the men are not intemperate on working
days. On Sundays, those who do not go to
church or chapel—the idler and worse sort
of men and boys—do not know what to do
with themselves. They lean against all the
posts in the district, and stand at all the
corners of the roads, criticising all persons
who pass; talking idly to each other, and
looking inexpressibly awkward and clumsy.
When the public-houses open, they slink into
them. On Monday, nearly all give way either
to simple out-of-door idleness, or to a dull
sort of rejoicing in the public-house. Thus,
although many of them become sottish by
fits and starts, the pit-men can by no means
be said, as a class, to be given to drunkenness.

But, while there is a home life thus tending
to humanise the collier, it has in itself certain
inevitable defects. At eighteen, or nineteen,
he can earn what he will earn at fifty. After he
is married, sons, as they grow up, will by their
earnings add to his prosperity: as a question of
money, therefore, it is as wise for him to marry
at nineteen, as at nine and twenty. Very
early marriages are, for this reason, common;
they are founded upon a rough sort of calf-
love; and form a tie that is maintained, on
the whole, pleasantly between husband and
wife, but is maintained by no very peculiar
community of interest or feeling. The husband
is in the pit all day, and the satisfaction
of his animal wants fills the main part of the
time at home. This may in part explain
why, among the colliers, there are very many
to whom the marriage bond does not appear
so sacred or so necessary as it ought to be.
In too many cases, if a collier leaves his wife,
and goes upon a journey, it is not a Penelope
who stays behind. I speak only, of course,
in all that is here said, from my own
observation in a single district. I have seen in
that district nearly all the colliers' wives,
and some few of their daughters, working
indefatigably in their respective households;
famous helpers to the men, and, with the
rarest exceptions, kindly treated by them. I
have seen very many acts of noble self-
devotion on the part of husband on
behalf of wife, or of wife on behalf of husband
or of child; but I could not, possibly, avoid
seeing that the ties of family were worn
loosely, as well as comfortably, by a large
part of the community, and that, in a most
material respect, the morality of the district
was painfully low. I have seen rough men
become as women for a child's sake, and
have very seldom seen or heard in the pit-
country of children that were beaten or
ill-used. But, I have seen not unfrequently
superfluous children by a sort of indirect
murder wilfully left to slip into the grave,
and I have seen gaps made in a household by
bereavement, bitter in the first few days, filled
up so speedily, and forgotten, as grief, so
completely, as they could not be if the home ties
were really strong. It is a sad sight to see
in four or five adjoining houses the blinds
down and shutters closed, because house-fathers
and sons have been brought home dead
from the pit; but, of the greater number of
the mourners, the grief seems to be over very
soon after the blinds are up. Doubtless,
familiarity with sudden death breeds some
part of this temper; which may have other
causes. We are never right in assigning
only one reason to anything in nature; not
even to material things; but, to refer to
a single cause the workings of anything so
complex as the human mind, is unquestionably
wrong.

In another respect, I used to observe among
the miners, laxity of principle that stopped
short of assuming any violent or repulsive
form. They yielded a proportion of thieves,
bold in a small way, but guilty of nothing
like house-robbery or violence upon the
roads. To a popular pear-tree in my orchard,
there was a regular footpath established
across a gap in the hedge, made for the purpose
of robbing it in its due season. Buried
treasure in the shape of potatoes would be
also lifted; but, in four years, among a population
of more than ten thousand miners,
among whom was many a house worth
plundering and easy of access, I never heard
of one house robbery. From the surgery at
the back of my house and detached from it,
valuable things could have been taken
constantly. It was open and unwatched; but I
never lost even the most trifling article of
property by direct theft. Of indirect theft,
which did not appear theft at all to a dull
moral sense, there was plenty, and it took
plenty of forms; but that is not at all peculiar
to miners and their wives.

Of brute violence in any form I have
seen little or nothing among pit-men. I
have walked or ridden hundreds of times
at night about the wildest parts of the pit-
country, and have seen rough-looking men
start from wild-looking fires, but it never
once entered into my mind that there was
anything to fear; for, there was nothing. I
should know myself to be really safer at
midnight on the blasted ground occupied by
the pit-men, than by daylight in a shady lane
among a population purely agricultural.
Whoever reads the trials at assizes, knows
that the agricultural ignorance yields crimes
more foul and terrible than the less dense
ignorance of a community of colliers. The
difference depends, not on the men, but on
the conditions under which they live.

I have endeavoured to represent fairly
the main points of a collier's character as it
is formed by his occupation. The mining
population is not by any means so rough as
it appears, in its first aspect, to a stranger,
and I cannot for a moment admit that it is
to be made answerable for any defect whatever
in the construction or working of a
mine. Like other men, miners have opinions
and prejudices; but, in their own calling,