Page:Australian views of England.djvu/90

  stepped into the railway carriage in which I was travelling. An acquaintance in the carriage, after shaking him by the hand, good-humouredly remarked that he was not getting any thinner. "No," said the farmer; "I have just paid £115 for poor rates; if that is not enough to make a man fat, I don't know what is I" Think of a state of things like this, good grumbling Australians, and bless yourselves that you are in a land where labour is, of all things, the thing most valuable.

Let writers and talkers say what they will of the improved condition of the English people, these pictures of blank ruin and despair are to be found all over the kingdom. Three hundred and fifty miles from Coventry I was waiting for a railway train in the valley of the Leven, when I got into conversation with a Scotch labourer. He told me that he and his wife had lived for months past on 4d. to 6d. a day. I asked him what they lived upon, and the reply was, "meal and sour milk." Did he get no meat, I asked him; "not a bit of meat had passed his lips for more than a month." In the valley of the Leven there are some extensive cotton-printing works.