Page:The English Peasant.djvu/93

 sent on the parish because there is nothing 'in the box of his club,' or because he and others were getting old, and were likely soon to come on its funds, the younger members of the club having dissolved it and reconstituted it without him." Sickness and want of work bring many labourers into debt against their will, and the system of the tally-men with whom he deals is so tempting as to render it with many a confirmed habit.

The reports frequently refer to the indifference to chastity, attributing it to the wretched sleeping-places so often the lot of labouring families. "The rage for beer" is described as such that if a man gets an extra shilling it goes in drink, while mop fairs, club festivals, and harvest homes are usually scenes of intoxication. What with the overwhelming force of a propensity, the result of a habit of many generations, due largely to wretched cottages and the abominable little beer-shops which are spread like devil-traps over the country-side, the labourer has no chance. "If the Queen means to do any good to us," said a poor wife to Mr Culley, "she had best begin by putting down them alehouses; they makes gentlefolks' fortunes [the italics are mine], they do; look at this, captain; and they won't put them down, but the Queen might, or, leastways, shorten their hours. It's Saturday night till twelve o'clock, and they ain't well out o' church on Sundays till they're in again. Them alehouses is our curse, they are."

Human nature gets used to the circumstances around it, and nothing at last becomes so painful as a change. Thus the labourer gets used to his wretched cot, and dislikes the change involved in his removal to a better one. A great landlord complained that he had given a very good cottage to a labourer, and found it was not appreciated at all. The tenant put his apples in one room, did not inhabit another, and would put his pig into another, if allowed to do so. Another landlord said: "If you built a palace, and furnish it to match, you would scarcely induce the people to leave these places into which you would hardly put a pig to live." Could any sadder proof be given of the moral depression into which the men have fallen on whose labours these great landlords live than this clinging to wretchedness, this habit of living in misery?

"In the eye of the moralist," says Dr Fraser, "the most