The Express.
London, England, 1862-01-23 00:00:00

THE EXPRESS, THURSDAY EVENING, JANUARY 23, 1862.

Or, if there is nothing of romance in the

immierlng of fifty coasters, what shall we
say of web a seen* as that around the mouth of the
Hartley Coal Pit, where throsghout the long dead
January nights, and the bleak cheerless fog-wept
miserable days, from Thursday to Thursday, a
crowd of poor wives and children—widows and
orphans now wait and watch—all hushed and
helphes and tearless, as if turned to stone by
anguish, or murmuring vacantly remembered '
syllables of prayer—for a sound or sign of life
or movement from husband, brother, or child,
buried alive a hundred fathoms down in the
bowels of the earth. Surely there is nothing
in the romance of war to compare with
this picture of the buried men and lads
in the depths of the pit, and the women and
children standing at the mouth, mutely suppliant
and stupefied with grief under the pitiless
winter skies. Buried alive ! The delirium of fever
never pressed a more horrible nightmare on
the brain. The most cruel tyrant never (le-
vied a more atrocious punishment. The wildest
imagination never conceived human agony more
intense than this ►ug and wrestling of strong life
with the remorseless weight of • legion of deaths.
It is loud to be shot down or hewed to death by
assassins, to be cut off by • fell surprise ; but
who would not rather be murdered in the light of
the sun and in the free air of Heaven, than die by
inches in the yardeeam of a coal pit, yet almost
within earshot of aid and rescue

Let ns not look idly on at such a spectacle se
this. The other day when • great man died •
courtly Bishop, by way of improving the occa-
sion, began unctuously to mete out judgments
to the people in the name of PROTIDINCIL

How do Bishops, courtly or popular, moralise on
the chaos of mortal destinies in a ooelpit I Around
that pit's mouth stood the aged and infirm, weak
women with infants at the breast, and children just
able to say " father"—widowed, orphaned, home-
less, desolate as the survivors of a city sacked by an
invading army, torn up by an earthquake, or over-
whelmed by a volcano. The buried men and kids
below represent the destruction of • British army
or the loss of a British fleet. Rude in speech,
coarse in manners, they have not escaped the
caricaturist or the social homilist--this hardy
and enduring population of miners—the very
pith and marrow of our race, who sustain on
Atlantean shoulders the weight of the prosperity
of England, as in life-long darkness, and amidst
dangers incessant and always imminent, they
explore the secret sources of national wealth
and power—to whose unknown and unrecorded
martyrdom we owe not only the cheerful light
and warmth of our dwellings and our streets, but
the very means by which the strength of England
subsists, and the peaceful victories of our civiliza-
tion are achieved.

Does the British public as it Nits by its fireside
ever spare a thought to these true paladins
of the nineteenth century these nanatgem
champions, but for whose strong arms and
patient spirits neither Downing-street, nee
Whitehall, nor Woolwich, nor Portsmouth could
maintain the honour and the rights of England for
a single day f Chivalry and courage, and heroic
virtues, are not found only in camps and on

quarter-decks. Let us celebrate the heroes of
gasettes in sonorous bulletins and pompous
volumes ; let us raise monumental trophies of
their prowess in public places ; let us reward the
shattered survival. of campaigns with pensions ;
let us comfort dur invalided veterans in hospitals.
But let those humble but not less heroic

men of peaceful labour and endurance, who
absolutely 'mute England, and who it may
be, die as these two hundred and fifteen
men and lads in the Hartley pit have died,
at work and duty, be not forgotten wherever at
this season public charity is something better than
an ostentatious and organized hypocrisy. When
the working people of Lyons were the victims of
an inundation, the City of London called a meet-
ing to subscribe to their relief. The widows and
orphans of these poor buried colliers will, we
trust, excite at least equal commiseration, not in
the capital only, but in all those commercial and
industrial centres, ►nd in all those houses of the
highborn and the wealthy, whose honours and
riches and comforts have been wrung from the
labours of such men as those who lay last night
locked together, father and child, son and brother,
in the last embrace, in the yardeesm of the Hartley
Pit—buried alive.