NATIONAL DISTRESS.
In a late number[61] we somewhat unfeelingly (it is hinted by a correspondent) doubted, and even sneered at, the universal topic, the national distress, with which we are, it seems, overwhelmed; and when any suggestions of our friends (backed by truth and reason) can be attended to, we are always delighted to avail ourselves of them, and recant our errors.
We have reconsidered the subject, and, during the last fortnight, have visited the most diversified scenes of life, and we feel bound to retract the "flippant doubts" (those are our communicant's words), which we expressed as to the existence of general calamity, and are ready to confess that we had no idea of its extent, particularly in and about the metropolis.
The first object which tended to convert us from our original prejudiced opinion on the subject, was the sight of that most melancholy assemblage of people called "Epsom Races." Upwards of fifty thousand of the most unhappy of our fellow-countrymen, victims of tyranny and taxation, no longer ago than the week before last, dragged their wretched limbs to this sad and deplorable spectacle; and the vast sums of money taken from some of them, and the immense quantity of provisions and liquor which the poorer part of the slaves were compelled to devour, were unparalleled, we believe, on any former similar occasion.
It made our hearts bleed to behold our excellent and free-born tailor driving, with great labour and danger, a tandem, with two blood-horses; and we nearly wept when we found that our bootmaker and his unhappy family could only afford a barouche and four, hired for the day.
But we had, also, an eye to the agricultural part of the question; and we were struck with horror and amazement at the pale, emaciated, and threadbare appearance of the broken-down farmers of Surrey, Berks, and Bucks, who crawled out to the mournful scene upon their starving ponies, for which some, in their despair for money, were wild enough to ask seventy, eighty, and a hundred guineas each.
At the inns on the road, the expenses the tax-ridden slaves incurred were abominable. A hatter in Bond Street was charged seventeen shillings a bottle for champagne; and a wretched party of landholders in the neighbourhood of Leatherhead, who have threatened to abandon their farms, were driven by their grief to drink two dozen and four bottles of that shameful imposition upon British credulity called Chateau Margaux.
On our return from Epsom (having to cross the country) we passed through Kingston. Woe, grief, and mendicity there had established their tribunal. Petitions and remonstrances were all in array; and, in order to give the mourning victims of that devoted parish an opportunity of assembling occasionally to grieve in unison, some sympathetic philanthropists in the vicinity have built a theatre or circus, wherein a Miss Hengler endeavours nightly to solace their incurable woes, by dancing on wires, balancing tobacco-pipes, and swallowing live cockchafers. Such an expedient was never hit upon at this distance from town, till the melancholy aspect of things in general pointed out the absolute necessity of it in this wretched year.
During the week we thought we would go to some of the London playhouses. We essayed Covent Garden. It was Miss Stephens' benefit: "boxes full" stared us in the face; the pit, too, was crowded with the more unfortunate classes of society; and upon inquiring if we could make our way into the gallery, we were told that both galleries had been crowded with squalid wretches, in a state of actual starvation, who had spent their last five shillings each that night in paying for admission, for oranges, apples and nuts, which, as everybody knows, is not the sort of food the noble and free-born Briton is accustomed to. We sighed and crossed the river, having been refused admission at Mathews's, because the crowd of deplorable beggars who had sought refuge in the Lyceum would admit of no increase.
At Astley's, a house we thought remote from woe, we again applied. "There's standing-room at the back of the boxes, sir," said a little round-shouldered man in black, "but not a place in the pit or gallery." "Good heavens!" we exclaimed, "and is there so general a calamity pervading even the suburbs?" We turned into the road, where we were stopped by a string of horsemen, and of gigs, carts, and coaches, filled, inside and out, with the lowest and most unhappy persons among the people, who had not chosen to assuage their sorrows in the theatres, but had preferred to indulge their tender sympathies in a fight, some twenty or thirty miles from town, to which the circumstance of the times had induced them to transport themselves at the nefarious expense, perhaps, of two or three pounds each. But what made us shudder still more, was seeing that they were, for the greatest part, in a state of intoxication, to which they had no doubt been urged by the disastrous acts of that empty pretender to politics, Pitt,—that weak man, Lord Londonderry,—or that misguided bigot, Peel,—or some others of those who are, or have been, at the helm of the State.
Having got clear of these, we crossed the bridge, and turned down to the House of Commons: the doors were fast—no house. Tried at the Lords: their lordships had adjourned at seven. "Ah!" said we, "this is a new proof of the truth of our friend's suggestions: these are noble and wealthy men; there is no distress here—no crowds—no misery—no assemblage."
We were baffled in our attempt to get up the Haymarket, several thousand unhappy persons having dressed themselves in diamonds, and lace, and gold, and pearls, and feathers, and flounces, to weep away the night, in the body of the Opera House. And at the Duke of Devonshire's wall, we were obliged to abandon our hackney-coach, into which we had stepped at the corner of St. James's Street, to avoid the crowd of carriages, which had brought an innumerable host of distressed families to his Grace's hospitable roof, in order that their immediate necessities might be alleviated by some Italian singing and Ponche à la Romaine.
Some of the females of these wretched groups we happened to encounter, and a more truly pitiable sight we never saw; in the middle of the night were they straggling out of the court-yard to look for their carriages, with clothes hardly sufficient to cover them from cold, or answer the purposes of common decency. To such straits our women are driven by necessity.
Here our doctrine that even the highest were exempt from sorrow fell to the ground, and we went to bed to dream of woe.
Pursuing, the next day, our course through the town, we dropped into the Somerset House Exhibition, where there could not have been less than two thousand of our unhappy fellow-creatures, who had paid, all of them, one shilling, most of them two shillings, mewed up in close hot rooms, with hardly space to move or breathe, and without the smallest refreshment; nay, not even a crust of bread—not even a drop of water to relieve them in their lamentable condition.
At Belzoni's Tomb the mourners were in myriads; at the Cosmorama several wretched-looking people were endeavouring to pass their lingering hours by peeping through little holes at coloured prints stuck against a wall. At the Panorama—at the British Gallery, the same horrid scenes were acting—the same deception was carrying on; and at the Soho Bazaar it was quite moving to see the hundreds of well-dressed suffering innocents who have been driven from the best mercantile parts of the town to this secondary quarter, merely because they are enabled, by this painful humiliation, to purchase gauze, and coloured paper, and bugles, and knitting-needles, and card-racks, and shuttlecocks, and fiz-gigs, and the other necessaries of life, nearly one hundred per cent. cheaper there than anywhere else in the metropolis.
We passed from the neutral ground of Soho Square into St. Giles's, where we saw an Irishwoman, somewhat elevated with the private consolation of the afternoon, thumping her husband about the head with a shoulder of mutton, because he had bought it in preference to a leg, which she wished for, while her four little starveling children (who had neither beaver hats on their heads, nor red morocco shoes to their feet), were playing with the motley tails of three full-sized mackerel, upon which the famishing labourer had expended a portion of his hard-earned wages, by way of supper, which the poor creature had told his spouse he intended to take, that it might give him an appetite for his next day's dinner.
Just above these, in a room, the windows of which were open, were a set of unfortunate creatures, who had, in happier days, named themselves the "Sons of Frolic;" these wretched persons were suffering under the dreadful effects of civil dissension, which always creeps in with domestic distress. That type of kings, the parish beadle, had been sent for by the overbearing landlord, to secure the most active of three of the members, who had just kicked the waiter down stairs for having brought them up a corked bottle of port wine. These distressed tradesmen, however, were so far imposed upon as to be induced to make up the affair by a present of three guineas to the waiter, and a pound to the beadle. Still, exclaimed we, accumulation upon accumulation.
We found in all the dingy streets about those rural and unfrequented parts of London, Bedford, Russell, Red Lion, Bloomsbury, Tavistock, and Brunswick squares, the same congregation of carriages standing (and lights were on the tables in the eating-rooms of the houses) at different doors, which proved to us that the most respectable families, at this period of distress, are driven to club together to get food upon a principle of economy.
This remote passage led us towards Islington. At a melancholy place, quite on the outskirts of the town, called White Conduit House, many thousands of our fellow-mourners were congregated in the open fields; night, too, was coming on, and the poor children were drinking milk just as it came from the cow, while their parents, equally wretched, but more experienced in sorrow, were swallowing the same succedaneum, made into a mixture called syllabub.
At Sadler's Wells the grief was raving—we heard the lamentations at the distance of half a mile—crowds filled even the lobbies; and such is the pressure of national misfortune at the moment, that a corn-factor was obliged the night we were there to give fourteen shillings and sixpence, hackney-coach-hire, to get his poor shivering wife and daughters to their miserable cottage ornée, with a four-stall stable, conservatory, and coach-house in the Kent-road.
We rested in our researches from that evening pretty well till Whitsuntide, and then, indeed, conviction took full possession of us.
To us who remember Greenwich park in the year 1792, what a reverse!—then there were gaiety and sunshine, and fun and amusement. In the first place, Whit-Sunday this year was a wet Sunday,—a circumstance which, we are bold to say, never occurred before the late Mr. Pitt's accession to office, and very rarely even during his ruinous administration. The conduct of the "talents" in this particular cannot be cited, as only one Whitsuntide occurred during their splendid career.
Our readers may conceive the gloom this oppressive mismanagement, and evident disregard for the comforts of the poor, threw over the quondam scene of gaiety; the people surely might have been allowed to meet, and weep in comfort in one of the Royal parks!
But if Sunday filled us with this feeling, what must Monday have done, when nature interfering, to triumph over the tyrants, gave the people a fine day? Then did we see them loading every sort of vehicle, on the inner and outer sides, driving horses, and donkeys, and ponies, and riding them with all their speed and energy, to reach the once-loved spot they had known in former days, and grieve all together at our deplorable state.
When arrived there, how did they conduct themselves? They threw themselves into the most extravagant postures, rolling down hills, and running up again, throwing sticks even at oranges and cakes, in hopes of getting something to allay their hunger and thirst—some indeed we saw, decent-looking persons, devouring with avidity fish, called eels, who themselves (poor victims!) are driven to wallow in mud for their food, and first skinned alive, are next cut to pieces, and finally exterminated by the hands of cooks as men are by ministers.—What a striking resemblance there is between an Eel and an Englishman!
At Richmond sorrow put on her deepest sables—hundreds of devoted persons were crammed into vessels, encouraged by Government as packets at our outports, in which the danger of being scalded to death, burnt alive, or blown to atoms, are added to all the other little désagréments of the deep.
Steam-boats are what they call improvements. They may be in this age of redundant population: but what Government is there on earth, except ours, who, for the chance of thinning an overstocked nation, could have had the barbarity to allow these craft to ply on the seas and the rivers, which must wound the feelings and invade the rights of those established captains of colliers and owners of coal-barges, who, for centuries before, used to make their voyages satisfactorily to themselves, but whose pride is now destroyed, and whose vessels are treated like petitioners when applying for relief to the great and mighty. Away puffs the nobleman and the steamer, and all the suffering coal-bargemen or the needy applicant gets for his manual labour, is a sight of the stern of either, and a tremulous sensation, caused by the swell of their passing power.
But to return to the more immediate effects of misrule. The commons and heaths round the metropolis were sought out, to change the wretched scene; and Blackheath, Hampstead-heath, Hornsey-wood, and Norwood, were covered with flocks of the populace, who had quitted their houses in despair, and in one-horse chaises.
They, and indeed all those particularly around London, seemed to join in a determined manifestation of the crisis of affairs, which might, if anything could, we should think, show Ministers the destruction, to the brink of which they have brought desponding England. The same threat, it is true, has been held out to all preceding Ministers by sensible Reformers for the last century and a half; and they, heartlessly and senselessly, have, without feeling, disbelieved the cry; but when, to all the calamities of peace, are added that curse of nations, plenty, the blow naturally received by an increasing revenue, and a decreasing expenditure; and, above all, the heartrending proofs of popular misery, which we have here selected; we think the present administration, which has reduced us to this debased, degraded, and unhappy state, will take warning in time. We give them fair notice—we have done our duty in bringing the matter before them—we shall say no more—if they are not wise enough to take a hint, why "there's an end on't," and we give them up.