ever knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of
good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently
so hungry as I ought to be; but I should think it no hardship to eat
_sweet_ lard instead of butter. But, now-a-days, the labourers, and
especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of
_niceness_ in food and _finery in dress_; a quarter of a bellyful and rags
are the consequence. The food of their choice is high-priced, so that, for
the greater part of their time, they are half-starved. The dress of their
choice is _showy_ and _flimsy_, so that, to-day, they are _ladies_, and
to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not Nature made the
country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and
white teeth!) and a great deal prettier too! But are they _less_ pretty,
when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural
presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when
drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel,[9] "where tawdry colours
strive with dirty white," exciting violent suspicions that all is not as
it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely
hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and
commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest
when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when their
draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However,
the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is _the
system_ of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all
_flashy_ and _false_, and has put all things out of their place.
Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking
and in writing; mock-delicacy in manners; mock-liberality, mock-humanity,
and mock-religion. Pitt's false money, Peel's flimsy dresses,
Wilberforce's potatoe diet, Castlereagh's and Mackintosh's oratory, Walter
Scott's poems, Walter's and Stoddart's[10] paragraphs, with all the bad
taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all
have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together; and we are
now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as
is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of
Spinning-Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford,
the author of that _Bill_, before