The Sun.
London, England, 1859-10-25 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23; 1859

The calamitous effects of the Strike are at length
beginning to tell upon its victims, and even to force
a tardy suspicion of its folly (to use the very mildest
'phrase) upon the judgments of some among its
most ardent
,promoters. The melancholy conse-
quences of the whole proceeding are no longer to
be eoncealed, They glare upon our notice—the
most fatal of these consequences—through the
weekly report of that inexorable Gazeteer of
Death, the Registrar-General. For these are evi-
dences now only too visible, from week to week,
upon those tabulated records official records
more than most records of an official character to be
accepted upon all hands as perfectly reliable—these
are frightfully conspicuous evidences, these, that
the Strike has added, in a deplorable way, its own
peculiar quota to the general mortality. The
impoverishment necessarily produced by the
Strike has told, naturally enough, upon the
weakest, frailest, and most delicate constitutions
—it has cut off by scores the poor women
and children ! Before the actual death of which
unfortunates, we are constrained to bear in mind
the lengthened sufferings endured day by day in
these now bereaved households of the poor ! Be-
fore that most deplorable of natural deaths can
come—if we can in any way induce ourselves to
speak of it as a " natural" death—the death pro-
duced by actual inanition ; before the wives and
children of working men can die of absolute star-
vation—every stick and rag (be sure of that) has
long since gone to the pawnbroker.

The scenes of misery thatmnst have been
rife in all parts of this metropolis during the
chief part of the deplorable interval which
has elapsed since the strike commenced
scenes that must have come to the knowledge of,
if they have not actually been witnessed by, the
daring originators and obstinate upholders of the
Nine Hours' Movement—must have served to
attest the hardness and stubbornness of their
philosophy. Whatevir they may argue to the con-
trary these men have been all this while coolly
driving these scores upon scores to death, and these
hundreds and thousands to misery. Better, they
have seemed to say, that all these sickly women
and children should continue to perish—better that
all these fathers and husbands should be denied the
chance of saving them from destruction by work—
better that all these unnumbered families should
be rendered utterly wretched and impoverished
to the last degree of impoverishment, than that we
should do anything so mean and paltry now as to
4, give in" after alio= bold words and resolute pro-
ceedings ! And so—weeks, months have gone by
without a hint at the probability of any relenting.
And during the lapse of these same miserable
weeks and months the Registrar-General has been
ticking down more and more rapidly the lists of
the helpless victims. At last—with the prema-
ture indications of approaching winter suddenly
upon us—at last the funds begin to fall
off. The boldest spoken hitherto show signs of
the dawn of something like timidity, or at any
rate of something like hesitation. An appeal to
the general community is talked of—without any
distinct idea evidently of the principle upon which
it should be addressed to the sympathies of the
population. And so out of the very depth of the
groom of the general wretchedness there comes the
glimmering of a ghostly- hope of amelioration.
The worst ofit all now is, however, that so very brief
an interval is really left to attempt even to make
up arrears before the building season is ended
peremptorily by the annual setting in of the Shari)
frosts, when the trowel and mortar can no longer
be handled by the bricklayer any more than the
TeX, and spade can be used by the poor frozen-out