The harmony of interests: agricultural, manufacturing by Carey, Henry Charles Publication date: 1856 [quote] The Mother Caimtry, by Sydney Smith pg 205
"Humanity cries to us from the depths. If we will not answer her, it were better a millstone were tied about our necks, and that we were cast into the sea. Have we no sense of the precipice on which we stand? Have not the books of the prophetess been one by one burnt before our eyes — and does not the sybil even now knock at our doors to offer us her final volume, ere she turn from us and leave us to the Furies? Crime, not stealing, but striding onward. Murders, poisonings, becoming almost a domestic institution among our villages — husband, children, parents, drugged to their final home for the sake of the burial fees. Vice within the law, keeping pace with offence without. Incest winked at by our magistracy from its fearful frequency in our squalid peasant dwellings. Taxation reaching beyond the point at which resources can meet it, so that, at increasingly shorter intervals, we have to borrow from ourselves to make expenditure square with income. Poor Laws extended to Scotland and Ireland, where they were never known before, and new Poor Laws failing in England to check the advance of rates, and the growth of inveterate beggary, until property threatens to be swallowed up by the propertyless, and a terrible communism to be realized among us by a legalized division of the goods of those who have, among those who have not — the fearfulfest socialism, the equal republic of beggary. 'Speak I strike! redress!' Three millions and a half of the houseless and homeless, the desperate, the broken, the lost, plead to you in a small still voice, yet louder than the mouthing theories of constitution-mongers. Man, abused, insulted, degraded, shows to you his social scars, his broken members, his maimed carcass. blurred in the conflict of a selfish and abused community. "We say it must no longer be. We are a spectacle to gods and men — 'a by-word and a hissing to the nations.' Savages grow up in the midst of our feather-head civilization, wilder, more forlorn, more forgotten, and neglected than the Camanches, or the eartheaters of New Holland. Ragged foundlings, deserted infant wretchedness, paupers hereditary, boasting a beggar pedigree older than many of our nobles, grow up from year to year, generation to generation, eat with brazen front into the substance of struggling industry." — The Mother Caimtry, by Sydney Smith.