The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1868-08-15 00:00:00

HIS CAREER STOPPED.

At Ipswich, Owen Hargrave Suffolk, described in
the calendar as a journalist, pleaded " Guilty " to
stealing a black mare, a plueton, and a set of harness
belonging to the landlady of the White Horse Hotel,
Ipswich, and also to obtaining £lO by means of false
pretences from one Arthur Gibbons.
It appeared from a document handed in by the
learned counsel for the prosecution, that in the year
1844 the prisoner had been sentenced to transportation
and penal servitude for the term of twenty-nine years
and, a half. When called upon to say why judgment
slould sot be passed on him, he begged for mercy on
acoount of his wife, aged nineteen, and her infant
child.
The Chief• Justice said : Don't try and impose on
me. I know your career. You were married to a
widow, obtained all her property, deserted her, pre-
tended, by a false 'sport inserted in a newspaper, that
you were drowned, went away with your brother's
child, who cannot therefore be your wife. (The pri-
soner here interrupting said, "She is my wife, my
Lord.") Then, said his Lordship, if you did marry
her you have added bigamy to your other offences, and
I sentence you now to a term of fifteen years' penal
servitude.

AN ENGLISH WORKING MAN ON THE
AMERICAN WORKING CLASSES.
The following is an extract from the letter of an
"English Woking Man on the American Working
Classes," and is one of a series which has appeared in
the Daily News :
Workmen here may pssrhaps be well described just now by
wing Mr. Bright's forslide mmlle, and declaring them to be
" fall of corn." They are. metaphorically speaking, rearing
and plunging all over this continent. The bricklayers, the
ironworkers, the tailors, the gasmen, and the miners are
making strenuous efforts to Improve the victory which a little
clever strategy gm the part of some of their leaders at Wash-
ington has enabled labour to gain over capital. Mc brick-
layers have virtually carried their point, and eight hours is
now the recognised term per diem for a gentleman to devote
to that branch of human industry, which news will, I hope,
lc mercifully dealt with by ever-worked government clerks
se home, who find six hours' hack-warming and visitor-
baiting such an exhaustive daily pastime. The miners in
Pennsylvania are marching and counter-marching, flag-rais-
ing, and orating, but never a pick are they driving into the
bowels of the earth, and there is every prospect of eight
hours' banishment from sunlight becoMing their daily
sentence for having the honour to be. The gas men in
Philadelphia cut matters niitirt by simply leaving their an-
tagonists as well as the public in the dark ; and as o”bu'lY
was able to make any dollars after sunset in a city of SOO,OOO
people, you can imagine the howl it indignation which
greeted the proprietors of the gas works. The men earned
their point in two nights, The only ones who do not strike
here seem to be the police : and it would he much better for
peaceably disposed inhabitants if sometimes they would
strike a little. They have in the city of New York some-
-thing like three pounds fifteen shillings per week sterling
not currency), and hi other cities a salary in I,ropor-
-7tion, for protecting their employers from a set of the
most Ood-forsaicen scoundrels which any civilised country
ever produced; and they seem to do nothing. Only one stay
'this week the car was stopped In New York, and the passen-
gers one and all clearest out of their money anti watches. A
fortnight ago an eircuslon train returning to the same city
from Coney tland was hoarded, and its occupants Claude
Unveiled out of every cent they had shout them. Murders
with robbery are of nightly occurrence in the drinking
:saloons and filthy dens which abound in the ' Empire city;"
:andgsst one never hears of a single rap being bestowed by a
:polls, man's truncheon on the head of any of the cowardly
villalus who are the hornets of these atrocities. Wages are
smrprisaugly high in all the places I have yet visited. Brick-
lstyers get five ilollars a day, and the employers used to coin-
plain before the strike that at that Oct, a thousand bricks

was all that the men consented to lay In a working day of
ten hours. A goal hatter, I know, gets twenty-five dollars
a week. Compositors are allowed sixty cents per thousand
m'x (to' reckoning by no as in England', and as a general
rule it may be taken that labour here is worth nearly double
what it will bring in England. The prices of provisions and
house rent run high, but not to anything like doable what
they are at home ;lint t am able to state from personal ob-
servation, that the amount of work which will pass
muster for a fair day's toil is far beyond what is ex-
pected of a man in Groat Britain. This is no country
for foreign idlers to come to The Americans hate
physical exertion themselves, and are willing to pay
Englishmen, Irishmen, Germans, or anybody else well
to come here and do the hard work for theni, but they will
take great care to get as much out of the people they pay
as can be either wheedled or forced from their bones.
have been very limn struck here by the fact of the evident
dislike of hard work which animates the real American. If
I have noticed a man in a workshop or in the open air driving
at his work with a will and an apparent relish, as is so com-
monly seen in England, I have said to myself, that man's
grandfather was not an American citizen ; and upon inquiry
I have seldom found that I was mistaken. The dry climate
may have something to do with it, for I have observed else-
where that dry climates do not seem conducive to as appetite
for manual labour, but they seem to make people more
nervously active than the denizens of a damper region.
Your true lineal cies mina oil the pilgrim lathers, if he has
rod Inherited homily dollars or a business, will resort to the
most peculiar shifts to feed and clothe himself. lie will
turn phrenologist, wal travel up and down on a river steamer,
feeling the bumps of the passengers at twenty-five
cents per head. I had my character revealed to
me by one the other day, who said that I had just
that happy fearlessness of temperament which suited me to
take the command of armies ; whereat I was much pleased,
until I heard a villanous-looking person W 110 succeeded nie
described as a man " calkilated "to inspire respect and con-
fidence in the breasts of all who knew him ! Or if he does
not see an opening in the phrenological line he will peddle
magnetic fish, or perambulate the States with a blowing
machine, strength tester, weighing chair, or metwoing
apparatus By the by, one of these itinerant gentlemen
complained bitterly to me the other day of an act of Southern
malignity committed on him before the outbreak of the re-
bellion. lie was on one of the plantations in Virginia with
a punching machine, and a nigger who had live cents worth
of him had the misfortune to put his shoulder out of joint,
whereupon the inhuman wretches of the neighbourhood set
upon the unhappy proprietor of the self-registering ° Dyne-
meena," beat hini, hr. ke his instrument into splinters, and ,
then threw him into gaol, and wanted him to pay fir the
property which had been deteriorated in value by his accursed