riters of the
bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not
religious, and do not attend church. From the general statement are to
be excepted the Irish, a few elderly people, and the half-bourgeois, the
overlookers, foremen, and the like. But among the masses there prevails
almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost,
some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or
a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. The clergy of all
sects is in very bad odour with the working-men, though the loss of its
influence is recent. At present, however, the mere cry: "He's a parson!"
is often enough to drive one of the clergy from the platform of a public
meeting. And like the rest of the conditions under which he lives, his
want of religious and other culture contributes to keep the working-man
more unconstrained, freer from inherited stable tenets and cut-and-dried
opinions, than the bourgeois who is saturated with the class prejudices
poured into him from his earliest youth. There is nothing to be done
with the bourgeois; he is essentially conservative in however liberal a
guise, his interest is bound up with that of the property-holding class,
he is dead to all active movement; he is losing his position in the
forefront of England's historical development. The workers are taking
his place, in rightful claim first, then in fact.

All this, together with the correspondent public action of the workers,
with which we shall deal later, forms the favourable side of the
character of this class; the unfavourable one may be quite as briefly
summed up, and follows quite as naturally out of the given causes.
Drunkenness, sexual irregularities, brutality, and disregard for the
rights of property are the chief points with which the bourgeois charges
them. That they drink heavily is to be expected. Sheriff Alison asserts
that in Glasgow some thirty thousand working-men get drunk every Saturday
night, and the estimate is certainly not exaggerated; and that in that
city in 1830, one house in twelve, and in 1840, one house in ten, was a
public-house; that in Scotland, in 1823, excise was paid upon 2,300,000
gallons; in 1837, upon 6,620,000 gallons; in England, in 1823, upon
1,976,000 gallons, and in 1837, upon 7,875,000 gallons of spirits. The
Beer Act of 1830, which facilitated the opening of beerhouses (jerry
shops), whose keepers are licensed to sell beer to