Now this is a sad picture truly.  The pen is sharp and cuts like a knife,—­but it is the surgeon’s knife, not the poisoned barb of a foreigner’s taunt.  This is the hopeful and promising aspect of these delineations and denunciations of the laboring man’s condition.  That low, damp, ill-ventilated, contracted room in which he pens his family at night, was, quite likely, constructed in the days of Good Queen Bess, or when “George the Third was King,” at the latest.  And houses were built for good, substantial farmers in those days which they would hardly house their horses in now.  There are hundreds of mechanics and day-laborers in Edinburgh who pen their families nightly in apartments once owned and occupied by Scotch dukes and earls, but which a journeyman shoemaker of New England would be loth to live in rent free.  Even the favorite room of Queen Mary, in Holyrood Palace, in which she was wont to tea and talk with Rizzio, would be too small and dim for the shop-parlor of a small London tradesman of the present day.  Thus, after all, the low-jointed, low-floored, small-windowed, ill-ventilated cottages now occupied by the agricultural laborers of England were proportionately as good as the houses built at the same period for the farmers of the country, many of which are occupied by farmers now, and the like of which never could be erected again on this island.  Indeed, one wonders at finding so many of these old farm houses still inhabited by well-to-do people, who could well afford to live in better buildings.

This, then, is a hopeful sign, and both pledge and proof of progress—­that the very cottages of laboring men in England that once figured so poetically in the histories and pictures of rural life, are now being turned inside out to the scrutiny of a more enlightened and benevolent age, revealing conditions that stir up the whole community to painful sensibility and to vigorous efforts to improve them.  These cottages were just as low, damp, small and dirty thirty years ago as they are now, and the families “penned” in them at night were doubtless as large, and perhaps more ignorant than those which inhabit them at the present time.  It is not the real difference between the actual conditions of the two periods but the difference in the dispositions and perceptions of the public mind, that has produced these humane sensibilities and efforts for the elevation of the ploughers, sowers, reapers and mowers who enrich and beautify this favored land with their patient and poorly-paid labor.  And there is no doubt that these newly-awakened sentiments and benevolent activities will carry the day; replacing the present tenements of the agricultural laborers with comfortable, well-built cottages, fitted for the homes of intelligent and virtuous families.  This work has commenced in different sections under favorable auspices.  Buildings have been erected on an estate here and there which will be likely to serve as models for whole hamlets of new tenements.  From what I have heard, I should think that Lord Overstone, of the great banking house of the Lloyds, has produced the best models for cottage homes, on his estates in Northamptonshire.  Although built after the most modern and improved plan, and capacious enough to accommodate a considerable family very comfortably, almost elegantly, the yearly rent is only 3 pounds, or less than fifteen dollars!