The labouring classes, however, were, according to Mr.Southey, better fed three hundred years ago than at present.We believe that he is completely in error on this point.The condition of servants in noble and wealthy families, and of scholars at the Universities, must surely have been better in those times than that of day-labourers; and we are sure that it was not better than that of our workhouse paupers.From the household book of the Northumberland family, we find that in one of the greatest establishments of the kingdom the servants lived very much as common sailors live now.In the reign of Edward the Sixth the state of the students at Cambridge is described to us, on the very best authority, as most wretched.Many of them dined on pottage made of a farthing's worth of beef with a little salt and oatmeal, and literally nothing else.This account we have from a contemporary master of St.John's.Our parish poor now eat wheaten bread.In the sixteenth century the labourer was glad to get barley, and was often forced to content himself with poorer fare.In Harrison's introduction to Holinshed we have an account of the state of our working population in the "golden days," as Mr.Southey calls them, "of good Queen Bess." "The gentilitie, "says he, "commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat for their own tables, whylest their household and poore neighbours in some shires are inforced to content themselves with rye or barleie; yea, and in time of dearth, many with bread made eyther of beanes, peason, or otes, or of altogether, and some accrues among.I will not say that this extremity is oft so well to be seen in time of plentie as of dearth; but if I should I could easily bring my trial: for albeit there be much more grounde cared nowe almost in everye place then bathe beene of late yeares, yet such a price of corne continueth in eache towne and markete, without any just cause, that the artificer and poore labouring man is not able to reach unto it, but is driven to content him self with horse-corne." We should like to see what the effect would be of putting any parish in England now on allowance of "horse-corne." The helotry of Mammon are not, in our day, so easily enforced to content themselves as the peasantry of that happy period, as Mr.Southey considers it, which elapsed between the fall of the feudal and the rise of the commercial tyranny.
"The people," says Mr.Southey, "are worse fed than when they were fishers." And yet in another place he complains that they will not eat fish."They have contracted," says he, "I know not how, some obstinate prejudice against a kind of food at once wholesome and delicate, and everywhere to be obtained cheaply and in abundance, were the demand for it as general as it ought to be." It is true that the lower orders have an obstinate prejudice against fish.But hunger has no such obstinate prejudices.If what was formerly a common diet is now eaten only in times of severe pressure, the inference is plain.The people must be fed with what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors.
The advice and medicine which the poorest labourer can now obtain, in disease, or after an accident, is far superior to what Henry the Eighth could have commanded.Scarcely any part of the country is out of the reach of practitioners, who are probably not so far inferior to Sir Henry Halford as they are superior to Dr.Butts.That there has been a great improvement in this respect, Mr.Southey allows.Indeed he could not well have denied it."But," says he, "the evils for which these sciences are the palliative, have increased since the time of the Druids, in a proportion that heavily overweighs the benefit of improved therapeutics." We know nothing either of the diseases or the remedies of the Druids.But we are quite sure that the improvement of medicine has far more than kept pace with the increase of disease during the last three centuries.This is proved by the best possible evidence.The term of human life is decidedly longer in England than in any former age, respecting which we possess any information on which we can rely.All the rants in the world about picturesque cottages and temples of Mammon will not shake this argument.No test of the physical well-being of society can be named so decisive as that which is furnished by bills of mortality.That the lives of the people of this country have been gradually lengthening during the course of several generations, is as certain as any fact in statistics; and that the lives of men should become longer and longer, while their bodily condition during life is becoming worse and worse, is utterly incredible.
Let our readers think over these circumstances.Let them take into the account the sweating sickness and the plague.Let them take into the account that fearful disease which first made its appearance in the generation to which Mr.Southey assigns the palm of felicity, and raged through Europe with a fury at which the physician stood aghast, and before which the people were swept away by myriads.Let them consider the state of the northern counties, constantly the scene of robberies, rapes, massacres, and conflagrations.Let them add to all this the fact that seventy-two thousand persons suffered death by the hands of the executioner during the reign of Henry the Eighth, and judge between the nineteenth and the sixteenth century.
We do not say that the lower orders in England do not suffer severe hardships.But, in spite of Mr.Southey's assertions, and in spite of the assertions of a class of politicians, who, differing from Mr.Southey in every other point, agree with him in this, we are inclined to doubt whether the labouring classes here really suffer greater physical distress than the labouring classes of the most flourishing countries of the Continent.