Page:The English Peasant.djvu/88

 "Bedfordshire is very inadequately supplied with cottages. They are few and small, and their condition is often a mere precarious holding together of rotten materials; the stitch in time has not been applied, and there are hundreds on which no repairs can now be bestowed with advantage." This was the state of things in 1864. In 1867 Mr Culley reports that in about half of fifty-five parishes of which he received descriptions, the cottage accommodation was either mixed, bad and good, or generally bad—so that we may take the above as descriptive of the cots in such parishes. Of one district it is said: "Most of the men are intemperate. The causes are the aggregation of cottages in the villages, the wretched condition of the cottages, the entire absence of a proprietary considering themselves in any way responsible for the moral and physical well-being of their tenants, and lastly, the very defective legislation about public-houses."

In Buckinghamshire the labourer's home is no better than elsewhere. Here is an interior drawn by a landowner at Coleshill. "Look into a cottage in Bucks. You see a want of furniture, scanty bedding, perhaps the remains of a quartern loaf, and a mug smelling of beer. The family, not having a good meal of victuals once in twelve months, do their work (except piecework) accordingly without a will. As a rule, they are honest and well-conducted, but their enemies are want of economy, ignorance, and the beershop."

In the autumn of 1863 the Morning Star published a series of articles, entitled "Rural Life in Buckinghamshire." Mr Culley mentions that in seven of the worst parishes exposed in these articles there has only been improvement in two. Of cottages in other parts he speaks in such language as "very wretched dens," "wretched hovels," "very bad cottages, quite unfit for human beings to live in."

In the "Burnham Magazine" of May 1868 were some strong remarks about the cottages in that town, ending thus:—"Human nature caged up in them must become degraded, and when these homes are emptied from the sheer impossibility of living in them, the beer-shops of course are filled."