Page:Civil and Religious Liberty (Annie Besant).pdf/8

 been into some so-called homes, composed of two small rooms, in one of which father and mother, boys and girls growing up into manhood and womanhood, were obliged to sleep in the one room, even in the one bed. I have seen a room in which slept four generations, the great-grandfather and his wife, the grandmother (unmarried), the mother (unmarried), and the little child of the latter, and in addition to these relatives, the room also afforded sleeping accommodation to three men lodgers. Yet people talk about the "immorality of the agricultural poor," as though people could be anything except immoral, when the lads and lasses have to grow up without any possibility of being even decent, much less with any possibility of retaining the smallest shred of natural modesty. The only marvel is how, among our poor, there do grow up now and then fair and pure blossoms, worthy of the most carefully-guarded homes. But a very short time since there were worse hovels even than those I have mentioned. Down at Woolwich there were "homes" composed of one small room, 12 feet by 12, and 8½ feet high in the middle of the sloping roof, and the huts were built of bad brick, the damp of which sweated slowly through the whitewash, and the floor was made of beaten earth, lower in level than the ground outside, and in front of the fire they kept a plank all day baking warm and dry, in order that at night they might put it into the bed, to keep the sleeper next the wall from being wet through by the drippings as he slept. And in other such huts as these four families lived together, with no partition put up between them, save such poor rags as some lingering feeling of decency might lead them to hang up for themselves—and these huts, these miserable huts, were the property of Government, and in them were housed her Majesty's married soldiers, housed in such abodes as her Majesty would not allow her cattle to occupy near Windsor or near Balmoral. Yet among us there is no open rebellion; there is no open disloyalty. Among us, too, what disloyalty there is, is chiefly confined to the lower orders, and that, as everyone knows, can be snuffed out at a moment's notice. Among us, it also shows itself in that fancy of the people to gather into Republican clubs and other such societies, where loyalty to the Crown is not the lesson most enforced by the speakers. The quiet, slow alienation of the people from the Throne is going on unobserved; a people who are loyal to a monarchy will not form themselves into