57. This allowance of Mr. Arthur Young was made, observe, in 1771, which was before the Old American War took place. That war made some famous fortunes for admirals and commodores and contractors and pursers and generals and commissaries; but, it was not the Americans, the French, nor the Dutch, that gave the money to make these fortunes. They came out of English taxes; and the heaviest part of those taxes fell upon the working people, who, when they were boasting of “victories,” and rejoicing that the “Jack Tars” had got “prize-money,” little dreamed that these victories were purchased by them, and that they paid fifty pounds for every crown that sailors got in prize-money! In short, this American war caused a great mass of new taxes to be laid on, and the people of England became a great deal poorer than they ever had been before. During that war, they BEGAN TO EAT POTATOES, as something to “save bread.” The poorest of the people, the very poorest of them, refused, for a long while, to use them in this way; and even when I was ten years old, which was just about fifty years ago; the poor people would not eat potatoes, except with meat, as they would cabbages, or carrots, or any other moist vegetable. But, by the end of the American war, their stomachs had come to! By slow degrees they had been reduced to swallow this pig-meat, (and bad pig-meat too,) not, indeed, without grumbling; but to swallow it; to be reduced, thus, many degrees in the scale of animals.
58. At the end of twenty-four years from the date of Arthur Young’s allowance, the poverty and degradation of the English people had made great strides. We were now in the year 1795, and a new war, and a new series of “victories and prizes” had begun. But who it was that suffered for these, out of whose blood and flesh and bones they came, the allowance now (in 1795) made to the poor labourers and their families will tell. There was, in that year, a Table, or Scale, of allowance, framed by the Magistrates of Berkshire. This is, by no means, a hard county; and therefore it is reasonable to suppose, that the scale was as good a one for the poor as any in England. According to this scale, which was printed and published, and also acted upon for years, the weekly allowance, for a man, his wife and three children, was, according to present money-prices, 11s. 4d. Thus it had, in the space of twenty-four years, fell from 13s. 1d. to 11s. 4d. Thus were the people brought to the pig-meat! Food, fit for men, they could not have with 11s. 4d. a week for five persons.
59. One would have thought, that to make a human being live upon 4d. a day, and find fuel, clothing, rent, washing, and bedding, out of the 4d., besides eating and drinking, was impossible; and one would have thought it impossible for any-thing not of hellish birth and breeding, to entertain a wish to make poor creatures, and our neighbours too, exist in such a state of horrible misery and degradation as the labourers of England were condemned to by this scale of 1795. Alas! this was happiness and honour; this was famous living; this 11s. 4d. a week was luxury and feasting, compared to what we NOW BEHOLD! For now the allowance, according to present money-prices, is 8s. a week for the man, his wife, and three children; that is to say 25⁄7d. In words, TWO PENCE AND FIVE SEVENTHS OF ANOTHER PENNY, FOR A DAY! There, that is England now! That is what the base wretches, who are fattening upon the people’s labour, call “the envy of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world.” This is what Sir Francis Burdett applauds; and he applauds the mean and cruel and dastardly ruffians, whom he calls, “the country gentlemen of England,” and whose generosity he cries up; while he well knows, that it is they (and he amongst the rest) who are the real and only cause of this devil-like barbarity, which (and he well knows that too) could not possibly be practised without the constant existence and occasional employment of that species of force, which is so abhorrent to the laws of England, and of which this Burdett’s son forms a part. The poor creatures, if they complain; if their hunger make them cry out, are either punished by even harder measures, or are slapped into prison. Alas! the jail is really become a place of relief, a scene of comparative good living: hence the invention of the tread-mill! What shall we see next? Workhouses, badges, hundred-houses, select-vestries, tread-mills, gravel-carts, and harness! What shall we see next! And what should we see at last, if this infernal THING could continue for only a few years longer?
60. In order to form a judgment of the cruelty of making our working neighbours live upon 25⁄7d. a day; that is to say 2d. and rather more than a halfpenny, let us see what the surgeons allow in the hospitals, to patients with broken limbs, who, of course, have no work to do, and who cannot even take any exercise. In Guy’s Hospital, London, the daily allowance to patients, having simple fractures, is this: 6 ounces of meat; 12 ounces of bread; 1 pint of broth; 2 quarts of good beer. This is the daily allowance. Then, in addition to this, the same patient has 12 ounces of butter a week. These articles, for a week, amount to not less at present retail prices (and those are the poor man’s prices,) than 6s. 9d. a week; while the working man is allowed 1s. 7d. a week! For, he cannot and he will not see his wife and children actually drop down dead with hunger before his face; and this is what he must see, if he take to himself more than a fifth of the allowance for the family.
61. Now, pray, observe, that surgeons, and particularly those eminent surgeons who frame rules and regulations for great establishments like that of Guy’s Hospital, are competent judges of what nature requires in the way of food and of drink. They are, indeed, not only competent judges, but they are the best of judges: they know precisely what is necessary; and having the power to order the proper allowance, they order it. If, then, they make an allowance like that, which we have seen, to a person who is under a regimen for a broken limb; to a person who does no work, and who is, nine times out of ten, unable to take any exercise at all, even that of walking about, at least in the open air; if the eminent surgeons of London deem six shillings and ninepence worth of victuals and drink, a week, necessary to such a patient; if they think that nature calls for so much in such a case; what must that man be made of, who can allow to a working man, a man fourteen hours every day in the open air, one shilling and seven pence worth of victuals and drink for the week! Let me not however ask what “that man” can be made of; for it is a monster and not a man: it is a murderer of men: not a murderer with the knife or the pistol, but with the more cruel instrument of starvation. And yet, such monsters go to church and to meeting; aye, and subscribe, the base hypocrites, to circulate that Bible which commands to do as they would be done by, and which, from the first chapter to the last, menaces them with punishment, if they be hard to the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the stranger!
62. But, not only is the patient, in a hospital, thus so much more amply fed than the working man; the prisoners in the jails; aye, even the convicted felons, are fed better, and much better, than the working men now are! Here is a fine “Old England;” that country of “roast beef and plumb pudding:” that, as the tax-eaters say it is, “envy of surrounding nations and admiration of the world.” Aye; the country WAS all these; but, it is now precisely the reverse of them all. We have just seen that the honest labouring man is allowed 25⁄7d. a day; and that will buy him a pound and a half of good bread a day, and no more, not a single crumb more. This is all he has. Well enough might the Hampshire Baronet, Sir John Pollen, lately, at a meeting at Andover, call the labourers “poor devils,” and say, that they had “scarcely a rag to cover them!” A pound and a half of bread a day, and nothing more, and that, too, to work upon! Now, then, how fare the prisoners in the jails? Why, if they be CONVICTED FELONS, they are, say the Berkshire jail-regulations, “to have ONLY BREAD and water, with vegetables occasionally from the garden.” Here, then, they are already better fed than the honest labouring man. Aye, and this is not all; for, this is only the week-day fare; for, they are to have, “on Sundays, SOME MEAT and broth!” Good God! And the honest working man can never, never smell the smell of meat! This is “envy of surrounding nations” with the devil to it! This is a state of things for Burdett to applaud.
63. But we are not even yet come to a sight of the depth of our degradation. These Berkshire jail-regulations make provision for setting the convicted prisoners, in certain cases, TO WORK, and, they say, “if the surgeon think it necessary, the WORKING PRISONERS may be allowed MEAT AND BROTH ON WEEK-DAYS;” and on Sundays, of course! There it is! There is the “envy and admiration!” There is the state to which Mr. Prosperity and Mr. Canning’s best Parliament has brought us. There is the result of “victories” and prize-money and battles of Waterloo and of English ladies kissing, “Old Blucher.” There is the fruit, the natural fruit, of anti-jacobinism and battles on the Serpentine River and jubilees and heaven-born ministers and sinking-funds and “public credit” and army and navy contracts. There is the fruit, the natural, the nearly (but not quite) ripe fruit of it all: the CONVICTED FELON is, if he do not work at all, allowed, on week-days, some vegetables in addition to his bread, and, on Sundays, both meat and broth; and, if the CONVICTED FELON work, if he be a WORKING convicted felon, he is allowed meat and broth all the week round; while, hear it Burdett, thou Berkshire magistrate! hear it, all ye base miscreants who have persecuted men because they sought a reform! The WORKING CONVICTED FELON is allowed meat and broth every day in the year, while the WORKING HONEST MAN is allowed nothing but dry bread, and of that not half a belly-full! And yet you see the people that seem surprised that crimes increase! Very strange, to be sure; that men should like to work upon meat and broth better than they like to work upon dry bread! No wonder that new jails arise. No wonder that there are now two or three or four or five jails to one county, and that as much is now written upon “prison discipline” as upon almost any subject that is going. But, why so good, so generous, to FELONS? The truth is, that they are not fed too well; for, to be starved is no part of their sentence; and, here are SURGEONS who have something to say! They know very well that a man may be murdered by keeping necessary food from him. Felons are not apt to lie down and die quietly for want of food. The jails are in large towns, where the news of any cruelty soon gets about. So that the felons have many circumstances in their favour. It is in the villages, the recluse villages, where the greatest cruelties are committed.
64. Here, then, in this contrast between the treatment of the WORKING FELON and that of the WORKING HONEST MAN, we have a complete picture of the present state of England; that horrible state, to which, by slow degrees, this once happy country has been brought; and, I should now proceed to show, as I proposed in the first paragraph of this present Number, HOW THERE CAME TO BE SO MUCH POVERTY AND MISERY IN ENGLAND; for, this is the main thing, it being clear, that, if we do not see the real causes of our misery, we shall be very unlikely to adopt any effectual remedy. But, before I enter on this part of my subject, let me prove, beyond all possibility of doubt, that what I say relatively to the situation of, and the allowances to, the labourers and their families, IS TRUE. The cause of such situation and allowances I shall show hereafter; but let me first show, by a reference to indubitable facts, that the situation and allowances are such as, or worse than, I have described them. To do this, no way seems to me to be so fair, so likely to be free from error, so likely to produce a suitable impression on the minds of my readers, and so likely to lead to some useful practical result; no way seems to me so well calculated to answer these purposes, as that of taking the very village, in which, I, at this moment, happen to be, and to describe, with names and dates, the actual state of its labouring people, as far as that state is connected with steps taken under the poor-laws.
65. This village was in former times a very considerable place, as is manifest from the size of the church as well as from various other circumstances. It is now, as a church living, united with an adjoining parish, called Vernon Dean, which also has its church, at a distance of about three miles from the church of this parish. Both parishes put together now contain only eleven hundred, and a few odd, inhabitants, men, women, children, and all; and yet, the great tithes are supposed to be worth two or three thousand pounds a year, and the small tithes about six hundred pounds a year. Formerly, before the event which is called “The Reformation,” there were two Roman Catholic priests living at the parsonage houses in these two parishes. They could not marry, and could, therefore have no wives and families to keep out of the tithes; and, WITH PART OF THOSE TITHES, THEY, AS THE LAW PROVIDED, MAINTAINED THE POOR OF THESE TWO PARISHES; and, the canons of the church commanded them to distribute the portion to the poor and the stranger, “with their own hands, in humility and mercy.”
66. This, as to church and poor, was the state of these villages, in the “dark ages” of “Romish superstition.” What! No poor-laws? No poor-rates? What horribly unenlightened times! No select vestries? Dark ages indeed! But, how stands these matters now? Why, the two parishes are moulded into one church living. Then the Great Tithes (amounting to two or three thousand a year) belong to some part of the Chapter (as they call it) of Salisbury. The Chapter leases them out, as they would a house or a farm, and they are now rented by John King, who is one of this happy nation’s greatest and oldest pensioners. So that, away go the great tithes, not leaving a single wheat-ear to be spent in the parish. The Small Tithes belong to a Vicar, who is one Fisher, a nephew of the late bishop of Salisbury, who has not resided here for a long while; and who has a curate, named John Gale, who being the son of a little farmer and shop-keeper at Burbage in Wiltshire, was, by a parson of the name of Bailey (very well known and remembered in these parts), put to school; and, in the fulness of time, became a curate. So that, away go also the small tithes (amounting to about 500l. or 600l. a year); and, out of the large church revenues; or, rather, large church-and-poor revenues, of these two parishes; out of the whole of them, there remains only the amount of the curate, Mr. John Gale’s, salary, which does not, perhaps, exceed seventy or a hundred pounds, and a part of which, at any rate, I dare say, he does not expend in these parishes: away goes, I say, all the rest of the small tithes, leaving not so much as a mess of milk or a dozen of eggs, much less a tithe-pig, to be consumed in the parish.