feelings of self-
protection was an organized police, and the "Black" people are now more
disgusting than dangerous. The cholera of 1832, which decimated Bilston and
Wednesbury, did something toward calling attention to the grievous social and
sanitary wants of this district. In that pestilence several clergymen and
medical men died, like heroes, in the discharge of their duties. Some
churches were built, some schools established; but an immense work remains to
be done. Bull-baiting has been put down, but no rational amusements have
been substituted for that brutal and exciting sport.

In the northern coal fields, near Newcastle-on-Tyne especially, we have
noticed that when the miner ascends from the pit in the evening, his first
care is to wash himself from head to foot, and then to put on a clean suit of
white flannel. As you pass along the one street of a pitman's village, you
will see the father reading a Chambers' Journal or a cheap religious magazine
at the door of his cottage while smoking a pipe, and nursing a child or two
on his knee; and through the open door, a neat four-post bed and an oak or
mahogany chest of drawers bear witness to his frugality.

In Wednesbury, Bilston, and all that district, when work is over you find the
men drinking in their dirty clothes and with grimy faces at the beer-shop of
the "Buttey," that is to say, the contractor or middleman under whom they
work, according to the system of the country, and the women hanging about the
doors of their dingy dwellings, gossiping or quarreling,--the old furies and
the young slatterns.

In the face of such savagery, so evidently the result of defective education,
two opposite and extreme parties in the State, the anti-church Mialls and the
pro-church Anthony Denisons, combine to oppose the multiplication of
education that teaches decency if it teaches nothing else.

One great step has been made by the Health of Town's Act, which is about to
be applied to some of these coal towns; and railways have rendered the whole
district so accessible that no foul spot can long remain unknown or
unnoticed.

* * * * *

WALSALL, eight miles from Birmingham, the first town in our way, which may be
reached directly by following the South Staffordshire, or by an omnibus,
travelling half-a-mile from Bescot Bridge, lies among green fields, out of
the bounds of the mining country, although upon the edge of the Warwickshire
and Staffordshire coalfield,--indee