ABSTRACT
In the mean time, the farm labourers, for whose benefit, and that of the farmers, legislative protection had been so long continued, were ungratefully burning the ricks of their employers. “There are now,” says The League, of July 6th, 1844, “tens of thousands of men working for 7s., 6s., and 5s. a week, and from whose miserable pittances deductions are made whenever the weather or the farmers’ arrangements may render their services for a day or a half day of little use. This fact is clearly established. Such a state of things is proved to exist in the east of England by the evidence of the Times reporter, and the reports of other newspapers, by the admissions of the landowners, the magistrates, and the residents of that side of our island; in the west of England the labourers themselves have assembled in public meetings, and in simple and pathetic language have proclaimed the existence of the same evils there. This is enough to account for incendiarism, or any other of the dreadful crimes ignorant men commit when they are rendered criminal by the extremity of suffering and despair. We stop not now to inquire whether the particular way in which legal charity is afforded under the actual poor law be an immediate cause of some, or all, or any of the incendiary fires in Suffolk and Norfolk, as the Times asserts and the Chronicle denies; but we know that the condition of the great mass of the farm-labourers is so destitute, and apparently so utterly hopeless, that we seek for no secondary or subsidiary cause. And what aggravates this evil is the fact, that all this misery—this, for the present, hopeless misery—is the gratuitous infliction of our dominant landed aristocracy.”
