But all this while, it must not be supposed that I had forgotten my
promise to good Farmer Porter, to look for his missing son. And, indeed,
Crossthwaite and I were already engaged in a similar search for a friend
of his--the young tailor, who, as I told Porter, had been lost for
several months. He was the brother of Crossthwaite's wife, a passionate,
kind-hearted Irishman, Mike Kelly by name, reckless and scatter-brained
enough to get himself into every possible scrape, and weak enough of will
never to get himself out of one. For these two, Crossthwaite and I had
searched from one sweater's den to another, and searched in vain. And
though the present interest and exertion kept us both from brooding over
our own difficulties, yet in the long run it tended only to embitter and
infuriate our minds. The frightful scenes of hopeless misery which we
witnessed--the ever widening pit of pauperism and slavery, gaping for fresh
victims day by day, as they dropped out of the fast lessening "honourable
trade," into the ever-increasing miseries of sweating, piece-work, and
starvation prices; the horrible certainty that the same process which was
devouring our trade was slowly, but surely, eating up every other also;
the knowledge that there was no remedy, no salvation for us in man, that
political economists had declared such to be the law and constitution of
society, and that our rulers had believed that message, and were determined
to act upon it;--if all these things did not go far towards maddening us,
we must have been made of sterner stuff than any one who reads this book.
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