The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

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.