We have had a matter of ten children, six whereof are living. My eldest
son is engineer in the Italian steam-packet ‘Mezzo Giorno, plying between
Marseilles and Naples, and calling at Genoa, Leghorn, and Civita
Vecchia.’ He was a good workman. He invented a many useful little
things that brought him in—nothing. I have two sons doing well at
Sydney, New South Wales—single, when last heard from. One of my sons
(James) went wild and for a soldier, where he was shot in India, living
six weeks in hospital with a musket-ball lodged in his shoulder-blade,
which he wrote with his own hand. He was the best looking. One of my
two daughters (Mary) is comfortable in her circumstances, but water on
the chest. The other (Charlotte), her husband run away from her in the
basest manner, and she and her three children live with us. The
youngest, six year old, has a turn for mechanics.
I am not a Chartist, and I never was. I don’t mean to say but what I see
a good many public points to complain of, still I don’t think that’s the
way to set them right. If I did think so, I should be a Chartist. But I
don’t think so, and I am not a Chartist. I read the paper, and hear
discussion, at what we call ‘a parlour,’ in Birmingham, and I know many
good men and workmen who are Chartists. Note. Not Physical force.
It won’t be took as boastful in me, if I make the remark (for I can’t put
down what I have got to say, without putting that down before going any
further), that I have always been of an ingenious turn. I once got
twenty pound by a screw, and it’s in use now. I have been twenty year,
off and on, completing an Invention and perfecting it. I perfected of
it, last Christmas Eve at ten o’clock at night. Me and my wife stood and
let some tears fall over the Model, when it was done and I brought her in
to take a look at it.
A friend of mine, by the name of William Butcher, is a Chartist.
Moderate. He is a good speaker. He is very animated. I have often
heard him deliver that what is, at every turn, in the way of us
working-men, is, that too many places have been made, in the course of
time, to provide for people that never ought to have been provided for;
and that we have to obey forms and to pay fees to support those places
when we shouldn’t ought. ‘True,’ (delivers William Butcher), ‘all the
public has to do this, but it falls heaviest on the working-man, because
he has least to spare; and likewise because impediments shouldn’t be put
in his way, when he wants redress of wrong or furtherance of right.’
Note. I have wrote down those words from William Butcher’s own mouth.
W. B. delivering them fresh for the aforesaid purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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