws in raising the price of wheat. But it should be remembered that these wicked laws extend to all grains, and raise the price of every thing that can be made into bread, in the same proportion as they raise the price of Wheat, Barley, Rye, Oats, Indian- Corn, Beans, Peas, Potatoes &c., all are required to pay heavy duties. M'Culloch, Sidney Smith, Dr. Bowring, and indeed all others whose opin- ions I am familiar with, suppose that all other grains, (except wheat,) consumed in Britain, amount in value to about as much as the entire quantity of wheat. From M'Culloch's tables, it appears that these grains are all as much cheaper abroad compared with their price in England, as wheat is, and hence it follows conclusively that the increased price they bear in England solely in consequence of the corn laws, brings an additional tax half as great as is imposed upon wheat ! I have gone to M'Culloch, and made good my words. In my first work, I said the bread tax was $300,000,000 a year. I proved it at the time by good authorities. I have now 212 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND demonstrated it from M'Culloch. But I have not yet done with this argument. M'Culloch says that if it were not for the corn laws, which close British ports against foreign grain, it could be imported into England even at a lower rate than I have estimated. He says, "Hitherto owing to the fluctuating and capricious nature of our demand (for foreign grain,) it has proved of little advantage to the (foreign) cultivator, and but little corn has been raised in the expectation of finding its way to England. But it would be quite another thing were our ports always open. The supply of the English markets would then be an object of the utmost importance to the Polish agriculturists, who, there can be no doubt, would both extend and improve their tillage." Every man must see the force of this argument, unless "Libertas" prove an exception. But even M'Culloch entirely overlooks another important consideration connected most intimate- ly with the subject. His calculations are made on the supposition that this foreign grain would be purchased with gold and silver, whereas if the English ports were always open, it would be es- sentially a barter-trade, and the profit upon the English goods exchanged for corn would un- questionably cover the entire expense of trans- porting it to England from any part of Europe or America ; so that, any amount of foreign grain re- quired could be delivered in London for the same price it bore in the market where it was purchas- GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 213 ed. And another grand result would be experi- enced in England in consequence. Millions of operatives and labourers, who are now starving because they are idle, and idle because the manu- facturers cannot employ them ; for other na- tions have declared over and over again, that they cannot purchase English goods because England will not take corn in exchange, would then find a market for their labour, and with its avails could satisfy their hunger, and provide themselves the necessaries of life. That deep commercial gloom which has settled like a death- pall upon England, and prostrated her manufac- tures, and which is to be chiefly attributed to the baleful effects of the restrictive and protective system, would all be chased away by the beams of returning prosperity. If then all these considerations should be brought O into the estimate, no doubt could possibly remain in the mind of a man who can weigh such argu- ments, that the awful burden of MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED MILLIONS OF DOLLARS is bome by the British people as an annual tax to aug- ment the overgrown wealth of the landholders. Thus are the interests of the nation sacrificed to the avarice of 30,000 selfish men. God alone can tell how many tears have flowed, and how many pangs of hunger been endured to uphold this murderous system ! And when to this gigantic tax are added the enormous duties levied by the government upon sugar, tea, coffee, meat of every 214 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND description, and indeed all the necessaries of life, which have been referred to in the preced- ing chapter, the picture will appear still more ap- palling. I have thus gone somewhat minutely into this question, to afford an illustration of the shallow and base deception this Tory partizan has at- tempted to play off upon an intelligent people. And in his remarks on the Corn Laws, we have a fair sample of his arguments and statistics all through his book. Well may Englishmen ex- claim, " From all such Vindicators of our Fame, 1 Good Lord, deliver us.' " Who will doubt either his integrity or his ac- curacy in other matters, when he has made only the slight miscalculation of two hundred and sev- enty-seven 'millions of dollars a year> on the single article of a bread tax ? I now turn to one of his calculations which is relieved from the sadness of these reflexions about a starving people, and has therefore afforded me some amusement. In hunting up the items which constitute " the heavy burdens of the working man in America," he has stumbled upon one which has, at least, the charm of novelty. He says " the price of coals is from double to five times greater in the United States than in Great Britain," and that " the price of coals seriously af- fects the working classes" among us, and some- thing more wonderful still, " coal is indispensable for every family." GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 215 Is it possible that the author may have written his book in England, and published it before he had been in this country long enough to know, that not one family in the United States in an hundred, ever use coal ? Has he never heard that in America hundreds of millions of cords of wood are every year burnt up to get rid of it ? That fuel, so far from being a tax upon the people, is one great source of their wealth ? Has no one ever told him that in over three quarters of the territory embraced in the Union, men may have their wood for nothing, if they will clear it from the land ? Does he not know that the chief consumption of coal in the United States is by steam engines and manufactories, and that only a small propor- tion of even these use it ? That no amount of restriction upon coal can possibly affect any por- tion of the community, except comparatively a few families in the large cities ? That there are 30 tons of coal consumed in England where there is one consumed in the United States ? Above all, since he speaks of its being " from double to five times as dear in America as in England," did he never learn that the average retail price of Lehi coal (the best) from 1828 (when the en- tire consumption of Anthracite coal in the United States was only 77,516 tons) to 1838, delivered in Philadelphia, was only $>6 66 per ton of 2240 Ibs. ? and this too in an unbroken state. And does he not know that the wholesale price of coal 216 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND furnished to the Greenwich Hospital in London for thirty years, from 1835 to 1838, (which is the latest estimate M'Colloch gives) was $9 31 a ton, or two dollars and sixty-Jive cents a ton dearer than the price of the same article in Philadelphia ! (See Com. Die. vol. 1. p. 336 vol. 2. p. 352, Amer. Ed.) I know that in most parts of Great Britain coal is somewhat cheaper now than it is in the United States, chiefly in consequence of the slave colliers working with their wives and children in the terrible gloom of the coal mines for the wages of serfs ; and also because a part of the heavy duties formerly imposed upon it, have been removed. But it is still taxed, and the suffering weaver of Spital- fields, who is unable to take advantage of the market, or purchase in large quantities, even now pays more for coal than the poor man of New- York. The hand-loom Commission state, that in the winter of 1838, the silk weavers of Spitalfields paid 2s. 2d., or 53 cents per cwt. for coals, or $11 97 per ton ! Say the Commission, " The distress which thence ensued, at a time when the thermometer fell to zero, and three-fourths of the looms were idle, it would be impossible to de- scribe ! A woman, the wife of a silk weaver, relating the sufferings of her family, said to me, ' often, Sir, and often, were we obliged, when half starving, to go without a pennyworth of bread, and buy a pennyworth of coals, or take the chil- dren over to the neighbours to borrow a warm at their fire, or put them early to bed shivering and GLORY OP ENGLAND VINDICATED." 217 crying \vith cold.' " (See Westminster Rev. for July, 1841.) But how would the great body of the American people suifer even if coal were dear, so long as they use wood for their fuel, and not coal. Not one man in a hundred makes any use of coal, or will for a long time to come. Millions of acres of forests are yet to be felled before wood can be expensive, except in some small portions of the Eastern States. And yet this writer boldly de- clares that the average coal tax upon the Ameri- can labourer is $2 40 a year. This is almost as near the truth as his corn law statistics. Since it happens that this tax on coal, which at $2 40 to each working person and his family of four, in- cluding himself, would amount to only about twice as much as all the coal consumed in the United States sells for ! (See Com. Die. article coal.) This coal calculation is on a par with his next estimate, that the " United States lose $40,000- 000 every year by manufacturing' their goods instead of importing them" and M'Culloch agrees with him, he tells us. If so, how does he reconcile it with his declarations so often made, that the immense increase of the wealth of Eng- land within the last fifty years, is attributable chiefly to the unparalleled growth of her manu- factures. It is rather inexplicable to my mind, I confess, that England should double her wealth in half a century by her manufactories, and the VOL. i. 19 218 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND United States lose forty millions a year by the same process ! This country is the wrong place for him to try to make such political economy as this popu- lar, while we are suffering a commercial prostra- tion, brought upon us by an extravagant prodigal- ity, which has within the last six years contracted a debt of several hundred million dollars in Europe by which we have for some time to come secured to ourselves the mortification of losing our credit abroad, and securing the distress we feel at- home. And yet at such a crisis he proclaims the following doctrine in our ears. " It has been cus- tomary to call a balance of imports beyond exports an unfavourable balance ; but modern principles of political economy have shown that the reverse is the correct deduction. We know that every merchant thinks so. We should consider that man in an unsound state of mind who should boast that his trade had been this year most prosperous, for he had actually sold $500,000 worth and re- ceived $400,000 in exchange. If any man was to make this statement in company, would he get a single individual to join him in his self-gratifica- tion ? Certainly not. And what is beneficial to individuals is beneficial to the whole community." This is another striking specimen of our authors mode of reasoning. Does he not know that it is bad economy for individuals or nations to run into debt. That when our imports exceed our exports we do run in debt ? That these debts must be paid or repudiated ? What has impoverished GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 219 the United States, and rendered us bankrupts for the time, but buying of other nations more than they were willing to buy in return? He will not deny, that for nine years, ending with 1839, we imported every year vastly more than we exported, and during the whole period we had contracted a debt of nearly $250,000,000. Now, according to his system, we should have grown rich by the process of buying more than we paid for and rich too, in just the propor- tion we involved ourselves in debt to Europe. But we have at last awaked from the dream of extravagance and found ourselves on the verge of ruin. England was anxious enough to sell us her manufactured goods, but she would not let us pay for them with the products of our own labour. She excluded our grain from her ports she only admitted our tobacco on condition of our paying a duty of over 900 per cent. Our true policy would have been to purchase no more of her than she would part with in exchange for our own pro- ducts, and to have manufactured the balance at home, which we were fully able to do thereby putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of our own labourers, rather than sending four thousand miles to get the work done. We should then have saved ourselves the disastrous consequences which have followed an enormous debt to England loss of credit abroad and re- pudiation and prostration of manufactures and indeed every branch of industry, at home. But 220 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND with an inscanity unparalleled in the history of na- tions, we rushed into debt without bestowing a thought upon the future, or making any adequate provision for the discharge of our obligations. But " Libertas" is the last man who should reproach Mississippi for repudiating her State Debts. She has acted upon the very policy he recommended, and in so doing has brought her- self to her present condition of poverty and hu- miliation. She never would have been reduced to this state of vassalage and dishonour if she had incurred no greater obligation every year than her cot tmi would have discharged. But she expended more than her income, and now she, and indeed the whole nation, find themselves precisely in the condition of hundreds of private individuals who have rashly plunged into debt ; expended their money faster than they made it, and heaped up obligations they could not discharge. When the delusion passes away, and the day of reckoning comes, the spend-thrift prodigal, confounded with his extravagance, and hopeless for the issue, applies the sponge of repudiation to solemn claims, and turning on his heel, tells his creditors they must never trouble him about his debts : he too acted the part of folly, while every body else was play- ing the fool ; received little or no advantage from the goods he purchased, or the money he borrow- ed, and now he must take shelter under a Bank- rupt Law, (which legalizes his fraud) if it is not too much trouble, and if it is, why, he can get GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 221 along without it, (for there is no more of a cat than her skin,) and he takes a long breath, dis- misses all trouble about the past, turns over a new leaf and opens a cash account with the world at last; for the best reason in the world, he can now do business on no other principles. All this is the result of running in debt, of not paying for what is purchased. But this is not the greatest inconsistency in this argument ; in trying to support a structure built upon sand, its author is driven into a greater blunder still. He attempts to show that no draft is made upon us for our specie to pay our foreign debt, and that the amount of gold and silver in America, increased the more our debt augmented. I well know such fictions are too feeble to stand even against the assertion of a merchant's clerk ; but since I have gone thus far in exposing his folly I will finish the work. He says that from 1832 to 1838 while our imports greatly exceeded our exports, some $55,000,000 in specie, were brought into the country, more than was carried out. If it were so what would it prove ? Only that our credit was so good abroad during that time, we could get specie as well as goods upon credit, and Europe supposing her securities good, made no demand on us for specie in return for interest or principle. Heavy loans negotiated abroad, were taken up in specie to a large amount, and of course the gold and silver flowed into the nation. But where " Libertas" got his specie table 19* 222 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND I cannot say. Mr. Woodbury in his report to Congress, Feb. 11, 1841, makes a widely differ- ent estimate, and he may without much stretch of fancy, be supposed to know as much about the matter, as an anonymous writer, whose frequent falsifications have already been abundantly proved upon him. But no sooner did England become alarmed for the security of her claims against us than the tide of gold turned, and according to his own table, one single year made a difference of seventeen and a half million dollars ; for in 1838, we imported $14,239,070, in specie, more than we exported, and in 1839 we exported $3,201,180 more than we imported. The next year this sum increased to Jive millions, in 1841 it swelled to a greater amount still, and it is the opinion of several dis- tinguished financiers of the country, that during the present year it will be much larger than it has ever been ! Besides if the interest and principal of the state debts now due had not been repudiated, it would all have been paid in specie, for our paper currency will hardly pass current in sight of the banks from which it is issued, much less pay debts in Europe : and " Libertas" confesses, that, although during 1839 40 and 41, the re- vulsion of which I speak not only stopped the flow of over $14,000,000 of specie to the United States every year, but positively took away about $15,000,000, making a difference between the amount now in the country, and what it would GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 223 have been, had no unfavourable change taken place, of over $57.000,000 in three years; yet he does not deny that the sum would have been still larger had it not been for the large sale of our public stocks in the European Markets ! " Libertas" knows better than myself the mo- tive which prompted him to put forth such a de- lusive calculation. He says we shall get no more credit in England till our debts are paid. Right ! and would to God, we had never had any of this credit there at all. Then should we have saved our capital which has gone, or will go to England to pay for what we ought to have manufactured at home (for these debts and Bonds will be paid to the last dollar,) and England find- ing she could not sell us from $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 worth of her manufactures every year, would have been obliged before now to do away in part, at least, with her unjust, unrecipro- cal and selfish, restrictive, and prohibitory policy. Many, probably most of my readers, never saw or heard of the book here reviewed, and I trust refuted. It will enable such to judge more correctly of its author's qualifications to become a critic of Repub- lican Institutions, when I tell them he enters at great length, and with much zeal, into a defence of the Union of Church and State in England, and la- ments over the misfortune of America in not being blessed with such an establishment ; this accounts satisfactorily for his impugning the character and motives of such a man as John Thorogood, who 224 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND was shut up in a filthy jail in England two years by the " minister of Jesus," (?) for the non-pay- ment of a 5s. Gd. Church Rate ! His attack upon Mr. Thorogood was too base and intolerable to be swallowed by his own greatest friend and flatterer. The editor of The Scottish Journal, a man who seems to possess a spirit akin to that of " Li- bertas" himself, and who has established a press in New York through which to pour out his Bri- tish hatred upon American Institutions, even he, thoroughly saturated as he is with the monarchi- cal spirit, could not pass his contemptible libel upon John Thorogood without rebuke. He com- plains of " the harsh party-sided view which the author has taken of certain questions of English politics, and for the introducing of which he has not the shadow of an excuse. Such is the Church Rate question. John Thorogood, who lay in a damp jail, swarming with rats for nineteen months because he asserted the birth-right of every free- man to think for himself in matters of religion, and acting upon that belief, refused to pay an odious, oppressive, and unjust tax for the support of the bellows-blowers, organ-grinders, and bell- ringers of the Established Church, * * * has the farther misfortune to be the object of an extra quantity of very illiberal condemnation from ' Li- bertas,' and the latter has put himself in a very unfortunate position in consequence. ' Let us see,' Libertas says, ' John Thorogood, it seems, is a dissenter from the Church of England, and we GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 225 hope a sincere believer in Christianity,' ('what ne- cessity for this sneer,' says the editor.) ' How his conscience can be hurt by a small payment for supporting a Church teaching essentially the very same doctrines which his own church teaches, we cannot explain.' ' Libertas' must be very unfit to grapple with his subject, if he ven- ture to say that Episcopalianism and Indepen- dent principles have much in common. Upon Libertas's reasoning the Presbyterians of Scot- land, and the Wickliffites of England, instead of being glorious martyrs, must have their own blood upon their heads, as the doctrines for which they contended were not more essentially different. The smallness of the sum is nothing : trifling, in- deed, was the ship-money which Hampden refus- ed to pay ; from that refusal England dates her glorious Revolution. ' Libertas' is very unhappy in his Quaker illustration, saying that ' they quiet- ly pay their taxes,' for from the days of William Penn, no English Quaker has paid Church Rates. We conclude by informing ' Libertas' that John Thorogood was NOT ' pleased to walk him- self out of jail,' as he expresses it ; the debt, 5s. 6d. and costs, 121 10s., were paid by an unknown hand, through a London solicitor of eminence, (known to be solicitor to the Dukes of Bedford and Buckingham among others.) And John Thorogood never has known who paid them." Thus much for the estimation in which " Liber- tas" is held by his own friends. 226 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND He has probably let fall no remark more cha- racteristic of his principles than that he " cannot explain how, it could hurt John Thorogoods con- science to pay a church-rate." I presume he did find a difficulty in understanding how any man, could have so tender a conscience : a thing which, if his book is a fair sample, he is never troubled with. One other item shall close what I have to say, on the statistics of this book, " We may fairly state without fear of challenge, that the taxes paid by a working man in England do not exceed four to eleven per cent, on his income." Probably Sir E. L. Bulwer has had as good an opportunity of understanding this matter as " Libertas." He says, " By indisputable calculation it can be shown that every working man is now taxed to the amount Of ONE THIRD OF HIS WEEKLY WAGES." (Eng- land and the English, vol. 1st. p. 116.) Quite a difference between four and thirty-three and one- third per cent, when it comes out of a hungry man's pocket ; but still no great mistake for " Li- bertas." Mr. Villiers, in speaking on this subject in Par- liament last spring, said, " He believed he could not do better than call the attention of the com- mittee to the petition of a labouring man, by name William Gladstone, which set forth the share of taxation he bore with reference to the wages he received. He used, he said, one ounce of tea, two ounces of coffee, eight ounces of sugar, eight GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 227 ounces of meat, eight lb. of flour, seven pints of ale, and a quarter of a pint of brandy per week ; the cost of which articles, free from excise and customs' duties, was two shillings and four-three- fourths, but with those taxes seven shillings and seven pence, being a weekly tax of five shillings and two pence, or yearly of thirteen pounds, thir- teen shillings and six pence, while his wages amounted to only eleven shillings. These were articles almost of necessary consumption to the la- bouring man." After making an assertion, which probably no other man living ever made, that the labouring man in this country is more heavily taxed than in England, " Libertas" resorts to a statistical table to prove it. Finding it a difficult matter, and yet starting as he did, with the determination it should so appear by his statistics, he estimates the tax upon each individual, (working man) in conse- quence of the tariff, at twelve dollars and fifty cents ; that would be $56,000,000 per annum for the whole country, taking his estimate of four persons to a family, which is only two or three times as much as the whole revenue of the coun- try from the tariff. Then comes the coal tax of two dollars and forty cents, which I have proved existed only in his own brain. And these two fictitious sums only amount to one half the aggregate he wishes to make out. But with un- daunted resolution, he leaps the grand conclusion, and adds fifteen dollars and forty cents as the an- 228 SHORT REPLY TO "THE FAME AND nual average loss of every working man in the United States on bad bills ; or $60,000,000 a year, as the aggregate loss to the country, allowing four persons to a family ; or over six hundred millions of dollars in ten years. This happens to amount to about four times as much as all the bank cir- culation in the United States in 1836, when it was larger than it had ever been before, or than it has ever been since : (See Com. Die. article Banks) and nearly twice as much as all the banking ca- pital of the United States ever amounted to since the organization of the government ! This is financiering with a vengeance ! Our author's bill of taxes on the American working man, reminds me of the story told of Joseph Buonaparte and his Yankee landlord. It happened some years ago, while the ex-king of Spain was travelling with his suite, through one of the New-England states, he passed a night at a country inn. The ingenious host considering such a guest no ordinary windfall, determined at once to make a speculation, and so the next morn- ing after puzzling his brain all night about the best manner of presenting the bill, at last he came to the conclusion not to be very minute in his items, and he boldly wrote down $100. When the bill was presented, the servant considering it an unusual charge, thought he would hand it to his master for settlement. The landlord was call- ed in, whom the whilome king thus addressed : " Dis is a remarkable bill, Monsieur one hundred GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 229 dollar for one night ! Mon Dieu please make out de particulars." The host nothing abashed, withdrew to accomplish the work. He made out all the items he could either remember or invent ; many of them imaginary, and all extravagant ] but still he could not with all his yankee inven- tion, make them amount to more than fifty dol- lars. But a hundred dollars he must have ; so he made up the deficit by one grand coup-de-main. And it ran thus : JOSEPH BUONAPARTE, ESQ., Dr. To JONATHAN OCTWITYOU. For the above items already enumerated - $50 00 For making suck a fuss generally, - - - 50 00 Total, - - - $100 00 Received payment, Jonathan Outwityou. The bill of a working man's taxes in America, as figured out by " Libertas," is equally reasona- ble, and his "loss on bills" is the "fuss generally" that helps him out of the scrape. III. The last point to be proved against the author of this book, is, THAT HE HAS NO REGARD FOR THE TRUTH WHEN IT COMES IN COLLISION WITH HIS PASSIONS. His false assertions, peurile statistics, and laughable blunders, I can often at- tribute to other motives than the desire to utter VOL. i. 20 230 SHORT REPLY TO " THE FAME AND falsehoods. I know that national prejudice, the violence of passions, and great credulity, may cause even a sincere man to err widely from the truth. Over all these, which he seems to possess in no ordinary degree, I can throw the mantle of charity. But when he indulges in the bold assertions, that " the amount of common education given in Eng- land greatly exceeds that of America" that the working man in the United States has heavier bur- dens to bear, and enjoys fewer ef the comforts of life than the labouring man of England that the " Voluntary schools provided education for the great mass of the people of England, till within the last century that there is no oppression of the poor in Great Britain, $*c.," I cannot believe he designed or desired to tell the truth. Under the violence of passion, he has descended to the meanness of what cannot be other than conscious and intentional falsehood. With many other ma- licious and libellous charges against myself and my country, I pass over his aspersion of the peo- ple of Connecticut, of whom he says : " To talk of such men knowing anything of the meaning of liberty, is to make a mockery of that cherished word." When an attack worth noticing is made against that people they will answer it themselves. And in reply to his still viler aspersion of Massa- chusetts, I will only quote the words of her great orator : " Mr. President, I shall enter on no enco- mium upon Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is, go and behold her for yourselves. GLORY OF ENGLAND VINDICATED." 231 There is her history the world knows it by heart." In my letter to Mr. Greely, when this book first appeared, I said that in my reply to it I would make the author's charges recoil upon his own head. The public will judge whether I have re- deemed my pledge. From such a man I had no reason to expect the courtesy of a gentleman, al- though I might hope to escape the brutality of the blackguard. BOOK THE FIFTH. SOME GLANCES AT THE SUFFERING AND CRIME, THE IGNORANCE AND DEGRADATION, CAUSED BY THE OP- PRESSIVE BURDENS LAID UPON THE BRITISH PEOPLE. Glorious days for the Church ! and such displays well worthy the followers of the meek and lowly Jesus ! Services of gold for idle, port-bibbing, over-fed churchmen, when thousands nay, millions of families are wanting bread ! There must be an end to all this by-and-by ; the people's eyes are beginning to open, and thek lips to be unsealed. London Satirist March, 1842. We have offended, oh ! my countrymen ! We have offended very grievously, And been most tyrannous. From East to West, A groan of accusation pierces heaven ; The wretched plead against us, multitudes ! bartering freedom and the poor man's life For gold as in a market ! Coleridge. A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight Fortune's unequality . exhibits under the sun. Carlyle. STATE OF THE COUNTRY. On the evening of Friday week, Sir James Graham announced in the House of Commons, the terrible fact, that twelve hundred thousand people are at present receiving parochial relief in England and Wales ! One in every thirteen of the population is on the poor rates, and we may safely assume that one in every ten is destitute. This state of distress is unparalleled, we do believe, in the history of any nation on the face of the earth. Aberdeen Herald, June. 1842. BOOK FIFTH. SOME GLANCES AT THE SUFFERING AND CRIME, THE IGNORANCE AND DEGRADATION, CAUSED BY THE OPPRESSIVE BURDENS LAID UPON THE BRITISH PEOPLE. The Reader who has gone with me through the previous chapters, in which I have spoken of the principal burdens that press upon the lower classes in the British Islands, is now prepared to contemplate the results of all this oppression as they are developed in the sufferings of wronged millions. The throne and aristocracy have had all control over legislation for a thousand years, and the necessary result of this system of things has at last been worked out, the experiment which has been in trial for ages, is finally perfect- ed, the aristocracy are princes, and the poor are beggars. In turning over a file of London papers Last summer, I saw two or three facts on the same 236 SUFFERING AND CRIME page, which will illustrate the subject upon which we are now entering. " A noble Lord," (the earl of Scarborough,) had taken his seat in the House of Peers, and voted before taking the oaths and going through the other prescribed and requisite forms. By violating the laws of the realm, the noble Lord had incurred numerous and severe disabilities, (according to the 30th Charles II. Stat. 2, Cap. 1.) It was considered of course out of the question to execute the law's penalty upon a noble- man ; and the House of Peers, violating the stand- ing rules of that body, (that no bill shall be read twice in one day,) introduced a bill to relieve the offending Earl, and passed it through all its stages into a law the very day it was introduced. Per- haps this was all right. The next item in the column, was the follow- ing : " A tradesman of Shrewsbury, travelling in a taxed cart, on the Atcham road, was on Sunday charged a toll of 10s. 4rf. in passing through Emstrey gate, for having the name of the owner of the cart affixed on the wrong side of it ! !" In the Examiner I saw an account of the trial of Lord Waldegrave, in which that nobleman was acquitted, and it was thought in violation of justice, by Chief Justice Denman. Immediately after the same eminent Jurist sentenced a poor letter-carrier, who had stolen a penny from a letter, to transportation for life. These facts illustrate the spirit of English law and English society. The poor letter-carrier who OP THE BRITISH PEOPLE. is now dragging out a wretched life of slavery in antipodal Australia, torn from his wife and child- ren for the crime of stealing a penny, to save, by the crust he bought with it, his hungry babes from starvation, he could discourse somewhat eloquently on " the equal rights of all British subjects before the law." I find a case stated in a Scottish Journal of the first of June 1842, which came recently before a magistrate. It appeared that a shop-keeper on entering a house in pursuit of a poor wretch who had stolen a few potatoes, found in a boiling pot, a portion of a dead dog which the starving family was preparing to eat with the stolen potatoes ! I need not comment on such a fact ; only this much I will say, that about the same time, and if I remember right, the very same night, the halls of Victoria's palace were echoing the revelry of England's nobility, gathered at a grand bal masque, which is said to have eclipsed all the magnificence ever before seen at the court of St. James. To provide for this brilliant and dazzling pageant, " thousands of toil-worn labour- ers that same night, went hungry to their straw. While the queen and the lords and ladies of her court were squandering thousands upon this dis- play of useless magnificence, the millions of Bri- tain whose sweat and groans had filled those beaufets with plate of gold, and covered the robes of velvet with ermine and jewels, were starving in hovels." But says the editor of the Freeman's 238 SUFFERING AND CRIME Journal, " the pampered lordling and the silken demoiselle did not dance away the woes of the bed-ridden. Gilded masks did not hide the grim and wasted visage of squalid poverty. Garments of cloth of gold, clusters of diamonds did not hide the nakedness of the beggar, and in the pomp and splendour of that mocking pageantry, the sorrows and cries of famished millions without, were neither solaced nor hushed." What wonder that in England a poor wretch, who feels only the gnawings of hunger, and that somebody is to blame for it besides himself, should, in the sullen revenge of desperation, attempt the life of the Queen. She may be personally inno- cent, but famine is often blind in the victim it se- lects for its fury. When the Queen was first shot at, in the summer of 1840, I was in London, and but a short distance from the scene. In passing to my lodgings late that night, I met crowds of houseless, half starved wretches coming away from the fashionable part of the town, where they had gone with the excited thousands who gathered around the palace. I could not but feel that this, and even worse awaited an oppressive govern- ment ; and that there were eyes which would yet see the emaciated populace thronging round that palace with other motives than curiosity, and bear- ing away other trophies than their own tatters. I have shown, I think, from authorities which will not be questioned, that heavier burdens are imposed on the British people than on any other OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 239 nation in the world ; and since the great propor- tion of these taxes are on the necessaries and com- forts of life, they fall of course upon the labouring classes, who constitute the vast majority of the people. This will illustrate the folio wing remark of Sidney Smith, that " There is no doubt, more misery and acute suffering among the mass of the people of England, than there is in any kingdom of the world. There are thousands, houseless, breadless, friendless, without shelter, raiment or hope ; millions uneducated, only half fed, driven to crime and every species of vice which ignorance and destitution bring in their train, to an extent utterly unknown to the less enlightened, the less free, the less favoured, and the less powerful king- doms of Europe ; but really they are illiterate, and to say the truth, are sometimes actually not very civil when they have wanted bread for only two or three days." We now ask the attention of the reader while we lift the veil from the sufferings and degrada- tion of the SLAVE CLASSES. And although the facts I shall state will send a chill to the heart of every man who feels any sympathy for the wrong- ed and the degraded, yet I trust the reader will not turn away from the picture I shall draw, dark and appalling though it be, until this great lesson sinks deep into his heart, that man cannot inflict injustice on his brother man without high offence against heaven, and misery, wherever his wrong doing is felt To convey an idea of the general 240 SUFFERING AND CRIME condition of England during the last winter, I make the following extract from a January num- ber of the London Spectator. "When Parliament assembles on 3d February, it will meet no improved accounts of the state of the country. This week has added another to the list of great meetings to declare the advance of embarrassment, if not of ruin, among all classes in the manufacturing districts. The whole West Riding of Yorkshire has just made such a declara- tion. However tedious these reports may be in the detail, from their sameness and the triteness of the subject, as well as from their gloomy char- acter, they merit the profoundest attention as ema- nating from such wide and important tracts of country. District after district, each comprehend- ing great counties, has avowed itself unable to cope with the burden that oppresses it. If the reader were to take a blank map of the United Kingdom, and to colour those parts which have thus spoken in one tint, say in the appropriate hue of black, he would find a large portion of the country clothed in the shade of trouble, and that the most wealthy portion. It comprises the iron-district of Western Scotland, with Paisley and other trading places ; the iron-district of Wales ; Liverpool and Man- chester, and the districts belonging to them in Lancashire and North Cheshire ; the West Riding of Yorkshire ; Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, and their surrounding districts. The accounts from this wide region are all alike ; they represent such OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 241 a state of things as, when it is permanent, is called the decay of nations." Such was the condition of England last winter ; and since then the evil, so far from being remedied, has been continually augmenting, until embarrass- ment in every branch of trade and commerce, and distress among the entire mass of the working classes, have increased to a most fearful extent. But for distinctness we will take up each class of labourers by itself, and ascertain as nearly as possible their real condition, the amount of their wages, the demand for their labour, and the num- ber of hours they work. Finding, as we shall, a great disproportion between their wants and their means, we shall be able more correctly to learn the amount of their suffering. For convenience sake we shall divide the Lower Classes into two great bodies, the Agricultural and the Commercial. Under the Agricultural head, we embrace also the slaves in the coal mines; and under the Commercial, we shall include the suffering population of large towns in the three kingdoms. AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS. Always choos- ing to substantiate my statements by English au- thorities, I shall open this section with a few words from the Westminster Review for January, 1842, to do away with the false impression which has been so common in the United States, and VOL. I. 21 242 SUFFERING AND CRIME into the belief of which, so many Englishmen have been deluded ; that the peasantry of England are " the happiest peasantry in the world !" An impression which has no other foundation than the dreams of the poet, or the false representations of oppressive landlords. Says the Review, " There is not a step, but sim- ply a hand's-breadth between the condition of our agricultural labourers, and pauperism ! For al- though the labour of our parish yards and Unions is more dependent and less remunerated than that of the free labour of those who keep themselves aloof from the parish, yet such is the actual condi- tion of the farming men of this country, to say nothing of Ireland, that if only sickness during a few weeks assail them, or they lose employment for the same length of time, they have nothing to fall back upon, but the large district receptacles for the sick, the famishing, and the infirm. * * * Misery everywhere exists vast and incalculable misery ! but it is more obvious, condensed, palpi- tating, and fuller of interest to a mere casual ob- server, in the great towns and cities, than in the fields, moors, fens, and mountains of our land. Misery in the country is less obvious to the passer-by, to the votary of pleasure and dissipa- tion, and even to the man of leisure and reflection : but it is not the less real. The cottagers of Eng- land, once so cheerful and gay, are melancholy and mournful. The voice of singing is never heard within their walls. Their unhappy in- OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 243 mates vegetate on potatoes and hard dumplings, and keep themselves warm with hot water pour- ed over one small teaspoonful of tea that barely colours the water, and which is administered to the fretful children by their anxious and impover- ished parents." " We have not taken these statements for grant- ed : we have not fallen into the cry of ' harcl times for the agricultural poor.' without knowing them to be so ; and we are as well acquainted with the farming labourer's repast, as we are with their mi- series. They are ground down by iron and searching poverty, and their meals are neither nu- tritive in quality, nor adequate in solid amount." From all I can gather, I have no hesitation in saying, that the wages of agricultural labourers will not average Ss. per week. I am not now speaking of the average including all the adult able-bodied male peasantry, for vast multitudes are compelled to remain idle. It should be remembered that the price of la- bour, like the price of everything else, depends on the proportion the demand bears to the supply. Where there is so much surplus labour as there is in England, the poor who have no other resources are obliged to bid against each other, until their labour falls in the market to so low a rate, that a whole family may often find themselves unable even by the most wasting and ceaseless toil to get a sufficient supply of the coarsest bread to al- lay the pains of hunger. This competition is 244 SUFFERING AND CRIME ruinous to the poor. The rich merchant is often made bankrupt by being compelled to dispose of his goods in a market he already finds glutted with the only articles he has to sell ; how much more seriously is this misfortune felt by whole masses, who are never sought after by the propri- etors, but who crowd around every spot where work is to be'done, offering to labour for the scantiest pit- tance rather than stand idle. This is the case all over the British Islands. Everywhere there are more workmen than work. It is no argument against this to say that English manufactures have increased in a far greater ratio than the pop- ulation, for the work of several hundred millions of men is now done by labour-saving machinery. This I shall show when I come to speak of 800,000 hand-loom weavers, who waste away their muscles in a painful attempt to compete with the tremendous power of machinery It still remains true, that after all the wonderful inven- tions of modern times which have called such half-miraculous power into play, there never was a period when the English labourer struggled so hard to live, or lived in such suffering as now. Another thing must be considered. The great question to settle is not, how much money the labourer receives for his work ; but how many of the necessaries and comforts of life it will procure him ; for upon this the value of the poor man's labour entirely depends. And although it is undoubtedly .true, that the money rate of wages OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 245 in England and Scotland, generally exceeds some- what that of the continent, yet in consequence of the enormous price of all the necessaries of life, the English labourer is often more dependant and suffers more, than the labourers of most, if not all other European countries. Soon after the "anti-corn law league" was organized, a new spirit of inquiry into the condi- tion of the people was awakened. This resulted in so thorough an investigation, and in the accu- mulation of facts so incontrovertible, that no person who has any reputation for accuracy or intelli- gence to preserve, will risk it upon a denial of the terrible truth, that misery vast and incalculable everywhere prevails in the three kingdoms ; and that the agricultural labourers, so far from being exempt from the general distress, have been among the severest sufferers. In giving an account of an investigation into the condition of the peasantry of Devonshire, the garden of England, the editor of the anti-corn circular, says : '' We invite particular attention to the account of the condition of the Devonshire peasantry, given in this number. It appears that the aver- age wages paid to the labourers who till the soil of that garden of England, are under eight shil- lings a week ! Tens of thousands of heads of families are there toiling for a shilling or fourteen pence a day each, which, supposing them to have a wife and three children, will not be more than 21* 246 SUFFERING AND CRIME eighteen- pence a head ; less by sixpence than is allowed for the subsistence of a pauper in the Manchester workhouse, nay, less than is paid for the food and clothing of the criminals confined in our New Bailey prison ! Such are the peasantry of beautiful Devonshire. Truly may it be said of that country, -God created a paradise, and man surrounded it with an atmosphere of misery, and peopled it with the wretched victims of selfish legislation !." In putting on record the weekly expenditure of a peasant's family, whose receipts were seven shillings a week, the writer adds, " the account subjoined is not imaginative, being taken from the mouth of an honest and industrious peasant, living and working in the parish of Tiverton. His family consists, of himself, his wife, and four chil- dren, the ages of the latter being seven, six, four, and two years." The following is the literal account given me by the parties : 5. d. Rent of two rooms and garden - - - - 1 4 One peck of wheat - - - - 2s. Od. Grinding 1J Barm OOj 2 2 Half a bag of potatoes - - - - - -26 One pound of lard - - 7J Candles ----- - 1 Soap - - 1 Salt 0| Milk, (scalded,) six pinta - - - - - 2 t OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE- 247 I entered the dwelling of a poor peasant in the parish of Newton Poppleton, (between Topsham and Sidmouth,) for the purpose of investigating an alleged case of " comparative comfort." At the village inn I had fallen into conversation with two farmers, one of whom, in reply to my loudly expressed regret at the misery of the labourers in that district, informed me that that misery was exaggerated. " For instance," said he, " one of my men receives 7s. a week, and has a house rent free." For the moment I conceded the fact as a creditable exception to the general rule ; but, on the departure of farmer Thomas, determined to visit the happy family, and, accompanied by a guide, proceeded on my errand. I found the mother and her five little ones at home. One of them was ill, and it was evident that none of them were overfed. They had not tasted meat for months. The weekly consumption of coarse bread was eight four-pound loaves, at sevenpence halfpenny the loaf, purchased from the baker at a cost of five shillings, five-sevenths of the week's wages ! Potatoes, and soap, and salt consumed the remaining pittance. For fuel the children prowl, like gypsies, along the lanes and through the woods, gathering a few rotten sticks, or the mother proceeds to the nearest waste for her burthen of turf. Not the least provision against casual sickness or premature infirmity can ever be made out of the peasant's earnings. 248 SUFFERING AND CRIME This account was published in the Somerset County Gazette. The editor expressed great surprise that such a state of things prevailed in Devonshire, and congratulated the peasantry of Somerset on their independence. A committee however, was appointed to make a similar inquiry into their condition. In reference to it the editor says : " At the Board of Guardians on Wednesday, however, we received painful evidence that the agricultural labourers of Somerset are, if it be possible, worse off than those of Devonshire. One case will be sufficient. " A woman applied for relief in consequence of the ill health of herself and children, and the cer- tificate of the medical officer stated her to be suf- fering from want of sufficient nourishment. She bore two children in her arms, one of them hav- ing inflamed eyes. The case was strictly ex- amhied, and with a view to information on the real state of our boasted peasantry the happy children of the soil the pride of our land, as they are called by poets and landlords, we put se- veral questions, the answers to which filled us with surprise. The following is the substance of her statement. " Her husband is a farm labourer, working for a farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of Taunton. His wages are seven shillings a week only, with an allowance of cider for himself. We ascertained that these were the wages generally OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 249 given by the farmers in this vicinity. The fami- ly consists of the peasant, his wife, and five chil- dren under ten years old. The farmer sells them wheat, not the best, but still, she said, very good, at eight shillings a bushel. She bought half a bushel a week, which consumed four shillings out of the seven. She paid eighteen pence a week for house rent ; it cost her sixpence a week for grinding, baking and barm, to make the wheat into bread ; another sixpence was consumed in firing, and only a solitary sixpence was left to provide the family with the luxury of potatoes, clothes, and other necessaries, for comforts they had none. And this is the condition of the En- glish labourer." These, and similar accounts of the peasantry in every part of England, were published more than two years ago. Since then the state of things has been growing worse and worse every day. The price of food has greatly increased. Commercial embarrassment has carried a distress hitherto unknown through every part of the coun- try ; and the most undoubted authorities, Quar- terly Reviews, Members of Parliament, London and Provincial Journals, have all confirmed the sad truth, that although the peasantry have been surrounded by overflowing granaries, yet " those who till the earth and make it lovely and fruitful by their labours, are only allowed the slave's share of the many blessings they produce." A powerful writer in the Westminster Review, 250 SUFFERING AND CRIME in alluding to the insensibility of the upper and middle classes to the distress of the lower orders, remarks : " They have so long been habituated to the knowledge of the existence of misery, want and privation, that they ask with indolent or va- pid indifference when pressed upon to consider the whole question ' what is there new that we have not yet heard of? Is there any thing par- ticular to which you refer ?' Tell them that an agricultural labourer who toils twelve, and some- times fourteen hours per day, in cold, rain, frost, sun, fog, alternately frozen, bleached, and drench- ed, earns for his week's labour, for the support of himself and his wife, and four young children, none of them able to leave the hut in which they reside, without their mother accompanying them ; the wretched pittance of twelve shillings (which is nearly or quite double the average sum.} and they will ask, ' Oh ! that has been the price for a long time past is that all V " No, it is not all ; for these men shall hear fur- ther how these twelve shillings are expended ; and when they look on their own purple and fine linen, their own tables groaning under the lux- uries piled on them, and see their own eyes stand out with fatness, let the bill of fare, of their fellow man, the labourer, stare them in the face : OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 251 Rent - - 2s. Od. Flour 50 Cheese - .... 7 Tea 07 Potatoes 10 Sugar 07 Bacon - .-08 Soap and Candles - - - - 7 Wood or Coals - - - - 1 2 12 " No butter no milk no meat no red her- rings even no clothing no medicine for the children no shoes or boots no provision put by for the times when the husband may be unable to work from sickness or accident ; and yet the twelve shillings are gone ! yes, gone ! And in what ? In insufficient food for the body ! We visited lately fifty such cases. There are 500,000 more to be looked to, and 500,000 more beyond them. So here is a population, and in England too, and in some of our best districts, existing on bread and potatoes, with no meat, beer, or milk, from year's end to year's end, but two ounces of tea and a pound of moist sugar for husband, wife and four children, for a whole week ! and this normal state is viewed with a sort of complacency by those who inquire ' is there any thing new T Yes, it is new in the history of the world, that an enlightened, industrious, indefatigable peasan- try, should exist on such fare, and should brook such a state of being." The same writer declares, that " the constant, 252 SUFFERING AND CRIME the perpetual state daring some years past, of the English agricultural poor is disgraceful to the name and character of the British Nation." He institutes a comparison between their con- dition and that of the same classes on the conti- nent, and enters into statistical calculations which show a state of things far more favourable to the continental labourer ; chiefly because the necessa- ries of life are so much cheaper on the continent. " And we are not," says this bold, humane writer, " to be sneered or balked out of these facts, by the idle and vain boastings about ' our matchless con- stitution ' or ' our wooden walls.' It is then wholly incorrect to assert that our English agricultural labourers are in a condition at all parallel to those of France, Belgium, or Switzerland." According to the result of Mr. Symons' investi- gations, the continental labourer procures with his wages more of the comforts of life than the En- glishman. In his " Philosophical Inquiry into the nature of a sound currency," James Pedie, of Edinburgh, arrives at the same conclusion. And yet all men know that the agricultural labourers on the continent are only a very little removed from the condition of serfdom. In the debate in the House of Lords on the col- lieries, Earl Fitzwilliam expressed the belief, that if the inquiry was extended to the peasantry, they would be found to be in a condition no better than that of the " SLAVES IN THE COAL MINES :" and in this belief several noble lords concurred. OP THE BRITISH PEOPLE, 253 I might crowd facts together, and accumulate evidence, but the case would be no more strongly made out. Our Republican travellers have said little about the condition of the poor in Great Britain of any class ; much less have they thought of looking for distress in the English cottage. Little has been known, even in England, among the higher classes, of the agricultural distress un- til recently, and they have cared still less than they knew. All hear the groan of the Factory operatives who are congregated in dense masses in the large manufacturing towns. But from the scattered and isolated position of the country la- bourers, their sufferings are less likely to be in- quired into. Poets who vegetate in Grub street attics may sing of " vine-clad cottages," and Re- publican tourists, who struggle to gain admittance to aristocratic circles abroad, (and this is no diffi- cult matter for any foreigner,) and who are there flattered, not only out of their republicanism but their humanity, may "say a thousand soft things of Lords and Ladies, and England being a Para- dise ; it will nevertheless remain true, that " there is not a step, but simply a handslreadth between the condition of the English agricultural labourer and pauperism." INFANT AND FEMALE SLAVES IN THE BRITISH COAL MINES. The friends of humanity in Eng- land are engaged in a noble work. They are tearing off the mask from the gilded institutions VOL. i. 22 254 SUFFERING AND CRIME of Britain, and displaying to the gaze of the world, barbarities and oppressions inflicted upon the down-trodden masses of the poor, compared with which African slavery in its worst forms is a hu- mane and beneficent system. This assertion will grate harshly on the ears of those Abolitionists who have been so greatly en- raged, that after witnessing for myself the condi- tion of the English operative and the American slave, I should say as I did, in the " Glory and the Shame of England," that of the two I would choose the lot of the latter for my children. How- ever little humanity this class of one-sided dema- gogues may award to the rest of the community, I believe they are the only men in this country whose sympathies and indignation will not be deeply stirred by the facts I shall relate. " Talk of slavery !" exclaims the Dublin Free- man's Journal. " What slave is in a worse condi- tion than that described by the Commissioners' Report ? Are the female slaves treated as these poor women? Are the children of slaves set to work at six years of age, and kept at work for twelve hours daily ? Is the negro boy worked for six-and-thirty hours without interruption ? No ; slavery in its most hideous form never equalled this ; and the condition, physical as well as mor- al, of the most degraded bondsman, may be es- teemed exalted if compared with that of the free collier of England." The Commission appointed by Parliament to OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 255 inquire into the employment of children and its effects upon their morals and health, aided by twenty sub-commissioners, thoroughly qualified for their work, during the month of May last, laid before the House of Commons 2,000 folio pages as the result of their investigations. In speaking of this Report, a London Journal says, " The infer- nal cruelty practised upon boys and girls in the coal mines, these graves both of comfort and vir- tue, have never in any age been outdone. The recent disclosures made in this Report may well excite the horror of every individual in whom a vestige of humanity remains. We have some- times read, with shuddering disgust, of the out- rages committed upon helpless childhood by man, when existing in a state of naked savageness. We aver our belief, that in cold-blooded atrocity, they do not equal what is going on from day to day in some of our coal mines. Young crea- tures, both male and female six, seven, eight, nine years old, stark naked in some cases, chained like brutes to coal carriages, and dragging them on all-fours, through sludge six or seven inches deep, in total darkness, for ten, occasionally twen- ty, in special instances, thirty hours successively, without any other cessation, even to get meals, than is casually afforded by the unreadiness of the miners here is a pretty picture of British ci- vilization. One cannot read through the evidence taken by the commission above referred to, with- 256 SUFFERING AND CRIME out being strongly tempted to abjure the very name of Englishman." One is almost tempted after reading the disgust- ing and horrible details of this Report, to believe that the days of ancient heathenism have again returned, when the worshippers of Moloch caused their children to pass through the fire. We will glance, as briefly as possible, at some of the facts contained in this voluminous record of infant and female woe. The age at which Children are forced into the mines. Will it be believed that there are many infants under nine years of age, enslaved in these dismal caverns, several hundred feet under ground? Nay, that there are some little crea- tures driven down to their slave tasks who have not lived long enough plainly to articulate their mother tongue? That they are confined to their prostrating tasks twelve, sixteen, nay, even thirty, and thirty-six hours at a time ? No sober man would believe that such barbarities are perpetrated upon children in a Christian land, unless the astounding truth came to him on evidence ir- reproachable. The Report states that six years is a common age at which children are thrust into these mines, while many are forced there at a still tenderer age. One witness says, " I have been acquainted with colleries nearly all my life, and I know it as a fact, that a collier now living has taken a child of his own, who was only three years old into the OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 257 pit, to ' hurry,' and when the child was exhausted it was carried home, stripped and put to bed." John Ibbotson, another witness, says, " I have been forty-five years in the pits, and I knew a man, called Joseph Canthrey, who sent a child in at four years, and there are many who go to ' thrust behind, at that time, and many more at jive : but it is soon enough for them to go at nine or ten, and the sooner they go in, the sooner their constitution is mashed up." 1 " The Commissioners say that the proprietors seemed reluctant to acknowledge the truth in re- gard to the age of the children, but that the prac- tice of sending them to the mines at this early age, is " as universal as it is barbarous" One case is recorded in which a child was regularly taken to the pit-work at three years of age. After the infant had worked itself into exhaustion, it was thrown upon the damp coal until night, when its father went home. And it was also stated, that " out of thirty children employed in six pits in the Halifax district, seventeen are between five and nine years of age." Says Mr. Fletcher, one of the Sub-commission- ers : " In the smaller collieries of the Oldham dis- trict, which had only thin strata, varying in thick- ness from eighteen inches to twenty-four, children are employed so early as six, five, and even four years of age. Some are so young, that they go even in their bed-gowns. One little fellow, whom I endeavoured to question, could not even articulate." 22* 258 SUFFERING AND CRIME The condition of these children, and the labour they perform. It would seem impossible even for avarice itself to contrive a plan by which the soft muscles of infants could be coined into gold. But it has been done most effectually. No indi- vidual miner is allowed to do more than a certain quantity of work, but for every child he introduces into the mine a farther allowance of work is awarded to him, and the consequence is, children are put to hurry a technical term for pushing or drawing trucks of coal through the narrow seams' where adults cannot get almost as soon as they can go by themselves. From a remark of the commissioners, it would seern that the regulation which thus stints the labour of the parent and offers him a premium for that of his infant, is attributable to the coal own- ers. If it were not, the stern demands of neces- sity and the calls of hunger, would compel the poor miner to enslave his children to brutalizing toil, rather than see them utterly starve. But one would suppose that even if tender chil- dren were forced up to hard labour, yet still they would not be condemned to the most prostrating and destroying kind; but, on the contrary, the work required of them is often of the most horrible description. Mr. Fellows, one of the sub-commis- sioners gives the following graphic picture : " I wish to call the attention of the board to the pits about Brampton. The seams are so thin that several have only two feet headway to all the OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 259 works. The pits are altogether worked by boys. The elder one lies on his side, and in that posture holes and gets the coal. It is then loaded in a barrow or tub, and drawn along the bank of the pit mouth, without wheels, by boys from eight to twelve years of age, on all fours, with dog belts and chains, the passages being very often an inch or two thick in black mud, and are neither ironed nor wooded. In Mr. Barneys pit these poor boys have to drag the barrows with one cwt. of coals sixty times a day sixty yards, and the empty barrows back, without once straightening their backs, unless they stand under the shaft and run the risk of having their heads broken by a coal falling." Again he says, " out of five children I examined who worked in the Brampton pits, three were not only bow-legged, but their arms were bowed in the same way ; and their whole frame appeared far from being well developed." Another commissioner in describing the Halifax miners, draws this melancholy picture. " The narrowness of the space in which all the operations," he says, " must be carried on, of course materially influences the labour of the children and young persons. Fortunately few children are needed in them as trappers ; but those that are employed, as in most other districts, sit in perfect darkness. I can never forget the first unfortunate creature of this class that I met with. It was a boy about eight years old, who looked at me as I passed with an expression of 260 SUFFERING AND CRIME countenance the most abject and idiotic like a thing-, a creeping thing, peculiar to the place. On approaching and speaking to him, he shrunk trembling and affrighted in a corner, as if I was about to do him some bodily injury, and from which neither coaxing nor temptations could draw him out." The report goes on to say : " The ages of the children (the trappers) vary from six and a half to ten years old ; few come before they are nearly seven, and few remain longer than nine. It is a most painful thing to contemplate the dull dungeon-like life these creatures are doomed to spend ; a life for the most part, passed in solitude, damp, and darkness. They are allowed no light ; but sometimes a good natured collier will bestow a little bit of candle on them as a treat. On one occasion, as I was pass- ing a little trapper, he begged of me a little grease from my candle. I found that the poor child had scooped out a hole in a great stone, and having obtained a wick, had manufactured a rude sort of lamp and that he kept it going as well as he could, by begging contributions of melted tallow from the candles of any passers by" One child says : ' I've no time to play ; I never see daylight all the week in winter, except when I look up the pitshaft, and then it looks about half a yard wide. Another aged seven, says : ' I stop twelve hours in the pit ; / never see OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 261 daylight now except on Sundays / I fell asleep one day, and a corve ran over my leg and made it smart ; they'd squeeze me against the door if I fall a sleep again.' ' George Foster (12 years) has wrought a dou- ble shift of twenty-four hours three times in the Benton pit. About a year and a half ago he wrought three shifts at one time, going down at four o'clock one morning, and staying thirty-six hours without coming up. The overman asked him to stop, &c. A great quantity of boys are doing this now, from a scarcity of work. * Some lads have worked double shifts, thirty-six hours lately. John Clough, aged fourteen, work- ed thirty-six hours last Friday, (his brother con- firms this.") But there is yet a darker side of this appalling picture. Girls as well as boys, infant girls and young women, are thus employed ; and such are the degrading effects of habit, that when these girls grow up to puberty they continue to work in the mines without the slightest sense of their position, being other than is fitting a state of civilization. These females are not kept as u trappers," or put to some other light occupation : they are harnessed to the "corves," and must draw their loads as well as the men ! " Girls, says Mr. Scriven, from^ye to eighteen, perform the work of boys. There is no distinc- tion whatever in their coming up the shaft or going down in the mode of hurrying or thrust- 262 SUFFERING AND CRIME ing in the weights or corves, or in the distances they are hurried in wages or dress." " A broad belt is buckled round their waist, to the front of which a chain is fastened, which, when they go down on all fours, is passed between their legs and attached to the corve, which they draw after them, thus harnessed to it like animals/' An Irish writer, with the enthusiasm of his nation, says of this treatment of females : " Thank Heaven we have not been assimilated in all things ! and from lands-end to lands-end throughout Ireland the bare mention of placing a woman ' all fours,' and harnessing her to a cart, would be met with a shout of indignation that would make civilized England blush. The evi- dence of one woman is so strikingly illustrative of the immoral tendency of the practice of having women employed at such labour, that we quote it, even at the risk of being thought to dwell too long upon a subject so abhorrent to all the higher feel- ings of our nature. Says this female witness examined : ' I wear a belt and chain at the work- ings to get the corves out. The getters are naked, except their caps; they pull off all their clothes. I see them at work when I go up. They some- times beat me, if I am not quick enough. There are twenty boys and fifteen men. All are naked.' " But horrible as is the condition of these chil- dren, there is another class whose fate is infinitely worse the orphans, children of paupers, who are apprenticed as "hurriers" by the parish officers OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 263 to the conductors of the mines. Of this barbarous custom, the London Morning Herald remarks : " The usual plan is to bind them to this worse than negro slavery in its worst days, from the age of nine years to twenty-one, but even this mer- ciful limitation of the bondage is evaded without scruple. Mr. Symons, sub-commissioner, men- tions a 'very gross case' of the Dewsbury union apprenticing a child who was not five years of age, and having been remonstrated with, pleaded that they had not formally bound him, and should not until he was nine ! At Halifax ' a great number of children are apprenticed by the boards of guar- dians as hurriers, from the age of eight years to twenty-one,' getting rid of the children by pay- ment of a sovereign ; and at Oldham ' they have bound more parish children apprentices to miners latterly than to any other trade.' " The savage barbarity that rules the workhouse system in England, is strikingly developed here. It cannot be that the authorities which consign these tender orphans to such cruel slavery, are ig- norant of their fate ; they must know, when they send these " little ones, cast on the cold heath of the world's charity" to the coal caverns, what they are doing ! And I ask, where is the hu- manity of a social system which, rather than give food and clothing to infant children, whose parents are dead, will deliberately send them to these liv- ing graves, where they are certain to be treated with barbarity ; to be tortured out of the world, or 264 SUFFERING AND CRIME grow up through the gloom of suffering to become heathens in a land which has established religion by law, at an expense of $50,000,000 a year, " in order that the entire population, and especially the poor, may be supplied with the bread of life." The report contains more than enough evidence, that unheard of cruelties are inflicted on these or- phans. An overseer in one of the mines candidly acknowledges, that " cases of cruelty to them were very common." He was obliged to summon three cases in one week, where boys had been unmerci- fully used, in one of which a child was nearly beaten to death. For some trivial fault, the fol- lowing outrage was inflicted: "A man got the boy's head between his legs, and each boy in the pit, and there were eighteen or twenty of them, in- flicted twelve strokes on the boy's rump and loins with a cat. I never saw such a sight in my life. The flesh of the rump and the loins were beaten to a jelly. The surgeon said the boy could not survive but He did." Is it not more mysterious than all, that these little creatures, all common sufferers, should unite in torturing each other? Naturalists say, that even wild beasts of the forest are often known to fight in each other's defence. But the report clears up the mystery, by stating that " had the other boys refused to take part in the brutality, they would have been served in the same way ; and so far from the case being an extraordinary one, it was quite a common one" " No care whatever," OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 265 says the London Herald, " is in fact shown by any party to these children. Fortunate it is for them if they can get food, and still more fortunate if they get time to enjoy it ; but amusement or re- creation they have none, many of them never see- ing daylight for weeks in the winter; and as for education, secular or religious, they have no op- portunity to acquire it, even if there was any one to impart it. Their condition combines all the toil and confinement of the galley-slave, with the op- pression of the kidnapped African ; and they grow up ferocious from ill-treatment, to retort in after years the same ill-treatment upon others." Female Children. Multitudes of young girls are harnessed to carts in these subterranean pri- sons, and made to draw them on their hands and knees, " through confined passages, perhaps not two feet high, and frequently a foot of that space a thick sludge of water and coal dust." The Report says that girls are preferred to boys as " hurriers" for their greater docility, and are taken into the mines even at an earlier age, from a supposition that "when infants they are the more 'cute." Another commissioner states, that to all the re- volting cruelties practised on the boys, the girls are equally subjected : " Girls perform all the offices of trapping, hurrying, filling, riddling, top- ping, and getting (coal ;) just as they are perform- ed by boys. The practice of employing females in coal-pits is flagrantly disgraceful to a Christian VOL. i. 23 266 SUFFERING AND CRIME as well as to a civilized country. On descending Messrs. Hopwood's pit at Barnsley, I found assem- bled round the fire a group of men, boys, and girls, some of whom were of the age of puberty, the girls as well as the boys stark naked down to the waist, their hair bound up with a tight cap, and trousers supported by their hips." It is shocking to read such testimony from ten- der females. One says : " I work in Hardhill mine. We hurry the carts by pushing behind, but I frequently draw with ropes and chains as the horses do. It is dirty, slavish work, and the water quite covers our ancles. I knock my head against the roofs, as they are not so high as I am, and they cause me to stoop, and makes my back ache." Another thus speaks of the hardships they un- dergo : " My employment is carrying coal. Am frequently worked from four in the morning till six at night, and every other week I work night work. I then go down at two in the day, and come up at four or six in the morning. Two years ago the pit closed in upon thirteen of us, and we were without food and light two days ; nearly one day we were up to our chins in water." These volumes might be filled with this branch of the evidence contained in the Report; but, as remarks the London Herald : " We may content ourselves with stating generally, that there is no variation in any part of the voluminous evidence OP THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 267 collected on this subject of young girls being em- ployed in the coal mines, except that their labour is more severe, and treatment more cruel, if pos- sible, in the east of Scotland than elsewhere." Young' and married women. This class is very numerous in the coal mines, and their treat- ment no less brutal than that of the others. We extract from their own evidence : " We learn from the commissioners that the labour required by wo- men, is " filling, riddling, and carrying," work which none but the most robust men can endure, and which generally breaks down their iron con- stitution very quick. " Janet Duncan, aged seventeen," says the Report, ' was a coal bearer at Hen-muir-pit. The carts she pushed contained three cwt. of coals, and it was very severe work, especially when they had to stay before the carts to prevent their com- ing down too fast ; they frequently run too quick and knock us down. Is able to say that the hard- est day-light work is infinitely superior to the best of coal work." Margaret Drysdale, aged fif- teen, " did not like the work, but her mother was dead, and her father took her down and she had no choice. Her employment is to draw carts, and she had harness or drag ropes on, like the horses." One more, Katherine Logan, aged sixteen, " be- gan to work at coal carrying more than five years since ; works in harness now ; draws backward with her face to the tubs ; the ropes and chains 268 SUFFERING AND CRIME go under her pit clothes, (which consist simply of a pair of boy's trousers ;) ' it is o'er sair work, es- pecially when we had to crawl.' " What is the effect of such slave-toil on married women, and why do they go to the mines ? One reason why married women enter the pits is, that " if they did not work below, the children would not go down so soon." Another, " because they must go to the mines or starve, for there is work to be found no where else." Two fearful but sufficient reasons ! One of these witnesses says, that the oppression of coal bearing, is such as to injure them in after life, /etc existing whose legs are not injured or else their hips." The following brief extracts will explain the rest : "Jane Johnson, aged twenty-nine. I could carry two hundred weight when fifteen years of age, but now feel the weakness upon me from the strains. I have been married nearly ten years, and have had four children, and have usually wrought till with- in a day of the child's birth. Many women lose their strength early from overwork, and get in- jured in their backs and legs." "Jane Peacock, aged forty. I have wrought in the bowds of the earth thirty-three years. Have- been married twenty-three years, and had nine children, two still born, and think they were so from oppressive work. A vast number of wo- men have dead children and false births, which are worse, as they are not able to work after the latter. It is only horse work, and ruins the wo- OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 269 men, it crushes their haunches, bends their ancles, and makes them old women at forty. " Isabel Wilson, aged forty-five. When on St. John's work I was a carrier of coals, which caused me to miscarry five times, from the strains, and I was very ill after each. " Elizabeth M'Neil. I knew a woman who came up, and the child was born in the field next the coal-hill. Women frequently miscarry below, and suffer much after. " Jane Wood. The severe work causes wo- men much trouble. They frequently have pre- mature births. My neighbour, Jenny M'Donald, has lain ill for six months, and William King's wife lately died from miscarriage, and a vast number of women suffer from similar causes." The Report states that all the married women examined, (and they were many,} relate their expe- rience to the same purport. The Herald inquires " if it may not be asked, without exaggeration, whether such a system can be regarded as any thing less than murderous ?" " In fact," says a very intelligent witness, Mr. William Hunter, the mining foreman of Ormiston colliery, " women always did the lifting, or heavy part of the work, and neither they nor the chil- dren were treated like human beings, nor are they where they are employed. Females submit to work in places where no man, or even lad could be got to labour in : they work on bad roads, up to their knees in water, in a posture nearly dou- 23* 270 SUFFERING AND CRIME ble. They are below till the last stage of preg- nancy. They have swelled haunches and ancles, and are prematurely brought to the grave, or, what is worse, a lingering existence.'' " In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery under ground," says Robert Bald, Esq., the eminent coal viewer, " a married woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost una- ble to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said, in a plaintive and melan- choly voice, ' Oh, sir, this is sore, sore, sore work. I wish to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back, and never would have tried it again.' " Now when the nature of this horrible labour is taken into consideration, the extreme severity, its regular duration of from twelve to fourteen hours daily, which, and once a week, as in the in- stance of J. Gumming, is extended through the whole of the night ; the damp, heated, and un- wholesome atmosphere, in which the work is car- ried on ; the tender age, and sex of the workers ; when it is considered that such labour is perform- ed, not in isolated instances selected to excite compassion, but that it may be regarded as the type of the every-day existence of hundreds of our fellow creatures a picture is presented of deadly physical oppression, and systematic slav- ery, of which I conscientiously believe no one OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 271 unacquainted with such facts would credit the existence in the British dominions." But all this accumulation of torture and mur- derous outrage is not the worst part of the pic- ture. There is a hunger of spirit worse than starvation a nakedness of soul more repulsive than that of the body a bondage of the spirit ' worse than the chain of the limbs a darkness of intellect gloomier than these deep caverns where the light of heaven never shines on the dull and deadened. This leads us to consider The Intellectual and Moral Degradation of the Colliers. We would most gladly pass by this part of the subject, but truth requires us not to be silent. But we shall be as brief as possible, and use chiefly the language of the Commissioners. Said the Bishop of Norwich, in the House of Lords, " To this horrible physical toil extorted from them, is superadded the moral degradation to which these females are from their earliest years exposed associated as they are with the lowest profligacy and the grossest sensuality." " All classes of witnesses," the Report tells us, " bear the strongest testimony to the immoral ef- fects of the practice of females working in the mines." In the southern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, in great numbers of the coal-pits, the men work in a state of perfect nakedness, and are in this state assisted by females of all ages, from girls of six years old to women of twenty- 272 SUFFERING AND CRIME one, these females being themselves quite naked down to the waist/' Patience Kershaw, examined by Mr. Scriven, says, " The boys take liberties with me some- times ; they pull me about. I am the only girl in the pit. There are twenty boys, and fifteen men. All the men are naked" In all the mines this indecency prevails to a degree very slightly mitigated in shamelessness. Mr. Thorneley, a magistrate near Barnsley, says : " I have had forty years experience in the man- agement of collieries. The system of having fe- males to work in coal-pits prevails generally in this neighbourhood. I consider it to be a most awfully demoralising practice. The youths of both sexes work often in a half-naked state, and the passions are excited before they arrive at pu- berty. Sexual intercourse frequently occurs in consequence. Cases of bastardy frequently also occur ; and I am decidedly of opinion that women brought up in this way lay aside all modesty, and scarcely know what it is but by name. Another injurious effect arises from the modern construc- tion of cottages, where the father, mother, and children are all huddled together in one bed-room ; this tends to still more demoralization." On such disgusting details we will not dwell. No doubt can remain in the mind of any person who reads the report, that to look for chastity among such persons would be a fruitless under- taking. The lamentable fact is also proved, that OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 273 the depravity of females far exceeds even that of the men. The assertion needs no proof, that where the bodies of men are left imcared for, their souls are neglected. Baxter said, " starving men are poor theologians." The commissioners tell us, that they examined large numbers of young persons, taken indiscriminately, in .regard to their know- ledge of religion: I make the following extracts to show the result. In a church school, which the commissioners praise as superior to many, no one in reading the miracle of the draft of fishes, knew the meaning of the words " shores," " abun- dance," or : ' prophecies." One boy said the dis- ciples were the people who did not go up to Jeru- salem. " Elizabeth Day, a girl of seventeen. I don't go to Sunday school. The truth is, we are con- fined bad enough on week days, and want to walk about on Sundays. I can't read at all. Jesus Christ was Adam's son, and they nailed him on a tree ; but I don't rightly understand these things." "William Beaver, aged sixteen. The Lord made the world. He sent Adam and Eve on earth to save sinners. I have heard of the Saviour ; he was a good man, but he did not die here. I think Ireland is a town as big as Barnsley, where there is plenty of potatoes and lots of bullocks/' " Ann Eggley, aged eighteen. I have heard of Christ performing miracles, but I don't know what 274 SUFFERING AND CRIME sort of things they were. He died by their pour- ing fire and brimstone down his throat. I think I once did hear that he was nailed to a cross. Three times ten make twenty. There are four- teen months in the year, but I don't know how many weeks there are." "Bessy Bailey, aged fifteen. Jesus Christ died for his son to be saved. I don't know who the apostles were. I don't know what Ireland is, whether it is a country or a town." "Elizabeth Eggley, aged sixteen. I cannot read. I do not know my letters. I don't know who Jesus Christ was. I never heard of Adam either. I never heard about them at all. I have often been obliged to stop in bed all Sunday to rest myself." This is no one-sided view. The same state of things prevails throughout the numerous coal mines in Yorkshire, Lancaster, Cheshire, South Wales, and the east of Scotland ; and in all the coal mines of Great Britain a slavery and a degra- dation exists, unequalled in any other land. Nor is the number of its victims small. " Thousands and tens of thousands of children}'' says the Earl of Winchelsea, " have been destroyed in conse- quence of being compelled thus to breathe an at- mosphere unfit for preservation of health." In Christian England these thousands of tender children are condemned to a toil which in Austria and other European states is seldom, if ever, im- posed on any but criminals ; and even they are OP THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 275 treated with greater humanity. The Siberian exiles too, are in a condition far preferable to the free miners of England. It is vain to say, that because this terrible state of things has been so little known before, the En- glish government are not to blame for it. I would reply that it has been known before: the facts have been told by individuals. But such state- ments have hitherto either been disregarded or disbelieved. In my first work on England I spoke of the wretched condition of the colliers ; for at the time it was not unknown to me. I withheld in that work the darkest shades in many pictures I drew for two reasons. The real condition of the working classes of Great Britain was in a great measure unknown both in America and England ; and I remembered that I was not only the first American who had spoken so freely of the wrongs of England, but I was an author unknown to the world, and I did not wish to lay too heavy a tax upon the credulity of my readers. For exposing a part only of the truth, I was grossly abused by the ignorant con- ceited slaves of party, who, on mounting the edi- torial chair of a vile print, use the royal pronoun as imposingly as though they spoke the senti- ments of half the world by silk stockened wri- ters of romance, who were qualified to give no opinion of any matter that related to humanity, simply because they knew nothing about it; and even by female editors and contributors of 276 SUFFERING AND CRIME namby pamby magazines, it was declared I had exaggerated the sufferings and wrongs of the poor of England, not even adding the modest qualifica- tion " in their opinion" Noble critics these, surely, upon the condition of the poor of a land which they visited, and it appears, only to pet a profli- gate aristocracy, who have caused this same misery of which I spoke. Some of these persons who have been so kind as to correct my mistakes by exposing their own ignorance, were in Eng- land, the same summer with myself. And while their pretty feet were pressing the winter carpets of the halls of the aristocracy, they had made such a death struggle to enter, I happened either from humanity or curiosity call it which you please, to be exploring the coal mines of Lanca- shire, and the factories and lanes of Preston, Man- chester and Leeds. Some of these travellers have told us what they saw they have described soirees, balls, and all kinds of fashionable dissipa- tion, enough of which I witnessed to be disgusted with it all, and with descriptions of which I might have filled two volumes and peddled out the leavings to fashionable magazines, had I cared more for the esteem of the beau monde, than of the humane and the philanthropic. But to return. It is impossible such horrid barbarities could be perpetrated in a country like England, and not be known to multitudes. They were most likely unknown to the aristocracy and fashionable circles in the metropolis to the great OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE. 277 pleasure-seeking world of London ; for these classes meddle no more than is necessary with the affairs of the poor. "It is," says Blackwood's Magazine, "nauseous and emetical to such persons to be told that our fellow subjects starve outside our gates : such recitals of domestic misery inter- fere with the process of digestion, and like the sad realities of another place should not be mentioned in the hearing of ears polite. Nothing can be more vulgar, uninteresting and anti-sentimental, than the distresses of Hicks, Higgins, Figgins and Stubbs, and all weavers and others, who are neither rebels nor refugees who are vulgar enough to work if they can get it who wear no bristles under their noses and lips, and who have no names ending in ' rinskV " But whether the legislators of England knew these facts or not, it is nevertheless true that this damning slavery which stamps the condition of the lower classes in Great Britain, is the result of unjust laws, and an oppressive system of Govern- ment, by which the helpless poor man is robbed of the fruits of his hard toil. It is also true that after a full investigation of the facts/ Parliament refused to provide a remedy, and indefinitely postponed the whole matter. As investigation goes on. and one abuse after another is exposed, Englishmen profess great surprise at such unlooked for developments ! They shock all men who have a spark of human- ity left, but they surprise no one who is gifted VOL. i. 24 278 SUFFERING AND CRIME. with sagacity enough to discover that these terrible sufferings are produced legitimately and of neces- sity by the tyranny of the government. This grand cause is adequate to the production of more misery and crime than have yet been brought to light. Let the investigation go on. Let the curtain which has so long veiled the distress and degradation of the slave classes, from the gaze of the aristocracy be lifted, and let them behold the fearful ruin they have brought on starving mil- lions, so that they be not taken by surprize when they find themselves visited by the ISSUE. END OF FIRST VOL.