FIFTH THOUSAND.
THE WHITE SLAVES
OF
ENGLAND.
COMPILED FROM OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS.
WITH TWELVE SPIRITED ILLUSTRATIONS.
BY JOHN C. COBDEN.
AUBURN AND BUFFALO:
MILLER ORTON & MULLIGAN.
1854.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred andfifty-three, by
Derby and Miller,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Northern District of New-York.
The following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrageequally abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. Thefrightful abuses which are here set forth, are, from their enormity,difficult of belief; yet they are supported by testimonythe most impartial, clear and irrefutable. These abuses aretime-honored, and have the sanction of a nation which prides itselfupon the freedom of its Constitution; and which holds upits government to the nations of the earth as a model of regulatedliberty. Vain, audacious, false assumption! Let the refutationbe found in the details which this volume furnishes, ofthe want, misery and starvation—the slavish toil—the menialdegradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. Let herminers, her operatives, the tenants of her workhouses, hernaval service, and the millions upon millions in the EmeraldIsle and in farther India attest its fallacy.
These are the legitimate results of the laws and institutionsof Great Britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or lessdegree, all her dependencies. Her church and state, and herlaws of entail and primogeniture, are the principal sources ofthe evils under which her people groan; and until these are[Pg 6]changed there is no just ground of hope for an improvementin their condition. The tendency of things is, indeed, to makematters still worse. The poor are every year becoming poorer,and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings;while the wealth and power of the realm are annuallyconcentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instrumentsof oppression. The picture is already sufficientlyrevolting. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine children of thesame common Father, suffer from destitution, that the thousandthmay revel in superfluities. A thousand cottages shrinkinto meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a single palace.The tables of a thousand families of the industrious poor wasteaway into drought and barrenness, that one board may be ladenwith surfeits."
From these monstrous evils there seems to be little chanceof escape, except by flight; and happy is it for the victims ofoppression, that an asylum is open to them, in which they canfully enjoy the rights and privileges, from which, for ages, theyhave been debarred. Let them come. The feudal chainswhich so long have bound them can here be shaken off. Herethey can freely indulge the pure impulses of the mind and thesoul, untrammeled by political or religious tyranny. Herethey can enjoy the beneficent influences of humane institutionsand laws, and find a vast and ample field in which to developand pro