AGRICULTURAL POPULATION. 65 



quit, because, with a view to the small profit to be derived from 

 their board, they had taken lodgers into their families, who were 

 not agreeable to him. The old people whom I was visiting, 

 though they had occupied the same place for perhaps more than 

 thirty years, and felt themselves quite too far advanced to seek 

 a new home, were suffering under the apprehension that they 

 too might, in some way, have involuntarily incurred the land 

 lord s displeasure, and might be turned out of their homes like 

 wise ; and the woman said that her husband, through fear of 

 such an event, &quot; had had no sleep for several nights.&quot; In another 

 house, which we visited, we found the woman of the house had 

 just returned from attending the accouchement of a neighbor, the 

 wife of a laboring man j and she told us that when she an- 

 lounced to the father the birth of twins, he received the intelli 

 gence with sadness, and replied, that &quot; it would have been a 

 kinder act if Heaven had been pleased to have taken them both 

 away.&quot; Where honest and laborious people, in advanced age, 

 feel constantly that they may be turned adrift, at the caprice of 

 their landlord, from the home of their youth, and where a father 

 regards the birth of a child as a curse, the benevolent mind sees 

 evils in the condition, which it must lament if it cannot remedy, 

 and which it must lament the more, in proportion, as all remedy 

 seems hopeless. The landlord in this case, as I am persuaded, 

 was incapable of committing, knowingly, any act of injustice or 

 unkindness ; but it is obvious to what abuses such a power is 

 liable, and to what evils a relation of such servile and abject 

 dependence may subject one. 



In the present condition of society in England, no material 

 alteration, however, is to be looked for in the position of the 

 laboring classes. Their lot seems to be sealed, and they must 

 remain in this condition of servility and dependence. They 

 cannot rise above it. They are not slaves ; but they are not 

 free. Liberty and independence, to them, are words without 

 meaning. They have no chains upon their hands, but the iron 

 enters into their souls. Their limbs may be unshackled, but 

 their spirits are bound. 



At the anniversary meeting of the Northamptonshire Agricul 

 tural Society, several aged and respectable laborers were called 

 in and advanced to the upper table to receive the premiums for 

 good conduct, &quot; which they had merited,&quot; in the terms of the 

 6* 



