Page:The English Peasant.djvu/60

 scrofula, as every country practitioner has known, found its most frequent victims amongst this famine-struck race.

The degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag gravel carts like a beast of burden.

Left in ignorance so dense that probably not one in five could read or write, was it surprising that agricultural labourers should view the introduction of threshing machines as calculated to put the finishing stroke to their ruin? When a prairie has been dried up by a long drought the merest spark will produce a conflagration, carrying destruction over hundreds of miles; so it is with a popular movement, no one knows how it began or where it will end. Thus in the autumn of 1830, Agricultural England was panic-stricken by the news that the labourers were rising everywhere, destroying machines and setting fire to ricks. The movement spread through the southern, eastern and midland counties, and even showed itself in Cumberland. Sometimes it was a mere riot with an onslaught on some poor-house, parsonage, or manor-house, sometimes it was content with merely destroying machinery, but the most usual form was rick-burning. Night after night in many parts of England the blazing sky told that Captain Swing had been at his work.

In the roughly printed booklet from whence this mythic personage sprang, he is made to say: "I am not the author of these burnings. What can have caused them? Those fires," said I, "are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man's only cow for the tithe of his cabbage-garden. These are the things that caused the burnings and not unfortunate 'Swing.'"

No, these rick burnings, this machine breaking, these attacks on manor-houses and parsonages had in them nothing preconcerted. Men who in the morning had gone quietly to their work found themselves before day was out, part of a great mob, the infection siezed them in a moment, and laying hold of some pitchfork or