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1089 HZf) * JUfl<V [Saturday
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OTJIt STREET FOLK. The labours of Henry ...
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A LESSON FROM THIS LORD MAYORS HI IOW. W...
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Our Colonies In The Coming Year. It Is N...
without her borders , as we approach an inevitable contest ? Within ? ah , within , there is still , notwithstanding all our yawning miseries and crying sins oft misrule , the union that makes force ; the freedom that peacefully regenerates , the forgiveness of injustice , and the fusion of divided classes in the presence . of a common foe . But without ? How do we find bur world-embracing colo . iial empire ? The arteries , as Kossuth has finely said , of our dominion .
Is England sound at heart , with disease in all her scattered members ? Do we find our colonial possessions united to the mother country by gratitude , affection , interest , mutual contentment ? Are they the happy outposts of our power , ready to render back with interest our generous protection , our kind and equitable administration , our aid in time of need , our enlightened and anxious vigilance ? or is it but the news which every mail proclaims trumpet-tongued , that our whole colonial empire is a running sore of disaffection and discontent ? Is it a fact that in every colony English enterprise has planted , we have a nascent enemy to England ; that official provocation has ripened into a disastrous
precedent , and American emancipation is treasured up as a contagious example ? That wherever our own offspr ing hare set their foot , to hew out a new England under the shadow of the ancestral flag , there we find a crop of petty official exaction , of official interference , official jobbing—vexatious , inquisitorial , offensive—growing in rank luxuriance ? That the comfort and prosperity of every settlement waits on the miserable caprice , nay , on the fits of spleen and indigestion , of a feudal autocrat , sitting in a Down ing-street back parlour , and trying to girdle the earth with tape ? That Rotten-row , the Clubs , and Coppock , are the nursery of colonial officials , who descend , like a flight of locusts , to prey on the vitals of the infant state ?
The Times , an unexceptionable , because an independent , authority in colonial affairs , exposes the whole disease under which our colonies are labouring , with merciless precision . To the petulant vagaries of the Colonial Secretary ' s ill temper and vanity the Times ascribes " the present disastrous condition of affairs . " " To his mischievous meddling the outbreak of the Kafirs is solely attributable . " There , in South Africa , the colonists are first driven to the verge of rebellion by the bad faith and vexations tyranny of the Minister ; then into an internecine struggle for very existence , hamprrcl and bewildered , prepared for revolt , but not for defence .
So alarming is the position of affairs , that the Home Government " talk of five fresh regiments in addition to the ten either on their way to , or serving in South Africa . "
We are in the thick of a harassing and impracticable war , of which it is impossible to see the termination ; but which must be terminated at whatever cost , in the final and complete subjugation of the savage tribes , at the risk of seeing the whole colony devoured . JJut it is not the Cape alone that testifies to the virtues of Family ( Government . Lord Grey touches nothing that he does not wither . It is the same system in all our Colonies , so long crying out for , iind so long deprived of self-government .
The secret of the whole evil is contained in the following statement of the 'I'imes ; — " A colon ) ' ni present is considered by every Administration a patronaye preserve . Self-governed , it would cease to be a subject of interest in Downing-street . " Canada is at zero in Downing-street , " simply because now Canadians fill a large proportion of the ofliees in their own Government , which consequently affords but a small harvest of patronage to the Administration here . "
To sii'Ji a point has the corrupt disinclination to grant Keif-government reached , that " every improvement is steadily resisted , and every shift is resorted to , every mischief recklessly braved , in order to continue the in ' iKcluevoiiH power of official patronage . " Hut not to the Colonial-office alone ' in the blame . " The apathy of tin ; public and of Parliament" in
the intervals of peace and quietness gives official incapacity and corruption a full swing . There may be and " i « discontent , indeed , in all " colonial possession , " and at all times ; " but until we are called upon to pay for Nome catastrophe , or to sink a paltry mirpIuH in a " little war , " we . do not cry out ; and even then it is only a cry , and not a decisive interference . Jf our colonial empire is not to dwindle away , we must apply the searching remedy of self-government
to all . For ( says the Times ) " the rule that is good for Sydney is good also for New Zealand and the Cape . The men who have founded the colony of South Australia are of the same race , have the same education , habits , thoughts , and feelings as those who established Port Phillip . The constitutions which the one set of colonists need , the others also require ; and the representative constitution that would work well in New Zealand , would be equally useful in South Africa . "
To our whole colonial system , and to all our colonies , Parliament must apply the same rule . Better the abolition of the Colonial-office , than the estrangement of our colonies . We shall awake some fine morning to find * our dependencies , as the Colonial-office loves to call them , hostile independencies . Now , what a prospect is this , we do not say for a distant , but for an immediate future ! The hour is coming when England may demand the sympathy and the succour of all her children . We shall call to them , but they will not answer ; their averted gaze will be set towards a dawning light ; the light that once guided Washington , and which official tyranny may kindle , but never quench .
1089 Hzf) * Jufl&Ltv [Saturday
1089 HZf ) * JUfl & ltV [ Saturday
Otjit Street Folk. The Labours Of Henry ...
OTJIt STREET FOLK . The labours of Henry Mayhew are of national importance . Emerging from obscurity in 1849 , he was first publicly known as one of the staff of the Morning Chronicle , employed in the Home depart ? ment . The honesty of his " Revelations" compassed his dismissal from that staff , since which event he has started on his own account , and unveiled the mysteries and miseries of London Life ,
among the proletarians and prostitutes . Mr . Mayhew in his own words is " neither Chartist , Protectionist , Socialist , Communist , nor Cooperationist ; but a mere collector of facts , endeavouring to discover the several phenomena of labour with a view of arriving ultimately at the laws and circumstances affecting and controlling the operation and rewards of the labourer , as well as of showing the importance of the poor and the working classes as members of the state . "
Mr . Mayhew has given us the result of his researches in his Revelations of the state of industry throughout the country , published in the Morniny Chronicle , and in his numbers on London Labour and the London Poor , which have appeared weekly since December , IS 50 . These consist of a cyclopaedia of the social condition and earnings of—1 st . Those who will work . 2 . Those that cannot work . 3 . Those that will not work . The life , character , and morals of the Costermongers occupies a prominent part of the pages in these numbers , besides
which Mr . Mayhew has , moreover , published since July , 1851 , weekly numbers on the condition of the London Prostitutes . The general result that has hitherto accrued from his researches , is the discovery of the iniquities perpetrated on working men , through the fines imposed by the slop tailors of the metropolis , the stopping system practised in the cabinet trade , the pence demanded from the sawyers for the use of their tools , and other infamies , showing the necessity of a protective Act of Parliament .
Another result is the discovery of the heathenish condition of the London costerinongers and other street folk , showing that they form a dangerous class , and that something must be done to raise them . Another result is what Mr . Mayhew himself styles " the prodigious shortcomings and jumblings of Political Keonoiny , the dogmas of which are
enunciated with the same confidence as if they were matters oi Revelation , constituting as it were the Bible of Selfishness , the Gospel preached by Mammon , giving uh the last new commandment , 'Do your neighbour as your neighbour would do you , ' in contradistinction to that higher code of kindness and charity which Kdinburgh reviewers und Manchester men do not hesitate now to rank as morbid sentiinentalisiii . "
Lastly , Mr . Mayhew's reseiirehes show the continual reduction of wages in many branches of industry , necessarily reuniting from the improvements of the age in machinery , & c , and terminating in the ruin and starvation of whole masses of the commuity . These results may be Hummed up thus : — 1 . The present condition of labour hIiowh a crescendo of over work and under pay to be the lot of the working cIunscn in the , " laissez-faire" system of tiociety . ' 2 . The great want felt by the proletarian class in the protection of the workman against the tyranny
of capital , and the protection of female ~ vbtu 7 T ssr ? hSi ? r longas * ° *^ % A remarkable feature of the pictures displayed in Mayhew ' s works is the overstrain of Bocfiy h ? i 2 race after happiness and the prevalence of fo 3 play resulting from the licence given to comiS ? tion which establishes the oppression of the S * by the strong . Not that the evil is confined tcS one class or to be cast at any one door The chanism of the existing state of things evident leads to this consummation . We know of few thin more stirring to the soul than the appeal made £ our better feelings in these startling revelations of White Slavery and Prostitution .
rake the instances of the poor journeyman tailor driven to blindness for fear of starvation Z shivering flower girls coming forth with ' their fragrant nosegays from the haunts of corruption and ruin ; take the white slavery of the old wife toiling away in patient despair to find wherewithal to keep her poor bedridden husband from the dreaded workhouse ; take the multitudes who slave all day , and not unfrequently all night , to obtain the wretched weekly 4 s . or 5 s . that scarcely cover their rent .
Follow Mayhew where Jesus loved to go , to the haunts of the publican and sinner , to the daily walks of the halt , the lame , and the blind . He shows us swarms of children , prematurely old in mind and vice , doomed to a life of long , brutalizing drudgery , ignorant of schools and church and God , a heathenish generation in our midst . He shows us their amusements , which exhibit extravagancies in obscenity and sensuality , exciting tears of laughter in the infant scarcely able to walk about alone . And he shows us , under a thick
crust of foul and diseased humanity , bright and pure fountains of heroism and natural nobleness gushing forth from the inmates of the lazar-house , the brothel , and the gaol . There are solemn lessons in these pages , dark with the shades of spiritual death , and yet illumined here and there with beams from , brighter
worlds . It were well for portly millowners and mellow country gentlemen to ruminate upon them over their wine , in their easy chair , by their bright hearth , with the curtains snugly drawn . Let them follow the writer into the daily and nightly haunts of misery and infamy , and let them see on all sides over work and under pay and the principle of individualism stretched to cracking .
We are glad that the instrument of these revelations cannot be pronounced as belonging to the Socialist camp . His grand exhibition of the flaws of our civilization is not an exparte statement . It is difficult to rise from a perusal of his pages without becoming a Socialist ; but his facts have not proceeded from a Socialist pen . Henry Mayhew cannot be classed with any strongly pronounced section of economists . He has happily escaped from the exhausted receiver of antique political
economy , and is not yet enrolled in the ranks of the new army of martyrs . lie belongs to a neutral party , forming the centre between this gauche and droite ; and as such he was admirably calculated for the work that he has so bravely done . We are not , however , without our hopes that one who has probed so deeply the wounds that are inherent in our society , wiil at no distant time find a warmer comfort than that held out by the quackeries emanating from the meagre pharmacopoeia of conservative economy and politics .
The fact that the only substantial p lans , such as mutual pension societies , for alleviating the miseries of the distressed , which are advocated by May hew , by sundry good Samaritans , and by the patient " themselves , involve more or less the principle o association , is a favourable omen . The , iiistnit . H with
of benevolence and sound reason combine •» famished experience in pronouncing this « i-s . remedy for the ilia which all flesh , but especiall y pauper Ucali , is heir to . It m our hope that U ^ despair , the , agony , and the heroism of the I )<)<) r ' "' disclosed in these Revelations , will rivet the thoi ' K " of those who have breathing time in the iever o life , and can rest on their oars to look around tl >«» -
A Lesson From This Lord Mayors Hi Iow. W...
A LESSON FROM THIS LORD MAYORS HI IOW . Wickk there any democrats looking at the : ! ' <*< Mayor ' s nhovv on Monday ? This i « a I'f I ' , ' question . I ' alher the whole population can !)<> < lraw ¦ forth , and yet the absent democrats be so lew u * they cannot be missed—or there were , in tno riicuso concourse that witnessed that ancient aruj > good store of dcmocrutH . We incline to the luttu
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 15, 1851, page 12, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_15111851/page/12/
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