ork, it was
only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there was
no question.

What the moral and intellectual character of this class was may be
guessed. Shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn
and woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of
wages--so shut off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood
of the town never went thither until they were robbed of their trade by
the introduction of machinery and obliged to look about them in the towns
for work--the weavers stood upon the moral and intellectual plane of the
yeomen with whom they were usually immediately connected through their
little holdings. They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of
the region, as their natural superior; they asked advice of him, laid
their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honour,
as this patriarchal relation involved. They were "respectable" people,
good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation
to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity,
and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their
thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who
took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their
children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the
fear of God; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as
the children were unmarried. The young people grew up in idyllic
simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married; and even
though sexual intercourse before marriage almost unfailingly took place,
this happened only when the moral obligation of marriage was recognised
on both sides, and a subsequent wedding made everything good. In short,
the English industrial workers of those days lived and thought after the
fashion still to be found here and there in Germany, in retirement and
seclusion, without mental activity and without violent fluctuations in
their position in life. They could rarely read and far more rarely
write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired,
never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited
reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning
humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the "superior" classes. But
intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private
inte