MENTAL AND MORAL CONDITION OF THE WHITE SLAVES IN GREAT BRITAIN.

The moral degradation and mental darkness of the labouring classes in Great Britain in the middle of the Nineteenth century, are appalling to contemplate. Beneath the wing of a government professedly Christian, there is sheltered a vast number of people who must be characterized as heathen—as fit subjects of missionary labours, such as are freely given to the dark sons of India and Africa. They know nothing of God but his prevailing name; and the Bible\'s light is hid from them as completely as if its pages were inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Their code of morals is the creature of their sensual inclinations; their intelligence seemingly the superior instinct of the animal. Scotland is far beyond other portions of Great Britain in the moral and mental cultivation of its people; but there is a large class in that country to which the above observations may be justly applied.

According to Kay, more than half the poor in England [Pg 380] and Wales cannot read and write, while the majority of the remainder know nothing of science, history, geography, music, or drawing, and very little of the Scripture history. In the great mercantile and manufacturing towns, it is true that poor men, if they defer their marriage, and have no extraordinary encumbrances, may improve their condition; but scarcely any facilities are offered for their acquiring the intelligence necessary for the control of passion. The schools in the towns are wretchedly arranged and managed. Many are nothing more than "dame schools," conducted often in cellars or garrets, by poor women, who know how to read, but who often know nothing else. The schools for the peasants are still fewer in number, and inefficient in character; and hence the result, that the English peasantry are more ignorant and demoralized, less capable of helping themselves, and more pauperized, than those of any other country in Europe, if we except Russia, Turkey, South Italy, and some parts of the Austrian Empire. A writer in a recent number of "Household Words," makes some remarkable statements in regard to the ignorance of the English masses:—

"Wherever we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to the experimentum crucis of \'his mark,\' The number of petty [Pg 381] jurors—in rural districts especially—who can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only \'men of mark,\' but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the post-office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A housewife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen\'s bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practical evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We cannot pass through the streets, we cannot enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote—with the attestation of our own experience—the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper: \'Taking the adult class of agricultural labourers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect they are perfect strangers. You cannot address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you accost him, if he is not insolent—which he seldom is—he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview while it lasts, and obviously relieved when it is over. These are the traits [Pg 382] which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm labourers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult peasant reading for his own or others\' amusement? The invariable answer is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place, the great bulk of them cannot read. In the next, a large proportion of those who can, do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say that many of those who cannot read have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours.\'"

From statistics given by Kay, it is apparent that the proportional amount of crime to population, calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in almost all the agricultural counties of England than it was in the mining and manufacturing districts. The peasants of England must be subjected to a singularly demoralizing system to produce so terrible a result. The extreme poverty of the agricultural labourers is the great stimulant to crime of all kinds; but the darkness of ignorance is also a powerful agent. Poverty renders the peasants desperate, and they are too ignorant to see the consequences of crime.

In a former part of this work, it was mentioned that [Pg 383] the miserable cottages in which the peasants are compelled to reside have considerable influence in demoralizing them. This deserves to be fully illustrated. The majority of the cottages have but two small rooms; in one of which husband and wife, young men and young women, boys and girls, and, very often, a married son and his wife all sleep together. Kay says—

"The accounts we receive from all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively increasing. People of both sexes, and of all ages, both married and unmarried—parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers—sleep in the same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentlemen tells us of six people of different sexes and ages, two of whom were man and wife, sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other; another, of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together; another, of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same room with a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so filled with beds that there is no space between them, but that brothers, sisters, and parents crawl over each other half naked in order to get to their respective resting-places; another, of its being common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another, of cases where women have been delivered in bedrooms crowded with men, young women, and children; and others mention facts of these crowded bedrooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen writing in ALL parts of the country."

The young peasants from their earliest years are accustomed to sleep in the same bedrooms with people [Pg 384] of both sexes; and they lose all sense of the indecency of such a life, taking wives before they are twenty years of age to sleep in the same room with their parents. The policy now pursued by the aristocratic landlords, of clearing their estates, tends to crowd the cottages which are allowed to remain, and thus the demoralization of the peasantry is stimulated. Adultery is the very mildest form of the vast amount of crime which it is engendering. Magistrates, clergymen, surgeons, and parish-officers bear witness that cases of incest are increasing in all parts of the country. An eminent writer represents the consequences of the state of the peasant\'s cottages in England and Wales in the following startling, but unexaggerated terms:—

"A man and woman intermarry, and take a cottage. In eight cases out of ten it is a cottage with but two rooms. For a time, so far as room at least is concerned, this answers their purpose; but they take it, not because it is at the time sufficiently spacious for them, but because they could not procure a more roomy dwelling, even if they desired it. In this they pass with tolerable comfort, considering their notions of what comfort is, the first period of married life; but, by-and-by they have children, and the family increases, until, in the course of a few years, they number, perhaps, from eight to ten individuals. But in all this time there has been no increase to their household accommodation. As at first, so to the very last, there is but the ONE SLEEPING-ROOM. As the family increases, additional beds are crammed into this apartment, until at last it is so filled with them, that there is scarcely room left to move between them. I have known instances in which they had to crawl over each other to get to their beds. So long as the children are very young, the only evil connected with this is the physical one arising from crowding so many people together [Pg 385] into what is generally a dingy, frequently a damp, and invariably an ill-ventilated apartment. But years steal on, and the family continues thus bedded together. Some of its members may yet be in their infancy, but others of both sexes have crossed the line of puberty. But there they are, still together in the same room—the father and mother, the sons and the daughters—young men, young women, and children. Cousins, too, of both sexes, are often thrown together into the same room, and not unfrequently into the same bed. I have also known of cases in which uncles slept in the same room with their grown-up nieces, and newly-married couples occupied the same chamber with those long married, and with others marriageable but unmarried. A case also came to my notice, already alluded to in connection with another branch of the subject, in which two sisters, who were married on the same day, occupied adjoining rooms in the same hut, with nothing but a thin board partition, which did not reach the ceiling, between the two rooms, and a door in the partition which only partly filled up the doorway. For years back, in these same two rooms, have slept twelve people of both sexes and all ages. Sometimes, when there is but one room, a praiseworthy effort is made for the conservation of decency. But the hanging up of a piece of tattered cloth between the beds, which is generally all that is done in this respect, and even that but seldom, is but a poor set-off to the fact, that a family, which, in common decency, should, as regards sleeping accommodations, be separated at least into three divisions, occupy, night after night, but one and the same chamber. This is a frightful position for them to be in when an infectious or epidemic disease enters their abode. But this, important though it be, is the least important consideration connected with their circumstances. That which is most so, is the effect produced by them upon their habits and morals. In the illicit intercourse to which such a position frequently gives rise, it is not always that the tie of blood is respected. Certain it is, that when the relationship is even but one degree removed from that of brother and sister, that tie is frequently overlooked. And when the circumstances do not lead to such horrible consequences, the mind, particularly of the female, is wholly divested [Pg 386] of that sense of delicacy and shame, which, so long as they are preserved, are the chief safeguards of her chastity. She therefore falls an early and an easy prey to the temptations which beset her beyond the immediate circle of her family. People in the other spheres of life are but little aware of the extent to which this precocious demoralization of the female among the lower orders in the country has proceeded. But how could it be otherwise? The philanthropist may exert himself in their behalf, the moralist may inculcate even the worldly advantages of a better course of life, and the minister of religion may warn them of the eternal penalties which they are incurring; but there is an instructor constantly at work, more potent than them all—an instructor in mischief, of which they must get rid ere they can make any real progress in their laudable efforts—and that is, the single bedchamber in the two-roomed cottage."

But such cottages will continue to be the dwellings of the peasantry until the system of lord and serf is abolished, until they can obtain ground of their own, and have no fear of eviction at a moment\'s notice. It has often been a matter of wonder that there is less discontent and murmuring among the miserable peasants than among the workmen in the manufacturing towns. The reason lies upon the surface. The workmen in the factories are generally more intelligent than the agricultural labourers, and have a keen feeling of their degradation. It requires a certain degree of elevation to render a man discontented. The wallowing pig is satisfied.

We need not be surprised to find that where so much misery prevails crime is frightfully frequent. The "Times" of the 30th of November, 1849, shows the [Pg 387] terrible increase of crime in the last few years in Dorsetshire. The "Times" says—

"We yesterday published, in a very short compass, some grave particulars of the unfortunate county of Dorset. It is not simply the old story of wages inadequate for life, hovels unfit for habitation, and misery and sin alternately claiming our pity and our disgust. This state of things is so normal, and we really believe so immemorial in that notorious county, that we should rather deaden than excite the anxiety of the public by a thrice-told tale. What compels our attention just now is a sudden, rapid, and, we fear, a forced aggravation of these evils, measured by the infallible test of crime. Dorsetshire is fast sinking into a slough of wretchedness, which threatens the peace and morality of the kingdom at large. The total number of convictions, which

"In 1846 was 798, and
"In 1847 was 821, mounted up,
"In 1848, to 950;

"and up to the special general session, last Tuesday, (Dec. 1849,) for less than eleven months of the present year, to the astonishing number of 1193, being at the rate of 1300 for the whole year! Unless something is done to stop this flood of crime, or the tide happily turns of itself, the county will have more than doubled its convictions within four years! Nor is it possible for us to take refuge in the thought that the increase is in petty offences. In no respect is it a light thing for a poor creature to be sent to jail, whatever be the offence. He has broken the laws of his country, and forfeited his character. His name and his morals are alike tainted with the jail. He is degraded and corrupted. If his spirit be not crushed, it is exasperated into perpetual hostility to wealth and power.

"It is, then, no light affair that a rural county, the abode of an ancient and respectable aristocracy, somewhat removed from the popular influences of the age, with a population of 175,043 by the late census, should produce in four years near 4000 convictions, [Pg 388] being at the rate of one conviction in that period for every sixty persons, or every twelve householders."

We might express our doubts of the real respectability of the ancient aristocracy of Dorsetshire. They do not injure society in a way of which the laws take notice; but had they nothing to do with the making of the 4000 criminals? In 1834, an English writer estimated that about 120,000 of the people were always in jail. At the present time the number is still greater.

The humane and able author of "Letters on Rural Districts," published in the "Morning Chronicle" of London, thus speaks of the frightful immorality among the agricultural population of Norfolk and Suffolk counties:—

"One species of immorality, which is peculiarly prevalent in Norfolk and Suffolk, is that of bastardy. With the exception of Hereford and Cumberland, there are no counties in which the percentage of bastardy is so high as it is in Norfolk—being there 53.1 per cent. above the average of England and Wales; in Suffolk it is 27 per cent. above, and in Essex 19.1 per cent. below the average. In the two first-named counties, and even in the latter one, though not to the same extent, there appears to be a perfect want of decency among the people. \'The immorality of the young women,\' said the rector of one parish to me, \'is literally horrible, and I regret to say it is on the increase in a most extraordinary degree. When I first came to the town, the mother of a bastard child used to be ashamed to show herself. The case is now quite altered; no person seems to think any thing at all of it. When I first came to the town, there was no such thing as a common prostitute in it; now there is an enormous number of [Pg 389] them. When I am called upon to see a woman confined with an illegitimate child, I endeavour to impress upon her the enormity of the offence; and there are no cases in which I receive more insult from those I visit than from such persons. They generally say they\'ll get on as well, after all that\'s said about it; and if they never do any thing worse than that, they shall get to heaven as well as other people.\' Another clergyman stated to me, that he never recollected an instance of his having married a woman who was not either pregnant at the time of her marriage, or had had one or more children before her marriage. Again, a third clergyman told me, that he went to baptize the illegitimate child of one woman, who was thirty-five years of age, and it was absolutely impossible for him to convince her that what she had done was wrong. \'There appears,\' said he, \'to be among the lower orders a perfect deadness of all moral feeling upon this subject.\' Many of the cases of this kind, which have come under my knowledge, evince such horrible depravity, that I dare not attempt to lay them before the reader. Speaking to the wife of a respectable labourer on the subject, who had seven children, one of whom was then confined with an illegitimate child, she excused her daughter\'s conduct by saying, \'What was the poor girl to do! The chaps say that they won\'t marry \'em first, and then the girls give way. I did the same myself with my husband.\' There was one case in Cossey, in Norfolk, in which the woman told me, without a blush crimsoning her cheek, that her daughter and self had each had a child by a sweep, who lodged with them, and who promised to marry the daughter. The cottage in which these persons slept consisted of but one room, and there were two other lodgers who occupied beds in the same room; in one of which \'a young woman occasionally slept with the young man she was keeping company with.\' The other lodger was an old woman of seventy-four years of age. To such an extent is prostitution carried on in Norwich, that out of the 656 licensed public-houses and beer-shops in the city, there are not less than 220, which are known to the police as common brothels. And, although the authorities have the power of withholding the licenses, nothing is done to put a stop to the frightful vice."

[Pg 390]

A want of chastity is universal among the female peasants of Wales, arising chiefly from the herding of many persons in the small cottages. In the vicinity of the mines, the average of inhabitants to a house is said to be nearly twelve. The Rev. John Griffith, vicar of Aberdare, says—

"Nothing can be lower, I would say more degrading, than the character in which the women stand relative to the men. The men and the women, married as well as single, live in the same house, and sleep in the same room. The men do not hesitate to wash themselves naked before the women; on the other hand, the women do not hesitate to change their under garments before the men. Promiscuous intercourse is most common, is thought of as nothing, and the women do not lose caste by it."

The Welsh are peculiarly exempt from the guilt of great crimes. But petty thefts, lying, cozening, every species of chicanery and drunkenness are common among the agricultural population, and are regarded as matters of course.

Infanticide is practised to a terrible extent in England and Wales. In most of the large provincial towns, "burial clubs" exist. A small sum is paid every year by the parent, and this entitles him to receive from ￡3 to ￡5 from the club on the death of the child. Many persons enter their children in several clubs; and, as the burial of the child does not necessarily cost more than ￡1, or at the most ￡1 10s., the parent realizes a considerable sum after all the expenses are paid. For the sake of this money, it has become common to cause the death [Pg 391] of the children, either by starvation, ill-usage, or poison. No more horrible symptom of moral degradation could be conceived.

"Mr. Chadwick says, [101] \'officers of these burial societies, relieving officers, and others, whose administrative duties put them in communication with the lowest classes in these districts, (the manufacturing districts,) express their moral conviction of the operation of such bounties to produce instances of the visible neglect of children of which they are witnesses. They often say—You are not treating that child properly, it will not live; is it in the club? And the answer corresponds with the impression produced by the sight.

"\'Mr. Gardiner, the clerk of the Manchester union, while registering the causes of death, deemed the cause assigned by a labouring man for the death of a child unsatisfactory, and staying to inquire, found that popular rumour assigned the death to wilful starvation. The child (according to a statement of the case) had been entered in at least ten burial clubs; and its parents had had six other children, who only lived from nine to eighteen months respectively. They had received from several burial clubs twenty pounds for one of these children, and they expected at least as much on account of this child. An inquest was held at Mr. Gardiner\'s instance, when several persons, who had known the deceased, stated that she was a fine fat child shortly after her birth, but that she soon became quite thin, was badly clothed, and seemed as if she did not get a sufficiency of food.... The jury, having expressed it as their opinion that the evidence of the parents was made up for the occasion and entitled to no credit, returned the following verdict:—Died through want of nourishment, but whether occasioned by a deficiency of food, or by disease of the liver and spine brought on by improper food and drink or otherwise, does not appear.

"\'Two similar cases came before Mr. Coppock, the clerk and [Pg 392] superintendent-registrar of the Stockport union, in both of which he prosecuted the parties for murder. In one case, where three children had been poisoned with arsenic, the father was tried with the mother and convicted at Chester, and sentenced to be transported for life, but the mother was acquitted. In the other case, where the judge summed up for a conviction, the accused, the father, was, to the astonishment of every one, acquitted. In this case the body was exhumed after interment, and arsenic was detected in the stomach. In consequence of the suspicion raised upon the death on which the accusation was made in the first case, the bodies of two other children were taken up and examined, when arsenic was found in their stomachs. In all these cases payments on the deaths of the children were insured from the burial clubs; the cost of the coffin and burial dues would not be more than about one pound, and the allowance from the club is three pounds.

"\'It is remarked on these dreadful cases by the superintendent-registrar, that the children who were boys, and therefore likely to be useful to the parents, were not poisoned; the female children were the victims. It was the clear opinion of the medical officers that infanticides have been committed in Stockport to obtain the burial money.\'"

Such parents must be placed upon a level with the swine that devour their farrow. We are led to doubt whether they could sink much lower in the animal scale; poverty and ignorance seem to have thoroughly quenched the spark of humanity. The author of "Letters on Labour, and the Poor in the Rural Districts," writing of the burial clubs in the eastern counties, says:

"The suspicion that a great deal of \'foul play\' exists with respect to these clubs is supported, not only by a comparison of the different rates of mortality, but it is considerably strengthened by the facts proved upon the trial of Mary May. The Rev. Mr. Wilkins, the vicar of Wickes, who was mainly instrumental in [Pg 393] bringing the case before a court of justice, stated to me that, from the time of Mary May coming to live in his parish, he was determined to keep a very strict watch upon her movements, as he had heard that fourteen of her children had previously died suddenly.

"A few weeks after her arrival in his parish, she called upon him to request him to bury one of her children. Upon his asking her which of the children it was, she told him that it was Eliza, a fine healthy-looking child of ten years old. Upon his expressing some surprise that she should have died so suddenly, she said, \'Oh, sir, she went off like a snuff; all my other children did so too.\' A short time elapsed, and she again waited upon the vicar to request him to bury her brother as soon as he could. His suspicions were aroused, and he endeavoured to postpone the funeral for a few days, in order to enable him to make some inquiries. Not succeeding in obtaining any information which would warrant further delay in burying the corpse, he most reluctantly proceeded in the discharge of his duty.

"About a week after the funeral, Mary May again waited upon him to request him to sign a certificate to the effect that her brother was in perfect health a fortnight before he died, that being the time at which, as it subsequently appeared, she had entered him as nominee in the Harwich Burial Club. Upon inquiring as to the reason of her desiring this certificate, she told him that, unless she got it, she could not get the money for him from the club. This at once supplied the vicar with what appeared to be a motive for \'foul play\' on the part of the woman. He accordingly obtained permission to have the body of her brother exhumed; doses of arsenic were detected, and the woman was arrested. With the evidence given upon the trial the reader is, no doubt, perfectly conversant, and it will be unnecessary for me to detail it. She was convicted. Previously to her execution she refused to make any confession, but said, \'If I were to tell all I know, it would give the hangman work for the next twelve months.\' Undue weight ought not to be attached to the declaration of such a woman as Mary May; but, coupled with the disclosures that took place upon the trial with respect to some of her neighbours and accomplices, and with the extraordinary rate [Pg 394] of mortality among the clubs, it certainly does appear that the general opinion with respect to the mischievous effects of these societies is not altogether without foundation.

"Although there are not in Essex, at present, any burial clubs in which children are admitted under fourteen years of age as members or nominees, still, as illustrating the evils arising from these clubs, I may state that many persons who are fully conversant with the working of such institutions have stated that they have frequently been shocked by hearing women of the lower classes, when speaking of a neighbour\'s child, make use of such expressions as, \'Oh, depend upon it, the child\'ll not live; it\'s in the burial club.\' When speaking to the parents of a child who may be unwell, it is not unfrequently that they say, \'You should do so and so,\' or, \'You should not do so and so;\' \'You should not treat it in that way; is it in the burial club?\' Instances of the most culpable neglect, if not of graver offences, are continually occurring in districts where clubs exist in which children are admitted. A collector of one of the most extensive burial societies gave it as his opinion, founded upon his experience, that it had become a constant practice to neglect the children for the sake of the allowance from the clubs; and he supported his opinion by several cases which had come under his own observation."

A vast number of other facts, of equally shocking character, have been ascertained. The Rev. J. Clay, chaplain of the Preston House of Correction, in a sanitary report, makes some statements of a nature to startle:—

"It appears, on the unimpeachable authority of a burial-club official, that \'hired nurses speculate on the lives of infants committed to their care, by entering them in burial clubs;\' that \'two young women proposed to enter a child into his club, and to pay the weekly premium alternately. Upon inquiring as to the relation subsisting between the two young women and the child, he learned that the infant was placed at nurse with the mother of one of [Pg 395] these young women,\' The wife of a clergymen told me that, visiting a poor district just when a child\'s death had occurred, instead of hearing from the neighbours the language of sympathy for the bereaved parent, she was shocked by such observations as—\'Ah! it\'s a fine thing for the mother, the child\'s in two clubs!\'

"As regards one town, I possess some evidence of the amount of burial-club membership and of infant mortality, which I beg to lay before you. The reports of this town refer to 1846, when the population of the town amounted to about 61,000. I do not name the town, because, as no actual burial-club murders are known to have been committed in it, and as such clubs are not more patronized there than in other places, it is, perhaps, not fair to hold it up to particular animadversion; indeed, as to its general character, this very town need not fear comparison with any other. Now this place, with its sixty-one thousand people of all classes and ages, maintains at least eleven burial clubs, the members of which amount in the aggregate to nearly fifty-two thousand; nor are these all. Sick clubs, remember, act as burial clubs. Of these there are twelve or fourteen in the town, mustering altogether, probably, two thousand members. Here, then, we have good data for comparing population with \'death lists;\' but it will be necessary, in making the comparison, to deduct from the population all that part of it which has nothing to do with these clubs, viz. all infants under two months old, and all persons of unsound health, (both of these classes being excluded by the club rules;) all those also of the working classes, whose sound intelligence and feeling lead them to abhor burial-club temptations; and all the better classes, to whom five or twenty pounds offer no consolation for the death of a child. On the hypothesis that these deductions will amount to one-sixth of the entire population, it results that the death lists are more numerous by far than the entire mass—old, young, and infants—which support them; and, according to the statement of a leading death-list officer, three-fourths of the names on these catalogues of the doomed are the names of children. Now, if this be the truth—and I believe it is—hundreds, if not thousands of children must be entered each into four, five, or even twelve clubs, their chances of life [Pg 396] diminishing, of course, in proportion to the frequency with which they are entered. Lest you should imagine that such excessive addiction to burial clubs is only to be found in one place, I furnish you with a report for 1846, of a single club, which then boasted thirty-four thousand one hundred members, the entire population of the town to which it belongs having been, in 1841, little more than thirty-six thousand!"

The authorities from whom these statements are derived are of the highest respectability; they hear witness to a state of affairs scarcely to be conceived by people of other civilized countries. Hundreds of thousands of human beings seem to be driven into an awful abyss of crime and misery by the iron rule of the aristocracy—an abyss where mothers forget maternal feelings, where marriage vows are scoffed, and where the momentary gratification of brutal passions is alone esteemed. There, indeed, there is no fear of God, and heathenism spreads its upas shade to poison and destroy.

The only amusement which the English poor possess in many parts of the country, is to visit taverns. In the towns the "gin-palaces" and the beer-houses are very numerous; and whenever the poor have leisure, these places are thronged by drunken men and abandoned women. In all the rural districts there is a frightful amount of drunkenness. British legislation has increased the number of these hot-beds of crime and pauperism.

"In the beginning of the revolutionary war the duties on malt were augmented, and in 1825 the duties on spirits were decreased. [Pg 397] It was thus that whisky was substituted for ale as the beverage of the Scotch, and that gin and brandy began to be generally drunk by the English poor.

"The consumption of spirits immediately increased in a tremendous proportion. From 4,132,263 gallons, the consumption in 1825, it rose in one year to 8,888,648 gallons; that is, the consumption was in one year more than doubled by the change; and from that period, with the exception of the year next following, viz. 1827, the consumption has been progressively augmenting.

"Since that time the noted beer-shop act has been passed. By that act, any one was enabled to obtain a license to enable him to sell beer, whether the person desirous of doing so was a person of respectable character or not.

"But this was the least of the evils which were effected by that act. A clause, which was still more injurious, was that which prescribed that the liquor must be drunk upon the premises of the beer-house, i. e. either in the beer-house or on a bench just outside the door.

"This has the effect in many cases, where the poor would otherwise take the beer home to their own cottages, of forcing the young men who wish to have a little to drink, to sit down and take it in the society of the worst people of the neighbourhood, who always, as a matter of course, spend their leisure in the tavern. I am convinced that nothing can be more injurious in its effects upon the poor than this clause. It may be said to force the honest labourers into the society and companionship of the most depraved, and so necessarily to demoralize the young and honest labourer.

"The following is the number of gallons of native proof spirits on which duty was paid for home consumption in the United Kingdom, in the undermentioned years:—
Years     Gallons.
1843     18,841,890
1844     20,608,525
1845     23,122,588
1846     24,106,697

[Pg 398]

"To the above must be added the number of gallons of foreign and colonial spirits retained for home consumption, as follows:—
Years     No. of Gallons of Foreign, &c. Spirits.     No. of Gallons of Home and Foreign Spirits consumed in the United Kingdom.
1843     3,161,957     22,026,289
1844     3,242,606     22,042,905
1845     3,549,889     26,672,477
1846     4,252,237     28,360,934

"From the above statistics it appears that the consumption of spirits in the United Kingdom is increasing much more rapidly than the population!

"The number of licenses granted to retailers of spirits or beer amounted, in 1845, to 237,345; that is, there was to be found, in 1845, a retailer of beer or spirits in every 115 of the population! Of the beer licenses, 68,086 were for dwellings rated under ￡20 per annum, and 35,340 were licenses for premises rated under ￡10 per annum! This shows how large a proportion of the beer-shops are situated in the poorest districts, for the use of the poorest classes. [102]

There is a section of London, which in 1847 had 2000 inhabitants, one butcher\'s shop, two bakers\' shops, and seventeen beer-houses. The total cost of the spirits and beer consumed in the United Kingdom was, in 1848, estimated at ￡65,000,000, a sum greater, by several millions, than the whole revenue of the government. The inimitable Dickens has given us a vivid sketch of a London gin-palace and its attendants. He says—

"The extensive scale on which these places are established, [Pg 399] and the ostentatious manner in which the business of even the smallest among them is divided into branches, is most amusing. A handsome plate of ground glass in one door directs you \'To the Counting-house;\' another to the \'Bottle Department;\' a third to the \'Wholesale Department,\' a fourth to the \'Wine Promenade;\' and so forth, until we are in daily expectation of meeting with a \'Brandy Bell,\' or a \'Whisky Entrance.\' Then ingenuity is exhausted in devising attractive titles for the different descriptions of gin; and the dram-drinking portion of the community, as they gaze upon the gigantic black and white announcements, which are only to be equalled in size by the figures beneath them, are left in a state of pleasing hesitation between \'The Cream of the Valley,\' \'The Out and Out,\' \'The No Mistake,\' \'The Good for Mixing,\' \'The real Knock-me-down,\' \'The celebrated Butter Gin,\' \'The regular Flare-up,\' and a dozen other equally inviting and wholesome liqueurs. Although places of this description are to be met with in every second street, they are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood. The gin-shops in and near Drury-lane, Holborn, St. Giles\'s, Covent-garden, and Clare-market, are the handsomest in London. There is more of filth and squalid misery near those great thoroughfares than in any part of this mighty city.

"We will endeavour to sketch the bar of a large gin-shop, and its ordinary customers, for the edification of such of our readers as may not have had opportunities of observing such scenes; and on the chance of finding one well suited to our purpose we will make for Drury-lane, through the narrow streets and dirty courts which divide it from Oxford street, and that classical spot adjoining the brewery at the bottom of Tottenham-court-road, best known to the initiated as the \'Rookery.\'

"The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London can hardly be imagined by those (and there are many such) who have not witnessed it. Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper, every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three; fruit and \'sweet-stuff\' manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring [Pg 400] venders in the front parlours, and cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage; a \'musician\' in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one—filth everywhere—a gutter before the houses and a drain behind them—clothes drying and slops emptying from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen with matted hair, walking about barefooted, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.

"You turn the corner, what a change! All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite, and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior. A bar of French polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and there are two side-aisles of great casks, painted green and gold, enclosed within a light brass rail, and bearing such inscriptions as \'Old Tom, 549;\' \'Young Tom, 360;\' \'Samson, 1421.\' Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon, full of the same enticing vessels, with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished. On the counter, in addition to the usual spirit apparatus, are two or three little baskets of cakes and biscuits, which are carefully secured at the top with wicker-work, to prevent their contents being unlawfully abstracted. Behind it are two showily-dressed damsels with large necklaces, dispensing the spirits and \'compounds.\' They are assisted by the ostensible proprietor of the concern, a stout coarse fellow in a fur cap, put on very much on one side, to give him a knowing air, and display his sandy whiskers to the best advantage.

"It is growing late, and the throng of men, women, and children, [Pg 401] who have been constantly going in and out, dwindles down to two or three occasional stragglers—cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease. The knot of Irish labourers at the lower end of the place, who have been alternately shaking hands with, and threatening the life of, each other for the last hour, become furious in their disputes, and finding it impossible to silence one man, who is particularly anxious to adjust the difference, they resort to the infallible expedient of knocking him down and jumping on him afterward. The man in the fur cap and the potboy rush out; a scene of riot and confusion ensues; half the Irishmen get shut out, and the other half get shut in; the potboy is knocked among the tubs in no time; the landlord hits everybody, and everybody hits the landlord; the barmaids scream; the police come in; and the rest is a confused mixture of arms, legs, staves, torn coats, shouting, and struggling. Some of the party are borne off to the station-house, and the remainder slink home to beat their wives for complaining, and kick the children for daring to be hungry."

The neglected and frightfully wretched condition of a great part of the juvenile population in the British towns has frequently excited the attention of philanthropic Englishmen. On the 6th of June, 1848, Lord Ashley made a speech on juvenile destitution in the House of Commons, in which he drew an awful picture of misery and degradation. He showed that in the midst of London there is a large and continually increasing number of lawless persons, forming a separate class, having pursuits, interests, manners, and customs of their own. These are quite independent of the number of mere pauper children who crowd the streets of London, and who never attend a school. The lawless [Pg 402] class were estimated by Lord Ashley to number thirty thousand.

"Of 1600 who were examined, 162 confessed that they had been in prison, not merely once, or even twice, but some of them several times; 116 had run away from their homes; 170 slept in the \'lodging houses;\' 253 had lived altogether by beggary; 216 had neither shoes nor stockings; 280 had no hat or cap, or covering for the head; 101 had no linen; 249 had never slept in a bed; many had no recollection of ever having been in a bed; 68 were the children of convicts.

"In 1847 it was found that of 4000 examined, 400 confessed that they had been in prison, 660 lived by beggary, 178 were the children of convicts, and 800 had lost one or both their parents. Now, what was the employment of these people? They might be classed as street-sweepers; vendors of lucifer matches, oranges, cigars, tapes, and ballads; they held horses, ran errands, jobbed for \'dealers in marine stores,\' that being the euphonious term for receivers of stolen goods—an influential race in the metropolis, but for whose agency a very large proportion of juvenile crime would be extinguished. It might be asked, how did the large number who never slept in bed pass the night? In all manner of places: under dry arches of bridges and viaducts, under porticos, sheds, carts in outhouses, sawpits, or staircases, or in the open air, and some in lodging-houses. Curious, indeed, was their mode of life. One boy, during the inclement period of 1847, passed the greater part of his nights in the large iron roller in the Regent\'s Park. He climbed over the railings, and crept to the roller, where he lay in comparative security.

"Lord Ashley says, \'many of them were living in the dry arches of houses not finished, inaccessible except by an aperture, only large enough to admit the body of a man. When a lantern was thrust in, six or eight, ten or twelve people might be found lying together. Of those whom we found thus lodged, we invited a great number to come the following day, and there an [Pg 403] examination was instituted. The number examined was 33. Their ages varied from 12 to 18, and some were younger. 24 had no parents, 6 had one, 3 had stepmothers, 20 had no shirts, 9 no shoes, 12 had been once in prison, 3 twice, 3 four times, 1 eight times, and 1 (only 14 years old) twelve times. The physical condition of these children was exceedingly bad; they were a prey to vermin, they were troubled with itch, they were begrimed with dirt, not a few were suffering from sickness, and two or three days afterward several died from disease and the effects of starvation. I privately examined eight or ten. I was anxious to obtain from them the truth. I examined them separately, taking them into a room alone. I said, "I am going to ask you a variety of questions, to which I trust you will give me true answers, and I will undertake to answer any question you may put." They thought that a fair bargain. I put to several of them the question, "How often have you slept in a bed during the last three years?" One said, perhaps twelve times, another three times, another could not remember that he ever had. I asked them, how they passed the night in winter. They said, "We lie eight or ten together, to keep ourselves warm." I entered on the subject of their employments and modes of living. They fairly confessed they had no means of subsistence but begging and stealing. The only way of earning a penny in a legitimate way was by picking up old bones. But they fairly acknowledged for themselves and others scattered over the town, with whom they professed themselves acquainted, that they had not and could not have any other means of subsistence than by begging and stealing. A large proportion of these young persons were at a most dangerous age for society. What was the moral condition of those persons? A large proportion of them (it was no fault of theirs) did not recognise the distinctive rights of meum and tuum. Property appeared to them to be only the aggregate of plunder. They held that every thing which was possessed was common stock; that he who got most was the cleverest fellow, and that every one had a right to abstract from that stock what he could by his own ingenuity. Was it matter of surprise that they entertained those notions, which were instilled into [Pg 404] their minds from the time they were able to creep on all fours—that not only did they disregard all the rights of property, but gloried in doing so, unless they thought the avowal would bring them within the grasp of the law. To illustrate their low state of morality, and to show how utterly shameless they were in speaking on these subjects, I would, mention what had passed at a ragged school to which fourteen or fifteen boys, having presented themselves on a Sunday evening, were admitted as they came. They sat down, and the lesson proceeded. The clock struck eight. They all rose with the exception of one little boy. The master took him by the arm and said, "You must remain; the lesson is not over." The reply was, "We must go to business." The master inquired what business? "We must all go to catch them as they come out of the chapels." It was necessary for them, according to the remark of this boy, to go at a certain time in pursuit of their calling. They had no remorse or shame, in making the avowal, because they believed that there were no other means of saving themselves from starvation. I recollect a very graphic remark made by one of those children in perfect simplicity, but which yet showed the horrors of their position. The master had been pointing out to him the terrors of punishment in after-life. The remark of the boy was, "That may be so, but I don\'t think it can be any worse than this world has been to me." Such was the condition of hundreds and thousands.\'"

A large number of the depraved children live in what are called the "lodging-houses." Most Americans have heard of the "Old Brewery" at the Five Points in New York city, where more than two hundred persons of all ages and sexes were crowded together. Such lodging-houses as this, (which fortunately has been destroyed,) are common in London and the provincial towns of Great Britain. Mr. Mayhew, [Pg 405] in his "London Labour and the London Poor," has given us very full information concerning them. He obtained much of it from one who had passed some time among the dens of infamy. He says of these lodging-houses—

"\'They have generally a spacious, though often ill-ventilated kitchen, the dirty, dilapidated walls of which are hung with prints, while a shelf or two are generally, though barely, furnished with crockery and kitchen utensils. In some places knives and forks are not provided, unless a penny is left with the "deputy," or manager, till they are returned. A brush of any kind is a stranger, and a looking-glass would be a miracle. The average number of nightly lodgers is in winter seventy, in the summer (when many visit the provinces) from forty to forty-five. The general charge is, if two sleep together, 3d. per night, or 4d. for a single bed. In either case, it is by no means unusual to find eighteen or twenty in one small room, the heat and horrid smell from which are insufferable; and, where there are young children, the staircases are the lodgment of every kind of filth and abomination. In some houses there are rooms for families, where, on a rickety machine, which they dignify by the name of a bedstead, may be found the man, his wife, and a son or daughter, perhaps eighteen years of age; while the younger children, aged from seven to fourteen, sleep on the floor. If they have linen, they take it off to escape vermin, and rise naked, one by one, or sometimes brother and sister together. This is no ideal picture; the subject is too capable of being authenticated to need any meaningless or dishonest assistance called "allowable exaggeration." The amiable and deservedly popular minister of a district church, built among lodging-houses, has stated that he has found twenty-nine human beings in one apartment; and that having with difficulty knelt down between two beds to pray with a dying woman, his legs became so jammed that he could hardly get up again.

"\'Out of some fourscore such habitations,\' contin............