Page:The English Peasant.djvu/165

 But look a little longer. Try to cross the common, and dry as the weather is, you will find your feet continually sinking into the mud. Look at those pools; they are black and stagnant, and emit a smell like the vilest sewer. Pass along the skirts of the common where these miserable little cottages stand, and you will find a Styx-like ditch, widening in one part into a filthy pond. Around this pond the children are playing, and upon one of the planks which cross this rivulet of death sits a mother and babe» while, stretched along another, sprawling flat upon his stomach, lies a father.

I asked a man if the place was healthy.

"Oh, dear no," he replied; "we've had the scarlet-fever bad enough, eight or nine died. My son lost his only child, a sweet, engaging little thing; it's near broke the mother's heart."

Well might the poor fellow ask me for a bit of "bacca," the only disinfectant the unhappy people knew of. He said they had no drainage, but spoke of the cottage we were looking at as having a great pool behind, where they threw their chamber stuff, and all their slops, and only emptied it as the garden wanted manure.

But while evils of this kind are more or less local, there are moral disadvantages incident to the very nature of all common life.

Any one passing through the more secluded parts of Surrey must have been struck with the extraordinary dearth of inhabitants. In some parts you may walk for miles, and scarcely meet a soul. It is quite clear that "the great Wen," as Cobbett delighted to call the Metropolis, has depleted the whole county, and that its rural population is getting more and more sparse. In the decade 1851-1861, while the total population of Surrey increased rather more than 20 per cent, the number engaged in agricultural pursuits did not increase 3 per cent. The total area of land in Surrey, exclusive of that devoted to cities, towns, villages, water, roads, or railways, is 420,900 acres; and to cultivate this there were, in 1861, 19,086 persons of both sexes engaged in agricultural pursuits, giving one person to 22 acres. It is manifest, therefore, that their life must be one of increasing isolation, and this must be especially the case on the commons.