Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the
labourers. The cause is this, the great, the big bull frog grasps all.
In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich.
No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided
into great farms; a few trees surround the great farm-house. All the
rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of
wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down
upon. The rabbit countries are the countries for labouring men. There
the ground is not so valuable. There it is not so easily appropriated by
the few. Here, in this island, the work is almost all done by the
horses. The horses plough the ground; they sow the ground; they hoe the
ground; they carry the corn home; they thresh it out; and they carry it
to market: nay, in this island, they _rake_ the ground; they rake up the
straggling straws and ears; so that they do the whole, except the
reaping and the mowing. It is impossible to have an idea of anything
more miserable than the state of the labourers in this part of the
country.
After coming by Margate, I passed a village called Monckton, and another
called Sarr. At Sarr there is a bridge, over which you come out of the
island, as you go into it over the bridge at Sandwich. At Monckton they
had _seventeen men working on the roads_, though the harvest was not
quite in, and though, of course, it had all to be threshed out; but, at
Monckton, they had _four threshing machines_; and they have three
threshing machines at Sarr, though there, also, they have several men
upon the roads! This is a shocking state of things; and, in spite of
everything that the Jenkinsons and the Scots can do, this state of
things must be changed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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