Mr Leaper, the police superintendent at Spalding, reports that scores of farm labourers apply for admission into the Force who cannot even write their own names.
The Vicar of Langtoft says, "This year, out of twenty boys who came to me averaging sixteen years old, seven could not read at all, and ten could not write at all, while with others the power was too small to be of any practical use." But it is contrary to the spirit of the god worshipped in these regions that the human machine should be too enlightened. As the Vicar of Burgh-le-Marsh says, "The employers of labour do not wish the children to be wholly ignorant, but think that a very moderate share of scholarship is sufficient. Their view is that 'more than a little is by much too much;' they are afraid that the labourers will be spoilt for field work."
Parents bemoan the home misery, schoolmasters bewail their empty schools, and clergymen are in despair. It is impossible to cope with the evil, "I despair," says one, "of making the good overbalance the evil in this parish." A few philanthropic farmers and landowners deplore the system, and individually fight against it, striving to repress its greater evils, or at least to keep their own lands free from them. But, notwithstanding its science, this enlightened age has its gods just as the most barbarous ages that have gone before it. And perhaps, of the whole Pantheon, none is adored more sincerely by Englishmen than that cruel Moloch, the Trade Spirit. At his altar the inhabitants of the fens are compelled to sacrifice their children. For if the facts I have stated be correct—and they mainly rest on the authority of the Government Commissions, which have never been, as far as I know, refuted—is it too much to say that these unhappy people are compelled to a sin not unlike that into w^hich Israel fell in its most prosperous days—the sin of "causing their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire"—a fire more terrible in reality than a material furnace—the fire of physical, exhaustion and moral pollution?
