Down to the present hour, the property-holding class in Parliament still struggles against the better feelings of those not yet fallen a prey to egotism, and seeks to subjugate the proletariat still further.  One piece of common land after another is appropriated and placed under cultivation, a process by which the general cultivation is furthered, but the proletariat greatly injured.  Where there were still commons, the poor could pasture an ass, a pig, or geese, the children and young people had a place where they could play and live out of doors; but this is gradually coming to an end.  The earnings of the worker are less, and the young people, deprived of their playground, go to the beer-shops.  A mass of acts for enclosing and cultivating commons is passed at every session of Parliament.  When the Government determined during the session of 1844 to force the all monopolising railways to make travelling possible for the workers by means of charges proportionate to their means, a penny a mile, and proposed therefore to introduce such a third class train upon every railway daily, the “Reverend Father in God,” the Bishop of London, proposed that Sunday, the only day upon which working-men in work can travel, be exempted from this rule, and travelling thus be left open to the rich and shut off from the poor.  This proposition was, however, too direct, too undisguised to pass through Parliament, and was dropped.  I have no room to enumerate the many concealed attacks of even one single session upon the proletariat.  One from the session of 1844 must suffice.  An obscure member of Parliament, a Mr. Miles, proposed a bill regulating the relation of master and servant which seemed comparatively unobjectionable.  The Government became interested in the bill, and it was referred to a committee.  Meanwhile the strike among the miners in the North broke out, and Roberts made his triumphal passage through England with his acquitted working-men.  When the bill was reported by the committee, it was discovered that certain most despotic provisions had been interpolated in it, especially one conferring upon the employer the power to bring before any Justice of the Peace every working-man who had contracted verbally or in writing to do any work whatsoever, in case of refusal to work or other misbehaviour, and have him condemned to prison with hard labour for two months, upon the oath of the employer or his agent or overlooker, i.e., upon the oath of the accuser.  This bill aroused the working-men to the utmost fury, the more so as the Ten Hours’ Bill was before Parliament at the same time, and had called forth a considerable agitation.  Hundreds of meetings were held, hundreds of working-men’s petitions forwarded to London to Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the interests of the proletariat.  This man was, except Ferrand, the representative of “Young England,” the only vigorous opponent of the bill; but when the other Radicals saw that the people were declaring against it, one after the other crept forward and took his place by Duncombe’s side; and as the Liberal bourgeoisie had not the courage to defend the bill in the face of the excitement among the working-men, it was ignominiously lost.