the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants, "and then wonder, if you can, that the jails and dungeons and tread-mills increase." If after years of effort on the part of some landowners, the above description is scarcely now an exaggeration of certain parts of the country, how universally true must it have been before the national conscience was aroused on the matter!
Pent-up city folk often envy the fresh complexion and the stalwart frame of the farmer or country gentleman, while they wonder how labourers who breathe the same air have such a feeble and dejected look. Who can wonder, when he once knows the secret of those "Black Holes," miscalled bedrooms, in which they nightly inhale draughts of poisoned vapour?
One of the most evident results of bad dwellings is physical debility. One surgeon in Norfolk "observes the want of muscular development in the agricultural labourer: he has no calves to his legs, and no development of the biceps muscle of his arm." Another notes the blanched and unhealthy-looking condition of the children in a particular locality. Some places are scourged by fevers, some decimated by consumption—everywhere the aged are cruelly tortured by rheumatism.
"There is a want," writes Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, "of physical energy, of what I may call labour pluck, a deadening of mind and body force. They may work up to what they are worth as regards the value of what they do in the labour market, but even this is done after a very listless fashion. They form farm machinery in the mass, but the motive power is weak."
In the south and west of England, agricultural labourers live on I the verge of pauperism, and have no hope of bettering their position. "A labourer who is ill one day, or whose child is sick, as a matter of course applies to the parish doctor, and a week's illness always sends him to the parish. Even the best and most industrious labourers are discouraged from joining friendly societies lest it should interfere with their right to come upon the rates. And too often the management of these societies is calculated to make them think that it is far wiser to rely wholly upon parish relief. In hundreds of cases, after years of patient self-denial, and of saving against a day of trouble, the poor labourer has been
