so, whence come beggary, deceit of all sorts, ending in fully developed craftiness.  If he were so inclined, he yet has not the courage which makes of the more energetic of his class wholesale poachers and smugglers.  But he pilfers when occasion offers, and teaches his children to lie and steal.  His abject and submissive demeanour towards his wealthy neighbours shows that they treat him roughly and with suspicion; hence he fears and hates them, but he never will injure them by force.  He is depraved through and through, too far gone to possess even the strength of despair.  His wretched existence is brief, rheumatism and asthma bring him to the workhouse, where he will draw his last breath without a single pleasant recollection, and will make room for another luckless wretch to live and die as he has done.”

Our author adds that besides this class of agricultural labourers, there is still another, somewhat more energetic and better endowed physically, mentally, and morally; those, namely, who live as wretchedly, but were not born to this condition.  These he represents as better in their family life, but smugglers and poachers who get into frequent bloody conflicts with the gamekeepers and revenue officers of the coast, become more embittered against society during the prison life which they often undergo, and so stand abreast of the first class in their hatred of the property-holders.  “And,” he says, in closing, “this whole class is called, by courtesy, the bold peasantry of England.”

Down to the present time, this description applies to the greater portion of the agricultural labourers of England.  In June, 1844, the Times sent a correspondent into the agricultural districts to report upon the condition of this class, and the report which he furnished agreed wholly with the foregoing.  In certain districts wages were not more than six shillings a week; not more, that is, that in many districts in Germany, while the prices of all the necessaries of life are at least twice as high.  What sort of life these people lead may be imagined; their food scanty and bad, their clothing ragged, their dwellings cramped and desolate, small, wretched huts, with no comforts whatsoever; and, for young people, lodging-houses, where men and women are scarcely separated, and illegitimate intercourse thus provoked.  One or two days without work in the course of a month must inevitably plunge such people into the direst want.  Moreover, they cannot combine to raise wages, because they are scattered, and if one alone refuses to work for low wages, there are dozens out of work, or supported by the rates, who are thankful for the most trifling offer, while to him who declines work, every other form of relief than the hated workhouse is refused by the Poor Law guardians as to a lazy vagabond; for the guardians are the very farmers from whom or from whose neighbours and acquaintances alone he can get work.  And not from one or two special districts of England do such reports come.  On the contrary, the distress is general, equally great in the North and South, the East and West.  The condition of the labourers in Suffolk and Norfolk corresponds with that of Devonshire, Hampshire, and Sussex.  Wages are as low in Dorsetshire and Oxfordshire as in Kent and Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire.