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is now dragging out a wretched life of slavery in antipodal Australia, torn from his wife and children 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 masqué, 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 labourers that same night, went hungry to their straw. While the queen and the lords and ladies of her court were squandering thousands upon this display of useless magnificence, the millions of Britain 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

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 innocent, but famine is often blind in the victim it selects 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 government; and that there were eyes which would yet see the emaciated populace thronging round that palace with other motives than curiosity, and bearing 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

nation in the world; and since the great proportion of these taxes are on the necessaries and comforts of life, they fall of course upon the labouring classes, who constitute the vast majority of the people. This will illustrate the following 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 kingdoms 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 degradation 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 wronged 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

condition of England during the last winter, I make the following extract from a January number 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 declaration. However tedious these reports may be in the detail, from their sameness and the triteness of the subject, as well as from their gloomy character, they merit the profoundest attention as emanating from such wide and important tracts of country. District after district, each comprehending 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 Manchester, 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

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 embarrassment 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 number 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 choosing to substantiate my statements by English authorities, 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

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