No. 8. VOL. 4.] LONDON, Friday, August 21, 1829. [PRICE 6d.

Liverpool, August 16, 1829.

THE Contrast between Liverpool and other parts of Lancashire is indeed great. Here, we see not Starvation, with its gaunt features, preying upon our sympathies, and making well-fed life itself miserable. Here, we have not the plying sound of the shuttle which proclaims the worst of slavery, labour without reward, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, yet excessive labour. To see a man starving amidst full employ, which may be seen in a hundred thousand instances in Lancashire, is indeed a woeful sight. It is frightful to contemplate war, famine, or pestilence; but not half so frightful as to contemplate starving industry. A breaking up of the present state of things in the country generally, is now every politician's sentiment as to a desideratum, the only question is, as to which way it shall be begun, in what manner it shall be carried on, and where it shall end; points on which there will never be any agreement, so as to produce planned, congregated, and united action; but to walk through Lancashire, to visit the cottage, the cellar, and the garret, and to converse with the weaver, is enough to induce one to say, that, as far as Lancashire is concerned, this breaking up should be no longer delayed. It is no wild prediction to announce, that, in and under a continuation of the present state of things, in Lancashire, ten thousand full-grown persons and a hundred thousand children, will die from the want of life's sustenance and care in the ensuing winter. Like the grim spectres of a romance, gaunt Starvation stalks its day-light hour through the streets and roads of Lancashire, and such is the subdued character of its victims, that they have not enough of life's fire remaining to express their honest indignation. To add to their misery, their last energies

Printed and Published by R. CARLILE, 62, Fleet Street.

No. 8.-Vol. 4.

seem to be exhausted in child-getting, and a miserable race of squallid, filthy, brute and worse than brute, because diseased, children swarm throughout these haunts of misery. The chief power and only apparent natural purpose of animal life is procreation, and that remains when all the necessary means to be associated with it for its support are gone. That late truly wretched picture of humanity, John Cameron, a weaver of Bolton, who had been starved into an irrecoverable decline of life, in comparative youth; who had sunk so low in animal energy as to require the same attentions with the most helpless infancy, was so far rallied with unusual sustenance poured into him by Methodistical and Infidel friends, as, in a state approaching to intoxication, to impregnate his young wife, and to lie down and die! I am told, for I have not seen it, that the child is a complete continuation of the father's sickly and sickening countenance. This is the master social vice of this country, and, until we correct it, by showing its evils, until we unite all minds in its consideration, and keep up extensive and constant moral inculcation on this ground, this vice will deprave every attempt lastingly to improve the condition of mankind. I know well how deeply the subject is loathed. I know most fully how far it has gone as an excuse among my timid well-wishers, and as a means of attack among my hypocritical and other enemies, to exclude me from more public and from the better or more agreeable part of social intercourse. I know it; but I prefer the continued, aye, the more extended exclusion, to the smothered concealment of so great a subject, so necessarily conducive to the improved condition of general humanity. I am told, that it excludes my publication from more general reading. Be it so; the more good is done, where it is read. I am told, that it lessens my income, or fair profits in trade. As I have no hope of getting rich by trade, and as my only hope of getting rich is through property bequeathed by those who approve my public doings, I have determined to be useful where I cannot determine to be rich, and to place my future provision in life upon the merits of that utility. In all my private habits of life, 1 am incapable of an indecency. In my contact with male or female society, I am habitually incapable of an immodesty or an indelicacy, in carriage, countenance, or language; and it is because I am so, because I am known so to be, by all who know me, the man of sorrows, rather than the man of gaiety or debauchery, that I am emboldened to proclaim these greatest wants, these greatest wrongs in society. I begun the proclamation under very solitary and prospectively endless imprisonment; no other person was so well situated and so well qualified for the great necessary proclamation; I embarked on it; my unimprisoned experience proves its importance; I find it beginning to be well understood; it cannot fail finally of being generally approved; and any change of condition shall never

change the advocacy of any sound and useful principles with which my name has been connected, and in the advocacy of which I have, as in this case, voluntarily embarked. Perish all my other happiness in life, rather than that I should cease to be alike bold, honest, and useful, in relation to the general wants of my much abused species.

Mr. Cobbett, after a criminal abuse of me for saying the thing, has, in his Advice to Young Men, lately published, maintained precisely the same principle, and tells his young men, that there is a criminality in the begetting of children for other people to maintain, or for which the parents have no prospective suste-' nance. A little further knowledge of his subject, a little physiological knowledge of the animal character, may bring him to, see, that, though it may not be always convenient to produce children, sexual abstinence can never be convenient to the healthy and matured part of the community. All the good morals, all the pleasures, all the prosperities of society are linked to the wise' regulation of the relations of the sexes to each other.

that oneIn Bolton, it is the estimate of some of the weavers, fourth of the families in the whole town are in a state of starvation, or have not enough of food, raiment, and other necessaries, to ward off disease and premature death. One of them most affectingly described a Saturday night in a weaver's family. The husband lays down the scanty produce of his week's labour before his wife. She feels, that, beyond the paying of the rent, and the mere wherewith of oatmeal and treacled water, to appease the gnawings of the stomach, she wants a little soap, candle, coal, and occasional articles of clothing, or for the repair of clothing. She divides her money for the various purposes, beginning with the most urgent necessities, and then weeps to find that any thing beyond the rent and scanty food is not within her means. God Almighty! where art thou? Wretched imagination, on whom wretches fruitlessly rely, why helpest thou not them? Here are men, incapable of earning more than three farthing's an hour, under the most laborious efforts; and under all the exertions they can make, the odds are on the side of starvation. The average produce of common calico-weaving is not more than a halfpenny an hour; and yet, under this state of things, the wretches will blindly go on to the accumulation of a large number of children. And such children! You see them in the streets naked and filthy, dropping their excrement about them, just like the most offensive of other animals. Houses are built for these wretches, by the manufacturers and other speculators in brick and mortar, which have no more convenience than a pig-sty, and which leave the inmates no alternative but to cast forth their excremental filth before their doors. And amidst this vile state of things,/chapels are raised, praying, and preaching,

and begging for God and God's cause incessantly going on, magistrates assemble, a police is established, bad laws are administered, every effort at human improvement is legislatively, magisterially, and corporatively discouraged; man is miserable and God is praised.

I offer myself to the people of this country as a rallying point for the alteration and amendment of this state of things. God has done nothing, God can do nothing for them. But, with their own will and assistance, I can do much, and, with or without their will and assistance, I will do something for them. I proclaim to them, and am every where and at all times prepared to maintain that proclamation by argument, that their God is a burthen to them, which must be cast away, before they can take the right ground on which to mend their condition. As religious reformers, they will never do any thing but spill blood; as reformers without religion, they may lay the foundation of a new and a better order of things. Man, I repeat, must provide for himself; God can do nothing for him. He is cast into life, as the creature of circumstances and not of a designing power, and, in life, his welfare depends upon the best moral arrangement of circumstances that he can produce.

I offer myself to the people of this country, as a rallying point for reform; because I see no disposition in any other public men, to speak out and say what is absolutely necessary to be done for the general improvement. Our present government, in its form and essentialities, is made up of such circumstances as have produced the present miserable state of things. It is a godlike government; and, in its practice, exhibits the power to do any thing but good to the mass of the people. And I proclaim, that, until mankind are separated from the gods and such godly governments, no general improvement worth a mention or a thought will take place in their condition. The religious propensities of mankind and of their governments must be rooted out before wise legislation can be brought forward to the amendment of their condition. This is the radical reform wanted: the rooting out of such of the human vices as generate naught but evil and as perpetuate evils once generated.

If the people of England be not yet prepared for this sort of reform, they are prepared for none, and must continue to suffer. Parliamentary Reform projects are destitute of practicability; and, as far as they have been yet stated, incompetent to the end sought, if obtained. A century has been wasted in this clamour for Parliamentary Reform, and other centuries will be wasted, and no good done, if no better ground be taken. To talk about Parliamentary Reform, to hope for bad harvests, and to pray for such an accumulation of distress as will rouse a multitude to insurrection, is the very acme of that beggarly kind of reform, which has now for many years been called radical. I renounce it, and call the people of England to better action.

There is another evil preying upon the working people of Lancashire, which is carried on in spite of forbidding acts of Parliament. Large manufacturers, who are known not to be making any profits upon the produce of their workmen and machinery, are still making fortunes by wringing profits from the small earnings of those workmen, in the shape of rents and upon the articles on which they subsist. In certain manufactories, a spinner, or other workman, is engaged, and whether he wants a house or not, he must take a key and pay the rent of one to the employer: and, it is asserted, that cases of this kind have been enforced, when there was neither lock, door, nor house connected with the key! A spinner, or other workman, in a cotton-mill, is as much sold to a manufacturer in Lancashire, as a slave to his master in the West Indies. The former can only exchange masters by a written allowance, and the workman, who, in Lancashire, shall assert his right to change at his own discretion will find here no master to employ him. The nominal slave is better situated; for though he may be sold from master to master, he must necessarily be maintained.

As a man, I feel degraded, when I move among the working people of Lancashire. Wilberforce never thought so intensely on the condition of the slave, as I think on the condition of the weaver and his family. I feel, that I have new duties to perform, new efforts to make, to strive to alter and amend the condition of this people. I swear by and in defiance of the gods, that I will perform those duties and make those efforts. And I feel that the great preliminary movement must be to get the people to cast away their gods. If ever a people has been punished and has suffered through idolatry, the English are that people. All religion is idolatry. All idolatry is vice. It is altogether mischievous to the community in which it has been adopted: and where it is deeply rooted, as in this country, at this time, there can be no possible reform that shall not begin there.

I am interrupted here by the receipt of another of those ugly things called an Exchequer writ, calling upon me to appear in court in November. I know not what it is about; but the Court of Exchequer is always frightful. The writ is connected with the Stamp-office, which, in relation to literature, is a great nuisance, even to this all-taxed country, and one of the worst modes of raising a revenue, as it is a tax upon talent, and a great impediment to the growing knowledge of the people.

RICHARD CARLILE.