HORSES AND HOUNDS. . 135 



dition, free of expense; a cordial welcome offered also to 

 myself, horses, and hounds, whenever I approached their 

 houses ; but of this I did not often avail myself, as time was 

 pressing, and I made a point of never stopping anywhere until 

 the business of the day was over. Many of them in those happy 

 days had all their well-earned enjoyments around them — and 

 why should they not ? Are tradesmen and shopkeepers alone 

 to have their days and hours of recreation, and farmers, for- 

 sooth, who work as hard, or harder than any, to be always 

 plodding and working at the plough tail 1 Forbid it, common 

 justice I I like to see the cultivator of the soil mounted on a 

 good horse, and taking his day's amusement, which are not 

 many in a season ; but what are the remarks which often un- 

 justly assail them ? "Look at your tenant,_Mr. So-and-so; he 

 is mounted on as good a horse as yourself; times must be good, 

 or his rent too low." 



Who ever heard of a farmer, however, becoming a millionaire 

 by farming, or saw one sitting in the House of Commons 1 But 

 from every other trade there are representatives in that house. 

 Builders, bakers, tinkers, and tailors, cotton spinners, brokers, 

 railway jobbers — not Jews yet, nor Turks, but infidels and 

 heretics enough, and why not farmers 1 " Oh, they are repre- 

 sented by the landlords, are they T The next election will, I 

 think, tell a different story. I hope to see some of niy friends, 

 the farmers, representing their own body ; and I will engage 

 they can give as good an opinion on most matters _ as many 

 honourable members who are now guiding the destinies of this 

 once great country. There are hundreds of clever men out of 

 this great body of agriculturists whose diffidence alone has 

 hitherto kept them in the background. They are not the 

 stone-hearted brutes which their enemies would have the world 

 believe them ; nor would they, taking them as a body, feed upon 

 the vitals of the poor to make themselves rich. 



Can the pretending and canting philanthropists of the present 

 day place their hands upon their hearts and say with truth, 

 that the whole and sole object of their advocating certain mea- 

 sures has been for the benefit onli/ of their poorer brethren, 

 without the slightest reference to their own advancement ? 

 Why, then, are the honest yeomen to be taunted only with 

 motives which are foreign to their nature, and to be likened by 

 one raised from below their own rank by some fortuitous cir- 

 cumstances, to the clods of the valley? The farmers of Old 

 England are not the enemies and oppressors^ of the poor, but 

 their friends. Their motto ever has been, " Live, and let live ;" 

 not perish, ye degraded and half-starved workers at the loom. 



