y,
and issued their piteous memories in the book called _The Hungry
'Forties_. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger
documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one
letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the
quartern loaf ranging from 7_d_. to 11-1/2_d_., and heavy, sticky,
stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato
that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told
of oatmeal and a dash of red herring--one red herring among three people
was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea--sixpence an ounce, and
one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of
burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents
went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a
butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a
man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was
imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was
the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy
the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture
of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's
memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We
was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's
face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this
crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of
our working people--the only people who really count in a country's
prosperity--we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low
and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in
those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and
leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and
their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret,
and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the
parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have
arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years
when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men
arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery.
And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is
not liked unless it