"Our village peasantry are jostled about from cottage to cottage, or
from cottage to no cottage at all, as freely and with as little
regard to their personal tastes, and conveniences as if we were
removing our pigs, cows, and horses from one sty or shed to another.
If they cannot get a house over their heads they go to the Union, and
are distributed--the man in one part, the wife in another, and the
children again somewhere else. That is a settled thing. Our peasantry
bear it, or, if they can't bear it, they die, and there is an end of
it on this side of the grave; though how it will stand at the great
audit, we leave an 'English Catholic' to imagine. We only mean to say
that in England the work has been done; cotters have been
exterminated; small holdings abolished; the process of eviction
rendered superfluous; the landlord's word made law; the refuge of the
discontented reduced to a workhouse, and all without a shot, or a
bludgeon, or a missile being heard of."

Thus driven from the land, they are forced to take refuge in London
and Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, and accordingly
there it is that we find nearly the whole increase of population in
the last ten years. Out of less than two millions, more than 400,000
were added to the number of London alone, and those who are familiar
with Mr. Mayhew's work, _London Labour and London Poor_, do not need
to be told of the extraordinary wretchedness, nor of the immorality
that there abound. Inquiries get on foot by Lord Ashley have shown
that "in the midst of that city there are," says Mr. Kay--

"Persons, forming a separate class, having pursuits, interests,
manners; and customs of their own, and that the filthy, deserted,
roaming, and lawless children, who may be called the source of
19-20ths of the crime which desolates the metropolis, are not fewer