6 time, 7,283 are wholly unemployed, and 7,000 are working on short time. Then 1,000 people belonging to other trades depend upon the staple trade, thrown out of work. 30,000 people in Stockport receive relief. But what an amount of misery do those figures represent. The more able-bodied men go tramping over the country to seek work, but spinners and weavers are not able-bodied, and a day’s march often lays them up. Some of them who can sing form a little company, and go singing glees, “ with nobody minding,” and few farthings for their half-starved music. The women also try to win a bitter meal with the sweetness of their voice. A spectator describes a scene of this kind : “ One young woman, about thirty years of age, with a- child in her arms, was standing in a by-street, singing in a sweet, plaintive voice, a Lancashire song. It was her first song in public ; and the tremulous voice and downcast look, as she hugged with nervous grasp her little one, was very touching. When the song was over, the poor creature looked round with a timid air to the bystanders ; but she had miscalculated her strength—the occasion was beyond her power of endurance—and she burst into a passionate flood of tears.”* 1 see in that woman the patient England held in slavery by a selfish Toryism, which would be glad to-morrow to recognize another slavery in order to keep its own fed and quiet. A relieving officer in Stockport, says : “ I have gone into the rooms of the English operatives when they have not had a mouthful of bread under the roof, and perhaps not had what you may call a meal the whole dity, and nothing but shavings to sleep on through the night, yet they talked as cheerfully and resignedly as if there was every prospect of employment on the morrow.” These are subjects of a government which has trained their bodies and souls to do only one thing, to mind the brutifying monotony of one machine, and is now exulting over what it calls the failure of a Democracy, as it lets arms and steamers for a Southern aristocracy slip through one hand, and a little soup for its starving poor through the other. This, then, is the largess of a constitutional monarchy,—piratical cannon and comfort for slave-drivers abroad, and the great institution of Soup for slaves at home I * A Visit to the Cotton Districts, 1862, p. 4.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=