Page:The English Peasant.djvu/94

 malign aspect of poverty is in its power to generate the loss of natural affection. Poverty is emphatically hardening—at any rate, in its influence on the natural man." In Cambridgeshire the children go to work as young as six years old; many at seven or eight. The reason appears to be in many cases that the parents compel the ganger to take the little one on condition of getting regularly the labour of the bigger child of the same family. But what is to be expected of people who see their families suffering under such wretched physical evils, and are themselves depressed and disheartened by them? "For," says the report, "the formidable difficulty of all is not the apathy of their parents, but their poverty. It is impossible for men with large families to look beyond the present hour. To be warmed and filled is to them the one great object in life, and to talk to them about improving the minds of their children, while they are unable to provide those things which are needful for their bodies, must seem to them like mocking."

Can a mother forget her sucking child? Think of the Lincolnshire babies, drugged by their mothers with opium; of poor Betsey B—— who did not remember how many babies she had had. Think of mothers driving their poor little weeping children out to work before it is light, threatening to beat them if they do not go. Think of fathers sitting all day outside beer-shops, like lazy hogs basking in the sun, while their children break their backs to supply the means of parental dissipation. "Without natural affection." This is the result of a wretched home. And what can come of such a home? The poor girls often add shame to their wretchedness. In Norfolk one child out of every ten is illegitimate. The boys grow up to be young ruffians, who care for nobody. If they are wild, they will turn poachers, and perhaps get hanged for killing a gamekeeper, or they will be picked up by the recruiting sergeant; or if they are steady, they will continue to tread the same weary round as their father, and, unless these things be not speedily altered, perpetuate this misery to future generations.

These reports do not give any direct statements as to the religious condition of the agricultural poor, but we note that the greater part of the information is obtained through clergymen, and that its tone is, as a rule, depressing, carrying the conviction that