I found myself not altogether ignorant.
The horrible disclosures of S.G.O., and the barbarous abominations of
the Andover Workhouse, then fresh in the public mind, had had their due
effect on mine; and, like most thinking artizans, I had acquainted myself
tolerably from books and newspapers with the general condition of the
country labourers.
I arrived in the midst of a dreary, treeless country, whose broad brown and
grey fields were only broken by an occasional line of dark, doleful firs,
at a knot of thatched hovels, all sinking and leaning every way but the
right, the windows patched with paper, the doorways stopped with filth,
which surrounded a beer-shop. That was my destination--unpromising enough
for any one but an agitator. If discontent and misery are preparatives for
liberty--and they are--so strange and unlike ours are the ways of God--I
was likely enough to find them there.
I was welcomed by my intended host, a little pert, snub-nosed shoemaker,
who greeted me as his cousin from London--a relationship which it seemed
prudent to accept.
He took me into his little cabin, and there, with the assistance of a
shrewd, good-natured wife, shared with me the best he had; and after supper
commenced, mysteriously and in trembling, as if the very walls might have
ears, a rambling, bitter diatribe on the wrongs and sufferings of the
labourers; which went on till late in the night, and which I shall spare my
readers: for if they have either brains or hearts, they ought to know more
than I can tell them, from the public prints, and, indeed, from their own
eyes--although, as a wise man says, there is nothing more difficult than to
make people see first the facts which lie under their own nose.
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