Page:The English Peasant.djvu/128

 on the contrary, it has made their lives more miserable and more utterly hopeless than they otherwise would have been.

In their small cottages—for some are so small, that they have sometimes to turn the children into the street, the room is so stifling—they have passed the night, withfor six persons in one bedroom it can hardly be more; and this not imaginary. In one row of twelve houses at Langtoft (1864), a ganging village, the average to one bed«9airL_was more than six~persons. Up at earliest dawn, for they must start for work at half-past five or six, breakfast is scrambled through, and the children hurry out into the street, to meet like a company of factory hands at a given rendezvous. Boys and girls, big and little, corrupt and innocent, they flock together; and there in the pure morning light the more depraved give the tone to the assemblage, by commencing some disgusting badinage. Croyland triple bridge is a spot where they thus assemble, and one of the farmers in the neighbourhood thus writes to the Government Commissioner in 1866:—

"You should see the children and women at Croyland; they all meet at the bridge at six a.m. before they start for work, and you should hear the talk that goes on then."

The gang-master appears, and under his guidance they commence the toils of the day. Three, four, five, sometimes six miles they trudge into the fen, where in companies they begin their task, pulling weeds or potatoes, or topping beets, or peeling osiers, or whatever else may be the work of the season. And how do they work? Continually stooping to grub up weeds or potatoes, at other times kneeling on the damp earth, as in weeding carrots, and occasionally wet up to their middles, as, for instance, in weeding standing corn. "It is dreadful," says a large farmer at Spalding, "to see the little things coming out wet and draggled. It is as bad for their health as their morals."

If the ganger be a decent man, he will do his best to suppress such evil as he may chance to see and hear; but if, as not unfrequently happens, he is a man of no principle, he will permit the evil to have full sway, as the easiest means of preserving his power. Nay, it is on record that he himself is sometimes the leader and inciter of moral corruption. Anyhow, all are left to themselves during meal-times, and then untaught, hard-worked,