Crabbe, who saw things as they really were, disposed long ago of the sentimental view of the Cottage Homes of England—
"Ye gentle souls who dream of rural ease,
Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please,
Go! if the peaceful cot your praises share,
Go look within, and ask if peace be there;
If peace be his—that drooping, weary sire.
Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire;
Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand
Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand!"
Even Crabbe's photographic painting gives but an inadequate idea of the moral misery of these pretty cots,—"smiling o'er the silvery brooks, and round the hamlet-fanes."
The Rev. James Fraser, afterwards Bishop of Manchester, one of the Assistant Commissioners in the inquiry made in 1867-68 into the conditions of agricultural labour[1] (an inquiry nominally confined to the employment of women and children, but really extending to the whole subject), reports that "the majority of" cottages that exist in rural parishes are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilised community. They are deficient in bedroom accommodation, very few having three chambers, and in some chambers the larger proportion only one. They are deficient in drainage and sanitary arrangements; they are imperfectly supplied with water; such conveniences as they have are often so situated as to become nuisances; they are full enough of draughts to generate any amount of rheumatism; and in many instances are lamentably dilapidated and out of repair.
"It is impossible to exaggerate the ill effects of such a state of things in every aspect, physical, social, economical, moral, intellectual. Physically, a ruinous, ill-drained cottage, cribbed, cabin'd, confined, and overcrowded, generates any amount of disease, fevers of every type, catarrh, rheumatism, as well as intensifies to the utmost that tendency to scrofula and phthisis which, from their frequent intermarriages and their low diet, abound so largely among the poor.
