“. . . . . If any one had told me that I should ever feel an anxious interest in any promise of the Lord Chancellor Brougham’s, it would have seemed a most improbable supposition; and yet I am now solicitous about two of his promises,—that to which you are looking, and that which he made to Henry about the Lunacy Commission. I have known men who make promises without the slightest intention of keeping them, rather with the full intention of never performing them. This is not Brougham’s case: in such things he does not look so far forward; and he is a good-natured man, much too good-natured ever to raise hopes, meaning to disappoint them. . . . .
“This year will not pass away without greater changes than the last. It is already apparent that the reformed Parliament will not work. Government by authority has long been defunct. Government by influence, was put to death by the Reform Bill, and nothing is left but Government by public opinion.
| 200 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 58. |
“I have gone through the whole evidence concerning the
treatment of children in the factories, and nothing so bad was ever brought to
light before. The slave trade is mercy to it. We know how the slave trade began
and imperceptibly increased, nothing in the beginning being committed that
shocked the feelings and was contrary to the spirit of the age. Having thus
grown up, it went on by succession, and of later years has rather been
mitigated than made worse. But this white slavery has risen in our own days,
and is carried on in the midst of this civilised and Christian nation. Herein
it is that our danger consists. The great body of the manufacturing populace,
and also of the agricultural, are miserably poor; their condition is worse than
it ought to be. One after another we are destroying all the outworks by which
order and with it property and life are defended; and the brutalised populace
is ready to break in upon us. The prelude which you witnessed at Bristol was a
manifestation of the spirit that exists among them. But in the manufacturing
districts, where the wages of the adults are at a starvation rate, and their
children are literally worked to death,—murdered by inches,—the
competition of the masters being the radical cause of these evils, there is a
dreadful reality of oppression, a dreadful sense of injustice, of intolerable
misery, of intolerable wrongs, more formidable than any causes which have ever
moved a people to insurrection. Once more I will cry aloud and spare not. These
are not times to be silent. Lord Ashley has
taken up this Factory Question with all his heart, under a deep religious
| Ætat. 58. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 201 |
“God bless you, my dear friend! Remember me most kindly to your two daughters; and believe me always yours most affectionately,
