Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1885 — Distress in England Forty Years Ago. [ARTICLE]

Distress in England Forty Years Ago.

The distress had no ir so deepened in the manufacturing districts astonpder it clearly inevitable that Ima’ny must die, and a multitude be lowered to a state of sickness find irritability' from want of food; whiie there seemed no chance of any member of.tlie manufacturing classes .coming out of tha struggle at last with a vestige of property wherewith to begin the world again. The pressure had long extended beyond the interests first affected, and when the new Ministry came into power there seemed to bdno cl<m« that was not threatened with ruin. In Carlisle the Committee of Inquiry reported that a fourth of the population was in a #tfl/te bordering on starvation—actually certain to die of famine unless relieved by extraordinary exertions.' In the woolen districts of Wiltshire the allowance to the independent laborer was not two-thirds of the minimum in the workhouse, and the large existing population consumed only a fourth of the bread and meat required by the much smaller population of 1820. In Stockport more than half the master spinners had failed before the close of 1842; dwelling houses to the number of 3,000 were shut up, and the occupiers of many hundreds more were unable to pay rates at all. Five thousand persons were walking the streets in compulsory idleness, and the Burnley guardians wrote to the Secretary of State that the distress was far beyond their management, so that a government commissioned and government funds were sent down without delay. At a meeting in Manchester, where humble shopkeepers were the speakers, anecdotes wqre related which told more than declamation. Rent collectors were afraid to meet tbeir principals, as no money could be collected. Provision dealers were subject to incursions- from a wolfish man prowling for food for his children, or from a half frantic woman, with a dying babe at her breast; or from parties of ten or a dozen desperate wretches who were levying contributions along the street. The linendraper told how new clothes had become out of the question with his customers, and they bought only remnants am 1 patches, to mend the old ones. The baker was more and more surprised at the number of people who bought half-pennyworths of bread. A provision dealer used to throw away outside scraps, but now respectable customers of twenty years’ standing bought them in pennyworths to moisten their potatoes. These shopkeepers contemplated nothing but ruin from the impoverished condition of their customers. While poor rates were increasing beyond all precedent their trade was only one-half, or one-third, or even one-tenth, what it had been throe years before. In that neighborhood a gentleman who had retired from business in 1833, leaving a property worth £60,000 to his sons, and who had, early in the distress, become security for them, was showing the works for the benefit of the creditors at a salary of £1 a week. In families where the father had hitherto earned £2 a week and laid by a portion weekly, and where all was now gone but the sacks of shaving they slept on, exertions were made to get “blue milk” fer children to moisten their oatmeal with; but soon they could have it only on alternate days, and soon water must do. At Leeds the pauper storreheorp amounted to 150,000 tons, and the guardians offered the 6s. per week for doing nothing rather that 7. 6d. per week for stone-breaking. The millrights and other trades are offering a premium on emigration, to induce their hands to go away. At Hinckley one-third of the inhabitants were paupers; more than a fifth of the houses stood empty, and there was not work enough in the place to employ properly one-third of the weavers. In Dorsetshire a man and his wife had for wages 2s. 6d. per week and three loarves, and the ablest laborer had 6s. or 7s. In Wiltshire the poor peasants held openair meetings after work—which was necessarily after dark. There, by the light of one or two flaring tallow candles, the man or the woman who had a story to tell stood on a chair and related how their children were fed and clothed in olden times—poorly enough, but so as to keep body and soul together, and now, how they could nohow manage to do it. The bare details of the ages of their children, and what the little things could do, and the prices of bacon and bread, and calico and coals, had more pathos in them than any oratory heard elsewhere.— Miss Martineau.