Page:The English Peasant.djvu/63

 paupers twice as well as nine-tenths of English labourers could feed on the wages they obtained.

On a bleak winter's evening in January 1846, the Wiltshire labourers held a mass meeting in a cross-road near Goat-acre. Standing on a hurdle supported on stakes driven into the ground, the speakers read, by the flickering light of a candle or the glare of a lanthorn, their woe-begone statements. One who had come twenty miles told the story of his struggles to provide for a wife and six children out of eight shillings a week. At last he applied to the relieving officer, who gave him an order for one of his children to go into the workhouse. "Now, fellow-labourers, is not one child as dear to you as another? I could not part with ne'er a one. I said to my oldest girl, 'You are to go into the workhouse.' She did not like to go, and then I spoke to the others, and then I had the cries of my poor children, which were piercing to my heart, 'Don't send me, father! don't send me!'"

Here we see the main cause why English labourers called the workhouses Bastilles. They lacerated their bruised souls in the only spot where feeling was left; the law tore asunder husband and wife, parents and children.

So these miserable people preferred to starve in their horrible lairs, called cottages. If you think this phrase mere rhetoric, study the Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1864, and the Reports of the Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1867, and you will find that no phrase you can think of will be adequate to express the truth. Crazy, dilapidated hovels, shaking with every wind, vast numbers containing but one bedroom, in which parents and children, grown-up brothers and sisters, even grandparents and aunts and uncles, and occasionally lodgers, all pigged together, where a whole family had to be ill of fever and to lie in the same room with a corpse,—rooms through the ceilings of which the water poured, where the walls reeked with damp, where fever lurked in the saturated floor, so that the very accent of the people seemed to have grown clammy,—such were vast numbers of English cottages up to within the time that I began to study this subject, and, by numbers of pedestrian tours, to realise the truth with my own eyes. Charles Kingsley refers to these facts in his terrible