Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The third vice--for it is a vice--which we know to be prevalent in
Wales, is the extreme dirt and untidiness of all the inhabitants. Go
into any Welsh town or village, and observe the squalid shabby look of
the houses and their tenants; visit their farms and cottages, and see
the wretched filth in which men and animals herd together, and you
will bear witness to the truth of our assertion. There is no spirit of
order and improvement among them; every thing is done on the principle
of the least possible present trouble. Were the Welsh blessed with the
climate of Naples, they would, every one of them, become pure
Lazzaroni,--as it is, they approximate to the Irish in their innate
indolence and love of dirt. Whenever the commissioners for the health
of towns receive their full power, they will have an Augean stable to
cleanse, comprising the whole Principality.
Even here, however, we are disposed to find some excuse for the
people. They have so few resident gentry, at least of the larger
proprietors; their country is so wild and so lonely; the difficulties
of poverty and bad weather which they have to contend against are so
great, that the philanthropical inquirer must make large allowances
for them on this head. The commissioners found most of the country
schools conducted in the most wretched buildings; but perhaps these
buildings were some of the very best and cleanest in the district:
they thought them neglected, and in bad repair; whereas the
inhabitants might have supposed that they "had done the correct
thing," and had adorned them in a style of lavish expenditure.
We might go on multiplying our extracts and our comments _ad
infinitum_, but we purposely abstain; and we shall conclude our review
of these highly important documents with one or two inferences that
seem to us obviously necessary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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