CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE MEN WHO ARE EATEN.

WITH many instructions from our friends, and warnings from Mackaye, I started next day on my journey. When I last caught sight of the old man, he was gazing fixedly after me, and using his pocket-handkerchief in a somewhat suspicious way. I had remarked how depressed he seemed, and my own spirits shared the depression. A presentiment of evil hung over me, which not even the excitement of the journey-to me a rare enjoyment-could dispel. I had no heart, somehow, to look at the country scenes around, which in general excited in me so much interest, and I tried to lose myself in summing up my stock of information on the question which I expected to hear discussed by the laborers. I found myself not altogether ignorant. The horrible disclosures of S. G. O., and the barbarous abominations of the Andover Workhouse, then fresh in the public mind, had had their due effect on mine; and, like most thinking artisans, I had acquainted myself tolerably from books and newspapers with the general condition of the country laborers.

I arrived in the midst of a dreary, treeless country, whose broad brown and gray fields were only broken by an occasional line of dark doleful firs, at a knot of thatched hovels, all sinking and leaning every way but the right, the windows patched with paper, the door-ways stopped with filth, which surrounded a beer-shop. That was my destination-unpromising enough for any one but an agitator. If discontent and misery are preparatives for liberty-and they are-so strange and unlike ours are the ways of God-I was likely enough to find them there.

I was welcomed by my intended host, a little pert snubnosed shoemaker, who greeted me as his cousin from London -a relationship which it seemed prudent to accept.

He took me into his little cabin, and there, with the assistance of a shrewd, good-natured wife, shared with me the best he had; and after supper commenced, mysteriously and in trembling, as if the very walls might have ears, a rambling bitter diatribe on the wrongs and sufferings of the laborers; which went on till late in the night, and which I shall spare my readers for if they have either brains or hearts, they

ought to know more than I can tell them, from the public prints, and indeed, from their own eyes—although, as a wise man says, there is nothing more difficult than to make people see first the facts which lie under their own nose.

Upon one point, however, which was new to me, he was very fierce-the custom of landlords letting the cottages with their farms, for the mere sake of saving themselves trouble; thus giving up all power of protecting the poor man, and de

livering him over, bound hand and foot, even in the matter of his commonest home comforts, to farmers, too penurious, too ignorant, and often too poor, to keep the cottages in a state fit for the habitation of human beings. Thus the poor man's hovel, as well as his labor, became, he told me, a source of profit to the farmer, out of which he wrung the last drop of gain. The necessary repairs were always put off as long as possible—the laborers were robbed of their gardens—the slightest rebellion lost them not only work, but shelter from the elements; the slavery under which they groaned penetrated even to the fireside and to the bedroom.

"And who was the landlord of this parish ?"

"Oh! he believed he was a very good sort of man, and uncommon kind to the people where he lived, but that was fifty miles away in another county; and he liked that estate better than this, and never came down here, except for the shooting."

Full of many thoughts, and tired out with my journey, I went up to bed, in the same loft with the cobbler and his wife, and fell asleep, and dreamed of Lillian.

About eight o'clock the next morning, I started forth with my guide, the shoemaker, over as desolate a country as men can well conceive. Not a house was to be seen for miles, except the knot of hovels which we had left, and here and there a great dreary lump of farm-buildings, with its yard of yellow stacks. Beneath our feet the earth was iron, and the sky iron above our heads. Dark curled clouds, "which had built up every where an under-roof of doleful gray," swept on before the bitter northern wind, which whistled through the low leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and crisped the dark sodden leaves of the scattered hollies, almost the only trees in sight.

We trudged on, over wide stubbles, thick with innumerable weeds; over wide fallows, in which the deserted plows stood frozen fast; then over clover and grass, burnt black with frost;

then over a field of turnips, where we passed a large fold of hurdles, within which some hundred sheep stood, with their heads turned from the cutting blast. All was dreary, idle, silent; no sound or sign of human beings. One wondered where the people lived, who cultivated so vast a tract of civilized, overpeopled, nineteenth-century England. As we came up to the fold, two little boys hailed us from the inside-two little wretches with blue noses and white cheeks, scarecrows of rags and patches, their feet peeping through bursten shoes twice too big for them, who seemed to have shared between them a ragged pair of worsted gloves, and cowered among the sheep, under the shelter of a hurdle, crying and inarticulate with cold.

"What's the matter, boys?"

"Turmits is froze, and us can't turn the handle of the cutter. Do ye gie us a turn, please!"

We scrambled over the hurdles, and gave the miserable little creatures the benefit of ten minutes' labor. They seemed too small for such exertion; their little hands were purple with chilblains, and they were so sorefooted they could scarcely limp. I was surprised to find them at least three years older than their size and looks denoted, and still more surprised, too, to find that their salary for all this bitter exposure to the elements-such as I believe I could not have endured two days running-was the vast sum of one shilling a week each, Sundays included. " They didn't never go to school, nor to church nether, except just now and then, sometimes-they had to mind the shep."

I went on, sickened with the contrast between the highlybred, over-fed, fat, thick-wooled animals, with their troughs of turnips and malt-dust, and their racks of rich clover-hay, and their little pent-house of rock-salt, having nothing to do but to eat and sleep, and eat again, and the little half-starved shivering animals who were their slaves. Man the master of the brutes? Bah! As society is now, the brutes are the masters-the horse, the sheep, the bullock, is the master, and the laborer is their slave. 66 Oh! but the brutes are eaten !" Well; the horses at least are not eaten-they live like landlords, till they die. And those who are eaten, are certainly not eaten by their human servants. The sheep they fat, another kills, to parody Shelley; and, after all, is not the laborer, as well as the sheep, eaten by you, my dear Society -devoured body and soul, not the less really because you are longer about the meal, there being an old prejudice against

cannibalism, and also against murder-except after the Riot Act has been read.

"What!" shriek the insulted respectabilities, "have we not paid him his wages weekly, and has he not lived upon them?" Yes; and have you not given your sheep and horses their daily wages, and have they not lived on them? You wanted to work them; and they could not work, you know, unless they were alive. But here lies your iniquity: you gave the laborer nothing but his daily food-not even his lodgings; the pigs were not stinted of their wash to pay for their stye-room, the man was; and his wages, thanks to your competitive system. were beaten down deliberately and conscientiously (for was it not according to political economy, and the laws thereof?) to the minimum on which he could or would work, without the hope or the possibility of saving a farthing. You know how to invest your capital profitably, dear Society, and to save money over and above your income of daily comforts; but what has he saved? what is he profited by all those years of labor? He has kept body and soul together-perhaps he could have done that without you or your help. But his wages are used up every Saturday night. When he stops working, you have in your pocket the whole real profits of his nearly fifty years' labor, and he has nothing. And then you say that you have not eaten him! You know, in your heart of hearts, that you have. Else, why in Heaven's name do you pay him poor's rates? If, as you say, he has been duly repaid in wages, what is the meaning of that half-a-crown a week? you owe him nothing. Oh, but the man would starve-common humanity forbids! What now, Society? Give him alms, if you will, on the score of humanity; but do not tax people for his support, whether they choose or not—that were a mere tyranny and robbery. If the landlord's feelings will not allow him to see the laborer starve, let him give, in God's name; but let him not cripple and drain, by compulsory poorrates, the farmer who has paid him his "just remuneration" of wages, and the parson who probably, out of his scanty income, gives away twice as much in alms as the landlord does out of his superfluous one. No, no; as long as you retain compulsory poor-laws, you confess that it is not merely humane but just, to pay the laborer more than his wages. You confess yourself in debt to him, over and above, an uncertain sum which it suits you not to define, because such an investigation would expose ugly gaps and patches in that same snug competitive and property world of yours; and, therefore, being the

stronger party, you compel your debtor to give up the claim which you confess for an annuity of half-a-crown a week-that being the just-above-starving-point of the economic thermometer! And yet you say you have not eaten the laborer. You see, we workmen too have our thoughts about political economy, differing slightly from yours, truly, just as the man who is being hanged may take a somewhat different view of the process from the man who is hanging him; which view is likely to be the more practical one?

With some such thoughts I walked across the open down, toward a circular camp, the earthwork, probably of some old British town. Inside it, some thousand or so of laboring people were swarming restlessly round a single large block of stone, some relic of Druid times, on which a tall man stood, his dark figure thrown out in bold relief against the dreary sky. As we pushed through the crowd, I was struck with the wan, haggard look of all faces; their lack-lustre eyes and drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy, dragging steps, gave them a crushed, dogged air, which was infinitely painful, and bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than that of the excitable and passionate artisan.

There were many women among them, talking shrilly, and looking even more pinched and wan than the men. I remarked, also, that many of the crowd carried heavy sticks, pitchforks, and other tools which might be used as fearful weapons -an ugly sign, which I ought to have heeded betimes.

They glared with sullen curiosity at me and my Londoner's clothes, as, with no small feeling of self-importance, I pushed my way to the foot of the stone. The man who stood on it seemed to have been speaking some time. His words, like all I heard that day, were utterly devoid of any thing like eloquence or imagination-a dull string of somewhat incoherent complaints, which derived their force only from the intense earnestness, which attested their truthfulness. As far as I can recollect, I will give the substance of what I heard. But, indeed, I heard nothing but what has been bandied about from newspaper to newspaper for years-confessed by all parties, deplored by all parties, but never an attempt made to remedy it.

"Thae farmers makes slaves on us. I can't hear no difference between a Christian and a nigger, except they flogs the niggers and starves the Christians; and I don't know which I'd choose. I served Farmer seven year, off and on, and arter harvest he tells me he's no more work for me,