poetry which has appeared during the last twenty years, without favour or
exception; among which he must needs, of course, find mine, and also, I am
happy to say, a great deal which is much better and more instructive than
mine.




CHAPTER X.

HOW FOLKS TURN CHARTISTS.


Those who read my story only for amusement, I advise to skip this chapter.
Those, on the other hand, who really wish to ascertain what working men
actually do suffer--to see whether their political discontent has not its
roots, not merely in fanciful ambition, but in misery and slavery most real
and agonizing--those in whose eyes the accounts of a system, or rather
barbaric absence of all system, which involves starvation, nakedness,
prostitution, and long imprisonment in dungeons worse than the cells of the
Inquisition, will be invested with something at least of tragic interest,
may, I hope, think it worth their while to learn how the clothes which they
wear are made, and listen to a few occasional statistics, which, though
they may seem to the wealthy mere lists of dull figures, are to the workmen
symbols of terrible physical realities--of hunger, degradation, and
despair. [Footnote: Facts still worse than those which Mr. Locke's story
contains have been made public by the _Morning Chronicle_ in a series of
noble letters on "Labour and the Poor"; which we entreat all Christian
people to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." "That will be better
for them," as Mahomet, in similar cases, used to say.]