Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/240

 should forswear sack, and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do. It is natural that a nobleman should not desire to have a slovenly unhandsome cottage come betwixt the wind and his nobility.

The price of bread is always considerably higher in these places than in the neighbouring towns; a fact which is partly accounted for by the number of bad debts met with by those who sell bread and flour. One man said he could not get paid, and gave up the trade. He said he lost about fifty pounds before he shut up his shop. Another man said the people had got between two and three hundred pounds in his debt. In truth, the public in those parts of the kingdom could not and did not live on their wages: and the above is only one of the ways in which those wages were eked out so as to enable them to keep body and soul together in the most miserable manner. As I wept along, I observed another shop shut. The man who kept it, was informed, had been ruined by bad debts, and went off in the night with all the goods he had left.

Nearly opposite this shut-up shop, getting over a stile, I found a footpath leading across a corner of what was once a park, through which had run a fine clear, rapid stream, well supplied with fine trout