ABSTRACT
I N The Times of April 14, 1862, appeared the first of a series of letters from " A Lancashire Lad," pleading with true and simple eloquence the cause of the distressed operatives. He said : " I am living in the centre of a vast district where there are many cotton mills, which in ordinary times afford employment to many thousands of ' hands,' and food to many more thousands of mouths. With very rare exceptions, quietness reigns at all those mills. * * * It may be that our material atmosphere is somewhat brighter than it was, but our social atmosphere is much darker and denser. Hard times have come ; and we have had them sufficiently long to know what they mean. We have fathers sitting in the house at mid-day, silent and glum, while children look wistfully about, and sometimes whimper for bread which they cannot have. We have the same fathers who, before hard times came, were proud men, who would have thought ' beggar' the most opprobrious epithet you could have hit them with ; but who now are made humble by the sight of wife and children almost starving, and who go before ' relief committees,' and submit to be questioned about their wants with a patience and humility which it is painful, almost shocking, to witness. And some others of these fathers turn out in the morning with longbesoms as street sweepers, while others again go to breaking stones in the town's yard or open road-side, where they are unprotected from the keen east winds which add a little more to the burden of misery which they have to bear just now. But harder even than this, our factory women and girls have had to turn out ; and plod-- ding a weary way from door to door, beg a bit of bread or a stray copper that they may eke out the scanty supply at home. Only
the other day, while taking a long stroll in the country lying about the town in which I live, I met a few of these factory girls, and was stopped by their not very beggar-like question of ' Con yo help us a bit ?' They were just such as my own sisters; and as I saw and heard them I was almost choked as I fancied my sisters come to such a pass as that. ' Con yo help us a bit ?' asked these factory girls. * * * I have heard of ladies whose whole lives seem to be but a changing from one kind of pleasure to another; who suffer chiefly from what they call ennui (a kind of disease from which my sisters are not likely to suffer at all), and to whom a new pleasure to enjoy would be something like what a new world to conquer would be to Alexander. Why should they not hear our Lancashire girls' cry of ' Con yo help us a bit ?' Why should not they be reminded that these girls in cotton gowns and wooden clogs are wending their way towards the same heaven-or, alas, towards the same hell-whither wend all the daughters of Eve, no matter what their outer condition and dress ? Why should not they be asked to think how these striving girls have to pray daily, ' Lead us not into temptation,' while temptations innumerable stand everywhere about them ? * * * Those of us who are men would rather do much than let our sisters go begging. May not some of us take to doing more to prevent it? I remember some poetry about the
and know that they hunt oftener together than singly. We have felt the fangs of the first : upon how many of us will the second pounce ?"
