’To paint the manners of the lower rank of the inhabitants of London is to draw a most disagreeable caricature, since the blackest vices and the most perpetual scenes of villainy and wickedness are constantly to be met with there. The most thorough contempt for all order, morality, and decency is almost universal among the poorer sort of people, whose manners I cannot but regard as the worst in the whole world. The open street for ever presents the spectator with the most loathsome scenes of beastliness, cruelty, and all manner of vice. In a word, if you would take a view of man in his debased state, go neither to the savages nor the Hottentots; they are decent, cleanly, and elegant, compared with the poor people of London.’
This is very strongly put. If you will look at some of Hogarth’s pictures you will admit that the words are not too strong.
Union had long since been forbidden; union was called conspiracy; conspiracy was punishable by imprisonment. If men cannot combine they sink into their natural condition and become savages again. All these evils fell upon our unfortunate working men as a natural result of neglect first, and of enforced isolation. Union was forbidden. During all these years every man worked for himself, stood by himself; there was no association. Therefore, there followed savagery. There was no education. Had there been either, association or rebellion must have followed. The awakening of associated effort took place at the beginning of the French Revolution. It was caused, or stimulated, by that prodigious movement; and the first combinations of working men were formed for political purposes. Since then, what have we seen? Associations for political purposes formed, prohibited, persecuted, formed again in spite of ancient laws. Associations victorious; we have seen Trades Unions formed, prohibited, formed again, and now flourishing, though not quite victorious. And the spirit of association, I cannot but believe, grows stronger every day. In this most glorious century—the noblest century for the advancement of mankind that the world has ever seen, yet only the beginning of the things that are to follow—we have gained an immense number of things: the suffrage, vote by ballot, the Factory Acts, abolition of flogging, the freedom of the press, the right of public meeting, the right of combination, and a system of free education by which the national character, the national modes of thought; the national customs, will be changed in ways we cannot forecast; but since the national character will always remain British we need have no fear of that change. All these things—remember, all these things; every one of these things—is the result, direct or indirect, of association. Think, for instance, of one difference in custom between now and a hundred years ago. Formerly, when a wrong thing had to be denounced, or an iniquity attacked, the man who saw the thing wrote a pamphlet or a book,