MR. Oliver's address. 19 



istence of a national calamity, of which she herself was the 

 great prime cause, — (I have not yet learned that her bowels of 

 compassion have been seriously moved for the bondmen of Po- 

 land and the serfs of Russia,) — England, I say, has at this mo- 

 ment within her own borders, cither drudging in her fields, or 

 shut out from the light of day, within the impenetrable black- 

 ness of her cavernous collieries, — thousands upon thousands of 

 men, women and children, "with no chains, indeed, upon 

 their limbs, but with the iron in their souls, and to whom the 

 words Liberty and Independence are words without meaning."* 

 All over her soil you will find " men with tanned, furrowed 

 faces, and hairy, freckled hands, clad in fustian and leather, 

 in velveteen and corduroy, glossy with wear or wet, soiled by- 

 brown clay and green moss, scratched and torn by brambles, 

 wrinkled, warped and threadbare with age." As Thomas 

 Hood, the well known English writer, from whom I have just 

 quoted, (speaking of them) in his "Lay of the Laborer," and 

 alluding to their condition, says, " Their destitution is a nak- 

 ed great fact. There are fathers with more children than shil- 

 luigs per week, mothers travailing literally in the straw, and 

 infants starving before the parent's eyes. Human creatures 

 worried at once by winter, disease and want, as by that triple- 

 headed dog, whelped in the realms of torment." And again, 

 declaring himself not to be responsible for these evils, he says. 

 No famishing laborer, his joints racked with toil, holds out to 

 me, in the palm of his broad, hard hand, seven miserable shil- 

 lings, and mutters, ' For these and a parish loaf, for six long 

 days, from dawn to dusk, thro' hot and cold, thro' wet and 

 dry, I tilled thy land.' " 



All these, without political influence, without power, gener- 

 ally uncared-for and uneducated, are classed by law and by 

 usage into the lowest degree of inferiority ; — without object of 

 aspiration and without aim of ambition, for there is no end to- 

 wards which ambition might reach with any hope of attaining, 

 and therefore ambition itself dies for want of sustenance, — all 

 hope crushed out, and all energy palzied and death-stricken, all 

 these have descended lower and lower, till a paralyzing subserv- 



* Colman. 



