ould raise the voice of complaint, and where, in the name
of suffering humanity at large, he should be silent and submit. It
should always be borne in mind, that it is very difficult for persons of
one condition of life, to judge of the comparative state of well-being
of those of another condition. An inhabitant of cities, a man of books
and tranquillity, goes down into the country, without previous
preparation, to survey and give report of the distress of a mining or
agricultural district. In what age since the world has been peopled,
could such an individual be transported into the huts of peasants, or
amongst the rude labours of the miner, without receiving many a shock to
his sensibility? Perhaps he descends, for the first time in his life,
the shaft of a coal-mine. How foul and unnatural must the whole business
seem to him!--these men working in the dark, begrimed, half-naked, pent
up in narrow galleries. He has gone to spy out hardships--he sees
nothing else. Or perhaps he pays his first visit to the interior of the
low-roofed crazy cottage of the husbandman, and is disgusted at the
scant furniture and uninviting meal that it presents; yet the hardy
labourer may find his rest and food there, with no greater share of
discontent than falls to most of us--than falls, perhaps, to the
compassionate inspector himself. We have sometimes endeavoured to
picture to ourselves what would be the result if the tables were
turned, and a commission of agricultural labourers were sent into the
city to make report of the sort of lives led there, not by poor citizens
or the lowest order of tradesmen, but by the very class who are occupied
in preparing largo folio reports of their own distressful condition.
Suppose they were to enter into the chambers of the student of law--of
the conveyancer, for example. They make their way through obscure
labyrinths into a room not quite so dark, it must be allowed, nor quite
so dirty as the interior of a coal-mine, and there they find an unhappy
man who, they are given to understand, sits in that gloomy apartment, in
a state of solitary confinement, from nine o'clock in the morning till
six or seven in the evening. They learn that, for several months in the
year, this man never sees the sun; that in the cheerful season when the
plough is going through the earth, or the sickle is glittering in the
corn, and the winds are blowing the great clouds along the sky, this
pale prisoner is condemned to pore