ote another member
of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives "an
instance, of the procedure of Church and State about this period":

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led
by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a
week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the
neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal
was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided
that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay
them. The parson, who had at first promised his help, now
turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced the
wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction. Loveless
then formed an agricultural union, for which all seven were
arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the assizes.
The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission. The
judge determined to convict them, and directed that they
should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III,
specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore.
The grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were
farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the
prevailing type. The judge summed up as follows: "Not for
anything that you have done, or that I can prove that you
intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it my
duty to pass the sentence of seven years' penal
transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
every one of you."

#Suffer Little Children#

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children. He
was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not
consider them superfluous. "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven", He
said; and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition--"feed my
lambs". There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the
nineteenth century, and we may see what was done with them by turning
to Gibbin's "Industrial History of England":

Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark
cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill owner in
want of hands, who would come and examine their height,
strength, and bodily capacities, exactly as did the slave
oweners in the American markets. Aft