ballad, "The Bad Squire," which I only refrain from quoting for want of room.
Every horror went on in such homes. The same loathsome crimes that startled us so in "The Bitter Cry" have been perpetrated in our English villages, and every now and then the newspapers have had to record some atrocious murder, or series of murders, committed in one of these slumbering hamlets.
Degraded by pauperism, harried by the game laws, brutalised by drink, maddened by starvation, are you surprised that such homes produced a state of mind only to be paralleled in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum, where people were kept in cages like raging beasts of prey? Some blessed angels have been at work all over the land restraining these poor devils, binding up their wounds, sitting at their bedsides, filling their minds with a hidden hope—a hope quite undefined, but for that reason the more vast and consoling. So you may enter these hovels, and find a resignation, a peace of mind, a trust in God absolutely sublime. It is the Spirit of Jesus Christ which we have driven to dwell in the nethermost hells of English society. But it is by such means He has preached to the spirits in prison—spirits from whom all hope has long fled—spirits lost to natural affection and all decency, foul-tongued and malicious, hating themselves and hating each other, apparently lost in this world and to all eternity.
Space fails me to speak of the innumerable miseries which rendered these miserable homes still more miserable—the toilsome journeys to the work, often many miles a day—the occupation of the mothers in the fields—the corruption of the young by the ganging system; all these causes assisted to destroy domestic affection—the one humanising influence left to the labourer amidst all his trials and temptations. When this was gone, there was nothing for him but drink, and this reacted on the home, and made its wretchedness still more wretched.
And thus the English labourer sank too often into a Caliban, whose sole enjoyment was to make night horrible as he rushed with whoops and yells from the village alehouse to terrify wife and cowering children. When the poor monster of the island of Lampedusa cries—
