n the United Kingdom, and the sum raised in poor-rates was not less
than L7,200,000. And that cost of pauperism is not the full amount,
for there is a vast amount of temporary, casual, and vagrant pauperism
that does not come in to swell that sum.

Then do not you well know--I know it, because I live among the
population of Lancashire, and I doubt not the same may be said of the
population of this city and county--that just above the level of the
1,100,000 there is at least an equal number who are ever oscillating
between independence and pauperism, who, with a heroism which is not
the less heroic because it is secret and unrecorded, are doing their
very utmost to maintain an honourable and independent position before
their fellow men? While Irish labour, notwithstanding the improvement
which has taken place in Ireland, is only paid at the rate of about
1_s_. a day, while in the straths and glens of Scotland there are
hundreds of shepherd families whose whole food almost consists of
oatmeal porridge from day to day, and from week to week; while these
things continue, I say that we have no reason to be self-satisfied and
contented with our position; but that we who are in Parliament and
are more directly responsible for affairs, and you who are also
responsible though in a lower degree, are bound by the sacred duty
which we owe our country to examine why it is that with all this
trade, all this industry, and all this personal freedom, there is
still so much that is unsound at the base of our social fabric?

Let me direct your attention now to another point which I never think
of without feelings which words would altogether fail to express.
You hear constantly that woman, the helpmate of man, who adorns,
dignifies, and blesses our lives, that woman in this country is cheap;
that vast numbers whose names ought to be synonyms for purity and
virtue are plunged into profligacy and infamy. But do you not know
that you sent 40,000 men to perish on the bleak heights of the Crimea,
and that the revolt in India, caused, in part at least, by the
grievous iniquity of the seizure of Oude, may tax your country to the
extent of 100,000 lives before it is extinguished; and do you know
that for the 140,000 men thus drafted off and consigned to premature
graves, nature provided in your country 140,000 women? If you have
taken the men who should have been the husbands of these women, and
if you have sacrificed L100,000,000, which as capi