Page:The English Peasant.djvu/62

 Terrible fact! it was only by means of these lurid flames, these black corpses dangling in the wintry wind, these English slaves sent to the antipodal hell at Botany Bay, that the consciences of the well-to-do ruling classes could be brought to the conviction that there was something rotten in the social condition of the country and that the ground beneath their feet was volcanic.

The Times newspaper for December 27, 1830, commenting upon the Winchester trials, made the danger-signal scream in quite revolutionary accents.

"We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the labourers), as a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling classes; the gentlemen, clergy (who ought to teach and instruct them), and the farmers who ought to pay and feed them, are disgraceful to the British name. The present population must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or the whole mass of labourers will start into legions of a banditti—banditti less criminal than those who have made them so—than those who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their victims."

The Parliamentary Commission appointed in 1833 to inquire into the operation of the Poor Laws, declared itself horrified at the results of its inquiries. "The condition of the rural labours in too many districts was," it affirmed, "brutal and wretched; their children during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch."

A reform conceived in the hard, inhuman spirit of modern science was the outcome. I once read of a hospital nurse who, disgusted with the dirty habits of some miserable patient, dragged the trembling wretch half-naked out of her bed and forced her into a cold bath. Such was the humanity of the New Poor Law.

The shivering labourers, accustomed to their dirty hovels, struggled long with grim famine before they would go into the Bastilles, as they named the new Workhouses. For this title there would have been no justification if honest families could have avoided their use, but that that was impossible is proved by the fact that the ordinary dietary of the workhouse fed the