Chapter XV: "rural Life of England."

From "Rural Life of England," by WM. H. HOWITT, we take the following extract:

"The wildness into which some of these children in the more
solitary parts of the country, grow, (recollect this is in
Lancashire, near the great city of Manchester,) is, I imagine, not
to be surpassed in any of the back settlements of America. On the
5th July, 1836, the day of that remarkable thunder-storm which
visited a great part of the kingdom with much fury, being driven
into a cottage at the foot of Pendle by the coming on of this
storm, and while standing at the door watching its progress, I
observed the head of some human creature, carefully protruded from
the doorway of an adjacent shed, and as suddenly withdrawn on
being observed. To ascertain what sort of a person it belonged to,
I went into the shed, but at first found it too dark to enable me
to discover anything. Presently, however, as objects became
visible, I saw a little creature, apparently a girl about ten
years old, reared very erectly against the opposite wall. On
accosting her in a kind tone, and telling her to come forward and
not be afraid, she advanced from the wall, and behold! there stood
another little creature, about the head shorter, whom she had been
concealing. I asked the elder child, whether this younger one were
a girl. She answered, 'Ne'a.' 'Was it a boy?' 'Ne'a.' 'What!
neither boy nor girl? Was she a girl herself?' 'Ne'a.' 'What! was
it a boy I was speaking to?' 'Ne'a.' 'What in the name of wonder
were they then?' 'We are childer.' 'Childer! and was the woman in
the house their mother?' 'Ne'a.' 'Who was she, then?' 'Ar mam.'
'O! your mam! and do you keep cows in this shed?' 'Ne'a,--bee-as.'
In short, common English was quite unintelligible to these poor
little creatures, and their appearance was as wild as their
speech. They were two fine young creatures,
nevertheless,--especially the elder, whose form and face were full
of that symmetry and fine grace that are sometimes the growth of
unrestrained Nature, and would have delighted the sculptor or
painter. Their only clothing was a sort of little boddice with
skirts, made of a reddish stuff, and rendered more picturesque by
sundry patches of scarlet cloth, no doubt from their mother's old
cloak. Their heads, bosoms, and legs to the knees, were bare to
all the influences of earth and heaven; and on giving each of them
a penny, they bounded off with the fleetness and elasticity of
young roes. No doubt the hills and the heaths, the wild flowers of
summer, and the swift waters of the glens, were the only live long
day companions of these children, who came home only to their
oatmeal dinner, and a bed as simple as their garments. Imagine the
violent change of life by _the sudden capture and confinement of
these little English savages in the night-and-day noise, labor,
and foul atmosphere of the cotton purgatories_!

"In the immediate neighborhood of towns, many of the swelling
ranges of hills present a much more cultivated aspect, and delight
the eye with their smooth, green, and flowing outlines; and the
valleys, almost everywhere, are woody, watered with clear, rapid
streams, and in short, are beautiful. But along the rise of the
tall chimneys of vast and innumerable factories, and even while
looking on the places of the master manufactories, with their
woods, and gardens, and shrubbery lawns around them, _one cannot
help thinking of the horrors detailed before the committee of the
House of Commons, respecting the Factory System_; of the
parentless and friendless wretches, sent by wagon loads from
distant work-houses to these prisons of labor and despair; of the
young frames crushed to the dust by incessant labor; of the beds
into which one set of children got, as another set got out, so
that they were said never to be cold the whole year round, till
contagious fires burnt out and swept away by hundreds these little
victims of Mammon's ever-urging never-ceasing wheel. Beautiful as
are many of these wild recesses, where, before the introduction of
steam, the dashing rivulet invited the cotton-spinners to erect
their mills; and curious as the remains of those simple original
factories are, with their one great water-wheel, which turned
their spindles while there was water, but during the drought of
summer quite as often stood still; yet one is haunted even there,
among the shadows of the fine old trees that throw their arms
athwart streams dashing down their beds of solid rock, by the
memory of little tender children, that never knew pity or
kindness, but labored on and on, through noon and through
midnight, till they slept and yet mechanically worked, and were
often awaked only by the horrid machinery rending off their limbs.
In places like these, where now the old factories and large houses
of the proprietors, stand deserted, or are inhabited by troops of
poor creatures, whose poverty only makes them appear the more
desolate. We are told by such men as Mr. Fielden, of Oldham, once
a factory child himself, and now a great manufacturer, who dares
to reveal the secrets of the prison-house, that little children
have even committed suicide to escape from a life worse than ten
deaths. And what a mighty system is this now become? What a
perpetual and vast supply of human energy and human life it
requires, with all the facilities of improved machinery, with all
the developed power of steam, and with all the glowing thirst of
wealth to urge it on! We are told that the state of the factories
is improved, and I trust they are; but if there be any truth in
the evidence given before the Parliamentary committees, there is
need of great amelioration yet; and it is, when we recollect these
things, how completely the laboring class has, in these districts,
been regarded as mere machinery for the accumulation of enormous
capitals, that we cease to wonder at their uncouth and degraded
aspect, and at the neglect in which they are suffered to swarm
over these hills, like the very weeds of humanity, cast out into
disregarded places, and left to spread and increase in rank and
deleterious luxuriance."

What is so poetically and graphically described by Mr. Hewitt, is verified in its minutest details in the "Glory and Shame of England," a very interesting work by C. Edwards Lester, an abolitionist of New York.