From Project Gutenberg. Wikipedia entry here
I took a post-chaise in the afternoon of yesterday and went to Frome, where I saw, upon my entrance into the town, between two and three hundred weavers, men and boys, cracking stones, moving earth, and doing other sorts of work, towards making a fine road into the town. I drove into the town, and through the principal streets, and then I put my chaise up a little at one of the inns.
This appears to be a sort of little Manchester. A very small Manchester, indeed; for it does not contain above ten or twelve thousand people, but it has all the flash of a Manchester, and the innkeepers and their people look and behave like the Manchester fellows. I was, I must confess, glad to find proofs of the irretrievable decay of the place. I remembered how ready the bluff manufacturers had been to call in the troops of various descriptions. “Let them,” said I to myself, “call the troops in now, to make their trade revive. Let them now resort to their friends of the yeomanry and of the army; let them now threaten their poor workmen with the gaol, when they dare to ask for the means of preventing starvation in their families. Let them, who have, in fact, lived and thriven by the sword, now call upon the parson-magistrate to bring out the soldiers to compel me, for instance, to give thirty shillings a yard for the superfine black broad cloth (made at Frome), which Mr. Roe, at Kensington, offered me at seven shillings and sixpence a yard just before I left home! Yes, these men have ground down into powder those who were earning them their fortunes: let the grinders themselves now be ground, and, according to the usual wise and just course of Providence, let them be crushed by the system which they have delighted in, because it made others crouch beneath them.” Their poor work-people cannot be worse off than they long have been. The parish pay, which they now get upon the roads, is 2s. 6d. a week for a man, 2s. for his wife, 1s. 3d. for each child under eight years of age, 3d. a week, in addition, to each child above eight, who can go to work: and, if the children above eight years old, whether girls or boys, do not go to work upon the road, they have nothing! Thus, a family of five people have just as much, and eight pence over, as goes down the throat of one single foot soldier; but, observe, the standing soldier; that “truly English institution” has clothing, fuel,[Pg 362] candle, soap, and house-rent, over and above what is allowed to this miserable family! And yet the base reptiles, who are called “country gentlemen,” and whom Sir James Graham calls upon us to commit all sorts of acts of injustice in order to preserve, never utter a whisper about the expenses of keeping the soldiers, while they are everlastingly railing against the working people, of every description, and representing them, and them only, as the cause of the loss of their estates!
These poor creatures at Frome have pawned all their things, or nearly all. All their best clothes, their blankets and sheets; their looms; any little piece of furniture that they had, and that was good for anything. Mothers have been compelled to pawn all the tolerably good clothes that their children had. In case of a man having two or three shirts, he is left with only one, and sometimes without any shirt; and, though this is a sort of manufacture that cannot very well come to a complete end, still it has received a blow from which it cannot possibly recover. The population of this Frome has been augmented to the degree of one-third within the last six or seven years. There are here all the usual signs of accommodation bills and all false paper stuff, called money: new houses, in abundance, half finished; new gingerbread “places of worship,” as they are called; great swaggering inns; parcels of swaggering fellows going about, with vulgarity imprinted upon their countenances, but with good clothes upon their backs.
I found the working people at Frome very intelligent; very well informed as to the cause of their misery; not at all humbugged by the canters, whether about religion or loyalty.
