[Illustration: THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND.]
FIFTH THOUSAND.
THE WHITE SLAVES
OF
ENGLAND.
COMPILED FROM OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS.
WITH TWELVE SPIRITED ILLUSTRATIONS.
BY JOHN C. COBDEN.
AUBURN AND BUFFALO:
MILLER ORTON & MULLIGAN.
1854.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-three, by
DERBY AND MILLER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Northern District
of New-York.
PREFACE.
The following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrage equally
abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. The frightful abuses
which are here set forth, are, from their enormity, difficult of
belief; yet they are supported by testimony the most impartial, clear
and irrefutable. These abuses are time-honored, and have the sanction
of a nation which prides itself upon the _freedom of its Constitution_;
and which holds up its government to the nations of the earth as a
model of _regulated liberty_. Vain, audacious, _false_ assumption! Let
the refutation be found in the details which this volume furnishes,
of the want, misery and starvation—the slavish toil—the menial
degradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. Let her _miners_, her
_operatives_, _the tenants of her workhouses_, her _naval service_, and
the millions upon millions in the _Emerald Isle_ and in farther India
attest its fallacy.
These are the legitimate results of the laws and institutions of Great
Britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or less degree, all
her dependencies. Her _church and state_, and her _laws of entail
and primogeniture_, are the principal sources of the evils under
which her people groan; and until these are changed there is no just
ground of hope for an improvement in their condition. The tendency of
things is, indeed, to make matters still worse. The poor are every
year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon
their sufferings; while the wealth and power of the realm are annually
concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments
of oppression. The picture is already sufficiently revolting. "Nine
hundred and ninety-nine children of the same common Father, suffer from
destitution, that the thousandth may revel in superfluities. A thousand
cottages shrink into meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a
single palace. The tables of a thousand families of the industrious
poor waste away into drought and barrenness, that one board may be
laden with surfeits."
From these monstrous evils there seems to be little chance of escape,
except by flight; and happy is it for the victims of oppression, that
an asylum is open to them, in which they can fully enjoy the rights
and privileges, from which, for ages, they have been debarred. Let
them come. The feudal chains which so long have bound them can here be
shaken off. Here they can freely indulge the pure impulses of the mind
and the soul, untrammeled by political or religious tyranny. Here they
can enjoy the beneficent influences of humane institutions and laws,
and find a vast and ample field in which to develop and properly employ
all their faculties.
The United States appear before the eyes of the down-trodden whites of
Europe as a land of promise. Thousands of ignorant, degraded wretches,
who have fled from their homes to escape exhausting systems of
slavery, annually land upon our shores, and in their hearts thank God
that he has created such a refuge. This is the answer—the overwhelming
answer—to the decriers of our country and its institutions. These
emigrants are more keenly alive to the superiority of our institutions
than most persons who have been bred under them, and to their care we
might confidently intrust our defence.
We design to prove in this work that the oligarchy which owns Great
Britain at the present day is the best friend of human slavery, and
that its system is most barbarous and destructive. Those feudal
institutions which reduced to slavery the strong-minded race of
whites, are perpetuated in Great Britain, to the detriment of freedom
wherever the British sway extends. Institutions which nearly every
other civilized country has abolished, and which are at least a century
behind the age, still curse the British islands and their dependencies.
This system of slavery, with all its destructive effects, will be found
fully illustrated in this volume.
Our plan has been to quote English authorities wherever possible. Out
of their own mouths shall they be condemned. We have been much indebted
to the publications of distinguished democrats of England, who have
keenly felt the evils under which their country groans, and striven,
with a hearty will, to remove them. They have the sympathies of
civilized mankind with their cause. May their efforts soon be crowned
with success, for the British masses and oppressed nations far away in
the East will shout loud and long when the aristocracy is brought to
the dust!
" • • • • • AS WE HAVE BEEN GREAT IN CRIME, LET US BE EARLY IN
REPENTANCE. THERE WILL BE A DAY OF RETRIBUTION, WHEREIN WE SHALL HAVE
TO GIVE ACCOUNT OF ALL THE TALENTS, FACULTIES, AND OPPORTUNITIES WHICH
HAVE BEEN INTRUSTED TO US. LET IT NOT THEN APPEAR THAT OUR SUPERIOR
POWER HAS BEEN EMPLOYED TO OPPRESS OUR FELLOW CREATURES, AND OUR
SUPERIOR LIGHT TO DARKEN THE CREATION OF OUR GOD."—_Wilberforce._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
General Slavery proceeding from the existence of the British
Aristocracy _Page_ 13
CHAPTER II.
Slavery in the British Mines 28
CHAPTER III.
Slavery in the British Factories 104
CHAPTER IV.
Slavery in the British Workshops 168
CHAPTER V.
The Workhouse System of Britain 206
CHAPTER VI.
Impressment, or Kidnapping White Men for Slaves in the
Naval Service 257
CHAPTER VII.
Irish Slavery 284
CHAPTER VIII.
The Menial Slaves of Great Britain 370
CHAPTER IX.
Mental and Moral Condition of the White Slaves in Great Britain 379
CHAPTER X.
Coolie Slavery in the British Colonies 433
CHAPTER XI.
Slavery in British India 441
CHAPTER XII.
The Crime and the Duty of the English Government 489
THE
WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL SLAVERY PROCEEDING FROM THE EXISTENCE OF THE BRITISH
ARISTOCRACY.
What is slavery? A system under which the time and toil of one person
are compulsorily the property of another. The power of life and death,
and the privilege of using the lash in the master, are not essential,
but casual attendants of slavery, which comprehends all involuntary
servitude without adequate recompense or the means of escape. He
who can obtain no property in the soil, and is not represented in
legislation, is a slave; for he is completely at the mercy of the
lord of the soil and the holder of the reins of government. Sometimes
slavery is founded upon the inferiority of one race to another; and
then it appears in its most agreeable garb, for the system may be
necessary to tame and civilize a race of savages. But the subjection
of the majority of a nation to an involuntary, hopeless, exhausting,
and demoralizing servitude, for the benefit of an idle and luxurious
few of the same nation, is slavery in its most appalling form. Such a
system of slavery, we assert, exists in Great Britain.
In the United Kingdom, the land is divided into immense estates,
constantly retained in a few hands; and the tendency of the existing
laws of entail and primogeniture is to reduce even the number of these
proprietors. According to McCulloch, there are 77,007,048 acres of
land in the United Kingdom, including the small islands adjacent. Of
this quantity, 28,227,435 acres are uncultivated; while, according to
Mr. Porter, another English writer, about 11,300,000 acres, now lying
waste, are fit for cultivation. The number of proprietors of all this
land is about 50,000. Perhaps, this is a rather high estimate for the
present period. Now the people of the United Kingdom number at least
28,000,000. What a tremendous majority, then, own not a foot of soil!
But this is not the worst. Such is the state of the laws, that the
majority never can acquire an interest in the land. Said the London
_Times_, in 1844, "_Once a peasant in England, and the man must remain
a peasant for ever_;" and, says Mr. Kay, of Trinity College, Cambridge—
"Unless the English peasant will consent to tear himself from his
relations, friends, and early associations, and either transplant
himself into a town or into a distant colony, he has no chance of
improving his condition in the world."
Admit this—admit that the peasant must remain through life at the
mercy of his lord, and of legislation in which his interests are not
represented—and tell us if he is a freeman?
To begin with England, to show the progress and effects of the land
monopoly:—The Rev. Henry Worsley states that in the year 1770, there
were in England 250,000 freehold estates, in the hands of 250,000
different families; and that, in 1815, the whole of the lands of
England were concentrated in the hands of only 32,000 proprietors!
So that, as the population increases, the number of proprietors
diminishes. A distinguished lawyer, who was engaged in the management
of estates in Westmoreland and Cumberland counties in 1849, says—
"The greater proprietors in this part of the country are
buying up all the land, and including it in their settlements.
Whenever one of the small estates is put up for sale, the great
proprietors outbid the peasants and purchase it at all costs. The
consequence is, that for some time past, the number of the small
estates has been rapidly diminishing in all parts of the country.
In a short time none of them will remain, but all be merged in
the great estates. * * * The consequence is, that the peasant's
position, instead of being what it once was—one of hope—is
gradually becoming one of despair. Unless a peasant emigrates,
there is now no chance for him. It is impossible for him to rise
above the peasant class."
The direct results of this system are obvious. Unable to buy land, the
tillers of the soil live merely by the sufferance of the proprietors.
If one of the great landholders takes the notion that grazing will
be more profitable than farming, he may sweep away the homes of his
labourers, turning the poor wretches upon the country as wandering
paupers, or driving them into the cities to overstock the workshops and
reduce the wages of the poor workman. And what is the condition of the
peasants who are allowed to remain and labour upon the vast estates?
Let Englishmen speak for Englishmen.
Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire are generally regarded
as presenting the agricultural labourer in his most deplorable
circumstances, while Lincolnshire exhibits the other extreme. We
have good authority for the condition of the peasantry in all these
counties. Mr. John Fox, medical officer of the Cerne Union, in
Dorsetshire, says—
"Most of the cottages are of the worst description; some mere
mud-hovels, and situated in low and damp places, with cesspools
or accumulations of filth close to the doors. The mud floors of
many are much below the level of the road, and, in wet seasons,
are little better than so much clay. In many of the cottages, the
beds stood on the ground floor, which was damp three parts of
the year; scarcely one had a fireplace in the bedroom; and one
had a single small pane of glass stuck in the mud wall as its
only window. Persons living in such cottages are generally very
poor, very dirty, and usually in rags, living almost wholly on
bread and potatoes, scarcely ever tasting any animal food, and,
consequently, highly susceptible of disease, and very unable to
contend with it."
Very often, according to other equally good authority, there is not
more than one room for the whole family, and the demoralization of
that family is the natural consequence. The _Morning Chronicle_ of
November, 1849, said of the cottages at Southleigh, in Devon—
"One house, which our correspondent visited, was almost a ruin.
It had continued in that state for ten years. The floor was of
mud, dipping near the fireplace into a deep hollow, which was
constantly filled with water. There were five in the family—a
young man of twenty-one, a girl of eighteen, and another girl of
about thirteen, with the father and mother, all sleeping together
up-stairs. And what a sleeping-room! 'In places it seemed falling
in. To ventilation it was an utter stranger. The crazy floor
shook and creaked under me as I paced it.' Yet the rent was 1_s._
a week—the same sum for which apartments that may be called
luxurious in comparison may be had in the model lodging-houses.
And here sat a girl weaving that beautiful Honiton lace which our
peeresses wear on court-days. Cottage after cottage at Southleigh
presented the same characteristics. Clay floors, low ceilings
letting in the rain, no ventilation; two rooms, one above and
one below; gutters running through the lower room to let off the
water; unglazed window-frames, now boarded up, and now uncovered
to the elements, the boarding going for firewood; the inmates
disabled by rheumatism, ague, and typhus; broad, stagnant, open
ditches close to the doors; heaps of abominations piled round
the dwellings; such are the main features of Southleigh; and it
is in these worse than pig-styes that one of the most beautiful
fabrics that luxury demands or art supplies is fashioned. The
parish houses are still worse. 'One of these, on the borders of
Devonshire and Cornwall, and not far from Launceston, consisted
of two houses, containing between them four rooms. In each room
lived a family night and day, the space being about twelve feet
square. In one were a man and his wife and eight children; the
father, mother, and two children lay in one bed, the remaining
six were huddled 'head and foot' (three at the top and three at
the foot) in the other bed. The eldest girl was between fifteen
and sixteen, the eldest boy between fourteen and fifteen.' Is it
not horrible to think of men and women being brought up in this
foul and brutish manner in civilized and Christian England! The
lowest of savages are not worse cared for than these children of
a luxurious and refined country."
Yet other authorities describe cases much worse than this which so
stirs the heart of the editor of the _Morning Chronicle_. The frightful
immorality consequent upon such a mode of living will be illustrated
fully in another portion of this work.
In Lincolnshire, the cottages of the peasantry are in a better
condition than in any other part of England; but in consequence of the
lowness of wages and the comparative enormity of rents, the tillers of
the soil are in not much better circumstances than their rural brethren
in other counties. Upon an average, a hard-working peasant can earn
five shillings a week; two shillings of which go for rent. If he can
barely live when employed, what is to become of him when thrown out of
employment? Thus the English peasant is driven to the most constant and
yet hopeless labour, with whips more terrible than those used by the
master of the negro slave.
In Wales, the condition of the peasant, thanks to the general system of
lord and serf, is neither milder nor more hopeful than in England. Mr.
Symonds, a commissioner who was sent by government to examine the state
of education in some of the Welsh counties, says of the peasantry of
Brecknockshire, Cardiganshire, and Radnorshire—
"The people of my district are almost universally poor. In some
parts of it, wages are probably lower than in any part of Great
Britain. The evidence of the witnesses, fully confirmed by other
statements, exhibits much poverty, but little amended in other
parts of the counties on which I report. _The farmers themselves
are very much impoverished, and live no better than English
cottagers in prosperous agricultural counties._
"The cottages in which the people dwell are miserable in the
extreme in nearly every part of the country in Cardiganshire, and
every part of Brecknockshire and Radnorshire, except the east.
I have myself visited many of the dwellings of the poor, and my
assistants have done so likewise. _I believe the Welsh cottages
to be very little, if at all, superior to the Irish huts in the
country districts._
"Brick chimneys are very unusual in these cottages; those which
exist are usually in the shape of large cones, the top being of
basket-work. _In very few cottages is there more than one room_,
which serves the purposes of living and sleeping. A large dresser
and shelves usually form the partition between the two; and where
there are separate beds for the family, a curtain or low board is
(if it exists) the only division with no regular partition. And
this state of things very generally prevails, even where there
is some little attention paid to cleanliness; but the cottages
and beds are frequently filthy. The people are always very dirty.
In all the counties, the cottages are generally destitute of
necessary outbuildings, including even those belonging to the
farmers; and both in Cardiganshire and Radnorshire, except near
the border of England, the pigs and poultry have free run of the
joint dwelling and sleeping rooms."
In Scotland, the estates of the nobility are even larger than in
England. Small farms are difficult to find. McCulloch states that there
are not more than 8000 proprietors of land in the whole of Scotland;
and, as in England, this number is decreasing. In some districts,
the cottages of the peasantry are as wretched as any in England or
Wales. For some years past, the great landholders, such as the Duke
of Buccleuch and the Duchess of Sutherland, have been illustrating
the glorious beneficence of British institutions by removing the
poor peasantry from the homes of their fathers, for the purpose of
turning the vacated districts into deer-parks, sheep-walks, and large
farms. Many a Highland family has vented a curse upon the head of the
remorseless Duchess of Sutherland. Most slaveholders in other countries
feed, shelter, and protect their slaves, in compensation for work;
but the Duchess and her barbarous class take work, shelter, food, and
protection from their serfs all at one fell swoop, turning them upon
the world to beg or starve. Scotland has reason—strong reason—to
bewail the existence of the British aristocracy.
Next let us invoke the testimony of Ireland—the beautiful and the
wretched—Ireland, whose people have been the object of pity to the
nations for centuries—whose miseries have been the burden of song and
the theme of eloquence till they have penetrated all hearts save those
of the oppressors—whose very life-blood has been trampled out by the
aristocracy. Let us hear her testimony in regard to the British slave
system.
Ireland is splendidly situated, in a commercial point of view,
commanding the direct route between Northern Europe and America,
with some of the finest harbours in the world. Its soil is rich
and fruitful. Its rivers are large, numerous, and well adapted
for internal commerce. The people are active, physically and
intellectually, and, everywhere beyond Ireland, are distinguished
for their energy, perseverance, and success. Yet, in consequence of
its organized oppression, called government, Ireland is the home of
miseries which have scarcely a parallel upon the face of the earth.
The great landlords spend most of their time in England or upon the
continent, and leave their lands to the management of agents, who
have sub-agents for parts of the estates, and these latter often have
still inferior agents. Many of the great landlords care nothing for
their estates beyond the receipt of the rents, and leave their agents
to enrich themselves at the expense of the tenantry. Everywhere in
Ireland, a traveller, as he passes along the roads, will see on the
roadsides and in the fields, places which look like mounds of earth and
sods, with a higher heap of sods upon the top, out of which smoke is
curling upward; and with two holes in the sides of the heap next the
road, one of which is used as the door, and the other as the window of
the hovel. These are the homes of the peasantry! Entering a hovel, you
will find it to contain but one room, formed by the four mud walls;
and in these places, upon the mud floor, the families of the peasant
live. Men, women, boys, and girls live and sleep together, and herd
with the wallowing pig. Gaunt, ragged figures crawl out of these hovels
and plant the ground around them with potatoes, which constitute the
only food of the inmates throughout the year, or swarm the roads and
thoroughfares as wretched beggars. The deplorable condition of these
peasants was graphically described by no less a person than Sir Robert
Peel, in his great speech on Ireland, in 1849; and the evidence quoted
by him was unimpeachable. But not only are the majority of the Irish
condemned to exist in such hovels as we have sketched above—their
tenure of these disgusting cabins is insecure. If they do not pay the
rent for them at the proper time, they are liable to be turned adrift
even in the middle of the night. No notice is necessary. The tenants
are subject to the tender mercies of a bailiff, without any remedy
or appeal, except to the court of Heaven. Kay states that in 1849,
more than 50,000 families were evicted and turned as beggars upon the
country. An Englishman who travelled through Ireland in the fall of
1849, says—
"In passing through some half dozen counties, Cork, (especially
in the western portions of it,) Limerick, Clare, Galway, and
Mayo, you see thousands of ruined cottages and dwellings of the
labourers, the peasants, and the small holders of Ireland. You
see from the roadside twenty houses at once with not a roof upon
them. I came to a village not far from Castlebar, where the
system of eviction had been carried out only a few days before.
Five women came about us as the car stopped, and on making
inquiry, they told us their sorrowful story. They were not badly
clad; they were cleanly in appearance; they were intelligent;
they used no violent language, but in the most moderate terms
told us that on the Monday week previously those five houses
had been levelled. They told us how many children there were
in their families: I recollect one had eight, another had six;
that the husbands of three of them were in this country for the
harvest; that they had written to their husbands to tell them
of the desolation of their homes. And, I asked them, 'What did
the husbands say in reply?' They said 'they had not been able
to eat any breakfast!' It is but a simple observation, but it
marks the sickness and the sorrow which came over the hearts of
those men, who here were toiling for their three or four pounds,
denying themselves almost rest at night that they might make a
good reaping at the harvest, and go back that they might enjoy it
in the home which they had left. All this is but a faint outline
of what has taken place in that unhappy country. Thousands of
individuals have died within the last two or three years in
consequence of the evictions which have taken place."
The great loss of life in the famine of 1847 showed that the peasantry
had a miserable dependence upon the chances of a good potato crop for
the means of keeping life in their bodies. Crowds of poor wretches,
after wandering about for a time like the ghosts of human beings,
starved to death by the roadside, victims of the murderous policy
of the landed aristocracy. Since that period of horror, the great
proprietors, envious of the lurid fame achieved by the Duchess of
Sutherland in Scotland, have been evicting their tenants on the most
extensive scale, and establishing large farms and pasturages, which
they deem more profitable than former arrangements. In despair at
home, the wretched Irish are casting their eyes to distant lands for a
refuge from slavery and starvation. But hundreds of thousands groan
in their hereditary serfdom, without the means of reaching other and
happier countries. The dearest ties of family are sundered by the force
of want. The necessity of seeking a subsistence drives the father to
a distant land, while the child is compelled to remain in Ireland a
pauper. The husband can pay his own passage to America, perchance, but
the wife must stay in the land of misery. Ask Ireland if a slave can
breathe in Great Britain! The long lamentation of ages, uniting with
the heart-broken utterances of her present wretched bondsmen, might
touch even the British aristocracy in its reply.
So much for the general condition of the peasantry in the United
Kingdom. The miserable consequences of the system of lord and serf do
not end here. No! There are London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow,
Dublin, and many other cities and towns, with their crowds of slaves
either in the factories and workshops, or in the streets as paupers and
criminals. There are said to be upward of four millions of paupers in
the United Kingdom! Can such an amount of wretchedness be found in any
country upon the face of the globe? To what causes are we to attribute
this amount of pauperism, save to the monopolies and oppressions of the
aristocracy? Think of there being in the United Kingdom over eleven
million acres of good land uncultivated, and four millions of paupers!
According to Kay, more than two millions of people were kept from
starving in England and Wales, in 1848, by relief doled out to them
from public and private sources. So scant are the earnings of those
who labour day and night in the cities and towns, that they may become
paupers if thrown out of work for a single week. Many from town and
country are driven by the fear of starvation to labour in the mines,
the horrors of which species of slavery shall be duly illustrated
farther on in this work.
Truly did Southey write—
"To talk of English happiness, is like talking of Spartan
freedom; the _helots_ are overlooked. In no country can such
riches be acquired by commerce, but it is the one who grows
rich by the labour of the hundred. The hundred human beings
like himself, as wonderfully fashioned by nature, gifted with
the like capacities, and equally made for immortality, are
sacrificed _body and soul_. Horrible as it must needs appear,
the assertion is true to the very letter. They are deprived in
childhood of all instruction and all enjoyment—of the sports
in which childhood instinctively indulges—of fresh air by day
and of natural sleep by night. Their health, physical and moral,
is alike destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting
task-work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded
rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust which
they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow up without
decency, without comfort, and without hope—without morals,
without religion, and without shame; and bring forth _slaves_
like themselves to tread in the same path of misery."
Again, the same distinguished Englishman says, in number twenty-six of
Espriella's Letters—
"The English boast of their liberty, but there is _no liberty in
England for the poor_. They are no longer sold with the soil,
it is true; but they cannot quit the soil if there be any
probability or suspicion that age or infirmity may disable them.
If, in such a case, they endeavour to remove to some situation
where they hope more easily to maintain themselves, where work is
more plentiful or provisions cheaper, the overseers are alarmed,
the intruder is apprehended, as if he were a criminal, and sent
back to his own parish. Wherever a pauper dies, that parish must
bear the cost of his funeral. Instances, therefore, have not
been wanting of wretches, in the last stage of disease, having
been hurried away in an open cart, upon straw, and dying upon
the road. Nay, even women, in the very pains of labour, have
been driven out, and have perished by the wayside, because the
birthplace of the child would be its parish!"
The sufferings of the rural labourers—the peasantry of Great Britain
and Ireland—are to be attributed to the fact that they have no
property in the land, and cannot acquire any. The law of primogeniture,
on which the existence of the British aristocracy depends, has, as we
have already shown, placed the land and those who labour on it—the
soil and the serfs—at the disposal of a few landed proprietors. The
labourers are not attached to the soil, and bought and sold with it,
as in Russia. The English aristocrat is too cunning to adopt such a
regulation, because it would involve the necessity of supporting his
slaves. They are _called_ freemen, in order to enable their masters
to detach them from the soil, and drive them forth to starve, when it
suits their convenience, without incurring any legal penalty for their
cruelty, such as the slaveholders of other countries would suffer. The
Russian, the Spanish, the North American slaveholder must support his
slaves in sickness and helpless old age, or suffer the penalties of the
law for his neglect. The British slaveholder alone may drive his slaves
forth to starve in the highway by hundreds and thousands; and no law
of Great Britain affords the means of punishing him for his murderous
cruelty. His Irish slaves may be saved from starvation by American
bounty, but he cannot be punished until he shall meet his Judge at the
day of final account.