impossible to clean some chimneys; they had such ledges and such windings, you couldn't nohow get at the soot unless a boy went up. He didn't believe in boys being ill-treated; had heard of pricking boys behind, but didn't believe it. You must be very good to boys to get them to go at all. It was no use larruping them, or they'd sulk and refuse. When you'd taught them their trade, then if they put on you, you might larrup them.
If I were to relate the statements I received on the subject of morality, I feel sure that I should be accused of exaggeration. Suffice it to say that as regards the relation of the sexes, public opinion can scarcely be lower in any part of England.
I observe from the Report of the Agricultural Commission in 1868 that in some parts of West Sussex the demoralization was attributed to habits of drunkenness on the part of the labouring classes. This is not true of the Weald; the people really have no money to spend on drink.
Poverty, miserable cottages, and the want of a really Christian ministry,—these are the causes of much of the degradation to be found in the Weald of Sussex.
To realize this poverty and the wretchedness of their homes one must live amongst them, not as a mere bird of passage, or a summer visitor, or a gentleman resident, but as one of themselves. One must pass up and down the Weald in winter-time and in rainy weather, note how they have neither cisterns nor drainage, how therefore they suffer from thirst in the dog-days when all the springs are dry, and have floors swamped when the rainy season sets in, while the house-filth oozes out from a slit in the wall to trickle into the garden or wayside gutter. One must go into the cots themselves, blackened with ages of wood fires, and breathe the reeking smoke and foul air, see the mother and children cowering over a few poor sticks smouldering on some bricks under the great chimney, realizing Cowper's picture of the poor labourer's wife a hundred years ago—
"The frugal housewife trembles when she lights
Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear,
But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys.
The few small embers left she nurses well,
And while her infant race with out-spread hands
