the following pages exhibit a system of wrong and outrage equally abhorrent to justice, civilization and humanity. the frightful abuses which are here set forth, are, from their enormity, difficult of belief; yet they are supported by testimony the most impartial, clear and irrefutable. these abuses are time-honored, and have the sanction of a nation which prides itself upon the freedom of its constitution; and which holds up its government to the nations of the earth as a model of regulated liberty. vain, audacious, false assumption! let the refutation be found in the details which this volume furnishes, of the want, misery and starvation—the slavish toil—the menial degradation of nineteen-twentieths of her people. let her miners, her operatives, the tenants of her workhouses, her naval service, and the millions upon millions in the emerald isle and in farther india attest its fallacy.
these are the legitimate results of the laws and institutions of great britain; and they reach and affect, in a greater or less degree, all her dependencies. her church and state, and her laws of entail and primogeniture, are the principal sources of the evils under which her people groan; and until these are [pg 6] changed there is no just ground of hope for an improvement in their condition. the tendency of things is, indeed, to make matters still worse. the poor are every year becoming poorer, and more dependent upon those who feast upon their sufferings; while the wealth and power of the realm are annually concentrating in fewer hands, and becoming more and more instruments of oppression. the picture is already sufficiently revolting. "nine hundred and ninety-nine children of the same common father, suffer from destitution, that the thousandth may revel in superfluities. a thousand cottages shrink into meanness and want, to swell the dimensions of a single palace. the tables of a thousand families of the industrious poor waste away into drought and barrenness, that one board may be laden with surfeits."
from these monstrous evils there seems to be little chance of escape, except by flight; and happy is it for the victims of oppression, that an asylum is open to them, in which they can fully enjoy the rights and privileges, from which, for ages, they have been debarred. let them come. the feudal chains which so long have bound them can here be shaken off. here they can freely indulge the pure impulses of the mind and the soul, untrammeled by political or religious tyranny. here they can enjoy the beneficent influences of humane institutions and laws, and find a vast and ample field in which to develop and properly employ all their faculties.
the united states appear before the eyes of the down-trodden whites of europe as a land of promise. thousands of ignorant, degraded wretches, who have fled from their homes to [pg 7] escape exhausting systems of slavery, annually land upon our shores, and in their hearts thank god that he has created such a refuge. this is the answer—the overwhelming answer—to the decriers of our country and its institutions. these emigrants are more keenly alive to the superiority of our institutions than most persons who have been bred under them, and to their care we might confidently intrust our defence.
we design to prove in this work that the oligarchy which owns great britain at the present day is the best friend of human slavery, and that its system is most barbarous and destructive. those feudal institutions which reduced to slavery the strong-minded race of whites, are perpetuated in great britain, to the detriment of freedom wherever the british sway extends. institutions which nearly every other civilized country has abolished, and which are at least a century behind the age, still curse the british islands and their dependencies. this system of slavery, with all its destructive effects, will be found fully illustrated in this volume.
our plan has been to quote english authorities wherever possible. out of their own mouths shall they be condemned. we have been much indebted to the publications of distinguished democrats of england, who have keenly felt the evils under which their country groans, and striven, with a hearty will, to remove them. they have the sympathies of civilized mankind with their cause. may their efforts soon be crowned with success, for the british masses and oppressed nations far away in the east will shout loud and long when the aristocracy is brought to the dust!
