218 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, 

 slipped something into her hand. I learned that not during 

 the ten years in which she had been bed-ridden had she re- 

 ceived a single farthing from the proprietor, nor, indeed, had 

 any of the poor of the island, and that the parish had no ses- 

 sion-funds. I saw her husband a few days after, an old 

 worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek 

 and eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his 

 tattered dress ; and he reiterated the same sad story. They 

 had no means of living, he said, save through the charity of 

 their poor neighbours, who had so little to spare ; for the 

 parish or the proprietor had never given them anything. He 

 had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who had 

 helped them but the one had perished in a storm off the 

 Mull of Cantyre, and the other had died of fever when on a 

 West India voyage ; and though their poor girl was very duti- 

 ful, and staid in their crazy hut to take care of them in their 

 helpless old age, what other could she do in a place like Eigg 

 than just share with them their sufferings ? It has been re- 

 cently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of this 

 kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the 

 law courts of the country, there to sue for a pittance to sup- 

 port life, until an intermediate newly-erected court, alien to 

 the Constitution, before which they must plead at their own 

 expense, shall have first given them permission to prosecute 

 their claims. And I doubt not that many of the English 

 gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made it such, 

 are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, 

 and who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, 

 as well shown by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book 

 for the poor, and another for the rich, but the same law and 

 the same administration of law for all. They surely could 

 not have seen that the principle of their Poor Law Act for 

 Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution 



