Page:The English Peasant.djvu/44

 But the English labourer had already then fallen, as Defoe's descriptions elsewhere prove, and from Defoe's times to those of Charles Dickens, the descent went on with increasing speed. The causes have been numerous, but all have had their origin in the persistent selfishness of those who have had the presumption to think that wealth and learning gave the right and the ability to manage the labourer's affairs without asking his opinion or obtaining his consent.

The idea the ruling classes have had of their position comes out in a phrase used by a noble lord in the debate in the House of Lords on the Spirituous Liquors Bill in 1743, "If any accidental public misfortune should render the people likely to mutiny." But the ruling classes of England have never been equal even to the military conception of duty, for they have cruelly and persistently sacrificed the lives and morals of the myriads of privates they pretend to command. Take, for instance, the Distilleries Act of 2 William and Mary. Its object was to ruin French commerce and to encourage the distilling of English brandy and spirits. What was its result? Little more than sixty years had passed away when Fielding and Hogarth drew their appalling pictures of the result of gin-drinking in England. Gin Lane, "full of strange images of death," shows vividly the moral murder which had been going on. "Should," said Fielding, "the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height during the next twenty years, there will be very few of the common people left to drink it."

But the interest of some powerful class has constantly outweighed the moral welfare of the people. Take the brewers, for instance. Hundreds of them in former times were spread all over the country, and their profits enabled them to almost rank with the gentry. How were these profits obtained? From innumerable alehouses in the district, many of which were actually the property of the brewer. Dunning, a writer on Pauperism at the time of the Revolution, connects the small country alehouses with the brandy-shops, as affording incredible returns to the Excise.

What need to paint the results? In the drawings of Moreland we see the labourer, bloated and lazy, seated on a bench of the village alehouse, drinking away his wages, or ascending the steps of the roadside inn, to get another draught of ale, or it may be, a