We Do Things Every Day In The Present Age Equally Unjust And Cruel, Only We Cannot See Them; As Some One Observed, One Cannot See The Eye Because It Is So Close To The Sight.

In the almost sacred name of education tyrannies are being enacted surpassing anything recorded in the most outlying village in the most outlying time.

One constantly sees cases of poor people sent to prison because they happen to have children. No other reason can be detected.

Our great-grandfathers' doctors never used to trouble themselves to write prescriptions for their poorer patients; they used to keep two or three mixtures always made up ready in great jars, and ladle them out. There was the bread and cheese mixture, very often called for, as the ailments of the labourers are commonly traceable to a heavy diet of cheese. As an old doctor used to say when he was called to a cottage, 'Hum; s'pose you've been eating too much fat bacon and cabbage!' Another was the club mixture, called for about May, when the village clubs are held and extra beer disturbs the economy. In factory towns, where the mechanics have dispensaries and employ doctors, something of the same sort of story has got about at the present day. The women are constantly coming for physic, and the assistants are stated to gravely measure a little peppermint and colour it pink or yellow, which does as well. Great invalids with long pockets, who have paid their scores of guineas and gone the round of fashionable physicians, do not seem to have received much more benefit than if they had themselves chosen the yellow or pink hue of their tinted water. It is wonderful what value the country poor set on a bottle of physic; they are twice as grateful for it as for a good dinner. Some of the doctors of old are said to have had an eye for an old book, or an old clock, or an old bit of furniture or china in the cottage, and when the patient was recovering they would take a fancy to it and buy it at their own valuation, for of course the humble labourer was obliged to regard such a wish as a command. The workhouse system puts the labourer completely under the thumb of the clergyman and the doctor. It was in this way that many good old pieces of work gradually found their destination in great London collections. Once now and then, however, the eager collector would come across some one independent, and meet with a sharp refusal to part with the old china bowl. The wife of a small farmer naively remarked about the tithes, 'You know it is such a lot to pay, and we never go there to church; you know it is too far to walk.' It was not the doctrine to which she objected - it was the paying for nothing; paying and never having anything. The farmers, staunch upholders of Church and State, are always grumbling because the clergy are constantly begging. One man took a deep oath that if the clergyman ever came to his house without asking for money he would cut a deep notch with his knife in the oaken doorpost.

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