severe and
dismal task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they
subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health
miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually
confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred
thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating
smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and
managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two
hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable
slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would
be our just indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and
ignominious a punishment! This is an instance--I could not wish a
stronger--of the numberless things which we pass by in their common
dress, yet which shock us when they are nakedly represented. But this
number, considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness
and horror, which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the
world affords of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the
poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and
arsenic. To say nothing of those other employments, those stations of
wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the
numerous _enfans perdus_ of her army. Would any rational man submit to
one of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial
enjoyments which policy has made to result from them? By no means. And
yet need I suggest to your lordship, that those who find the means, and
those who arrive at the end, are not at all the same persons? On
considering the strange and unaccountable fancies and contrivances of
artificial reason, I have somewhere called this earth the Bedlam of our
system. Looking now upon the effects of some of those fancies, may we
not with equal reason call it likewise the Newgate and the Bridewell of
the universe? Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating
with the frenzy and villany of the other, has been the real builder of
this respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of
mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is
made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the
politician will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude
disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a search of truth,
and supplies them with no