[Illustration: THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND.] FIFTH THOUSAND. THE WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND. COMPILED FROM OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS. WITH TWELVE SPIRITED ILLUSTRATIONS. BY JOHN C. COBDEN. AUBURN AND BUFFALO: MILLER ORTON & MULLIGAN. 1854. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-three, by DERBY AND MILLER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Northern District of New-York. PREFACE. The following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrage equally abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. The frightful abuses which are here set forth, are, from their enormity, difficult of belief; yet they are supported by testimony the most impartial, clear and irrefutable. These abuses are time-honored, and have the sanction of a nation which prides itself upon the _freedom of its Constitution_; and which holds up its government to the nations of the earth as a model of _regulated liberty_. Vain, audacious, _false_ assumption! Let the refutation be found in the details which this volume furnishes, of the want, misery and starvation—the slavish toil—the menial degradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. Let her _miners_, her _operatives_, _the tenants of her workhouses_, her _naval service_, and the millions upon millions in the _Emerald Isle_ and in farther India attest its fallacy. These are the legitimate results of the laws and institutions of Great Britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or less degree, all her dependencies. Her _church and state_, and her _laws of entail and primogeniture_, are the principal sources of the evils under which her people groan; and until these are changed there is no just ground of hope for an improvement in their condition. The tendency of things is, indeed, to make matters still worse. The poor are every year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings; while the wealth and power of the realm are annually concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments of oppression. The picture is already sufficiently revolting. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine children of the same common Father, suffer from destitution, that the thousandth may revel in superfluities. A thousand cottages shrink into meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a single palace. The tables of a thousand families of the industrious poor waste away into drought and barrenness, that one board may be laden with surfeits."