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Europe, to examine the comparative social condition of the poorer classes of the different countries. His labors were finished in 1850. After completing the ablest and most exhaustive treatise ever published on this subject, he closes with these words:

"The poor of England are more depressed, more pauperized, more numerous in comparison to the other classes, more irreligious, and very much worse educated than the poor of any other European nation, solely excepting Russia, Turkey, South Italy, Portugal, and Spain."

L

III.

ET us begin at the beginning; let us trace these foul waters to the fountain head. Who owns the land on which twenty millions live?

For the last century there has been a growing tendency, all through the three Kingdoms, to increase the great estates and diminish the number of small freeholds. In 1688, while England had a population of only 5,500,000, one hundred and seventy thousand of them were landholders; and in 1786 the number rose to 250,000. In 1861, with a population of over 20,000,000, England had but 30,766 landholders; thus, with five times the population she had only one-sixth as many landholders, making a disproportion in a little less than two centuries of nearly thirty to one. The baleful results of such a system on the independence and prosperity of the agricultural class, must be apparent at a single thought. The yeomanry, of whom England could once proudly boast as the bone and sinew of a free state, have been, especially during the last twenty years, driven in increasing numbers into other and less healthful pursuits, or to distant lands; while the great mass of tenants and farm laborers are brought into subjection to the will of the lord of the soil, who can turn them from their holdings at his pleasure.

In a recent able article in the Westminster Review, the writer

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MR. KAY'S INVESTIGATIONS.

says: "In ten English counties the number of farms under one hundred acres in extent, decreased from 31,583 in 1851, to 26,567 in 1861, and 5,016 small holdings, in ten counties alone, were swallowed up wholly. . . . The body of the yeomanry, once an important element in the strength and stability of the nation, has now quite disappeared, and the agriculturalists generally have actually declined, from 1851 to 1861, 87,337. No thinking man, much less one who has the slightest idea of the sources of the wealth and prosperity of a people, need be told what must necessarily be the result of such a system, especially upon a people like the English, whose laboring classes have reached a point of degradation unequaled in any civilized nation on earth."

THE

IV.

HE American editor of Mr. Kay's work, who has devoted special attention to the subject, well says: (Harpers' edit.)

"In 1861, before the cotton famine commenced, and with no war on their hands, England and Ireland's paupers had increased about five per cent. yearly since 1851: with three millions more population, less land was under cultivation than in 1851, and one-third of her people were fed from foreign sources. A government founded on the power of a class must produce the results described by Mr. Kay. Among the lower orders, the grandfather, the father and the son, alike wallow in the mud, and will continue to do so as long as they see no path to wealth; and that path will never open to the masses of Great Britain during the maintenance of her present law of primogeniture, of land tenure and transfer, for the protection of the Church, and finally, that franchise permitting only one million of votes in her thirty millions population."

V.

TOW Mr. Kay shall speak for himself awhile; and he and

NOW

other unimpeachable authorities shall say what will come with better grace from them than from any foreigner, and least of all from an American.

"During the last half-century everything has been done to deprive the peasant of any inter

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est in the preservation of public order; of any wish to maintain the existing constitution of society of all hope of raising himself in the world, or of improving his condition in life; of all attachment to his country; of all feelings of there really existing any community of interest between himself and the higher ranks of society. . . .

.....

"The laborer has no longer any connection with the land which he cultivates; he has no stake in the country; he has nothing to lose, nothing to defend, and nothing to hope for. The word 'cottage' has ceased to mean what it once meant-a small house surrounded by its little plot of land, which the inmate might cultivate as he pleased, for the support and gratification of his family and himself. The small freeholds have been long since bought up and merged in the great estates. Copyholds have become almost extinct, or have been purchased by the great landowners. The commons, upon which the villagers once had the right of pasturing cattle for their own use, and on which, too, the games and pastimes of the villages were held, have followed the same course; they are enclosed, and now form part of the possessions of the great landowners. Small holdings of every kind have, in like manner, amost entirely disappeared. Farms have gradually become larger and larger, and are now, in most parts of the country, far out of the peasant's reach, on account of their size, and of the amount of capital requisite to cultivate them. The gulf between the peasant and the next step in the social scale-the farmer -is widening and increasing day by day. The laborer is thus left without any chance of improving his condition. His position is one of hopeless and irremediable dependence. The workhouse stands near him, pointing out his dismal fate if he fall one step lower, and, like a grim scarecrow, warning him to betake himself to some more hospitable region, where he will find no Middle-Age institutions opposing his industrious efforts.

"It is no answer to all this, to tell me, that in Ireland the peasants have small plots of land, and that their state is still worse than that of our own people. The poor Irish have no certainty of tenure, and may be tarned out of their little plots, even into the bleak and inhospitable night, without a remedy. They feel no interest in good farming, or in the improvement of their little lands; nor dare they expend capital upon them, even when they have any to expend; for they know not when they may be turned adrift, or when they may be deprived of their plots and their improvements. Fifty years ago it was so in all parts of Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and France: the peasants were mere tenants-at-will, and cared as little about their plots as tenants-at-will always have done; and their state in those days was just as miserable, and they were just as discontented, as the peasants of Ireland now are. The governments of those countries were forced to enable the tenants to purchase their plots; and since then, the condition and character of the peasants, and of the little proprietors, have been immeasurably improved; and now, the most prudent, economical and conservative members of those countries, are the peasants and proprietors of the soil.

"To become the proprietor of a small portion of land, is the next step in the social scale, by which alone a peasant can hope to rise: to add gradually to the first acquired portion, are the after steps. But we, and we alone, of all the well-governed European nations, have deprived our peasant of all possibility of climbing the first of these steps, and of ever raising himself above the peasant class.

"The social position of the peasants of England and Wales has considerably deteriorated in the last half-century. Fifty years ago, the farms were very much smaller, and much more numerous, than at present. They did not require nearly so much capital to work them. They were not, therefore, removed, nearly so far, out of the reach of the peasants as at present. Any peasant, who was industrious and careful enough to lay by sufficient to stock a small farm, might reasonably hope to become a tenant of one. Besides this, there were many small farins in every county of England and Wales, which were either freeholds or copyholds, and which belonged to the farmers themselves. These small proprietors were the survivors of the old English yeomanry; men who felt that they had a stake in the country, and who were filled with that old English feeling of sturdy independence and honest self-reliance, which always distinguishes a class of small proprietors, and which peculiarly distinguished our old yeomanry. The small proprietors and farmers formed a class, to which the tenant farmers and the peasantry themselves looked up with feelings of interest and pride; knowing that the freehold farmers had sprung, in many cases, from the ranks of the peasantry themselves, and knowing

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that if they exerted themselves with equal industry, prudence and economy, they, too, might possibly rise to the same positions in the social scale.

"But all this class of yeomanry farmers have disappeared; the small tenant farmers are likewise rapidly disappearing; the smaller farms are gradually being united, so as to form large ones; and the chasm between the peasant and the next step in the social scale is every day becoming wider."

VI.

F such be the peasant, how does he live? What is a peasant's cottage-what is a peasant's life? To answer these questions, I must take my readers on a pretty thorough tramp through England and Wales; giving them first Mr. Kay's general descriptive classification of the dwellings of the agricultural laborers:

"Small cottages built of brick, of only one story in height, with a thatched roof, and without any cellar, so that the bricks or flags of the room rest immediately on the earth, with two small rooms, between seven and eight feet in height, one used as the day room and cookingroom, the other as the bed-room, where husband and wife, young men and young women, boys and girls, and very often a married son and his wife, all sleep together; without any garden, and with only a very small yard at the back, in which the privy stands almost close to the back door, pouring its gases into the house at all hours. This species of cottage is to be found in all parts of England and Wales.

"Cottages which have two stories, with one small kitchen room on the ground floor, and with another small room above on the first floor, in which the whole family, father, mother and children of both sexes sleep together. These houses have generally no garden, and only a small yard behind, in which the privy stands close to the back door. This class is very numerous throughout the country.

"The third class of cottages are those which have two stories-the ground floor, where there is a day-room and a little scullery, and the upper floor, on which there are two bed-rooms, in one of which the parents sleep, and in the other of which the children, boys and girls, and young men and young women, all sleep together. In many parts of England and Wales this class of cottages is very rare.

"The accounts we receive from all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively increasing. People of both sexes, and of all ages, both married and unmarried-parents, brothers, sisters and strangerssleep in the same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentleman tells us of six people, of different sexes and ages, two of whom were man and wife, sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other; another of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together; another of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same room with a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so filled with beds that there is no space between them, but that brothers, sisters and parents crawl over each other half naked in order to get to their respective resting-places; another, of its being common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another of cases where women have been delivered in bed-rooms crowded with men, young women and children; and others mention facts of these crowded bed-rooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen writing in ALL parts of the country.

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"The miserable character of the houses of our peasantry is, of itself, and independently of the causes which have made the houses so wretched, degrading and demoralizing the poor of our rural districts in a fearful manner. It stimulates the unhealthy and unnatural increase of population. The young peasants from their earliest years are accustomed to sleep in the same bed-rooms with people of both sexes, and with both married and unmarried persons. They therefore lose all sense of the indelicacy of such a life. They know, too, that they can gain nothing by deferring their marriages and by saving; that it is impossible for them to obtain better houses by so doing; and that in many cases they must wait many years before they could obtain a separate house of any sort. They feel, that if they defer their marriage for ten or fifteen years, they will be at the end of that period in just the same position as before, and no better off for their waiting. Having then lost all hope of any improvement of their social sitation, and all sense of the indelicacy of taking a wife home to the bed-room already occupied by parents, brothers and sisters, they marry early in life-often, if not generally, before the age of twenty-and very often occupy, for the first part of their married life, another bed in the already crowded sleeping-room of their parents! In this way the morality of the peasants is destroyed; the numbers of this degraded population are unnaturally increased, and their means of subsistence are diminished by the increasing competition of their increasing numbers.

"A low standard of living always tends to stimulate improvident marriages, to unduly increase the numbers of the population, and to engender pauperism, vice, degradation and misery.

"As I have said before, the landlords are unwilling to increase the number of cottages in the rural districts, because they fear to increase the numbers of the resident laboring population, and the amount of their poor-rates; and they are generally unwilling, even when they are able, to spend money in improving the size or character of the cottages, because they know that they can easily let any of the existing cottages, no matter how wretched, owing to the great demand for house-room.

"The crowding of the cottages has, therefore, of late been growing worse and worse. The promiscuous mingling of the sexes in the bed-rooms has been increasing very much, and is productive of worse consequences every year. Adultery is the very mildest form of the vast amount of crime which it is engendering. We are told by magistrates, clergy men, surgeons and union officers, that in many parts of the country, cases of incest, and reports of other cases of the same enormity, are becoming more and more common among the poor. And there is no doubt whatsoever-and in this all accounts and authorities agree-that the way in which the married and unmarried people, and the different sexes, are mingled together, in the same bedrooms, and even in the same beds, throughout the rural districts, is tending to destroy the modesty and virtue of the women, to annihilate the foundations on which are based all the national and domestic virtues, and to make want of chastity before marriage, and want of delicacy and purity after marriage, common characteristics of the mothers and wives of our laboring population."

VII.

ONLY

NLY one conclusion can be reached from all this-it forces itself upon every mind—that the great primary causes of the pauperism and degradation of the English peasants are the utter hopelessness and helplessness of their position. Everything is done to prevent their helping themselves. They are deprived of every strong inducement to practice self-denial, prudence and economy. The peasant cannot buy land as the