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tressed, they are passed with acclamation? 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 increasing their overpowering burdens?" If the information 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 !"

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Ought not Sydney Smith, the Marquis of Tavistock, 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

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 Spitalfields 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 description, and were so badly clothed that they could not attend divine worship or send their children 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 suffering, 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." 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,

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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 England at the present day, "which sweeps the distant 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 caustic reproof. It meets the present case with peculiar fitness. 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-glorifying subject, to the great joy of the gods and goddesses 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

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 applies a spectacle of peculiar construction to remedy this defect; 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 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 philanthropy 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

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 into pauperism." The whole thing reminds us of a story told of the Irish barrister, who on being censured by his brethren for disgracing the profession 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."

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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 Gospel in Foreign Parts, and said, "I was six years in the West Indies, between St. Thomas and Barbadoes, 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

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