【英文读物】The White Slaves of England.docx

【英文读物】The White Slaves of EnglandPREFACE.The following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrage equally abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. The frightful abuses which are here set forth, are, from their enormity, difficult of belief; yet they are supported by testimony the most impartial, clear and irrefutable. These abuses are time-honored, and have the sanction of a nation which prides itself upon the freedom of its Constitution; and which holds up its government to the nations of the earth as a model of regulated liberty. Vain, audacious, false assumption! Let the refutation be found in the details which this volume furnishes, of the want, misery and starvationthe slavish toilthe menial degradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. Let her miners, her operatives, the tenants of her workhouses, her naval service, and the millions upon millions in the Emerald Isle and in farther India attest its fallacy.These are the legitimate results of the laws and institutions of Great Britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or less degree, all her dependencies. Her church and state, and her laws of entail and primogeniture, are the principal sources of the evils under which her people groan; and until these are Pg 6 changed there is no just ground of hope for an improvement in their condition. The tendency of things is, indeed, to make matters still worse. The poor are every year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings; while the wealth and power of the realm are annually concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments of oppression. The picture is already sufficiently revolting. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine children of the same common Father, suffer from destitution, that the thousandth may revel in superfluities. A thousand cottages shrink into meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a single palace. The tables of a thousand families of the industrious poor waste away into drought and barrenness, that one board may be laden with surfeits."From these monstrous evils there seems to be little chance of escape, except by flight; and happy is it for the victims of oppression, that an asylum is open to them, in which they can fully enjoy the rights and privileges, from which, for ages, they have been debarred. Let them come. The feudal chains which so long have bound them can here be shaken off. Here they can freely indulge the pure impulses of the mind and the soul, untrammeled by political or religious tyranny. Here they can enjoy the beneficent influences of humane institutions and laws, and find a vast and ample field in which to develop and properly employ all their faculties.The United States appear before the eyes of the down-trodden whites of Europe as a land of promise. Thousands of ignorant, degraded wretches, who have fled from their homes to Pg 7 escape exhausting systems of slavery, annually land upon our shores, and in their hearts thank God that he has created such a refuge. This is the answerthe overwhelming answerto the decriers of our country and its institutions. These emigrants are more keenly alive to the superiority of our institutions than most persons who have been bred under them, and to their care we might confidently intrust our defence.We design to prove in this work that the oligarchy which owns Great Britain at the present day is the best friend of human slavery, and that its system is most barbarous and destructive. Those feudal institutions which reduced to slavery the strong-minded race of whites, are perpetuated in Great Britain, to the detriment of freedom wherever the British sway extends. Institutions which nearly every other civilized country has abolished, and which are at least a century behind the age, still curse the British islands and their dependencies. This system of slavery, with all its destructive effects, will be found fully illustrated in this volume.Our plan has been to quote English authorities wherever possible. Out of their own mouths shall they be condemned. We have been much indebted to the publications of distinguished democrats of England, who have keenly felt the evils under which their country groans, and striven, with a hearty will, to remove them. They have the sympathies of civilized mankind with their cause. May their efforts soon be crowned with success, for the British masses and oppressed nations far away in the East will shout loud and long when the aristocracy is brought to the dust!CHAPTER I.GENERAL SLAVERY PROCEEDING FROM THE EXISTENCE OF THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY.What is slavery? A system under which the time and toil of one person are compulsorily the property of another. The power of life and death, and the privilege of using the lash in the master, are not essential, but casual attendants of slavery, which comprehends all involuntary servitude without adequate recompense or the means of escape. He who can obtain no property in the soil, and is not represented in legislation, is a slave; for he is completely at the mercy of the lord of the soil and the holder of the reins of government. Sometimes slavery is founded upon the inferiority of one race to another; and then it appears in its most agreeable garb, for the system may be necessary to tame and civilize a race of savages. But the subjection of the majority of a nation to an involuntary, hopeless, exhausting, and demoralizing servitude, for the benefit of Pg 14 an idle and luxurious few of the same nation, is slavery in its most appalling form. Such a system of slavery, we assert, exists in Great Britain.In the United Kingdom, the land is divided into immense estates, constantly retained in a few hands; and the tendency of the existing laws of entail and primogeniture is to reduce even the number of these proprietors. According to McCulloch, there are 77,007,048 acres of land in the United Kingdom, including the small islands adjacent. Of this quantity, 28,227,435 acres are uncultivated; while, according to Mr. Porter, another English writer, about 11,300,000 acres, now lying waste, are fit for cultivation. The number of proprietors of all this land is about 50,000. Perhaps, this is a rather high estimate for the present period. Now the people of the United Kingdom number at least 28,000,000. What a tremendous majority, then, own not a foot of soil! But this is not the worst. Such is the state of the laws, that the majority never can acquire an interest in the land. Said the London Times, in 1844, "Once a peasant in England, and the man must remain a peasant for ever;" and, says Mr. Kay, of Trinity College, Cambridge"Unless the English peasant will consent to tear himself from his relations, friends, and early associations, and either transplant himself into a town or into a distant colony, he has no chance of improving his condition in the world."Admit thisadmit that the peasant must remain Pg 15 through life at the mercy of his lord, and of legislation in which his interests are not representedand tell us if he is a freeman?To begin with England, to show the progress and effects of the land monopoly:The Rev. Henry Worsley states that in the year 1770, there were in England 250,000 freehold estates, in the hands of 250,000 different families; and that, in 1815, the whole of the lands of England were concentrated in the hands of only 32,000 proprietors! So that, as the population increases, the number of proprietors diminishes. A distinguished lawyer, who was engaged in the management of estates in Westmoreland and Cumberland counties in 1849, says"The greater proprietors in this part of the country are buying up all the land, and including it in their settlements. Whenever one of the small estates is put up for sale, the great proprietors outbid the peasants and purchase it at all costs. The consequence is, that for some time past, the number of the small estates has been rapidly diminishing in all parts of the country. In a short time none of them will remain, but all be merged in the great estates. * * * The consequence is, that the peasant's position, instead of being what it once wasone of hopeis gradually becoming one of despair. Unless a peasant emigrates, there is now no chance for him. It is impossible for him to rise above the peasant class."The direct results of this system are obvious. Unable to buy land, the tillers of the soil live merely by the sufferance of the proprietors. If one of the great landholders takes the notion that grazing will be more Pg 16 profitable than farming, he may sweep away the homes of his labourers, turning the poor wretches upon the country as wandering paupers, or driving them into the cities to overstock the workshops and reduce the wages of the poor workman. And what is the condition of the peasants who are allowed to remain and labour upon the vast estates? Let Englishmen speak for Englishmen.Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire are generally regarded as presenting the agricultural labourer in his most deplorable circumstances, while Lincolnshire exhibits the other extreme. We have good authority for the condition of the peasantry in all these counties. Mr. John Fox, medical officer of the Cerne union, in Dorsetshire, says"Most of the cottages are of the worst description; some mere mud-hovels, and situated in low and damp places, with cesspools or accumulations of filth close to the doors. The mud floors of many are much below the level of the road, and, in wet seasons, are little better than so much clay. In many of the cottages, the beds stood on the ground floor, which was damp three parts of the year; scarcely one had a fireplace in the bedroom; and one had a single small pane of glass stuck in the mud wall as its only window. Persons living in such cottages are generally very poor, very dirty, and usually in rags, living almost wholly on bread and potatoes, scarcely ever tasting any animal food, and, consequently, highly susceptible of disease, and very unable to contend with it."Very often, according to other equally good authority, there is not more than one room for the whole family, Pg 17 and the demoralization of that family is the natural consequence. The Morning Chronicle of November, 1849, said of the cottages at Southleigh, in Devon"One house, which our correspondent visited, was almost a ruin. It had continued in that state for ten years. The floor was of mud, dipping near the fireplace into a deep hollow, which was constantly filled with water. There were five in the familya young man of twenty-one, a girl of eighteen, and another girl of about thirteen, with the father and mother, all sleeping together up-stairs. And what a sleeping-room! 'In places it seemed falling in. To ventilation it was an utter stranger. The crazy floor shook and creaked under me as I paced it.' Yet the rent was 1s. a weekthe same sum for which apartments that may be called luxurious in comparison may be had in the model lodging-houses. And here sat a girl weaving that beautiful Honiton lace which our peeresses wear on court-days. Cottage after cottage at Southleigh presented the same characteristics. Clay floors, low ceilings letting in the rain, no ventilation; two rooms, one above and one below; gutters running through the lower room to let off the water; unglazed window-frames, now boarded up, and now uncovered to the elements, the boarding going for firewood; the inmates disabled by rheumatism, ague, and typhus; broad, stagnant, open ditches close to the doors; heaps of abominations piled round the dwellings; such are the main features of Southleigh; and it is in these worse than pig-styes that one of the most beautiful fabrics that luxury demands or art supplies is fashioned. The parish houses are still worse. 'One of these, on the borders of Devonshire and Cornwall, and not far from Launceston, consisted of two houses, containing between them four rooms. In each room lived a family night and day, the space being about twelve feet square. In one were a man and his wife and eight children; the father, mother, and two children lay in one bed, the remaining six were huddled 'head and foot' (three at the top and three at the foot) in the other bed. The eldest girl was between fifteen and sixteen, the Pg 18 eldest boy between fourteen and fifteen.' Is it not horrible to think of men and women being brought up in this foul and brutish manner in civilized and Christian England! The lowest of savages are not worse cared for than these children of a luxurious and refined country."Yet other authorities describe cases much worse than this which so stirs the heart of the editor of the Morning Chronicle. The frightful immorality consequent upon such a mode of living will be illustrated fully in another portion of this work.In Lincolnshire, the cottages of the peasantry are in a better condition than in any other part of England; but in consequence of the lowness of wages and the comparative enormity of rents, the tillers of the soil are in not much better circumstances than their rural brethren in other counties. Upon an average, a hard-working peasant can earn five shillings a week; two shillings of which go for rent. If he can barely live when employed, what is to become of him when thrown out of employment? Thus the English peasant is driven to the most constant and yet hopeless labour, with whips more terrible than those used by the master of the negro slave.In Wales, the condition of the peasant, thanks to the general system of lord and serf, is neither milder nor more hopeful than in England. Mr. Symonds, a commissioner who was sent by government to examine the state of education in some of the Welsh counties, says of the peasantry of Brecknockshire, Cardiganshire, and RadnorshirePg 19"The people of my district are almost universally poor. In some parts of it, wages are probably lower than in any part of Great Britain. The evidence of the witnesses, fully confirmed by other statements, exhibits much poverty, but little amended in other parts of the counties on which I report. The farmers themselves are very much impoverished, and live no better than English cottagers in prosperous agricultural counties."The cottages in which the people dwell are miserable in the extreme in nearly every part of the country in Cardiganshire, and every part of Brecknockshire and Radnorshire, except the east. I have myself visited many of the dwellings of the poor, and my assistants have done so likewise. I believe the Welsh cottages to be very little, if at all, superior to the Irish huts in the country districts."Brick chimneys are very unusual in these cottages; those which exist are usually in the shape of large cones, the top being of basket-work. In very few cottages is there more than one room, which serves the purposes of living and sleeping. A large