334 DRUNKENNESS AND ILLEGITIMACY. To the honor of the Welsh peasants and mine laborers, the Report states that they are peculiarly exempt from the guilt of great crimes; but there are few countries where the standard of minor morals is lower. The want of chastity is thought to result frequently from the practice of bundling, or courtship in bed, a practice still widely prevailing. Here, as in the English counties, we find the same statement of the prevalence of the revolting habit of herding of married and unmarried people of both sexes, often unconnected by relationship, in the same sleeping rooms and adjoining beds, without partition or curtains. Rev. R. Harrison, the incumbent of Builth, says: "The Welsh are very dirty. I found a house in Builth, where in the bedroom, down stairs, were two pigs in one corner, and two children ill with scarlet-fever in the other. The dunghills are placed in front of the houses in some parts of the town." Rev. Richard Lumley, Calvinistic Methodist minister, at Builth, says: "It is no uncommon thing for the whole family, among laborers, to sleep in the same room without any distinction of the sexes, and I have lately witnessed instances of the same habit among classes immediately above them." Rev. W. L. Bevan, Vicar of Hay, says: "That drunkenness and illegitimacy are the prevailing vices of his neighborhood. Very many of the poorer classes are ruined by indulgence in the first, while the second is considered a very venial offence." The Rev. James Denning, Curate of St. Mary's, Brecknockshire, says: "The poor have no idea what the comforts of life are. There are at least two thousand persons living in this town in a state of the greatest filth, and to all appearance they enjoy their filth and idleness, for they make no effort to get rid of it. From my experience of Ireland, I think there is a great similarity between the lower orders of Welsh and Irish; both are dirty, bigoted, indolent and contented." The Rev. L. H. Davies, of Troedey Raur, says: "The young people meet at evening-schools in private houses, and frequently spend the night afterward in hay-lofts together. So prevalent is the want of chastity among the females that, THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT'S PEASANTS. 335 although I promised to return the marriage fee of all couples whose first child should be born after nine months from marriage, only one in six years entitled themselves to claim it. Most of them were in the family-way at the time of marriage. The best remedy for the want of morals and education is the establishment of good schools. The present curse is the construction of their dwellings, the promiscuous mingling of the sexes at night, and the bad examples of their parents. And yet Dr. Richard Williams, a Coroner, says: In justice, I should say, as many strangers have informed me, the lower classes of Wales are far superior to those of the same class in other parts of the Kingdom.'' Mr. Thomas Davis, of Llangattock, for many years the agent of the Duke of Beaufort, says: "The want of morality among the great masses of the Welsh people, is owing entirely to their want of mental cultivation and the very great deficiency of all means of moral training. Byrnmaur contains five thousand people, all of whom are of the lowest class, except two shop-keepers. This constituted one of the main bodies of the Chartist mob who marched upon Newport, and, although so many years have elapsed since the Chartist outbreak, not the slightest step has been taken to improve the mental and moral condition of the violent and vicious of the community. Neither churches nor schools have been established by those who employ the people, or own the land, and it is exclusively owing to the Dissenters any kind of instruction whatever is given to the place." Descriptions given in this report of the mining population in Monmouthshire are indescribably horrible. Mr. Symons says, of thirty thousand inhabitants of certain iron manufacturing villages: "They drink to the most brutal excess. The abodes and habits of the people are almost as dirty as the towns and houses of the swarthy region in which they swarm. Even the physical condition of the people seems almost as if contrived for the double purpose of their degradation and the employers' profit. Some of the works are surrounded by homes built by the companies. I went into many of this class of houses and examined them from top to bottom. Men, women and children, of all sexes and ages, are stowed away in the bedrooms without any curtains or partitions; it being no uncommon thing for nine or ten people,not belonging in the same family, to sleep together in this manner, in one room. In abundance of instances the beds of these habitations are so scarce, that they are perpetually occupied; one gang of men turning in, as the other turns out. They work every eight hours consecutively, and the beds have never time to cool." 336 CONDITION IN NORTH WALES. XXIII. INCE I began to speak of Wales, most of the citations have referred to Central Wales. I come now to North Wales. In 1847, Mr. Johnson, a barrister, was sent there by the government, to examine the state of the schools. His testimony, if extensively quoted, would be only a repetition of what I have already laid before the reader. It is a sickening catalogue repeated from town to town, from county to county, from village to village, and from hovel to hovel. The same huddling of human beings of both sexes and all ages, the same promiscuous and shameless intercourse, the same brutal indulgence in intoxicating drinks of the most poisonous description. Rev. William Jones, Vicar of Nevin, says: "Want of chastity is flagrant, and this vice is not confined to the poor. In England, farmers' daughters are respectable-in Wales, they are in the constant habit of being courted in bed. In the case of domestic servants, the vice is universal. It becomes necessary to so secure their chamber windows with bars, to prevent them from admitting men, and I am told by my parishioners, that, unless I allow these practices, I shall very soon have no servants at all, and it will be impossible to get any." I Sickening revelations are made in the testimony of the Rev. J. W. Trevor, chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Bangor. have space only to describe in substance what he says. He declares that it is not only difficult, but extremely mortifying, to describe in proper terms the disgraceful state of the common people in Wales, in the intercourse of the sexes. He shows that the moral principles of the Welsh people are totally corrupt and abandoned in this respect; that no restraints or penalties of law can ever check the evil, nor is there any hope that it will be checked except by appliances of better education, and more general civilization which may teach them to regard their present customs with a sense of shame and decency; for, to look for any higher motives would be at present ridiculous. "While the sexes continue to herd together like beasts, it were idle to expect that they can be restrained by religion or conscience. I assert with confidence as an undeniable fact, that fornication is not regarded as a vice, scarcely as a frailty, by the common people in Wales. It REPORTS OF COMMISSIONERS. 337 is considered as a matter of course, as the regular conventional process towards marriage. The filthy disclosures which take place in open court of the obscenities practiced in the proof of so inany thousands of cases of bastardy, are too dreadful to be put into print. In short, in this matter, even in a greater degree than in the other which I have noticed, the minds of our common people have become thoroughly and universally depraved and brutalized. To meet this appalling evil, what is called the present system of education in Wales, is utterly powerless." XXIV. In the of such [N the presence of such social degradation, it is hardly neces tural and mining population. It is a case which sums itself up -it furnishes its own conclusion. Where we find whole classes sunk into such depths of physical want and bestiality, nothing in the shape of education can possibly exist. From the voluminous records of the Reports published by the Committee of Council on Education, of those of the Welsh Commissioners, of the Journals of the Statistical Society-from which he makes abundant citations, as well as from his personal investigationsMr. Kay holds the following graphic language: "About ONE HALF of our poor can neither read nor write, have never been in any school, and know little, or positively nothing, of the doctrines of the Christian religion, of moral duties, or of any higher pleasures than beer or spirit drinking and the grossest sensual indulgence. Even of the small shopkeeping and farmer classes, there are great numbers who can neither read nor write, and who have never entered even a Sunday school. It is a very common thing for even farmers, who are members of the union boards of guardians in the midland and eastern counties of England, to sign their names with a cross, from being unable to write. "None of all this class can ever search the Scriptures for themselves; few of them care to give their children any instruction, as they have never experienced the benefits of instruction themselves; scarcely any of them are sensible enough to even desire to improve their condition in life; scarcely any of them ever enter a place of public worship, or ever come into contact with a religious minister; none of them understand anything of the phenomena of nature around them, of the thoughts and wishes of their age, of their own situation here, or of the mysterious change before them. They live precisely like brutes, to gratify, as far as their means allow, the appetites of their uncultivated bodies, and then die, to go they have never thought, cared or wondered whither. "All this must seem exaggeration to those who have not examined for themselves the reports of the Inspectors of Schools, or those of the Welsh Commissioners, or those of the visitors, chaplains, inspectors and governors of our prisons, or those of the City Missionaries, or the admirable letters published in the Times and Chronicle. But those persons, who have examined these reports, will know that I have understated the deep ignorance of our poorer classes. "The Reports, to which I allude, disclose a degree of ignorance which must be quite incredible to all who have not given their attention to the study of these facts. I might fill volumes with quotations confirmatory of my statements, but as my space does not allow me to do more 338 NO EDUCATION FOR THE ENGLISH POOR. than state the facts, I am obliged to refer my readers to these Reports for proof of the universal truth of what I have affirmed. "If these poor creatures commit what the more intelligent classes call 'crimes against society'-if they are improvident and immoral-if they have no love for the society which has left, if it has not made, them thus degraded-and if they punish that society by burdening it with vice and pauperism, is it a matter of great surprise? "Brought up in the darkness of barbarism, they have no idea that it is possible for them to attain any higher condition; they are not even sentient enough to desire, with any strength of feeling, to change their situation; they are not intelligent enough to be perseveringly discontented; they are not sensible to what we call the voice of conscience; they do not understand the necessity of avoiding crime, beyond the mere fear of the police and a jail; they do not in the least comprehend, that what is the interest of society is their own also; they do not in the least understand the meaning, necessity, or effect of the laws; they have unclear, indefinite, and undefinable ideas of all around them; they eat, drink, breed, work and die; and while they pass through their brute-like existence here, the richer and more intelligent classes are obliged to guard them with police and standing armies, and to cover the land with prisons, cages, and all kinds of receptacles for those, who in their thoughtlessness or misery disturb the quiet and happiness of their more intelligent, and, consequently, more moral and prosperous neighbors, by plunder, assault, or any other deed, which the law is obliged, for the sake of the existence of society, to designate a 'crime,' although most of those who commit it do not in the least comprehend its criminality. "It is to this totally uneducated class, and to the class of those who can only read and write very imperfectly, as Mr. Porter shows in the statistics I have quoted above, that the greatest part of our criminals belong. The majority of all our criminals have received no education, and cannot read or write at all; or have received so wretched an education, as only to be ablo to read or write very imperfectly. Scarcely any of the inmates of our prisons have received even a decent education. And yet, in the presence of such facts as these, 1850 years have passed since the birth of Jesus Christ, and scarcely anything worthy of mention has yet been done for the education of the English poor!" ONE XXV. NE of those correspondents of the London daily press, who are chosen for their special ability, and whose work is always so thoroughly done, writing to the Morning Chronicle, December 1, 1849, says: "Taking the adult class of agricultural laborers, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the ignorance in which they live, and move, and have their being. As they work in the fields, the external world has some hold upon them through the medium of their senses; but to all the higher exercises of intellect, they are perfect strangers. You cannot address one of them, without being at once painfully struck with the intellectual darkness which enshrouds him. There is in general neither speculation in his eyes nor intelligence in his countenance. The whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. He is wanting, too, in the erect and independent bearing of a man. When you accost him, if he is not insolent--which he seldom is-he is timid and shrinking; his whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is seemingly oppressed with the interview, whilst it lasts, and obviously relieved, when it is over. These are the traits, which I can affirm them to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds of farm |