a sum never exceeded before (£10.5 million). This rise in the price of wheat taxed the working population of Bolton, for instance, as much as £195,000, which together with the reduction in wages amounted to a net loss of £325,000.1 It goes without saying that this sudden rise in the price of wheat, due primarily to the high import duties, at the time of a well-nigh universal state of unemployment, robbed many families of the bare necessities of life. In one case a man was seen standing over a swill tub, into which was thrown the wash for the pigs, and taking several pieces out and eating them with a voracious appetite.2 A farmer testified that about twenty females from Crompton and Shaw, near Oldham, begged him to allow them to disinter the body of a cow which had been buried a day and a half. Upon his permission the women "disinterred the body, cut it into pieces, took it to their respective families, who not only ate heartily of the carrion, but declared the meat to be the best they had tasted for many months past ". 3 In Johnstone mothers were witnessed who divided a farthing salt herring and a half-pennyworth of potatoes among a family of seven; others mixed sawdust with oatmeal in making their porridge, to enable each to have a mouthful, while still other families lived for ten days on beans and peas and ears of wheat stolen from the neighboring fields. Children wrangled with one another in the streets for the offal which well-to-do people did not allow their dogs to eat. Starving families seized the vilest substances which could protract for a few hours their miserable existence. Half-dressed wretches crowded together to save 4 1 Hansard, op. cit., vol. lviii, p. 31; vol. lxiii, p. 1125. 2 Ibid., vol. lviii, p. 595. Ibid. See also affidavit to the same effect in vol. Ixiii, p. 26. 4 Ibid., vol. lix, p. 759. themselves from the pain of cold. Several women were found in the middle of the day imprisoned in one bed under a blanket, because as many others who had on their backs all the articles of dress that belonged to the party were out of doors.1 Colonel T. P. Thompson, describing in the Sun the distress he witnessed in Bolton in 1841, says: I think I know what is the minimum of help by which horse, ass, dog, hog or monkey can sustain existence, and where it must go out for want of appliance and means of living. But anything like the squalid misery, the slow, moulding, putrifying death by which the weak and the feeble of the working classes are perishing here, it never befel my eyes to behold, nor my imagination to conceive.2 Such conditions being the rule and not the exception, there is little wonder that various diseases took root in the poor quarters and became the scourge of all industrial cities. Consumption and febrile diseases of a malignant and fatal character, together with plagues, prevailed in almost every house, and raised the mortality of the population to a point threatening almost racial extermination. The Reports of the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of England, as well as the Parliamentary Reports, contain an amazing mass of evidence to that effect. In Liverpool, for example, the average longevity of the gentry and professionals in 1840 was 35 years; that of business men and skilled mechanics, 22 years, while that of day-laborers, operatives, etc., was only 15 years. The variation of mortality in different districts of the metropolis in 1838 amounted, according to the first annual report of the registrar-general, to 100 per cent. The report of one of the medical officers 1 Report on Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain, 1842, p. 24. 2 Quoted by Archibald Prentice, op. cit., vol. i, p. 270. stated explicitly that the dwelling condition in Liverpool was the source of many diseases, "particularly catarrh, rheumatic affections, and tedious cases of typhus mitior, which, owing to the overcrowded state of the apartment, occasionally pass into typhus gravior". The cellars especially became hot-beds of epidemic diseases. In 1837 the same medical officer attended "a family of thirteen, twelve of whom had typhus fever, without a bed in the cellar, without straw or timber shavings-frequent substitutes. They lay on the floor, and so crowded, that I could scarcely pass between them". In another house, fourteen patients were found lying on boards, and during their illness, had never removed their clothes.1 Nassau W. Senior testified that he had found in Manchester a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be had without the cost of digging, and that not a single house of that street had escaped the cholera. The extent of the spread of diseases in industrial centers can be realized from the fact that the total number of patients admitted to the dispensaries in the Manchester district during the six years ending in 1836 was 54,000, whereas the total number of those admitted during the six years of dear food ending in 1841 reached 169,000,-an increase of over 200 per cent.3 The opponents of the New Poor Law pointed out repeatedly that the new measure would propagate crime. Cobbett was particularly emphatic on this point. Robbery, murder and violence would become a matter of dire neces 1 1 See Report on the Handloom Weavers, 1841, vol. x, p. 350; cf. also Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain, 1842, pp. 17-25. 'Nassau W. Senior, Letters on the Factory Act to the Rt. Hon. the President of the Board of Trade, London, 1837, p. 24. 3 Hansard, op. cit., vol. lxiii, p. 1124. sity, prophesied he.1 "What remains for the laborer but plunder?"-protested another." There is no law for a starving man—there is no tie of conscience or principle binding on a famished wretch who hears a wife and children clamorous for food." The prophecies soon became facts. Offenses of the most heinous nature spread with epidemic rapidity over the whole country and especially in the manufacturing districts. The total expense for suppression of crime in 1841 amounted to the enormous sum of £604,165, the expense for a single convict being equal to the cost of education of one hundred and seventeen children. The loss by plunder at Liverpool alone amounted in that year to £700,000. The progress of crime can be seen from the following table:* 2 George Stephen, Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord John Russell on the Probable Increase of Rural Crime, London, 1836, p. 4. 'Hansard, vol. lxvii, p. 66. See Official Report of 1846, no. 460, in vol. xxv. The increase of population as deduced from Census returns is even smaller. Thus, according to the Census reports, the total population in 1836 was 14,758,000, and in 1842, 15,981,000-an increase of 12,000 less than in our table. Of the commitments of 1842 not less than 8,591, or nearly 28 per cent, were made in the two manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Middlesex, including London, although the population of those districts was far from constituting such a large percentage of the total. The official report of Lancashire showed that the increase of crime in that district was nearly six times as great as that of the population. The Poor Law Commissioners could boast of the effect of their measures which brought about an annual average saving of a couple of millions in the expenditures for poor relief. But England paid too high a price for these sterling pounds by forcing multitudes of people into the “bastiles ". The wretchedness of the situation can be gauged from the growing number of workhouse inmates as shown in the following table. Bearing in mind that nothing but actual starvation could force the people to entetr the relief-prisons, such an increase tells a sorry tale. Within five years the workhouse population of England and Wales almost doubled. 3.3 11.0 169,000 29,000 20.7 17.4 1841. 1,108,000 111,000 70.7 40.4 Table III shows clearly that while the stringent administrators of the New Poor Law began to discern the hand This table is constructed on the basis of data given in Hansard, op. cit., vol. lxv, p. 367, vol. lxvi, pp. 1178-1179, and in George Nichols' History of the English Poor Law, London, 1854, vol. ii, p. 375. |