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cowers, chastity can "hardly survive, and female delicacy must 

 be unknown, the house only a shelter, full of cumber and litter. 

 Such are the homes of • the majority of our English peasantry 

 in the southern, western and south middle districts, and of 

 many in most parts of England and in wide districts of Scot- 

 land and Wales. Such is the condition of the pauperized peas- 

 ants, not as poets have painted, England's glory, but her 

 reproach." Eev. James Martineau says : " The social discrep- 

 ancies which disfigure and affect society have here assumed a 

 monstrous and fearful character. Our country is a vast conge- 

 ries of exaggerations. Enormous wealth and saddest poverty, 

 sumptuous idleness and unrewarded toil, princely provision for 

 learning and the most degrading ignorance, a large amount of 

 laborious philanthropy but a larger of unconquered misery and 

 sin terrify us with their dreadful contrasts of light and shade. 

 It is appalling to think of the moral cost by which England has 

 become materially great. Where is the laborer by whose 

 hand the soil has been tilled? In a cabin, with his children, 

 where the domestic decencies cannot be. I know not which is 

 the most heathenish, the guilty negligence of our lofty men, or 

 the fearful dei'gradation of the low." 



John Bright says : " Fearful suffering exists among the rural 

 laborers in almost every part of this kingdom. What wretched, 

 uncared for, untaught brutes, in helpless stolid ignorance, are 

 the people who raise the crops on which we live, and what dirt, 

 vice and misery in the houses where seven or eight persons of 

 both sexes are penned up together in one rickety, foul, vermin- 

 haunted bed-room — their wages reduced to the very lowest 

 point at which their lives can be kept in them ! They are 

 heart-broken,, spirit-broken, despairing men — reduced to such 

 brutality, recklessness, audacity of vice and extreme helpless- 

 ness that they have no aspirations to better their condition. 

 Accustomed to this from their youth, they can see nothing in 

 the future which can afford them a single ray of hope. As 

 the rural laborer looks longingly up the social ladder of ranks, 

 the first six or eight steps are broken out, and there seems to 

 him no chance to span the chasm." 



J. Scott Eussell said ten years ago, " Something must be done, 

 or our working classes will be grievously wronged and the 



