In Manchester, the pauper burial-ground lies opposite to the Old Town, along the Irk:  this, too, is a rough, desolate place.  About two years ago a railroad was carried through it.  If it had been a respectable cemetery, how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked over the desecration!  But it was a pauper burial-ground, the resting-place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter.  It was not even thought worth while to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases.  The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail.

Can any one wonder that the poor decline to accept public relief under these conditions?  That they starve rather than enter these bastilles?  I have the reports of five cases in which persons actually starving, when the guardians refused them outdoor relief, went back to their miserable homes and died of starvation rather than enter these hells.  Thus far have the Poor Law Commissioners attained their object.  At the same time, however, the workhouses have intensified, more than any other measure of the party in power, the hatred of the working-class against the property-holders, who very generally admire the New Poor Law.

From Newcastle to Dover, there is but one voice among the workers—­the voice of hatred against the new law.  The bourgeoisie has formulated so clearly in this law its conception of its duties towards the proletariat, that it has been appreciated even by the dullest.  So frankly, so boldly had the conception never yet been formulated, that the non-possessing class exists solely for the purpose of being exploited, and of starving when the property-holders can no longer make use of it.  Hence it is that this new Poor Law has contributed so greatly to accelerate the labour movement, and especially to spread Chartism; and, as it is carried out most extensively in the country, it facilitates the development of the proletarian movement which is arising in the agricultural districts.  Let me add that a similar law in force in Ireland since 1838, affords a similar refuge for eighty thousand paupers.  Here, too, it has made itself disliked, and would have been intensely hated if it had attained anything like the same importance as in England.  But what difference does the ill-treatment of eighty thousand proletarians make in a country in which there are two and a half millions of them?  In Scotland there are, with local exceptions, no Poor Laws.