Read
that book; and then ask yourselves, is it wonderful that, in one
district, before the mission of the society for which I plead was
established, the poor used seriously to believe that it was the wish and
endeavour of the rich to grind them down, and keep them poor. We, of
course, know that the poor folk were mistaken but do we not know, too--
some of us--that there are political economists in the world, who, though
they would not willingly make the poor poorer than they are, are still of
opinion that it is good for the nation, on the whole, that the present
state of things should continue; that there should be always a reserve of
labour, in plain English, a vast multitude who have not quite work enough
to live on, ready to be called on in any emergency of business, and used,
to beat down, by their competition, the wages of their fellow-workmen?
Is this theory altogether novel and unheard of? Or this theory also,
that for this very reason, Emigration, which looks the very simplest
remedy for most of this want,--while nine-tenths of the bounteous earth
is waiting to be subdued and replenished by the poor wretches who cannot
get at it--that Emigration, I say, is an unnecessary movement--that the
people are all wanted at home--to be such as the parson and the mission
women find them?
And it may be that the poor folk have heard--for a bird of the air may
carry the matter in these days of a free press--that some rich folk, at
least, hold this opinion, and translate it freely out of the delicate
language of political economy, into the more vigorous dialect used in the
fever alleys and smallpox courts in which the poor are left to wait for
work.
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