Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present

by Thomas Miller

“The pitiless pelting of the outer storm.”

They have nothing to offer one another but sympathy—nothing to give but sigh for sigh, as they mingle tears with tears. What have they to throw a charm over home? Where is the comfortable bed on which to repose when their labour is ended? Behold that heap of rags and straw in the dark corner of the room! Where are their pictures to enliven the walls? their flowers, to tell that spring or summer has come? The imagination must form a landscape where the mortar has broken away—the only white patch in that dirty dwelling; their flowers of summer are dying in that broken jug where the halfpenny nosegay is placed, purchased when hunger needed appeasing, because memory was pining for nourishment, and the heart and eye were weary of those black roofs and tall chimneys, and they wanted to look on something which God had made; for,

“Though man has power to build a town,
He cannot make the thistledown,
Which every wind doth shake.”

Mighty England, with all her glory, has but left them heirs to misery. When such as these are borne away to another country, we can almost picture the guardian-angels that would accompany them hiding their faces with their hands as they speed along with their white wings expanded above the vessel, as if weeping for these poor outcast daughters. But Hope, with her “golden hair” streaming out, would herald the way, pointing to other homes beyond the rim of the horizon, far over the sea, and bidding them remember that God is also there; and that there are no crowded courts and starving populace in those lands, where Health would stand with roses in her hands to plant in their pale cheeks, while honest Labour waved his sickle to welcome them to the thatched hut, which, stored with plenty, would send its blue smoke under the green trees, and then in coiling shadows over the golden harvest-field. Alas! these go not out with the Canterbury colonists. We should consider the present emigrants as going before to prepare the way for their feebler or poorer brethren. Their intelligence, capital, and enterprise will, we trust, create such a demand for labour, that they will invite the misery and poverty left at home to join them in the happy land of Canterbury, where we hope plenty will be found for all. May their turn soon come, and may they speedily join those who are now on their way; and, when it does, may the sea on which they will sleep flow around them with a gentle murmur—may the breeze visit them as softly as a mother’s breath when she bends over her slumbering infant, and so dream during their long voyage over the ocean! May they at last anchor in a foreign land, where they will find a home such as they have never known!

Here, where there is not even room for their dead, but where the last silent tenant is removed to make room for the next comer, what have they to weep over? Nothing! No one, perhaps, would be by to close their dying eyes, or when they turned their faces to the cold wall, to bid “God bless them!” No friendly hand to lift them down those stairs up which they had so often gone with aching hearts, but be borne by pauper arms, in a pauper’s coffin, to a nameless grave, the very hillock of which would be levelled within a month after they had been thrust beneath it, as if there was neither room for them living nor dead. Who would not pray to heaven to send them a prosperous voyage (as those were prayed for who have gone before) as they fly from a shore which brings to memory only misery, where the only hours of happiness they knew were those which went winged over their unconscious childhood, when hunger was scarcely felt while they played, and sorrow only forgotten when they slumbered—when the Angel of Sleep came and carried away the very memory of wretchedness until they awoke again. May the peaceful daisies soon blow about their home in a land where there is plenty and to spare, and human life is not made up of labour, hunger pangs, and short, fitful, moaning snatches of slumber, which is not sleep. May they, like those who are now preceding them, find a home around which to twine their affections, with a few trees and flowers that they can love and call their own, where the sun has room to get near them at morning, and can give them a parting smile before he sets at night, where he comes streaming free as when, first launched from God’s almighty hand, he went thundering with a golden trail of glory behind, until the voice of the Omnipotent bade him stop in the immensity of space. May they find verdant valleys over which no board ever looked, threatening the wanderer with imprisonment for trespassing, but where the land is as free as it is to the foot of the bird, and where in time the tall churchspire may rise and the Sabbath-bell ring, and the hum of childish voices be heard coming from beneath the blossoming trees in the orchard where they are at play. When we turn to such a picture as this, and look at the haunts of wretchedness they now inhabit, we are compelled to acknowledge emigration a blessing.

If emigration is too expensive, let us not close our eyes to the fact that there are millions of acres of waste land in England and Ireland which might be brought into cultivation, and enable thousands to live thereon in comfort, or be made to bring in a good rental, so as to support those we cannot send out; and that this could be done at but little more cost than we should have to pay to get rid of them and their labour. Let us look at the quantity of fruit and cattle imported into England every week, and which might be grown and fed in our own country, if these wastes were brought into cultivation by the capital which we are sending abroad; buying in food on the one hand, and on the other, paying those to leave the country who might remain and produce it. A wise king, in a remote and barbarous age, found it cheaper to divide his kingdom with pirates and robbers than to be constantly at war with them, though they were aliens; surely England ought to do for her own children as much as Alfred did for the heathen Danes, if she will not send them to other countries. Labour is the only true wealth that Nature ordained when she provided us with the raw materials. The possessor of millions is compelled to buy labour; his gold will neither clothe nor feed him; with it he calls in hard-handed industry to his aid. These are old truisms which no arguments can overthrow. Have we exhausted all our resources of employment, that we are compelled to drive so many thousands who are willing to labour from the land? This is a question more important than any other, and of a thousand times more consequence than the money even now spent in sending out emigrants. How many little freeholds might be reared in our wastes, with our facilities, with what we are spending annually in emigration? and how much closer would these little spots bind the affections of the occupiers to the soil, and make them struggle proudly to bear their share of the burdens which are necessary to support the state! Let a large portion of these millions of acres be brought into cultivation at any cost; and then, if our busy hive is overstocked, send a swarm abroad. Women are needed in our colonies; let them go—at least, as many as we can safely spare—and spread sweet images of themselves over distant lands,—faces to look upon in after years, which will call up the England their mothers were compelled to leave; such as we see breaking the evening shadows with their smiles, as they play until bed-time on the village-green. Any thing to lessen the vice and wretchedness which is eating like a canker into the heart of our over-crowded cities. Such as these the Canterbury colonists will not take with them; and if we cannot afford to send them abroad, let us see what can be done for them with our waste lands at home, instead of leaving them to pine and die, unwept and uncared for, in our over-crowded cities. This matter forces itself on all thinking men who visit the London Docks during the present high fever of emigration.