lized England.

On working days few men are to be seen, they are in the pits or the
ironworks, but women are met on the high-road clad in men's once white
linsey-woolsey coats and felt hats, driving and cursing strings of donkeys
laden with coals or iron rods for the use of the nailers.

On certain rare holidays these people wash their faces, clothe themselves in
decent garments, and, since the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway,
take advantage of cheap excursion trains, go down to Birmingham to amuse
themselves and make purchases. It would be a useful lesson for any one who
is particularly well satisfied with the moral, educational, and religious
state of his countrymen, to make a little journey through this Black Country.
He will find that the amiable enthusiasts who meet every May at Exeter Hall
to consider on the best means of converting certain aboriginal tribes in
Africa, India, and the Islands of the Pacific, need not go so far to find
human beings more barbarous and yet much more easily reclaimed.

The people of this district are engaged in coal-mining, in ironworks, in
making nails, and many other articles, or parts of articles, for the
Birmingham trade. Their wages are, for the most part, good; fuel is cheap;
well supplied markets, and means of obtaining the best clothing are close at
hand. But, within sixty years a vast dense population has been collected
together in districts which were but thinly inhabited as long as the value
lay on the surface, instead of in the bowels of the earth. The people
gathered together and found neither churches, nor schools, nor laws, nor
customs, nor means for cleanliness at first, nor even an effective police to
keep order. And thus they became one of the most ignorant, brutal, depraved,
drunken, unhealthy populations in the kingdom, unless it be a set of people
in the same occupations in the neighbourhood of Manchester.

We shall never forget, some five-and-twenty years ago, passing near Bilston
on a summer's holiday, and seeing a great red, pied bull foaming, and
roaring, and marching round a ring in which he was chained, while a crowd of
men, each with a demoniacal-looking bulldog in his arms, and a number of
ragged women, with their hair about their ears, some of them also carrying
bull-dog pups, yelled about the baited bull. It gave us an awful fright, and
haunted our childish dreams for years after.

The first change forced upon the governing classes, by