Anywhere, anywhere out of the world!
Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will
do well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures
butchered in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten
miles from your own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple
of lonely women, apparently living together in their poverty, gashed
and battered in the dead of the night, and left in their blood,
stripped of their little all. The motive, too, for all this horrible
housebreaking and bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of
bacon, and the shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a
hovel, being too paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never
dreaming of making resistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came to
slay rather than to steal.
Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on;
and, before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the
village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer
were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was
not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former
class, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all
had some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two
that he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then
there were no large farmers.
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