We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool us.  We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food.  Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure.  Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered.  How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed?  Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone.  The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality.  It seems very long ago, like Waterloo or the coach to York—­so long ago that we can almost hope it was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it.  They and their fathers lived through it at its worst.  Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country, 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