We next went to Steventon, in Berkshire.  It was a small town, said to be the poorest in the county.  I saw men working in the fields for six shillings, and seven shillings, a week, and women for sixpence, and sevenpence, a day, out of which they boarded themselves.  Of course they lived in the most primitive manner; it could not be otherwise, where a woman’s wages for an entire day were not sufficient to buy a pound of meat.  They paid very low rents, and their clothes were made of the cheapest fabrics, though much better than could have been procured in the United States for the same money.  I had heard much about the oppression of the poor in Europe.  The people I saw around me were, many of them, among the poorest poor.  But when I visited them in their little thatched cottages, I felt that the condition of even the meanest and most ignorant among them was vastly superior to the condition of the most favored slaves in America.  They labored hard; but they were not ordered out to toil while the stars were in the sky, and driven and slashed by an overseer, through heat and cold, till the stars shone out again.  Their homes were very humble; but they were protected by law.  No insolent patrols could come, in the dead of night, and flog them at their pleasure.  The father, when he closed his cottage door, felt safe with his family around him.  No master or overseer could come and take from him his wife, or his daughter.  They must separate to earn their living; but the parents knew where their children were going, and could communicate with them by letters.  The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too sacred for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity.  Much was being done to enlighten these poor people.  Schools were established among them, and benevolent societies were active in efforts to ameliorate their condition.  There was no law forbidding them to learn to read and write; and if they helped each other in spelling out the Bible, they were in no danger of thirty-nine lashes, as was the case with myself and poor, pious, old uncle Fred. I repeat that the most ignorant and the most destitute of these peasants was a thousand fold better off than the most pampered American slave.

I do not deny that the poor are oppressed in Europe.  I am not disposed to paint their condition so rose-colored as the Hon. Miss Murray paints the condition of the slaves in the United States.  A small portion of my experience would enable her to read her own pages with anointed eyes.  If she were to lay aside her title, and, instead of visiting among the fashionable, become domesticated, as a poor governess, on some plantation in Louisiana or Alabama, she would see and hear things that would make her tell quite a different story.