John C. Cobden

“ So much for the boasted charity of the dominant class in Great Britain! By its enormous drain upon the public purse, and its vast monopoly of that soil which was given for the use of all, it creates millions of paupers—wretches without homes, without resources, and almost without hope; and then, to prevent themselves from being hurled from their high and luxurious places, and from being devoured as by ravenous wolves, they take the miserable paupers in hand, separate families, shut them up, as in the worst of prisons, and give them something to keep life in their bodies. ”

“ England prides herself upon her efforts to destroy the trade in African savages and chattel slavery. Her philanthropy is all black; miserable wretches with pale faces have no claims upon her assisting hand; and she refuses to recognise the only kind of slavery by which masters are necessitated to provide well for their slaves, while she enforces that system which starves them! England is the best friend of the most destructive species of slavery, and has extended it over tens of millions of human beings. ”

“ The dearest ties of family are sundered by the force of want. The necessity of seeking a subsistence drives the father to a distant land, while the child is compelled to remain in Ireland a pauper. The husband can pay his own passage to America, perchance, but the wife must stay in the land of misery. Ask Ireland if a slave can breathe in Great Britain! The long lamentation of ages, uniting with the heart-broken utterances of her present wretched bondsmen, might touch even the British aristocracy in its reply. ”

“ The curse of Ireland was on the place. Landlord and tenant, gentleman and peasant, each with the roots and the shoots of many virtues in their hearts, thrown into a false position by the mutual injuries of ages, had wreaked on each other the miseries sown broadcast by their ancestors. Beneath this foul spell men who would, in any other circumstances, have been the happiest and the noblest of mankind, became tyrants; and peasants, who would have glowed with grateful affection toward them, exulted in being their assassins. ”

“ Such is a brief glance at the mal-administration, the abuse, and the murderous treatment of India, permitted by great and Christian England to a knot of mere money-making traders. We commit the lives and happiness of one hundred and fifty millions of souls—the well-being, and probably the chance of retention, of one of the finest countries in the world, and the comfort and prosperity of every human creature in Great Britain, to the hands of those who are only, from day to day, grasping at the vitals of this glorious Eastern region to increase their dividends. ”

“ So much for the slavery of the factories—a slavery which destroys human beings, body and soul. The fate of the helpless children condemned to such protracted, exhausting toil, under such demoralizing influences, with the lash constantly impending over them, and no alternative but starvation, is enough to excite the tears of all humane persons. That such a system should be tolerated in a land where a Christian church is a part of the government, is indeed remarkable—proving how greatly men are disinclined to practise what they profess. ”

“ Down the steep ladder they stumbled into the misery of a 'bounty' ship. A long, dark gallery, on each side of which were ranged the berths; narrow shelves open to every prying eye; where, for four months, the inmates were to be packed like herrings in a barrel, without room to move, almost without air to breathe; the mess table, running far aft the whole distance between the masts, left little room for passing, and that little was encumbered with all manner of boxes, packages, and infants, crawling about like rabbits in a warren. ”

“ We design to prove in this work that the oligarchy which owns Great Britain at the present day is the best friend of human slavery, and that its system is most barbarous and destructive. Those feudal institutions which reduced to slavery the strong-minded race of whites, are perpetuated in Great Britain, to the detriment of freedom wherever the British sway extends. Institutions which nearly every other civilized country has abolished, and which are at least a century behind the age, still curse the British islands and their dependencies. ”

“ In England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, they have the entire labouring mass for their slaves—men, women, and children being doomed to the most grinding toil to enable their masters to live in luxurious ease. In India and the other colonies they have treated the natives as the conquered were treated in the Middle Ages. They have drained their resources, oppressed them in every way, and disposed of tribes and nations as if they had been dealing with cattle. Add the slaves of India to the slaves of the United Kingdom, and we may count them by tens of millions. ”

“ We have thus shown that Ireland has long endured, and still endures, a cruel system of slavery, for which we may seek in vain for a parallel. It matters not that the Irish serf may leave his country; while he remains he is a slave to a master who will not call him property, chiefly because it would create the necessity of careful and expensive ownership. If the Irish master took his labourer for his slave in the American sense, he would be compelled to provide for him, work or not work, in sickness and in old age. ”

“ CHAPTER VII. IRISH SLAVERY.
For centuries the Irish nation has groaned under the yoke of England. The chain has worn to the bone. The nation has felt its strength depart. Many of its noblest and fairest children have pined away in dungeons or starved by the roadside. The tillers of the soil, sweating from sunrise to sunset for a bare subsistence, have been turned from their miserable cabins—hovels, yet homes—and those who have been allowed to remain have had their substance devoured by a government seemingly never satisfied with the extent of its taxation. ”

“ Dark grows the young sailor's face, as he watches the unsuspicious victim glide triumphantly up through the blue water into the undreaded snare; and a glance round, a slight contraction of those lines in his face which Katie Stewart, eagerly watching him, has never seen so strongly marked before, tells the poor wife on the grass enough to make her rise hysterically strong, and with her whole might gaze at the advancing ship; for, alas! one can doubt its identity no longer. ”

“ If we're not beside our bench the very moment the bell's done ringing, our time's docked—they won't give us a single minute out of the hour. If I was working for a fair master, I should do nearly one-third, and sometimes a half, less work than I am now forced to get through; and, even to manage that much, I shouldn't be idle a second of my time. It's quite a mystery to me how they do contrive to get so much work out of the men. But they are very clever people. They know how to have the most out of a man, better than any one in the world. ”

“ These instances of steady, systematic cruelty, in the treatment of children, go far beyond any thing recorded of slave-drivers in other countries. If an American overseer was to whip a slave to death, an awful groan would express the horror of English lords and ladies. But in the factories of Great Britain we have helpless children not only kicked and beaten, but liable at any moment to receive a mortal wound from the billy-roller of an exasperated slubber. ”

“ Why do we complain of their being idle and improvident, and helpless, when we have done every thing we could to make them so? Are our ministers and Parliaments any better? Are they not just as idle, and improvident, and helpless, as it regards Ireland? Has not this evil been growing these three hundred years? Have any remedies been applied but those of Elizabeth, and the Stuarts and Straffords, the Cromwells, and Dutch William's? Arms and extermination? We have built barracks instead of schools; we have sown gunpowder instead of corn—and now we wonder at the people and the crops. ”

“ Their health, physical and moral, is alike destroyed; they die of diseases induced by unremitting task-work, by confinement in the impure atmosphere of crowded rooms, by the particles of metallic or vegetable dust which they are continually inhaling; or they live to grow up without decency, without comfort, and without hope—without morals, without religion, and without shame; and bring forth slaves like themselves to tread in the same path of misery. ”

“ It is ignorance, not as citizens and subjects, but as cultivators and labourers. They are ignorant of the proper rotation of crops, of the preservation and use of manure—in a word, of the means by which the land, for which they are ready to sacrifice their neighbours' lives, and to risk their own, is to be made productive. Their manufactures, such as they are, are rude and imperfect, and the Irish labourer, whether peasant or artisan, who emigrates to Great Britain, never possesses skill sufficient to raise him above the lowest ranks in his trade. ”

“ In France such a rejection of a humble petition from breadless working-men would have been followed by a revolution. In Great Britain the labourers seem to have the inborn submission of hereditary slaves. Though they feel the iron heel of the aristocracy upon their necks, and see their families starving around them, they delay, and still delay, taking that highway to freedom—manly and united rebellion. ”

“ Nay, nature cannot furnish emblems extensive enough, and so start up to our astonished sight the most hideous shapes of fiendlike dragons and griffins, black, blasted as by infernal fires; the most fuliginous of monsters; and if the human shape is assumed for the guardians and supporters of aristocracy, they are wild and savage men, armed with clubs and grim with hair, scowling brute defiance, and seeming ready to knock down any man at the command of their lords. ”

“ There the fat of the land has been garnered up for the luxury of the conquerors, while famine has destroyed the people by thousands. There, indeed, has the British aristocracy displayed its most malignant propensities—rioting in robbery and bloodshed—setting all religion at defiance, while upholding the Christian standard—and earning to the full the continued execration of mankind. ”

“ In brief, the oligarchy lies like an incubus upon the empire, and the people cannot call themselves either free or happy until the aristocrats be driven from their high [Pg 498] places. Burst, then, the chains, ye countrymen of Hampden and Vane! Show to the world that the old fire is not yet quenched! that the spirits of your martyrs to liberty are yet among you, and their lessons in your hearts! Obtain your freedom—peaceably, if you can—but obtain it, for it expands and ennobles the life of a nation! In the air of liberty alone can a people enjoy a healthy existence. ”

“ The stern proud man said, 'Then why, in the name of Heaven, do you not reveal some other remedy? why do you not enlighten all Ireland? why don't you instruct Government? The unhappy wretches who have been swept away by force are no people, no tenants of mine; they squatted themselves down, as a swarm of locusts fix themselves while a green blade is left; they obstruct all improvement; they will not till the ground themselves, nor will they quit it to allow me to provide more industrious and provident husbandmen to cultivate it. ”

“ Hundreds of thousands of human beings seem to be driven into an awful abyss of crime and misery by the iron rule of the aristocracy—an abyss where mothers forget maternal feelings, where marriage vows are scoffed, and where the momentary gratification of brutal passions is alone esteemed. ”

“ Alas! poor country, where each hour teems with a new grievance; where tyranny is so much a custom that the very institutions which have charity written upon their front are turned to dangerous pest-houses, slaving shops, or tombs; where to toil even to extremity is to be rewarded with semi-starvation in styes, and, perhaps, by sudden eviction, and a grave by the wayside; where to entertain certain religious convictions is to invite the whips of persecution, and the particular tyranny of the landlord who adheres to the Church of England ”

“ The United States appear before the eyes of the down-trodden whites of Europe as a land of promise. Thousands of ignorant, degraded wretches, who have fled from their homes to [Pg 7] escape exhausting systems of slavery, annually land upon our shores, and in their hearts thank God that he has created such a refuge. This is the answer—the overwhelming answer—to the decriers of our country and its institutions. These emigrants are more keenly alive to the superiority of our institutions than most persons who have been bred under them, and to their care we might confidently intrust our defence. ”

“ Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master, and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the last extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this; they found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. ”

“ To this society of wretchedness the labouring poor of England look as their last resting-place on this side of the grave; and, rather than enter abodes so miserable, they endure the severest privations as long as it is possible to exist. A feeling [Pg 208] of honest pride makes them shrink from a place where guilt and poverty are confounded; and it is heart-breaking for those who have reared a family of their own to be subjected, in their old age, to the harsh and unfeeling authority of persons younger than themselves, neither better born nor better bred. ”

“ And now there is a hot pursuit—the cutter's boat in full chase after the forlorn hope; but as the sun disappears, and the long shadows lengthen and creep along the creeks and bays of the rocky coast so well known to the pursued, so ill to the pursuer, the event of the race is soon decided; and clambering up the first accessible landing-place they can gain, and leaving their boat on the rocks behind them, the forlorn hope joyously make their way home. ”