The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

CHAPTER IX.

MENTAL AND MORAL CONDITION OF THE WHITE SLAVES IN GREAT BRITAIN.

The moral degradation and mental darkness of the labouring classes in Great Britain in the middle of the Nineteenth century, are appalling to contemplate. Beneath the wing of a government professedly Christian, there is sheltered a vast number of people who must be characterized as heathen—as fit subjects of missionary labours, such as are freely given to the dark sons of India and Africa. They know nothing of God but his prevailing name; and the Bible's light is hid from them as completely as if its pages were inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Their code of morals is the creature of their sensual inclinations; their intelligence seemingly the superior instinct of the animal. Scotland is far beyond other portions of Great Britain in the moral and mental cultivation of its people; but there is a large class in that country to which the above observations may be justly applied.

According to Kay, more than half the poor in England and Wales cannot read and write, while the majority of the remainder know nothing of science, history, geography, music, or drawing, and very little of the Scripture history. In the great mercantile and manufacturing towns, it is true that poor men, if they defer their marriage, and have no extraordinary encumbrances, may improve their condition; but scarcely any facilities are offered for their acquiring the intelligence necessary for the control of passion. The schools in the towns are wretchedly arranged and managed. Many are nothing more than "dame schools," conducted often in cellars or garrets, by poor women, who know how to read, but who often know nothing else. The schools for the peasants are still fewer in number, and inefficient in character; and hence the result, that the English peasantry are more ignorant and demoralized, less capable of helping themselves, and more pauperized, than those of any other country in Europe, if we except Russia, Turkey, South Italy, and some parts of the Austrian Empire. A writer in a recent number of "Household Words," makes some remarkable statements in regard to the ignorance of the English masses:—

"Wherever we turn, ignorance, not always allied to poverty, stares us in the face. If we look in the Gazette, at the list of partnerships dissolved, not a month passes but some unhappy man, rolling perhaps in wealth, but wallowing in ignorance, is put to the experimentum crucis of 'his mark,' The number of petty jurors—in rural districts especially—who can only sign with a cross is enormous. It is not unusual to see parish documents of great local importance defaced with the same humiliating symbol by persons whose office shows them to be not only 'men of mark,' but men of substance. We have printed already specimens of the partial ignorance which passes under the ken of the post-office authorities, and we may venture to assert, that such specimens of penmanship and orthography are not to be matched in any other country in Europe. A housewife in humble life need only turn to the file of her tradesmen's bills to discover hieroglyphics which render them so many arithmetical puzzles. In short, the practical evidences of the low ebb to which the plainest rudiments of education in this country has fallen, are too common to bear repetition. We cannot pass through the streets, we cannot enter a place of public assembly, or ramble in the fields, without the gloomy shadow of Ignorance sweeping over us. The rural population is indeed in a worse plight than the other classes. We quote—with the attestation of our own experience—the following passage from one of a series of articles which have recently appeared in a morning newspaper: 'Taking the adult class of agricultural labourers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live and move and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect they are perfect strangers. You cannot address one of them without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you accost him, if he is not insolent—which he seldom is—he is timid and shrinking, his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview while it lasts, and obviously relieved when it is over. These are the traits which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm labourers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult peasant reading for his own or others' amusement? The invariable answer is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place, the great bulk of them cannot read. In the next, a large proportion of those who can, do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them to say that many of those who cannot read have bitterly regretted, in my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would now be to her could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours.'"

From statistics given by Kay, it is apparent that the proportional amount of crime to population, calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in almost all the agricultural counties of England than it was in the mining and manufacturing districts. The peasants of England must be subjected to a singularly demoralizing system to produce so terrible a result. The extreme poverty of the agricultural labourers is the great stimulant to crime of all kinds; but the darkness of ignorance is also a powerful agent. Poverty renders the peasants desperate, and they are too ignorant to see the consequences of crime.

In a former part of this work, it was mentioned that the miserable cottages in which the peasants are compelled to reside have considerable influence in demoralizing them. This deserves to be fully illustrated. The majority of the cottages have but two small rooms; in one of which husband and wife, young men and young women, boys and girls, and, very often, a married son and his wife all sleep together. Kay says—

"The accounts we receive from all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively increasing. People of both sexes, and of all ages, both married and unmarried—parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers—sleep in the same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentlemen tells us of six people of different sexes and ages, two of whom were man and wife, sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other; another, of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together; another, of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same room with a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so filled with beds that there is no space between them, but that brothers, sisters, and parents crawl over each other half naked in order to get to their respective resting-places; another, of its being common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another, of cases where women have been delivered in bedrooms crowded with men, young women, and children; and others mention facts of these crowded bedrooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen writing in ALL parts of the country."

The young peasants from their earliest years are accustomed to sleep in the same bedrooms with people of both sexes; and they lose all sense of the indecency of such a life, taking wives before they are twenty years of age to sleep in the same room with their parents. The policy now pursued by the aristocratic landlords, of clearing their estates, tends to crowd the cottages which are allowed to remain, and thus the demoralization of the peasantry is stimulated. Adultery is the very mildest form of the vast amount of crime which it is engendering. Magistrates, clergymen, surgeons, and parish-officers bear witness that cases of incest are increasing in all parts of the country. An eminent writer represents the consequences of the state of the peasant's cottages in England and Wales in the following startling, but unexaggerated terms:—