Past and Present | Page 6

their
dark lanes, hidden from
all but the eye of God, and of rare Benevolence the minister of God,
there are scenes of woe and destitution and desolation, such as, one
may hope, the Sun never saw before in the most barbarous regions
where men dwelt.
Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr.
Alison, who speaks what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his
charitable hands becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these
things for us: these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no
reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only to the
common state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic gangrene of this
kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may
be observed, is but a temporary measure; an anodyne, not a remedy:
Rich and Poor, when once the naked facts of their condition have come
into collision, cannot long subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True
enough:--and yet, human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till
something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a
byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble and
thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant
manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the metal of Potosi
cannot purchase back; to which the metal of Potosi, and all you can buy
with it, is dross and dust!
Why dwell on this aspect of the matter? It is too indisputable, not
doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the lower class,
in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries,
Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer
Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same
sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working

body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state,
to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel.
At Stockport Assizes,-- and this too has no reference to the present state
of trade, being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a Father are
arraigned and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to
defraud a 'burial-society' of some 31.8s. due on the death of each child:
they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, it is
whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you
had better not probe farther into that department of things. This is in the
autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season.
"Brutal savages, degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers;
hardly lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth
lingering
on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism being never so well
admitted. In the British land, a human Mother and Father, of white skin
and professing the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with
their Irishism and necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it.
Such instances are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view;
under which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged. A
human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do to
escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help
is far.--Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things happen;
best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's knees!--The
Stockport Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling
Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good
in this world: if he were out of misery at once; he well dead, and the
rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done.
And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little
starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?-- What an
inquiry of ways and means!
In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old Jerusalem
fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said, 'The hands
of the pitiful women have sodden their own children.' The stern
Hebrew imagination could conceive no
blacker gulf of wretchedness;
that was the ultimatum of degraded god-punished man. And we here, in
modern England, exuberant with supply of all kinds, besieged by
nothing if it be not by
invisible Enchantments, are we reaching

that?--How come these things? Wherefore are they, wherefore should
they be?
Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes, and
Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us. This
successful
industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody
rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet to nobody. We might
ask, Which of us has it enriched? We can spend