These wretched creatures, when they
have pawned their own clothes and bedding, will use as substitutes the
very garments they are making. So Lord ----'s coat has been seen covering
a group of children blotched with small-pox. The Rev. D---- finds himself
suddenly unpresentable from a cutaneous disease, which it is not polite to
mention on the south of Tweed, little dreaming that the shivering dirty
being who made his coat has been sitting with his arms in the sleeves for
warmth while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss C---- is swept off
by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about "God's heavy judgment
and visitation"--had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the
stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken
slopworker, they would have seen _why_ God had visited them, seen that His
judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system
which "speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth"--a system, to
use the words of the "Morning Chronicle's" correspondent, "unheard of
and unparalleled in the history of any country--a scheme so deeply laid
for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour to the market, that
it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded, by it
into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy--a system which is
steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out
of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artizans, living in
comparative comfort and civilization, into the dishonourable or sweating
trade in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their
incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes.
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