the perpetual state during 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 condition and that of the same classes on the continent, and enters into statistical calculations which show a state of things far more favourable to the continental labourer; chiefly because the necessaries 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 constitution' 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' investigations, the continental labourer procures with his wages more of the comforts of life than the Englishman. 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 collieries, 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.

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 until 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 inquired into. Poets who vegetate in Grub street attics may sing of "vine-clad cottages," and Republican tourists, who struggle to gain admittance to aristocratic circles abroad, (and this is no difficult 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 Paradise; it will nevertheless remain true, that "there is not a step, but simply a handsbreadth between the condition of the English agricultural labourer and pauperism."

INFANT AND FEMALE SLAVES IN THE BRITISH COAL MINES. The friends of humanity in England are engaged in a noble work. They are tearing off the mask from the gilded institutions 22

VOL. I.

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 humane and beneficent system.

This assertion will grate harshly on the ears of those Abolitionists who have been so greatly enraged, that after witnessing for myself the condition 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. However little humanity this class of one-sided demagogues 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 Freeman's Journal. "What slave is in a worse condition 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 moral, of the most degraded bondsman, may be esteemed exalted if compared with that of the free collier of England."

The Commission appointed by Parliament to

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 infernal cruelty practised upon boys and girls in the coal mines, these graves both of comfort and virtue, 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 sometimes read, with shuddering disgust, of the outrages 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 creatures, 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 twenty, 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 civilization. One cannot read through the evidence taken by the commission above referred to, with

out being strongly tempted to abjure the very name of Englishman.”

One is almost tempted after reading the disgusting 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 creatures 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 irreproachable.

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