The White Slaves of England

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL SLAVERY PROCEEDING FROM THE EXISTENCE OF THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY.

What is slavery? A system under which the time and toil of one person are compulsorily the property of another. The power of life and death, and the privilege of using the lash in the master, are not essential, but casual attendants of slavery, which comprehends all involuntary servitude without adequate recompense or the means of escape. He who can obtain no property in the soil, and is not represented in legislation, is a slave; for he is completely at the mercy of the lord of the soil and the holder of the reins of government. Sometimes slavery is founded upon the inferiority of one race to another; and then it appears in its most agreeable garb, for the system may be necessary to tame and civilize a race of savages. But the subjection of the majority of a nation to an involuntary, hopeless, exhausting, and demoralizing servitude, for the benefit of an idle and luxurious few of the same nation, is slavery in its most appalling form. Such a system of slavery, we assert, exists in Great Britain.

In the United Kingdom, the land is divided into immense estates, constantly retained in a few hands; and the tendency of the existing laws of entail and primogeniture is to reduce even the number of these proprietors. According to McCulloch, there are 77,007,048 acres of land in the United Kingdom, including the small islands adjacent. Of this quantity, 28,227,435 acres are uncultivated; while, according to Mr. Porter, another English writer, about 11,300,000 acres, now lying waste, are fit for cultivation. The number of proprietors of all this land is about 50,000. Perhaps, this is a rather high estimate for the present period. Now the people of the United Kingdom number at least 28,000,000. What a tremendous majority, then, own not a foot of soil! But this is not the worst. Such is the state of the laws, that the majority never can acquire an interest in the land. Said the London Times, in 1844, "Once a peasant in England, and the man must remain a peasant for ever;" and, says Mr. Kay, of Trinity College, Cambridge—

"Unless the English peasant will consent to tear himself from his relations, friends, and early associations, and either transplant himself into a town or into a distant colony, he has no chance of improving his condition in the world."

Admit this—admit that the peasant must remain through life at the mercy of his lord, and of legislation in which his interests are not represented—and tell us if he is a freeman?

To begin with England, to show the progress and effects of the land monopoly:—The Rev. Henry Worsley states that in the year 1770, there were in England 250,000 freehold estates, in the hands of 250,000 different families; and that, in 1815, the whole of the lands of England were concentrated in the hands of only 32,000 proprietors! So that, as the population increases, the number of proprietors diminishes. A distinguished lawyer, who was engaged in the management of estates in Westmoreland and Cumberland counties in 1849, says—

"The greater proprietors in this part of the country are buying up all the land, and including it in their settlements. Whenever one of the small estates is put up for sale, the great proprietors outbid the peasants and purchase it at all costs. The consequence is, that for some time past, the number of the small estates has been rapidly diminishing in all parts of the country. In a short time none of them will remain, but all be merged in the great estates. * * * The consequence is, that the peasant's position, instead of being what it once was—one of hope—is gradually becoming one of despair. Unless a peasant emigrates, there is now no chance for him. It is impossible for him to rise above the peasant class."

The direct results of this system are obvious. Unable to buy land, the tillers of the soil live merely by the sufferance of the proprietors. If one of the great landholders takes the notion that grazing will be more profitable than farming, he may sweep away the homes of his labourers, turning the poor wretches upon the country as wandering paupers, or driving them into the cities to overstock the workshops and reduce the wages of the poor workman. And what is the condition of the peasants who are allowed to remain and labour upon the vast estates? Let Englishmen speak for Englishmen.

Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire are generally regarded as presenting the agricultural labourer in his most deplorable circumstances, while Lincolnshire exhibits the other extreme. We have good authority for the condition of the peasantry in all these counties. Mr. John Fox, medical officer of the Cerne Union, in Dorsetshire, says—

"Most of the cottages are of the worst description; some mere mud-hovels, and situated in low and damp places, with cesspools or accumulations of filth close to the doors. The mud floors of many are much below the level of the road, and, in wet seasons, are little better than so much clay. In many of the cottages, the beds stood on the ground floor, which was damp three parts of the year; scarcely one had a fireplace in the bedroom; and one had a single small pane of glass stuck in the mud wall as its only window. Persons living in such cottages are generally very poor, very dirty, and usually in rags, living almost wholly on bread and potatoes, scarcely ever tasting any animal food, and, consequently, highly susceptible of disease, and very unable to contend with it."

Very often, according to other equally good authority, there is not more than one room for the whole family, and the demoralization of that family is the natural consequence. The Morning Chronicle of November, 1849, said of the cottages at Southleigh, in Devon—

"One house, which our correspondent visited, was almost a ruin. It had continued in that state for ten years. The floor was of mud, dipping near the fireplace into a deep hollow, which was constantly filled with water. There were five in the family—a young man of twenty-one, a girl of eighteen, and another girl of about thirteen, with the father and mother, all sleeping together up-stairs. And what a sleeping-room! 'In places it seemed falling in. To ventilation it was an utter stranger. The crazy floor shook and creaked under me as I paced it.' Yet the rent was 1s. a week—the same sum for which apartments that may be called luxurious in comparison may be had in the model lodging-houses. And here sat a girl weaving that beautiful Honiton lace which our peeresses wear on court-days. Cottage after cottage at Southleigh presented the same characteristics. Clay floors, low ceilings letting in the rain, no ventilation; two rooms, one above and one below; gutters running through the lower room to let off the water; unglazed window-frames, now boarded up, and now uncovered to the elements, the boarding going for firewood; the inmates disabled by rheumatism, ague, and typhus; broad, stagnant, open ditches close to the doors; heaps of abominations piled round the dwellings; such are the main features of Southleigh; and it is in these worse than pig-styes that one of the most beautiful fabrics that luxury demands or art supplies is fashioned. The parish houses are still worse. 'One of these, on the borders of Devonshire and Cornwall, and not far from Launceston, consisted of two houses, containing between them four rooms. In each room lived a family night and day, the space being about twelve feet square. In one were a man and his wife and eight children; the father, mother, and two children lay in one bed, the remaining six were huddled 'head and foot' (three at the top and three at the foot) in the other bed. The eldest girl was between fifteen and sixteen, the eldest boy between fourteen and fifteen.' Is it not horrible to think of men and women being brought up in this foul and brutish manner in civilized and Christian England! The lowest of savages are not worse cared for than these children of a luxurious and refined country."

Yet other authorities describe cases much worse than this which so stirs the heart of the editor of the Morning Chronicle. The frightful immorality consequent upon such a mode of living will be illustrated fully in another portion of this work.

In Lincolnshire, the cottages of the peasantry are in a better condition than in any other part of England; but in consequence of the lowness of wages and the comparative enormity of rents, the tillers of the soil are in not much better circumstances than their rural brethren in other counties. Upon an average, a hard-working peasant can earn five shillings a week; two shillings of which go for rent. If he can barely live when employed, what is to become of him when thrown out of employment? Thus the English peasant is driven to the most constant and yet hopeless labour, with whips more terrible than those used by the master of the negro slave.

In Wales, the condition of the peasant, thanks to the general system of lord and serf, is neither milder nor more hopeful than in England. Mr. Symonds, a commissioner who was sent by government to examine the state of education in some of the Welsh counties, says of the peasantry of Brecknockshire, Cardiganshire, and Radnorshire—

"The people of my district are almost universally poor. In some parts of it, wages are probably lower than in any part of Great Britain. The evidence of the witnesses, fully confirmed by other statements, exhibits much poverty, but little amended in other parts of the counties on which I report. The farmers themselves are very much impoverished, and live no better than English cottagers in prosperous agricultural counties.

"The cottages in which the people dwell are miserable in the extreme in nearly every part of the country in Cardiganshire, and every part of Brecknockshire and Radnorshire, except the east. I have myself visited many of the dwellings of the poor, and my assistants have done so likewise. I believe the Welsh cottages to be very little, if at all, superior to the Irish huts in the country districts.

"Brick chimneys are very unusual in these cottages; those which exist are usually in the shape of large cones, the top being of basket-work. In very few cottages is there more than one room, which serves the purposes of living and sleeping. A large dresser and shelves usually form the partition between the two; and where there are separate beds for the family, a curtain or low board is (if it exists) the only division with no regular partition. And this state of things very generally prevails, even where there is some little attention paid to cleanliness; but the cottages and beds are frequently filthy. The people are always very dirty. In all the counties, the cottages are generally destitute of necessary outbuildings, including even those belonging to the farmers; and both in Cardiganshire and Radnorshire, except near the border of England, the pigs and poultry have free run of the joint dwelling and sleeping rooms."

In Scotland, the estates of the nobility are even larger than in England. Small farms are difficult to find. McCulloch states that there are not more than 8000 proprietors of land in the whole of Scotland; and, as in England, this number is decreasing. In some districts, the cottages of the peasantry are as wretched as any in England or Wales. For some years past, the great landholders, such as the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duchess of Sutherland, have been illustrating the glorious beneficence of British institutions by removing the poor peasantry from the homes of their fathers, for the purpose of turning the vacated districts into deer-parks, sheep-walks, and large farms. Many a Highland family has vented a curse upon the head of the remorseless Duchess of Sutherland. Most slaveholders in other countries feed, shelter, and protect their slaves, in compensation for work; but the Duchess and her barbarous class take work, shelter, food, and protection from their serfs all at one fell swoop, turning them upon the world to beg or starve. Scotland has reason—strong reason—to bewail the existence of the British aristocracy.

Next let us invoke the testimony of Ireland—the beautiful and the wretched—Ireland, whose people have been the object of pity to the nations for centuries—whose miseries have been the burden of song and the theme of eloquence till they have penetrated all hearts save those of the oppressors—whose very life-blood has been trampled out by the aristocracy. Let us hear her testimony in regard to the British slave system.

Ireland is splendidly situated, in a commercial point of view, commanding the direct route between Northern Europe and America, with some of the finest harbours in the world. Its soil is rich and fruitful. Its rivers are large, numerous, and well adapted for internal commerce. The people are active, physically and intellectually, and, everywhere beyond Ireland, are distinguished for their energy, perseverance, and success. Yet, in consequence of its organized oppression, called government, Ireland is the home of miseries which have scarcely a parallel upon the face of the earth. The great landlords spend most of their time in England or upon the continent, and leave their lands to the management of agents, who have sub-agents for parts of the estates, and these latter often have still inferior agents. Many of the great landlords care nothing for their estates beyond the receipt of the rents, and leave their agents to enrich themselves at the expense of the tenantry. Everywhere in Ireland, a traveller, as he passes along the roads, will see on the roadsides and in the fields, places which look like mounds of earth and sods, with a higher heap of sods upon the top, out of which smoke is curling upward; and with two holes in the sides of the heap next the road, one of which is used as the door, and the other as the window of the hovel. These are the homes of the peasantry! Entering a hovel, you will find it to contain but one room, formed by the four mud walls; and in these places, upon the mud floor, the families of the peasant live. Men, women, boys, and girls live and sleep together, and herd with the wallowing pig. Gaunt, ragged figures crawl out of these hovels and plant the ground around them with potatoes, which constitute the only food of the inmates throughout the year, or swarm the roads and thoroughfares as wretched beggars. The deplorable condition of these peasants was graphically described by no less a person than Sir Robert Peel, in his great speech on Ireland, in 1849; and the evidence quoted by him was unimpeachable. But not only are the majority of the Irish condemned to exist in such hovels as we have sketched above—their tenure of these disgusting cabins is insecure. If they do not pay the rent for them at the proper time, they are liable to be turned adrift even in the middle of the night. No notice is necessary. The tenants are subject to the tender mercies of a bailiff, without any remedy or appeal, except to the court of Heaven. Kay states that in 1849, more than 50,000 families were evicted and turned as beggars upon the country. An Englishman who travelled through Ireland in the fall of 1849, says—

"In passing through some half dozen counties, Cork, (especially in the western portions of it,) Limerick, Clare, Galway, and Mayo, you see thousands of ruined cottages and dwellings of the labourers, the peasants, and the small holders of Ireland. You see from the roadside twenty houses at once with not a roof upon them. I came to a village not far from Castlebar, where the system of eviction had been carried out only a few days before. Five women came about us as the car stopped, and on making inquiry, they told us their sorrowful story. They were not badly clad; they were cleanly in appearance; they were intelligent; they used no violent language, but in the most moderate terms told us that on the Monday week previously those five houses had been levelled. They told us how many children there were in their families: I recollect one had eight, another had six; that the husbands of three of them were in this country for the harvest; that they had written to their husbands to tell them of the desolation of their homes. And, I asked them, 'What did the husbands say in reply?' They said 'they had not been able to eat any breakfast!' It is but a simple observation, but it marks the sickness and the sorrow which came over the hearts of those men, who here were toiling for their three or four pounds, denying themselves almost rest at night that they might make a good reaping at the harvest, and go back that they might enjoy it in the home which they had left. All this is but a faint outline of what has taken place in that unhappy country. Thousands of individuals have died within the last two or three years in consequence of the evictions which have taken place."

The great loss of life in the famine of 1847 showed that the peasantry had a miserable dependence upon the chances of a good potato crop for the means of keeping life in their bodies. Crowds of poor wretches, after wandering about for a time like the ghosts of human beings, starved to death by the roadside, victims of the murderous policy of the landed aristocracy. Since that period of horror, the great proprietors, envious of the lurid fame achieved by the Duchess of Sutherland in Scotland, have been evicting their tenants on the most extensive scale, and establishing large farms and pasturages, which they deem more profitable than former arrangements. In despair at home, the wretched Irish are casting their eyes to distant lands for a refuge from slavery and starvation. But hundreds of thousands groan in their hereditary serfdom, without the means of reaching other and happier countries. The dearest ties of family are sundered by the force of want. The necessity of seeking a subsistence drives the father to a distant land, while the child is compelled to remain in Ireland a pauper. The husband can pay his own passage to America, perchance, but the wife must stay in the land of misery. Ask Ireland if a slave can breathe in Great Britain! The long lamentation of ages, uniting with the heart-broken utterances of her present wretched bondsmen, might touch even the British aristocracy in its reply.

So much for the general condition of the peasantry in the United Kingdom. The miserable consequences of the system of lord and serf do not end here. No! There are London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Dublin, and many other cities and towns, with their crowds of slaves either in the factories and workshops, or in the streets as paupers and criminals. There are said to be upward of four millions of paupers in the United Kingdom! Can such an amount of wretchedness be found in any country upon the face of the globe? To what causes are we to attribute this amount of pauperism, save to the monopolies and oppressions of the aristocracy? Think of there being in the United Kingdom over eleven million acres of good land uncultivated, and four millions of paupers! According to Kay, more than two millions of people were kept from starving in England and Wales, in 1848, by relief doled out to them from public and private sources. So scant are the earnings of those who labour day and night in the cities and towns, that they may become paupers if thrown out of work for a single week. Many from town and country are driven by the fear of starvation to labour in the mines, the horrors of which species of slavery shall be duly illustrated farther on in this work.

Truly did Southey write—

"To talk of English happiness, is like talking of Spartan freedom; the helots are overlooked. In no country can such riches be acquired by commerce, but it is the one who grows rich by the labour of the hundred. The hundred human beings like himself, as wonderfully fashioned by nature, gifted with the like capacities, and equally made for immortality, are sacrificed body and soul. Horrible as it must needs appear, the assertion is true to the very letter. They are deprived in childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment—of the sports in which childhood instinctively indulges—of fresh air by day and of natural sleep by night. Their health, physical and moral, is alike destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task-work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust which they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort, and without hope—without morals, without religion, and without shame; and bring forth slaves like themselves to tread in the same path of misery."

Again, the same distinguished Englishman says, in number twenty-six of Espriella's Letters—

"The English boast of their liberty, but there is no liberty in England for the poor. They are no longer sold with the soil, it is true; but they cannot quit the soil if there be any probability or suspicion that age or infirmity may disable them. If, in such a case, they endeavour to remove to some situation where they hope more easily to maintain themselves, where work is more plentiful or provisions cheaper, the overseers are alarmed, the intruder is apprehended, as if he were a criminal, and sent back to his own parish. Wherever a pauper dies, that parish must bear the cost of his funeral. Instances, therefore, have not been wanting of wretches, in the last stage of disease, having been hurried away in an open cart, upon straw, and dying upon the road. Nay, even women, in the very pains of labour, have been driven out, and have perished by the wayside, because the birthplace of the child would be its parish!"

The sufferings of the rural labourers—the peasantry of Great Britain and Ireland—are to be attributed to the fact that they have no property in the land, and cannot acquire any. The law of primogeniture, on which the existence of the British aristocracy depends, has, as we have already shown, placed the land and those who labour on it—the soil and the serfs—at the disposal of a few landed proprietors. The labourers are not attached to the soil, and bought and sold with it, as in Russia. The English aristocrat is too cunning to adopt such a regulation, because it would involve the necessity of supporting his slaves. They are called freemen, in order to enable their masters to detach them from the soil, and drive them forth to starve, when it suits their convenience, without incurring any legal penalty for their cruelty, such as the slaveholders of other countries would suffer. The Russian, the Spanish, the North American slaveholder must support his slaves in sickness and helpless old age, or suffer the penalties of the law for his neglect. The British slaveholder alone may drive his slaves forth to starve in the highway by hundreds and thousands; and no law of Great Britain affords the means of punishing him for his murderous cruelty. His Irish slaves may be saved from starvation by American bounty, but he cannot be punished until he shall meet his Judge at the day of final account.

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