[-69-]
Chapter V
Up to this point we have had to do with genuine Rookeries, which have become so through the changing circumstances of the age, or through the abuse or former provisions for the decent lodging of the working classes. Men build small houses, which are not drained, supplied with water, ventilated as they ought to be,- these easily degenerate into Rookeries, but they were not originally designed for this; they were, in advertising phrase, eligible premises, multum in parvo's ; we now turn to a different part of the town, not strictly within the city boundaries, though not excluded from the bills of mortality, where Rookeries wear a different shape. The houses are not particularly small, ill ventilated, or crammed, yet they are begirt with a set of nuisances sufficient to degrade them to the lowest state of habitable dwellings. So that Rookeries may become fever depots through the avarice of speculators, who poison the water and pollute the air for the sake of an additional per centage upon the trade in which they are employed, much in the same way that wretches might be found who would retail poison, did not the Legislature curtail the freedom of the subject, when he would be rid [-70-] of the life which God gave him for a noble purpose. Tan-pits, glue-yards,- the head quarters of some odoriferous traffic,-subtract about seventy per cent, not only from the comforts but the necessaries of life. If air and water be essential for beings constituted as we are, Rookeries in such localities become dens of pestilence, and the full pressure of poverty is here exposed, by the loathsome dwellings to which it drives its victims. Men must be sunk indeed - desperate, reckless, past power of redemption, we had well nigh said-who could tolerate such a neighbourhood as the scene where they are to know the blessed influence of wedded love, and which is to be pictured in their children's memories as the place where first they saw the light. Suppose a man to marry, with some of the usual aspirations of his kind,-with some love for, and interest in, the being to whom he is united; allow him only the smallest particle of that romance which ought to gild unions such as these, how soon must he lose every finer feeling, how rapidly become demoralized by the loathsome attributes of a plague spot! Moralists have ever ranked among the great panaceas of our kind the hallowed influence of marriage, - how it destroys selfishness; what a stake it gives a man in the welfare of his country; how it opens the heart to the wants and feelings of others; what an object to live for; what benefit the country reaps from well-trained families; with what cheerfulness the man who is happily married goes to his daily work; what an aid to the sway of pure and sober religion these home [-71-] sympathies are! How does the romance of affection give a delicacy to the thoughts and refinement to the taste? All is checked, or rather distorted in neighbourhoods such as these; we blot out from the catalogue of God's gifts to men the holiest, the most precious of earthly blessings. The body soon becomes enfeebled by inhaling a fetid atmosphere, disease is generated, seizes hold upon some flaw in a weak constitution, makes one for itself in the stronger frame, and the mind sympathizes, is clouded, is driven to seek questionable relaxations, to purchase moments of forgetfulness in intoxication; the image the man has drawn of the partner of his life soon recedes before the figure of her who is a fellow sufferer with himself; the annoyances with which he is surrounded leave their traces in his family and his home; childhood's innocence seems a fable in such haunts, wedded love a mockery, when poverty and custom assign for its enjoyments receptacles like these. Who shall say how much the crime which pollutes England is owing to our St. Giles's and Saffron Hills? how much to this,-the failure in our education schemes? how much to this,-the abortive efforts of Churchmen and Dissenters for the religious improvement of their fellow creatures? Can you think to lift a man's eyes heavenward, when his vision is distorted by gazing ever on these objects,- to fill his heart with love who is reaping the fruits of a more than heathen avarice,- to teach him reverence for human laws, when the only exercise of law which he knows is the protection afforded to plague spots and the victimizers [-72-] of their fellow creatures? When legislation would root out the disease which decimates the poor, it is feebler than the child.
The late visitation has brought to light many
sores in the body corporate of London; and, thanks to the able articles in the Morning
Chronicle, Bermondsey, a Rookery quarter like those we have just described,
has come in for its full share of infamous notoriety. Our attention has been
directed to that parish by this able paper; and we have therefore wished to
include it in our sketch, though we would much rather refer our readers to the
articles themselves (which we trust will be published separately), and more
especially to a tract, entitled "Jacob's Island, and the Tidal ditches of
Bermondsey."
Our plan has been hitherto to show how a Rookery became what
it now is; whether it ever knew palmy days, and what and when these were;
because it is interesting to the mass to learn this, even if, in addition, it
did not point out by what steps such changes* [* See Wilkinson's Londiniana Illustrata.]
were accomplished.
Bermondsey, then, is supposed to have derived its name from
some Saxon. proprietor whose name was Bermond, the termination eu, or eye,
in that language, signifying water. This was added to denote the nature of
the soil, and is frequent in the names of places whose situation on the banks of
rivers renders them insular or marshy.
[-73-] King Edward was lord of
the manor, as Harold had been before him, in whose time it was rated to the land
tax (including the manor, afterwards called Rotherhithe) at thirteen hundred
acres. There were eight hundred acres of arable land ; a new and fair church,
with twenty acres of meadow; and as much woodland as yielded to the lord's share
in pasnage * [* Pasnage, or pannage, is an ancient law term for the most of the
oak and other forest trees used to feed swine. The time for receiving these
animals into the woods and keeping them, was from Holyrood Day, or fifteen days
before Michaelmas, to St. Martin's day.-WILKINSON.] time five fat swine. The
reputed annual value of the manor, or whole lordship, in the time of Edward the
Confessor, was £.900 of our present money, out of which the sheriff was allowed
20s. or £.60 of our present currency, for collecting the rents and paying them
into the Exchequer. The manor house, or palace, was given by William II., in
1094, to the monks of Bermondsey. After its surrender to Henry VIII., it was
granted by him to Sir Robert Southwell, who in the same year sold it to Sir
Thomas Pope; by whom soon afterwards the ancient edifice was taken down, and a
capital mansion erected. Having been occupied by the Earl of Sussex and various
owners, part of it, in 1792, was the property of William Richardson; and as late
as 1821 of James Riley, Esq., in whose garden, at that time, was an ancient
wall, with crosses and other devices in glazed bricks.
Whether from its situation by the side of the river, or from
what other cause is not mentioned, the ravages of [-74-] the
plague are stated to have been greater here than at Lambeth, although the latter
was the more populous parish. In 1625, this distemper was most fatal, the number
of deaths being 1117; twenty bodies were frequently interred in one night. In
1636, 203 persons died of this disease; in 1665, 263.
The importance of this place in the olden time was derived
from its famous Abbey or Priory, to which were attached lands, bounded by the
Thames, on which now stands the colony, called Jacob's Island the present
condition of this place is the subject of the strictures in the Morning
Chronicle, for we are told that the prior and convent of Bermondsey had a
park and other lands adjoining the Banks of the Thames, called Rotherhithe Wall.
This sustained so much damage in 1309, by a breach in those parts (probably a
high tide), that they were exempted from the purveyance of hay and corn. "
The mill of St. Saviour (still the place keeps the name St. Saviour's Dock) was
converted into a water machine to supply the inhabitants with water, and was, on
the first of June, 1536, demised by the abbot and monks to John Curlew, at the
annual rent of £6 (the value of eighteen quarters of good wheat), and to grind
all the corn for the use of the convent, which Curlew was to fetch home. The
annual charge of the whole was computed at £2 3s. 8d., which made the
annual rate of the said mill amount to £.8 3s. 8d." -MANNING'S Surrey.
An indenture was executed between Henry VII. the
[-75-] Mayor and commonalty of London, the Abbot and Convent of St.
Peter, Westminster, and the Abbot and Convent of St. Saviour, Bermondsey, for
holding an anniversary in the Abbey Church of Bermondsey, on the 6th of
February, to pray for the prosperity of the king and his family, and to pray for
the souls of the Earl and Countess of Richmond, the King's parents. The deed
contains directions as to the manner in which this anniversary is to be
solemnized. " The Abbot and Convent of St. Saviour, Bermondsey, shall
provide at every such anniversary an herse, to be sett in the myddes of the high
chancell of the same monasterie, before the high Aulter cov'd and appareled wt
the best and most honorable stuff in the same monasterie convenyent for the
same. And also four tap's of wax, ev'y of them weighing VIII. lb., to be sett
aboute the same herse, that is to say on either side thereof o'on taper, and at
either end of the same herse another taper. And all the same four tap's to be
light, and burning continually during all the tyme of ev'y such placebo, dirige,
wt nyne lessons, laudes, and masse of reg'ni, w~ the prayers and obs'vances
above rehersed. And ymmediately eeny of the same high masses singin and fynished,
the abbot of the said monasterie of Seynt Sau'yor, of Bermondsey, if he be
p'sent, and the Convet of the same," &c. The decree goes on to direct
that in the absence of the abbot the prior of the said Convent shall go with his
monks to the same hearse, in a most solemn and devout manner, and shall sing Libera
me de morte eterna. At the disso-[-76-]lution
of monasteries, that of Bermondsey was valued at £.474 14s. 4d.
The water-side division of Bermondsey, or that part of the
parish situate east of St. Saviour's Dock, and adjoining the parish of
Rotherhithe, is intersected by several streams or water-courses. Upon the south
bank of one of these, between Mill Street and George Row, stand a number of very
ancient houses, called London Street; of this locality, as connected with
Jacob's Island, we shall speak hereafter.
In the year 1804 there were still in being many fragments of
the venerable foundation of Bermondsey Abbey, probably more than of almost any
religious edifice in or near London, owing, it is supposed, to its remote
situation, which did not encourage the improvements generally so fatal to old
buildings. The principal entrance, called the Gate House, was then nearly
entire; it stood direct north and faced Bermondsey Church. An old stone wall ran
eastward the whole extent of the churchyard. On the other side of this wall was
a row of very old houses, whose stone-framed windows and style of building were
witnesses to their antiquity. The great Gate House and nearly all the ancient
buildings, with the exception of two or three dwelling houses, have, since 1805,
been destroyed, and a modern street, called Abbey Street, has been erected on
their site. A small portion of the Abbey walls yet remains on the south side,
and a fragment of the same wall on the north side of Long Walk; the latter being
a part of that which surrounded the [-77-] conventual
churchyard. There is reason to think that the monastic buildings were separated
from the Grange, which extended to the water side, by a long brick wall. This
Grange, or pasture, is the site of the abominations we have undertaken to
describe. The writer in The Morning Chronicle states that, in the reign
of Henry II., the foul stagnant ditch, which now makes an island of this
pestilential spot, was a running stream, supplied with the waters which poured
down from the hills about Sydenham and Nunhead, and was used for the working of
the mills which then stood on its banks. These had been granted to the monks of
St. Mary and St. John to grind their flour, and were dependencies upon the
Priory of Bermondsey; and what is now a straw yard skirting the river, was once
the city Ranelagh, called Cupid's Gardens; and the trees, now black with mud,
were the bowers under which the citizens loved, on the summer evenings, to sit
beside the stream drinking their sack and ale. We have no doubt that the
statement here made was founded on respectable authority, although we have not
been able to find it; the paper to which we allude is so ably written, and with
so much feeling for the poor creatures whose cause it pleads, that it should be
read by all who feel an interest in the subject, and for this purpose has been
published in a separate form. We, as in duty bound, visited this district; the
stagnant water which insulates this spot has no appearance of ever having been a
stream, though doubtless part of it was so; it seems rather to have been an
artificial reservoir, [-78-] where the water flowed
into channels cut to receive it and this idea is strengthened by the
circumstances of the case: there is a paper mill at a little distance from the
spot; and, on inquiry, we found that the waters of the Thames were let into
these tidal ditches, as they were called, three times a week; the form of the
ditch is also quadrangular. To those accustomed to Rookeries, the
appearance of the houses is not worse than that which they generally wear in
such localities. On entering many of them, as is often the case in old houses,
you descend, and thus are made sensible that the floor is below the level of the
ground; there is the usual amount of ricketty furniture, with a ladder on which
to mount to the bed- rooms: but the houses are not inconveniently crowded, nor
could we find that the rooms were tenanted by more than one family each. London
Street is a curious assemblage of houses, and retains very much the same
appearance as it did when it furnished a sketch, in 1814, for Wilkinson's
Londiniana Illustrata. The houses are evidently old, the first stories slightly
overhanging the ground floor, yet not no much as in many of our old towns where
these projections form penthouses : there is nothing particularly quaint and
interesting about them; hovels they were, and hovels will they remain as long as
they exist. Still, the whole locality is curious because surrounded on four
sides by stagnant water: part of this channel must be artificial, and it is not
easy to learn when the district became thus insulated; this quadrangular ditch
is crossed by means of bridges made of wood, [-79-] and
the whole is separated from the Thames by a long row of large warehouses, which
are the glory of that land. Paper mills, sufferance wharves, and other
commercial enterprises, have their emporiums there; so that you might pass along
the district again and again without stumbling on this isolated Rookery.
We do not say there is nothing to startle a stranger in the
buildings of this place-there is much; but, unhappily, twelve years of
experience in crowded districts of London have shown us many such sights, -
Chelsea, Whitechapel, St. Andrew's Holborn, have many such Rookeries. The floors
of the houses being below the level of the foot-path must be flooded in wet
weather; the rooms are mouldy and ill savoured; dark, small, and confined, they
could not be peopled as the alleys of St. Giles's, because their size would not
admit of it. There is the usual amount of decaying vegetable matter, the uneven
footpath, the rotten doors, the broken windows patched with rags, ash heaps in
front of the houses, dogs, &c. housed there, ragged children, and other
features well known to those conversant with such neighbourhoods. But here the
parallel ends :-there are peculiar nuisances in this spot which go far to
justify the language used by the writer of the articles in The Morning
Chronicle, and which he describes techically as perhaps a surgeon alone
could do. These abominations we proceed to notice; not, of course, that we can
go into many details; - the gentleman we have alluded to has done it much better
than we could pretend to do,- done it too with a [-80-] knowledge
of the consequences involved in such neglect, and done it at a season when such
supervision as he exercised involved the greatest results. He saw it while
cholera was decimating its victims, making wholesale ravages; we now see it when
frost and cold have purified the air; when what was a reeking flood of
pestilence is now frozen over; so that you might walk on it. Some slight
attempts have been made to supply the wants of the people,-public attention has
been called to the nuisances which here, to the disgrace of our laws, still
pollute this wretched district. The writer we have alluded to, says,- "The
striking peculiarity of Jacob's Island consists in the wooden galleries and
sleeping rooms at the back of the houses, which overhang the dark flood, and are
built upon piles, so that the place has positively the air of a Flemish street
flanking a sewer instead of a canal; while the little ricketty bridges that span
the ditches and connect court with court, give it the appearance of the Venice
of drains." . . This is the source of all the disgust with which the
visitor to these dens of wretchedness is inspired. This district, we have said
before, is insulated by a quadrangular ditch; the very figure of the
island tells you that such reservoirs must be stagnant; and stagnant they are
until moved for a while by the tide, which does not at each rising pour fresh
water into them, but which at intervals alone, twice or thrice a week, is
sparingly introduced, and checked again when enough is supposed to have been
done for the purposes of those who are concerned in traffic. Mean-[-81-]while
this circumambient pond is the common sewer of the neighbourhood, and the
only source from which the wretched inhabitants can get the water which they
drink - with which they wash-and with which they cook their victuals: and
because habit reconciles men to any anomaly, in the summer, boys are seeing
bathing there, though the Thames is not far distant, and offers at least a
cleaner bathing-place. Imagination will picture to itself much which we cannot
describe, when we point to such a disgraceful condition of being as that
entailed upon the denizens of Jacob's Island. We may well blush for the parish
which can tolerate such a plague spot,- for our country, whose insulted laws do
not at once sweep from the face of the earth such a record of its disgrace. Is
it indeed come to pass, that men, women, and children habitually drink water
whose ingredients decency forbids us to describe? - that with no affected
squeamishness we shrink from picturing that on which our eyes have rested, which
courts no secrecy, and which is naked and open to all who would inspect it? not
carefully fenced off, lest the indignant spirit of Englishmen should doom it to
destruction; not carefully guarded, lest perchance some wandering Christian
should denounce it as the future city of God's wrath - the Babylon of his
country? Is it indeed come to pass, that heavy taxes are wrung from hard-pressed
industry, and the poor man divides his loaf with the tax gatherer, and yet no
shield is thrown between him and horrors like these? that fierce cabals agitate
rival vestrymen, and some patriotic agitator, plethoric
[-82-] and bloated with good wishes for his country, wields his thunder,
and yet no one is heard to decry these scenes, till at length a stranger comes
and speaks, and men awake as from a dream, and go and see this new exhibition,
and a few guineas drop in for the fund raised to relieve the poor sufferers, and
then perhaps the wound will be scarred over, till when ?-till it festers in some
outbreak which shakes the nation.
Yet, gentle reader, we shall be told we are romancing. We
say, Go and see. "We then," says the author of the pamphlet,
"journeyed down London Street (that London Street we have spoken of before,
the best specimen of Rookeries, two hundred years old, and upwards). In No. 1 of
this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it
with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran
down it with like severity. As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer,
the sun shone upon a narrow slip of water. In the bright light it appeared the
colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in
the shadow; indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water: and yet we
were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink . . .
As we stood, we saw a little child, from one of the galleries opposite,
lower a tin can with a rope, to fill a large bucket that stood beside her. In
each of the balconies that hang over the stream the self-same tub was to be
seen, in which the inhabitants put the mucky [-83-] liquid
to stand, so that they may, after it has rested for a day or two, skim the
fluid. We asked if the inhabitants did really drink the water? The answer was,
They were obliged to drink it, without they could beg a pailful or thieve a
pailful of purer water. 'But have you spoken to your landlord about having it
laid on for you?' 'Yes, sir, and he says he'll do it, and he'll do it, but we
know him better than to believe him.' 'Why, sir,' cried another woman who had
shot out from an adjoining room, he won't even give us a little whitewash.' We
had scarce left the house when a bill caught our eye, announcing that this
valuable estate was to be sold. The inmates had begged for pure water to be laid
on, and the rain to be shut out, and the answer for eighteen years had been, -
that the lease was just out."
What a home for the future mothers of our working classes You
may talk of the oppression which preceded the outbreak of the first French
Revolution. Was it greater than this? Men, compelled by their occupation to live
within a given circle,- thrust down, oft by poverty, the victims of commercial
changes and the alternations to which traffic is subject,-doomed to drag out
their lives amidst scenes like these, as if the close room and the mixture of
sexes were not enough; as if precarious wages and dear food did not bring their
trials, but that these very Rookeries should be blacker still, through the
infamous neglect of the landlord on the one hand, and. the grasping avarice of
the trader on the other. [-84-] What purpose does
this tidal ditch serve ? Between it and the river a paper mill is at work; yet
it can scarce contribute to the power which such a piece of machinery requires.
It would rather seem that the water of the Thames must do this duty, and that,
after having answered such an end, it flowed into this reservoir at stated times
: staves, also, we are told, are laid to season there, as if no place could be
found for this but the source whence water is supplied for the necessities of
human life. What a place, we say again, for the future mothers of the working
classes - their nature hardened by a long course of oppression! For what
oppression worse than this,-to be pinioned down, as it were, to the lowest
conditions under which life can be sustained, their feelings outraged again and
again, till every trace of delicacy is worn out; and yet a mother's teaching is
one, if not the very first of God's earthly blessings. Our future working
classes to derive their first impressions of the opening world - their first
lessons in divine and human knowledge, from mothers thus debased! To live amidst
such miasmata till they connect such poison wells with the state of being for
which they were designed; or if they think at all, to be led by the very
contrasts of the spacious warehouses around them to hate the country which gave
them birth, and to trample on the laws under which such things still exist. Who
lives on such gains? For whom is the spot which God created made a Devil's
world? Does Government pay the expenses of the country thus? Are hospitals
supported thus ? Do we here behold, in [-85-] embryo,
the funds which strengthen the hands of the schoolmaster ? And thus the
specious, oft-refuted sophism, lends its colour to such abuse,-that the end
justifies the means. Not even this is the shield and defence of Jacob's Island.
From the sufferings of the poor, small capitalists reap a reprieve from honest
toil, and build up the income which feeds their indolence, their debauchery, or
their avarice. And verily Nature herself hath entered her visible protest
against such cruelties, and hath lifted up a voice which speaks to those that
will hear.
We are assured by one, who evidently knows the nature of such
symptoms, that the brown, earth-like complexion of some, and their sunken eyes,
with the dark areolae around them, tell you that the sulphuretted hydrogen of
the atmosphere in which they live has been absorbed into the blood. Scarcely a
girl that has not soreness of the eyes; so that if one of the inhabitants could
be taken to a foreign hospital, and there subjected to examination, science
would immediately assign the cause of the complaint under which he was
suffering- would specify the particular gas or vapour he had been inhaling - and
whilst doing so would accurately describe the sort of atmosphere which the
patient breathed, though the previous circumstances of the case had never been
stated.
Such a description as the one above quoted can only be
appreciated by those whose profession leads them often to examine similar cases;
but the most superficial [-86-] observer will
perceive an unnatural whiteness in the complexion, the scars of scrofula, and
the sore eyes of the children. We are not describing some scene in distant
lands, under a despotic government; but one taken from a district of what was
wont to be called merrie England - the land of charity, whose plans for the
welfare of our home population are a hundred-fold, and from whose shores
missions are sent year by year to distant colonies.
Now suppose a fire, one of the wasting fires so common to
that shore of the Thames, to take place in this district; and, because the
houses are wooden and the bridges already rotting, it swallowed up this Jacob's
Island in its ravages. We know what a fire is; how for a while all aid is
impotent, the image of a vengeance none can stay. Supposing the inhabitants
could escape, a fire would positively be a blessing in which philanthropy would
rejoice, and humanity hug itself. This greatest of earthly terrors, whose idea
suggests desolation, the worst and fiercest instrument of destruction, with
whose name men connect the immolation of cities, whose wrath consumed half
London, entailing on us for the time the greatest national suffering England
ever knew, would be a gift whose price we could scarce tell, whose healing influence
we could scarce enough appreciate; and, if the inhabitants could be removed in
time, an earthquake, which swallowed up this hamlet of the plague, would be a
thing to be remembered with thanksgiving in the annals of our nation. We read
with terror of the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 ; yet, if we except the loss of [-87-]
human life, such a visitation here would be a mercy. Yet very,
very deep-seated must be the disease for which such a remedy would be a cure
- very hard is it to write thus of any country, especially of one's own.
What an accumulated mass of sin is connected with such doings and such
endurance. How God's laws must have been put out of sight, done violence to, ere
we dare write thus of any spot in the wide world he has made. With such ravages
as those of fire we connect houseless families- their household gods laid
waste-the memorials with which men remember their childhood consumed: avarice
groans over property destroyed, and the hordes of capital wasted: and men stand
panic-stricken at the brink of such ruin, as though the disaster had bereaved
them of the power to think or to do ; and we read of the citizens repairing
slowly, by years of painful toil and at vast expense, the damages thus incurred,
and of the gulph which yawned during the lives of a whole generation ere the
loss sustained ceased to be felt.
Yet, again, in Jacob's Island such a fire, such wholesale
conflagration, would be a blessing; it would untie better than all the lawyers
in existence the knots which impede legislation, - cut through better than even
the death of the owners of these districts the meshes in which such property is
tied up. We should not then wait for leases to expire, for the capitalist would
scarcely value the lease of charred timber, and crumbling skeletons of what once
were houses; for gain's sake he would raise, under happier auspices, walls which
age alone could acclimatize to [-88-] the horrors
which now are; and one generation at least be spared the disgust which at
present it endures. Some opulent speculator might appropriate the ground thus
cleared, and on the foundations of the past rear some vast superstructure to the
genius of Mammon. Better so than that the poor should pay the penalty of
ill-gotten gains, and suffer, that capitalists should exhibit to the admiring
gaze of their countrymen the pride of England's wealth. Let us rather, if we yet
blush at our country's shame, repair the injuries which the poor sustain-let us
wipe away the blot which all may witness, and write at once the death-warrant of
Jacob's Island.
We struggle for theoretical reforms, and a clever demagogue
shakes the country with his statement of fancied injuries:- he agitates for
privileges which, like the relics in an Italian convent, are only to be
discerned by the favoured few. If his indignant eloquence must have vent, let
him employ it on wrongs like these.
Yet, let us not be ungrateful; the caricaturist may sketch
the grotesque amidst the haunts of poverty ; the antiquarian call up by the aid
of their antique decorations the features of a bygone age; the Legislature may
banish to these dens the convicted criminal till his time comes, without the
expense of transportation; the medical student may study some strange type of
disease amidst the remaining lazar houses of St. Giles's. Happy age, which is
spared the task of providing for the teeming multitudes which are yearly added
to its population. Happy country, [-89-] which
denies its well-bred citizens the sight of countenances which might shock their
delicacy, and of habits which might infect the rising scions of a higher caste;
which girdles vice within a barrier none need pass, and confines destitution to
dens few can investigate,- meanwhile, with a slight change, the words of the
poet are verified in these neglected colonies-
AEtas parentum pejor avis tulit
Nos nequiores, move daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.