The Express. — 1862-01-23 (London, England)

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 (levied 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 occasion, 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, homeless, desolate as the survivors of a city sacked by an invading army, torn up by an earthquake, or overwhelmed 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 civilization 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 meeting 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.