National Gazette

For the NATIONAL GAZETTE.

To the PRINTER.

WHILST our American aristocrats
are anxious to adopt the spirit
and principles of the British government,
they will no doubt, think it necessary to
publish the most flattering accounts of the
prosperity and grandeur of that Country.

Some of the Clergy, a few of the Nobility,
pensioners and placemen enjoy every
comfort and luxury, at the expense of the
laborious part of the community; but the
misery and oppression of the most numerous and most useful class of Citizens has
been strongly pictured by many late writers. In addition to the accounts given
in some of your late papers, I beg leave to
communicate one from a late publication
on agriculture. Mr. Marshall, in his "Mid-
land Counties," Vol. 2. Page 217, observes, "It having always appeared to me
incomprehensible how a common farm labourer who, perhaps, does not earn more
than six or even five shillings a week, rears
a large family, as many a one does without any assistance,-I desired old George
Barwell, who has brought up five or six
sons and daughters, to clear up the mystery-he acknowledged, that he has frequently been hard put to it. He has
sometimes barely had bread for his children : not a morsel for himself: having
often made a dinner of rare bog peas"

Again p. 364 "I lately sold a parcel of
cord wood to a Jersey comber, who em-
ployed a poor old man to burn it for him,
on the spot, at eight pence a quarter, and
board ; which however did not cost him
much. The poor devil had sometimes
bread and sometimes cheese, and sometimes neither, with seldom any thing but
water to drink. His lodging cost him
nothing. He built himself a hut with
slabs and sods, a cone ten feet wide at
the base, on the inside and four feet high
in the center. The floor divided by a long
log : one side littered with straw for a
lodging room : the other furnished with a
loose log as a sitting room."