16 MR. Oliver's address. 



to exist, such an unequal distribution of land to be recognized, 

 separate from excessive wealth, on the one hand, and excessive 

 penury 01) the other. You may have to please the mere eye, 

 and to gratify the mere taste, all the gorgeous and dazzling ac- 

 companiments of lavish wealth. You may have all the glit- 

 tering magnificence of gorgeous coronets, of regal palaces and 

 princely and aristocratic domains, embellished with all the elab- 

 orate and profuse adorning of the highest art. But when your 

 eyes look upon the opposite picture, the soul sickens, and the 

 feeling heart rejects the glory and the glitter, — for you know 

 you must have with them, all the deadly bitterness and the 

 foul dregs of the most intense, and squalid and starving, body- 

 and-soul-killing poverty, with its hideous appendages of heav- 

 en-daring and hell-peopling crime. God forbid, that you or I, 

 or our children, to the latest time, should know either extreme 

 beneath the sun, that shines upon our soil. God forbid that 

 individual accumulation of land and of wealth, should ever 

 cause, within the limits of our country, the existence of a de- 

 graded class of laborers, resembling those over whom English 

 Gang-Masters, men noted for their profligacy and dishonesty, 

 tyrannize. Such laborers are a people in the shape of men, in- 

 deed, with legs to walk withal, with eyes to see, with ears to 

 hear, with nose to smell, and tongue to taste, and hands that 



must 



" Work, work,, -work, 

 The labor never flags ; 

 And wliat are its wages ? — a bed of straw, 



A crust of bread and rags; 

 A shattered roof — a iwked floor, 



A table — a broken chair, 

 And a wall so blank, that a shadow they'd thank, 

 For sometimes falling there." — Hood, 

 Yes, with hands to work, but with no head to design, no 

 heart to take courage, and no strength to be used in throwing 

 off the thraldom under which they are heel-trodden and 

 ground into the deepest and dirtiest dust. 



Unfortunate men as they are, they impart nothmg but degra- 

 dation to the national character, themselves degraded, hope- 

 less, disheartened — as well as sunk in the profoundest igno- 

 rance. In France, too, the laborers are wretchedly ignorant. 



