“But have I counted the value of the poor souls he has saved in Bethnal?”
No—but I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal, he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned, at Tyburn,—each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example—or neglect. [[84]]
The above paragraph was sent me by a friend, of whose accompanying letter I venture to print a part together with it.
“I send you a cutting from a recent Times, to show you there are some faithful men left. I have heard of this Mr. Hansard before, and how well he works. I want to tell you, too, that I am afraid the coarseness and shamelessness you write about, in Fors, is not wholly caused by the neighbourhood of large manufacturing towns, for in the lonely villages I used to know long ago, it was exactly the same. I don’t mean that brutal crimes, such as you speak of, were heard of or even possible; but the conversation of men and women, working in the fields together, was frequently such that no young girl working with them could keep modesty. Nor if a girl had what they termed a “misfortune,” was she one bit worse off for it. She was just as certain to be married as before. Reform in all these things—i.e., immodest conversation—ought to begin with women. If women in cottages, and indeed elsewhere, were what they ought to be, and kept up a high tone in their households, their sons would not dare to speak in their presence as I know they often do, and their daughters would feel they fell away from much more than they do now, when they go wrong. Men are, I fancy, very much what women make them, and seem to like them to be; and if women withdrew from those who hurt their sense of what is right, I do believe they would try to be different; but it seems very difficult to preserve a high tone of maidenly dignity in poor girls, who, from youth up, hear every possible thing usually left unspoken of freely discussed by fathers and mothers and brothers, and sometimes very evil deeds treated as jests. This is the case painfully often.”
Though my notes, for this month, far exceed their usual limits, I cannot close them without asking my readers to look back, for some relief of heart, to happier times. The following [[85]]piece of biography, printed only for private circulation, is so instructive that I trust the friend who sent it me will forgive my placing it in broader view; and the more because in the last section of the ‘Queen of the Air,’ my readers will find notice of this neglected power of the tide. I had imagined this an idea of my own, and did not press it,—being content to press what is already known and practically proved to be useful; but the following portion of a very interesting letter, and the piece of biography it introduces, show the tide-mill to be in this category:
“My father, who began life humbly, dates the prosperity of his family to the time when—being the tenant of a small tide-mill—he laboured with spade and barrow (by consent of the Earl of Sheffield) to enclose an increased area—overflowed by the tide—in order to lay under contribution as motive power this wasted energy of rising and falling waters. He thereby nearly quadrupled the power of the mill, and finally became its possessor.”
“William Catt was the son of Mr. John Catt, a Sussex farmer, who married the daughter of a yeoman named Willett, living on a small estate at Buxted. He was born in the year 1780, and soon after that date his parents removed to the Abbey Farm at Robertsbridge. There he passed his early years, and there obtained such education as a dame’s school could afford. This of course was limited to very rudimentary English. He was not a particularly apt scholar: he hated his books—but liked cricket.
“When little more than nineteen, he married a daughter of Mr. Dawes, of Ewhurst. Farming in the Weald of Sussex was then, as now, a laborious and unremunerative occupation; and as an interesting record of the habits of his class at that period, it may be stated, that[8] on the morning of his wedding-day he went [[86]]into a wood with his father’s team for a load of hop-poles, was afterwards married in a white ‘round-frock,’ and returned to his usual work the next morning. He commenced business at Stonehouse, in Buxted, a farm of between 100 and 200 acres. Banking was in those days in its infancy, and travelling notoriously unsafe;[9] so his good and prudent mother sewed up beneath the lining of his waistcoat the one-pound notes which he carried from Robertsbridge to Buxted to meet the valuation of his farm. When settled in his little homestead, his household arrangements were of the simplest kind. One boy, one girl, and one horse, formed his staff; yet he throve and prospered. And no wonder: for both himself and his young wife often rose at three in the morning; he to thrash by candlelight in his barn, she to feed or prepare her poultry for the market. His principle was—‘earn a shilling, and spend elevenpence;’ and hence, no doubt, his subsequent success.
“After two years’ farming he took a small mill at Lamberhurst, where a journeyman miller, Saunders Ditton, gave him all the instruction that he ever received in the manufacture and business in which he was afterwards so extensively engaged. Hard work was still a necessity; the mill by night, the market and his customers by day, demanded all his time; and on one occasion, overcome by cold and fatigue, he crept for warmth into his meal-bin, where he fell asleep, and would certainly have been suffocated but for the timely arrival of Ditton. This worthy man afterwards followed his master to Bishopston, and survived him—a pensioner in his old age.