The White Slaves of England

The White Slaves of England

The following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrage equally abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. The frightful abuses which are here set forth, are, from their enormity, difficult of belief; yet they are supported by testimony the most impartial, clear and irrefutable. These abuses are time-honored, and have the sanction of a nation which prides itself upon the freedom of its Constitution; and which holds up its government to the nations of the earth as a model of regulated liberty. Vain, audacious, false assumption! Let the refutation be found in the details which this volume furnishes, of the want, misery and starvationthe slavish toilthe menial degradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. Let her miners, her operatives, the tenants of her workhouses, her naval service, and the millions upon millions in the Emerald Isle and in farther India attest its fallacy. These are the legitimate results of the laws and institutions of Great Britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or less degree, all her dependencies. Her church and state, and her laws of entail and primogeniture, are the principal sources of the evils under which her people groan; and until these are [Pg 6] changed there is no just ground of hope for an improvement in their condition. The tendency of things is, indeed, to make matters still worse. The poor are every year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings; while the wealth and power of the realm are annually concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments of oppression. The picture is already sufficiently revolting. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine children of the same common Father, suffer from destitution, that the thousandth may revel in superfluities. A thousand cottages shrink into meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a single palace. The tables of a thousand families of the industrious poor waste away into drought and barrenness, that one board may be laden with surfeits." From these monstrous evils there seems to be little chance of escape, except by flight; and happy is it for the victims of oppression, that an asylum is open to them, in which they can fully enjoy the rights and privileges, from which, for ages, they have been debarred. Let them come. The feudal chains which so long have bound them can here be shaken off. Here they can freely indulge the pure impulses of the mind and the soul, untrammeled by political or religious tyranny. Here they can enjoy the beneficent influences of humane institutions and laws, and find a vast and ample field in which to develop and properly employ all their faculties. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 52423
Author: Cobden, John C.
Release Date: Jun 28, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English