Atlantic States -- Description and travel; Kemble, Fanny, 1809-1893; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1783-1865
home; sat diligently crying the whole morning. The afternoon cleared up,
and became soft and sunny. My father insisted on my taking a walk; so I
bonneted and set out with him. What I saw of the town appeared to me
extremely like the outskirts of Birmingham or Manchester. Bright-red
brick houses, in rows of three and five, with interesting gaps of
gravel-pits, patches of meadow, and open spaces between, which give it
an untidy straggling appearance. They are building in every direction,
however, and in less than two years, these little pauses being filled
up, Baltimore will be a very considerable place; for it covers, in its
present state, a large extent of ground, and contains a vast population.
Immediately after dinner, our host made his entrée with a piano-forte. I
had suggested to Mr. ---- that I should be glad of one; and here it
came. I had asked him to return in the evening, and was glad of the
piano, for it helps the time away. At six o'clock, the managers of the
Holliday Street theatre made their appearance; and my father stating
that Mr. ---- was literally unable to fulfil his engagement with us,
entered into arrangements with them, during which I sat up at a
tremendously high window, looking at the beautiful serious skies, and
radiant moon, and listening to a tolerable band playing sundry of
Rossini's airs. When these men had departed, ---- came in. I sang and
made him sing till tea-time. After that, he entertained us with a very
long, but not very clear, account of the various processes of making,
polishing, etc. steel, as practised in his manufactory. His account of
their hard dealings with the poorer manufacturers was dreadful; and he
himself spoke with horror of it, saying, "Oh, they are so miserably
ground, poor wretches, they cannot be said to live,--they barely exist."
When I remonstrated with him upon the wickedness of such proceedings, he
replied, "We are compelled to do it in self-defence: if we did not use
the same means as other manufacturers, we should presently be
undersold." And this is the game playing all over England at this
moment, in every department of her commerce and manufacture,--this cruel
oppression of the poor, this forcing them by a league against them, as
it were, to toil in bitterness for their scanty daily bread, while those
who thus inhumanly depreciate their labour, and wring their hard
earnings from their starving grasp, grow wealthy on their plunder. Are
not these the things for which God has said he will avenge? Is his
abomination of the false balance, and the stinted measure, and the
unjust reckoning, less than in the days when he said he would visit the
oppressor of the poor, and plead the cause of the widow and fatherless?
Are not these the things that make a nation rotten at core, and ripe for
decay? Are not these the things for which retribution is laid up, and
fourfold restitution will be demanded?--'Tis awful to think of. From
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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