re very happy, or think themselves so.
And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve
of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he
happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin: oats in full measure if
thou wilt. "Hlunh, No--thank!" snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious
liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? "Hlunh!"--Gray
Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven, she too answers
Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops
are _ended_ in this world!--For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of
Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and
a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge's horses to
emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later,
inevitable. To have in this habitable Earth no grass to eat,--in Black
Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;--to roam
aimless, wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to
Chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of
forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not
sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour.

Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland, between these two
extremes of lazy refusal to work, and of famishing inability to find any
work, what a world have we made of it, with our fierce Mammon-worships,
and our benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses of one kind
and another! Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle,
Time will mend it:--till British industrial existence seems fast
becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral;
a hideous _living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a
Curtius' gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun never saw
till now. These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_ is bringing home
to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have
seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind.
Thirty thousand outcast Needlewomen working themselves swiftly to
death; three million Paupers rotting in forced idleness, _helping_ said
Needlewomen to die: these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.

Thirty thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of
abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian
quagmire of British industrial