IV
But before examining how two of the most dissimilar minds conceivable—one a man’s, the other a woman’s—reacted upon it, I must indicate the enormity of the challenge.
France had passed through her Revolution and her Terror, with graphic details of which our public speakers and writers had taken pains to make our country familiar enough: and England had won out of the struggle, having taken the side she chose, all oblivious (as we are, maybe, to-day) that victory in arms is at best but the beginning of true victory, and that she herself was in the throes of a revolution not a whit the less murderous than that of France, and only less clamant because its victims, instead of aristocrats and politicians and eminent saviours of their country following one another by scores in tumbrils to die scenically in the Place de la République, the Place of the Guillotine, were serfs of the cotton-mill and the mine, wives, small children, starved unscenically, withered up in foetid cellars or done to death beside the machines of such a hell-upon-earth as Manchester had grown to be out of towns in which an artificer, however humble, had once been permitted to rejoice in that which alone, beyond his hearth and family, heartens a man—the well-executed work of hand and brain. The capitalists of that time simply overwhelmed these towns, expanding, converting them into barracks for workers. Who these workers were, let an advertisement in a Macclesfield paper of 1825 attest—
To the Overseers of the Poor and to families desirous of settling in Macclesfield. Wanted between 4,000 and 5,000 persons between the ages of 7 and 21 years.
Yes, let us pass the hideous towns with but one quotation, from Nassau Senior—
As I passed through the dwellings of the mill-hands in Irish Town, Ancoats and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it was possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes. The towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculative builder.... In one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings of human beings. Not one house in the street escaped the cholera.
“Such,” wrote Chadwick, that careful observer, “is the absence of civic economy in some of our towns that their condition in respect of cleanliness is almost as bad as that of an encamped horde or an undisciplined soldiery.”
But from the poor men and women—who had sold themselves into these slums and industrial slavery—let us turn to their hapless children, who, after all, had never asked to be born. Your Malthus in that age, and your Mr. Harold Cox in this, are positive (God forgive them!) that a number of these brats never ought to be born. (I don’t know the price of millstones, but they ought to be cheap and handy, and properly labelled.) I shall lay stress on these children, Gentlemen, because—as children do so often—they brought back the gospel—or something of it. For these weaklings, as they were the foundation of the manufacturer’s wealth, by their illimitable woe enabling him to cut his wages, in the end brought about his exposure. To us—for always to us in our day the past wears a haze softening it into sentiment—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Cry of the Children is nothing, or suspected as sentimental, to be classed alongside with anything (say) by Mrs. Hemans or L. E. L. Listen to a couple of stanzas or three—
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
The reddest flower would look pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark, underground;
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts turn, our head with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places:
Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling,
Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling:
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And all day the iron wheels are droning,
And sometimes we could pray,
‘O ye wheels’ (breaking out in a mad moaning),
‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”
And well may the children weep before you!
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun.
They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;
They sink in man’s despair, without its calm;
As slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,
As martyrs, by the pang without the palm....
Let them weep! let them weep!
They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of their angels in high places,
With eyes turned on Deity.
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—
Stifle down with a mail’d heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!”
But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath.