Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
And yet there is an "_Emigration Committee_" sitting to devise the means
of getting _rid_, not of the idlers, not of the pensioners, not of the
dead-weight, not of the parsons, (to "relieve" whom we have seen the
poor labourers taxed to the tune of a million and a half of money) not
of the soldiers; but to devise means of getting rid of _these working
people_, who are grudged even the miserable morsel that they get! There
is in the men calling themselves "English country gentlemen" something
superlatively base. They are, I sincerely believe, the most cruel, the
most unfeeling, the most brutally insolent: but I know, I can prove, I
can safely take my oath, that they are the most base of all the
creatures that God ever suffered to disgrace the human shape. The base
wretches know well, that the _taxes_ amount to more than _sixty
millions_ a year, and that the _poor-rates_ amount to about _seven
millions_; yet, while the cowardly reptiles never utter a word against
the taxes, they are incessantly railing against the poor-rates, though
it is, (and they know it) the taxes that make the paupers. The base
wretches know well, that the sum of money given, even to the fellows
that gather the taxes, is greater in amount than the poor-rates; the
base wretches know well, that the money, given to the dead-weight (who
ought not to have a single farthing), amounts to more than the poor
receive out of the rates; the base wretches know well, that the common
foot-soldier now receives more pay per week (7_s._ 7_d._) exclusive of
clothing, firing, candle, and lodging; the base wretches know, that the
common foot-soldier receives more to go down his own single throat, than
the overseers and magistrates allow to a working man, his wife and three
children; the base wretches know all this well; and yet their railings
are confined to the _poor_ and the _poor-rates_; and it is expected that
they will, next session, urge the Parliament to pass a law to enable
overseers and vestries and magistrates _to transport paupers beyond the
seas_! They are base enough for this, or for any thing; but the whole
system will go to the devil long before they will get such an act
passed; long before they will see perfected this consummation of their
infamous tyranny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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