Visiting his cottage one day I found his wife ill, a dead child in the bed, a sick child in her arms; yes, she “was pining; there was no work to be had”.  “Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? because there was no other place to put it.”  The cottage consisted of one room and a “lean-to”, and husband and wife, the child dead of fever and the younger child sickening with it, were all obliged to lie on the one bed.  In another cottage I found four generations sleeping in one room, the great-grandfather and his wife, the grandmother (unmarried), the mother (unmarried), and the little child, while three men-lodgers completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow, ill-ventilated garret.  Other cottages were hovels, through the broken roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived with the dwellers.  How could I do aught but sympathise with any combination that aimed at the raising of these poor?  But to sympathise with Joseph Arch was a crime in the eyes of the farmers, who knew that his agitation meant an increased drain on their pockets.  For it never struck them that, if they paid less in rent to the absent landlord, they might pay more in wage to the laborers who helped to make their wealth, and they had only civil words for the burden that crushed them, and harsh ones for the builders-up of their ricks and the mowers of their harvests.  They made common cause with their enemy, instead of with their friend, and instead of leaguing themselves with the laborers, as forming together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with the landlords against the laborers, and so made fratricidal strife instead of easy victory over the common foe.

In the summer and autumn of 1872, I was a good deal in London with my mother.—­My health had much broken down, and after a severe attack of congestion of the lungs, my recovery was very slow.  One Sunday in London, I wandered into St. George’s Hall, in which Mr. Charles Voysey was preaching, and there I bought some of his sermons.  To my delight I found that someone else had passed through the same difficulties as I about hell and the Bible and the atonement and the character of God, and had given up all these old dogmas, while still clinging to belief in God.  I went to St. George’s Hall again on the following Sunday, and in the little ante-room, after the service, I found myself in a stream of people, who were passing by Mr. and Mrs. Voysey, some evidently known to him, some strangers, many of the latter thanking him for his morning’s work.  As I passed in my turn I said:  “I must thank you for very great help in what you have said this morning”, for indeed the possibility opened of a God who was really “loving unto every man”, and in whose care each was safe for ever, had come like a gleam of light across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had been tossing for nearly twelve months.  On the following Sunday, I saw them again, and was cordially invited down to their Dulwich home,