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Thus they go on, miserable themselves, and frightening government with their Chartism: thus, unfed, unclad, unimproved, and unamused, while the poor German peasants, whom we would have these dolorous creatures pity, go on eating their thirty pounds of meat per annum, but adding thereto, from the strips of their own land, plenty of good potatoes, fruit from their orchards, eggs from their fowls, milk from their cows, and flour from the corn of their own fields. If our manufacturing population could but see the jolly substitutes for the odd twenty pounds of meat in the year, that are so liberally credited to their account; if they could but see the famous cheap brown loaves, the famous puddings stuffed with fruit and eggs, the famous messes of boiled potatoes and milk, the dried fruits and curds, which these Prussian and German peasants "make a shift with," they would be very glad to throw up their fifty pounds of meat, and all their other starvation into the bargain, in exchange for it. What matters whether a man has a single pound of meat in the year or not, if he be well stuffed out with all the other good substantials of life? What matters it if a man get fifty pounds of flesh in a year, and wants fifty things beside?

it can never be understood by our manufacturing towns, or two petty improvements, and these in Scotland alone, could never have been the sole results. Why do not the active leaders of improvement in our provincial towns- why do not the master-manufacturers look into this? Surely free air is as essential to their starving workmen as untaxed bread.

wants a regular substantial supply of flour, bread, pudding, eggs, potatoes, and milk?

Accordingly, as our legislators do not see these things on the continent, high rents, high taxes, high-priced food, and a high pressure of distress, continue to banish comfort, knowledge, and morality, from the working masses. Accordingly, throughout the vast (and by most of our legislators, who should first personally learn the actual condition of our people before they begin to prescribe for it) untravelled regions of our most wonderful metropolis, the state of every-day existence is one great chaos of struggling care, dirt, and heartache. Swarms of human creatures, thick as motes in the sun, and stretching for miles and for leagues around in densest contact, wrestle day and night with dearness, taxation, and despair. They wallow in a poverty the most hideous of all poverty, in fœtid smut and filth; poverty, in selfish, ravenous degradation; poverty, without moral or religious culture, and without hope. The gin-shops, the only splendid erections in those regions, stand at every corner; and around their doors, the most squalid and the most revolting objects,-figures of rags, and faces of foulest and most desperate degradation. Wretched mothers with more wretched infants in their arms pass in if they have the necessary penny, and out if they have the necessary strength. Women reel forth, and falling headlong on the grated window-recesses beneath their feet,

or on the pebbles, gash their haggard faces, and are reared by the standers by, bloody and stupified, against the walls. At midnight, in the shivering and piercing midnights of the wildest winter, stand trembling crowds round those infernal doors, ravenous, if they have but the penny to pass-not the gates of heaven, but the gates of hell! Other women on a Saturday night, who have been starving all the week, and bearing daily tortures to which the harrows and the thorns under which David put his enemies the Amorites were nothing; the perpetual fangs of hunger, and the incessant cries of hungering children—are seen following their surly husbands from the doors of counting-houses, where they have just been paid their week's wages, and imploring, with menaces and curses, for a portion of that cash, with which the sour wretches, base from years of hardening in ignorance and vice, are making off most coolly to the alehouse.

And these are not the scenes of a casual time of extraordinary distress; they are not the scenes of one or two confined spots; they are the daily, standing, established, and ordinary scenes of many and many a square mile,—of many and many a wonderful region of the vastest, most populous, and most wealthy city of the world. They are scenes that any one may readily find, if he will seek them. They live, and heave with a pestilent life, like some huge mass of corruption, and force into our most public streets its terrible amount of

crime and prostitution, and all the while ten thousand homes are lit up with wealth and comfort; the carriages of the affluent and the happy roll along in crowds; chapels and churches send up their hymns and praises; and in the evening dusk, the father dismisses his happy family to rest, with a word of thanksgiving for overflowing blessings, while under his very windows sit houseless children side by side nodding in cold sleep; and homeless, tieless, hopeless vice, curses God, and dies in unregarded shame.

Go! British legislators, British travellers, British philanthropists, British christians; gaze and pace through every country of the continent; pace through every region of the world; nay, turn back and traverse every region of history, every nation of multitudinous history, every people, pagan or utterly savage, and find us any scene like this! To this gigantic conglomeration of care and crime, of misery unmitigated and depravity unheeded, to this huge and eating cancer in the heart of the proudest, the most affluent, and the most Christian community, what are the thirty pounds of meat and the black bread of the German peasant? And by this black scene, what a heaven of peace and innocent pleasure is the Sunday and the holiday dance of the working class of even such demoralized cities as Munich or Vienna ?

But if this frightful contrast is not observed by our travellers, and if they bring us no means of

alleviating it, by cheap food, and innocent and refining pleasures, what do they see abroad, and what do they bring us thence? A MOST ADMIRABLE SYSTEM OF POLICE; military regulations and costumes; endless BOARDS OF COMMISSIONERS, AND THE ADVOCACY OF A GOVERNMENT EDUCATION!

The misery of the poor in the metropolis and the manufacturing districts appears from recent disclosures to be almost outdone in some of the agricultural counties. The state of things in Dorsetshire, lately made public by Mr. Sheridan and Lord Ashley, is the most frightful that ever was existent in a Christian country, and almost exceeds that of our subterranean horrors, laid open to the day by the inquiries of the Commissioners into the horrors of our coal mines. Here are whole families existing on five shillings a week, in houses not fit for swine to sty in, in a state of corroding and contact, destructive, not merely of all comfort, but of all morals. The dreadful display of misery, starvation, perishing by actual hunger and neglect, of incest and other fearful crimes, arising from the state of agricultural wages, have awakened a public horror, which it is hoped will lead to the remedy of the evil. Mr. Sheridan has shewn himself worthy of the name he bears, and the blood which runs in his veins, by his lively sympathy with the poor, and his bold and independent conduct in the fearless exposure of this dreadful state of things,

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