Such parents must be placed upon a level with the swine that devour their farrow. We are led to doubt whether they could sink much lower in the animal scale; poverty and ignorance seem to have thoroughly quenched the spark of humanity. The author of "Letters on Labour, and the Poor in the Rural Districts," writing of the burial clubs in the eastern counties, says:
"The suspicion that a great deal of 'foul play' exists with respect to these clubs is supported, not only by a comparison of the different rates of mortality, but it is considerably strengthened by the facts proved upon the trial of Mary May. The Rev. Mr. Wilkins, the vicar of Wickes, who was mainly instrumental in bringing the case before a court of justice, stated to me that, from the time of Mary May coming to live in his parish, he was determined to keep a very strict watch upon her movements, as he had heard that fourteen of her children had previously died suddenly.
"A few weeks after her arrival in his parish, she called upon him to request him to bury one of her children. Upon his asking her which of the children it was, she told him that it was Eliza, a fine healthy-looking child of ten years old. Upon his expressing some surprise that she should have died so suddenly, she said, 'Oh, sir, she went off like a snuff; all my other children did so too.' A short time elapsed, and she again waited upon the vicar to request him to bury her brother as soon as he could. His suspicions were aroused, and he endeavoured to postpone the funeral for a few days, in order to enable him to make some inquiries. Not succeeding in obtaining any information which would warrant further delay in burying the corpse, he most reluctantly proceeded in the discharge of his duty.
"About a week after the funeral, Mary May again waited upon him to request him to sign a certificate to the effect that her brother was in perfect health a fortnight before he died, that being the time at which, as it subsequently appeared, she had entered him as nominee in the Harwich Burial Club. Upon inquiring as to the reason of her desiring this certificate, she told him that, unless she got it, she could not get the money for him from the club. This at once supplied the vicar with what appeared to be a motive for 'foul play' on the part of the woman. He accordingly obtained permission to have the body of her brother exhumed; doses of arsenic were detected, and the woman was arrested. With the evidence given upon the trial the reader is, no doubt, perfectly conversant, and it will be unnecessary for me to detail it. She was convicted. Previously to her execution she refused to make any confession, but said, 'If I were to tell all I know, it would give the hangman work for the next twelve months.' Undue weight ought not to be attached to the declaration of such a woman as Mary May; but, coupled with the disclosures that took place upon the trial with respect to some of her neighbours and accomplices, and with the extraordinary rate of mortality among the clubs, it certainly does appear that the general opinion with respect to the mischievous effects of these societies is not altogether without foundation.
"Although there are not in Essex, at present, any burial clubs in which children are admitted under fourteen years of age as members or nominees, still, as illustrating the evils arising from these clubs, I may state that many persons who are fully conversant with the working of such institutions have stated that they have frequently been shocked by hearing women of the lower classes, when speaking of a neighbour's child, make use of such expressions as, 'Oh, depend upon it, the child'll not live; it's in the burial club.' When speaking to the parents of a child who may be unwell, it is not unfrequently that they say, 'You should do so and so,' or, 'You should not do so and so;' 'You should not treat it in that way; is it in the burial club?' Instances of the most culpable neglect, if not of graver offences, are continually occurring in districts where clubs exist in which children are admitted. A collector of one of the most extensive burial societies gave it as his opinion, founded upon his experience, that it had become a constant practice to neglect the children for the sake of the allowance from the clubs; and he supported his opinion by several cases which had come under his own observation."
A vast number of other facts, of equally shocking character, have been ascertained. The Rev. J. Clay, chaplain of the Preston House of Correction, in a sanitary report, makes some statements of a nature to startle:—
"It appears, on the unimpeachable authority of a burial-club official, that 'hired nurses speculate on the lives of infants committed to their care, by entering them in burial clubs;' that 'two young women proposed to enter a child into his club, and to pay the weekly premium alternately. Upon inquiring as to the relation subsisting between the two young women and the child, he learned that the infant was placed at nurse with the mother of one of these young women,' The wife of a clergymen told me that, visiting a poor district just when a child's death had occurred, instead of hearing from the neighbours the language of sympathy for the bereaved parent, she was shocked by such observations as—'Ah! it's a fine thing for the mother, the child's in two clubs!'
"As regards one town, I possess some evidence of the amount of burial-club membership and of infant mortality, which I beg to lay before you. The reports of this town refer to 1846, when the population of the town amounted to about 61,000. I do not name the town, because, as no actual burial-club murders are known to have been committed in it, and as such clubs are not more patronized there than in other places, it is, perhaps, not fair to hold it up to particular animadversion; indeed, as to its general character, this very town need not fear comparison with any other. Now this place, with its sixty-one thousand people of all classes and ages, maintains at least eleven burial clubs, the members of which amount in the aggregate to nearly fifty-two thousand; nor are these all. Sick clubs, remember, act as burial clubs. Of these there are twelve or fourteen in the town, mustering altogether, probably, two thousand members. Here, then, we have good data for comparing population with 'death lists;' but it will be necessary, in making the comparison, to deduct from the population all that part of it which has nothing to do with these clubs, viz. all infants under two months old, and all persons of unsound health, (both of these classes being excluded by the club rules;) all those also of the working classes, whose sound intelligence and feeling lead them to abhor burial-club temptations; and all the better classes, to whom five or twenty pounds offer no consolation for the death of a child. On the hypothesis that these deductions will amount to one-sixth of the entire population, it results that the death lists are more numerous by far than the entire mass—old, young, and infants—which support them; and, according to the statement of a leading death-list officer, three-fourths of the names on these catalogues of the doomed are the names of children. Now, if this be the truth—and I believe it is—hundreds, if not thousands of children must be entered each into four, five, or even twelve clubs, their chances of life diminishing, of course, in proportion to the frequency with which they are entered. Lest you should imagine that such excessive addiction to burial clubs is only to be found in one place, I furnish you with a report for 1846, of a single club, which then boasted thirty-four thousand one hundred members, the entire population of the town to which it belongs having been, in 1841, little more than thirty-six thousand!"
The authorities from whom these statements are derived are of the highest respectability; they hear witness to a state of affairs scarcely to be conceived by people of other civilized countries. Hundreds of thousands of human beings seem to be driven into an awful abyss of crime and misery by the iron rule of the aristocracy—an abyss where mothers forget maternal feelings, where marriage vows are scoffed, and where the momentary gratification of brutal passions is alone esteemed. There, indeed, there is no fear of God, and heathenism spreads its upas shade to poison and destroy.
The only amusement which the English poor possess in many parts of the country, is to visit taverns. In the towns the "gin-palaces" and the beer-houses are very numerous; and whenever the poor have leisure, these places are thronged by drunken men and abandoned women. In all the rural districts there is a frightful amount of drunkenness. British legislation has increased the number of these hot-beds of crime and pauperism.