The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1844-11-12 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

WRONGS OF THE LABOURING CLASSES.—An extraordinary degree of public attention is at present drawn to the state of the labouring classes. The whole press of the country, in every phase of political opinion, joins in proclaiming their wrongs and the necessity for some remedies. "It were needless," says the Morning Chronicle, " to adduce examples of the pressing nature of these evils. Bishops furnish them in their charges ; country gentlemen quote them in their speeches ; city orators cite them at their public meetings; newspapers give them at full length from day to day. Such a state of things cannot go on. Commerce is prosperous ; trade is thriving; the revenue flourishes ; yet look at the condition of our labouring people." What a throng of deeds of cruelty and injustice has even the last ten drays produced ! In the metropolis, and in our great towns, we see, almost every day, coroners' inquests on men and women, either dying of want, or committing suicide out of mere desperation. At this instant, in the wealthy parish of Marylebone, such an investigation is going on. Meanwhile, our slopsellers persist in giving their five farthings for the work of a shirt, and sixpence for embroidering a shawl with eighty flowers ! And if we turn to the country, what meets us there ? In one county, we find a poor fellow who had brought up thirteen children, and inhabited one cottage for twenty years, sent to gaol, under a sentence which almost amounts to perpetualimprisonment, because found with a hare, In the next county, we see another man quietly sentenced to three months' hard labour, for being found with a gun ; though whether he was intending to shoot crows or rabbits, no one could tell ! In a third case, a poor man was sentenced to ten years' transportation, having confessed, that, when almost starved, he was tempted by a neighbour to assist in stealing a sheep. Now we are not arguing for impunity in such cases as these. No offence ought to pass without notice. But what we press upon our readers' attention, is this,— that here are three men, in the adjoining counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxrord,—all tempted into crime by want and wretchedness, and all instantly punished with rigour, though in each case it was a first offence, and though in each case the cost of maintaining them and their families, at the public cost, in prisons and workhouses, would inevitably amount to a far larger sum than would have rendered them all happy and comfortable in honest industry. But, in truth, the manner in which the game-laws are now carried out, looks like infatuation. Sir Harry Verney declared, a few days back, at a meeting of the magistrates of Buckinghamshire, his conviction, that the game of that county consumed one-fourth of the produce of the soil. And a correspondent of the Globe declares, that " a few weeks back the principal occupier in an adjoining parish declared to me that the game cost the occupiers of the parish more than the poor did, and they were numerous." In fact, if we were to take the average consumption of the fruits of the earth by the game at less than half what Sir Harry Verner estimates it at, it would still be true, of the whole kingdom, that the landed proprietors actually bestow more upon their hares and partridges, than they do upon their poor !—Church. man's Monthly Review.