Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/122

. 19, 1861.] idea of how locomotives might enjoy themselves when out for the holidays.

Alas! however, for the Poor during these hard times! There is another, and far less delightful side to this strange fantastic picture. This pitiful subject has been more than once touched upon in these brief notices of the chief events of each week, as it takes rank as the to the readers of this publication. There is something here at stake of far more importance than a mere literary interest. Would that any word of ours could carry such weight with our readers as should induce them to give a little more thought than usual to the sufferings of their poor fellow-countrymen and country-women, who are just now enduring very terrible privations. The pity should not be so much for those who are driven to take refuge in the unions and workhouses. For them, at least, there is food—such as it is—and warmth, and shelter. The helping hand should be for such as are just struggling to keep clear of the House, and who are parting, day after day, with one little article of furniture and clothing after another, in the hope that the frost may break up, and the work, as they say, may “come back.” Day after day they struggle on, and nothing but the instant apprehension of death—not always that!—will induce them to retire from their bare walls, and dissolve the fellowship of suffering which stands to them in place of the happiness of a family. The one consideration which appears to keep them out of the workhouse, more than bolt or bar, is the stern rule which enjoins separation during their sojourn within the walls of the Union between husband and wife, parent and child. It is probable that, as their means of procuring daily food of the roughest kind decrease, and the vital powers are lowered, the suffering has so become a habit that they look upon the realities of their situation with duller apprehension. They are content to starve to-day as they starved yesterday. To-day they are alive—why should they not be alive to-morrow? The problem is solved one way or another, and, on the First of May, most of them will be alive; but at what expense of human suffering—at what expenditure of vital power and energy which might have been profitably employed in taming the sea, and drawing nourishment from the earth, it would be hard to say. We are apt to think “they are alive—all is well.” There are worse things than death. To live on with abated energy, and forces sadly unequal to the daily task;—to bring into the world an offspring of stunted power and growth;—in the day to wish it were night, and at night to say, “would God it were morning!”—all this is worse than the long rest, and the realisation of the eternal hope which is in man’s nature. Is it not strange that there should be too many Englishmen and Englishwomen in this world? Is it not stranger still that we should have so much pity and sympathy for starving and distressed persons in other lands, whilst our own people—those of our own flesh and blood—are undergoing equal privations of food and of the necessaries of life, in addition to the miseries caused not merely by a rigorous climate, but by a climate whose rigour comes by fits and starts, and is therefore all the more distressing? Our pity always travels South. No one subscribes for the Esquimaux, and yet as long as the skies are bright, and the sun is warm above, human suffering is shorn of half its bitterness.

The intelligence received from the United States has been of the most astonishing kind. It would seem that in South Carolina there has been a convention, or State gathering, and that by the persons present it has been decided that this State shall no longer form part of the North American Union. Other slave-holding states have been invited to join this glorious conspiracy against the freedom of a large section of the human race in the name of freedom. Botanists tell us that the rose is a very foul feeder—no flower consumes so much dung as the garden’s queen. This seems to be the case with freedom in the Southern States of the North American Union. Freedom in South Carolina, and in the other planting states must be well manured with slavery, that its petals may be bright and its leaves vigorous, and that the plant may flourish in a satisfactory way. It is difficult to believe even now that the true statesmen of the United States will not find a way out of the difficulty, for as the matter strikes upon one’s intelligence at the first blush, the disruption of the Union is a heavy blow to the prosperity of that great confederation—which, with all its faults, was so useful an ally to the Liberals of Europe. We want a counterbalance to the vast military despotisms of Europe—for France, Spain, Russia, and Germany are still despotically governed by military power. Like “a good deed in a naughty world,” the lamp of freedom shines with faint glimmer here and there upon the European continent—in Holland, in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Piedmont—but as yet it sends forth but an uncertain beam. Were the British islands once subjected to military power, there would soon be an end of freedom in the Old World. The Liberals of Europe live by virtue of British freedom, and we in our turn rely for sympathy and support upon the various gatherings of the Anglo-Saxon race which have established themselves at this or that point of the habitable globe. The Australian continent, with its adjacent islands, and still more, at the present period of the world’s history, the continent of North America, constitute our two great supports. There does not exist any nation, save our own, which has cast its roots so deeply and so firmly into the earth at distant points of its surface, as our own. The power of Russia, of France, of Germany, respectively, is concentrated into a comparatively narrow space; but on the other side of the Atlantic there is another England; in the far Southern Ocean, an England again. These great offshoots have drawn their vigour from the parent trunk, but they have well repaid the debt. The progress which has been made in turning Liberal ideas into facts, during the last thirty years, even here at home, is greatly the result of the existence elsewhere of British communities, which had broken off all connection with feudal forms of thought. How, then, can we do otherwise than wish well to the United