Page:The English Peasant.djvu/96

 One secret of their depression is the empty larder. They rarely get butcher's meat, but eat coarse, brown bread, washed down by too much rough, sour cider. If moderately well off, their usual diet is bread in milk and water for breakfast, bread and cheese for luncheon and dinner, and potatoes and bacon for supper. Everywhere there is depression and hopelessness, owing partly perhaps to the damp, humid climate, partly to a decay of the prosperity which once distinguished the western counties, but mainly to the fact that they are miserably housed and under-fed.

Women work to some extent in the fields, but no one will allow that it has a demoralising influence. The men receive three pints of cider a day as part of their wages, a custom which adds to their depression by leading them to drink apart from their wives and families. Immorality is directly traced to the conditions of cottage life. Little value is set on education, and unless the Vicar pays the penny, the parents will frequently plead poverty or any other excuse to keep the children from school. In one district—probably a sample of others—the boys are described as a rough, coarse lot. "There is a marked class of lads," says the clergyman writing, "from the ages of fourteen to twenty and twenty-four, who are most difficult to handle, shifty in their work, ignorant. Very few can read or write, and they are utterly regardless of authority. 'Juvenile rowdyism' is on the increase, and is a marked and bad feature in our present social position, full, to my mind, of future evil."

In the annual report for 1868 of the South Devon Congregational Union, a missionary, whose work lies about Dartmoor, gives the following instance of belief io-fiitchcraft, as significant of the condition of the people:—"A poor man suffering from an internal complaint had been sent to the Torquay Infirmary. His disease completely baffled the skill of the medical men there, and also of others whom he had consulted. But this occasioned him no surprise. He was quite satisfied that he had been 'ill-wished,' and all efforts to shake this conviction were fruitless. In conversation one day he said, 'he was better, and able to do a little work again. I asked him how it came about, and the following was his account of the matter: 'I knew all along it was not God's affliction, and now I have proved it was not. A man came to me and