SOLON ROBINSON, 1849 281 



And if you answer, still he is a slave — I answer, true, 

 he is a slave. And what is a freeman? Stand forth, 

 first, ye who shout "long live queen Victoria;" while I 

 display the enviable condition of Britania's free horn 

 citizens. Come forth from your damp and crowded cel- 

 lars and fireless dens of squalid wretchedness, and ex- 

 hibit your starved and emaciated forms, your sickly 

 countenances, your toil-worn, youthful, crooked spines, 

 your swelled joints and contorted limbs, clothed in so 

 scanty a supply of filthy rags that they are hardly suffi- 

 cient to harbor the vermin, or hide the nakedness, of 

 proud anti-slavery England's freemen ! Come forth from 

 your dark and dismal coal-mine caverns, a thousand feet 

 below the surface of the earth, where you live upon a 

 scanty pittance that barely supports life, while you are 

 able to toil, but now you are past it: come forth, then, 

 and enjoy, in your toil-worn premature old age, the com- 

 forts provided for you in freedom's work-house. 



Stand up ye full fed, hard toiling laborers upon the 

 soil ye do not, and cannot own, for I would see how even 

 the best classes of England's free born agricultural labor- 

 ers, who produce all that lords and bishops eat, do eat 

 themselves! Seven pounds of coarse black bread and 

 four ounces of meat per week. Ah! that is freemen's 

 food, is it? Now take me to your lodging room — for I 

 would see where you rest your weary limbs after partak- 

 ing of such sumptuous fare. 



It is here — men, women and children, like hogs huddled 

 together. But ye are freemen, and dare not murmur at 

 your lot, or neglect your labor, for thus you will be driven 

 forth from the enjoyment of this freemen's fare, and be 

 free to starve, or steal, to prolong your miserable life 

 upon the food provided for convicts and refused to you 

 while honest. 



We hear the sound of the factory bell, that tells the 

 English operative of that world of machinery, of that 

 government who fain would supply mankind with all 

 their manufactured articles, that he is now free, at nine 

 ^t night, to retire to his supper and his bed. We see 



