MR. NEWDEGATE AND THE SPECTATOR.
IN the debate on the report of the Address, on Wednesday, Mr. Newdegate appears to have read a passage from the political sum- mary in last week's Spectator, respecting the unemployed railway labourers ; of which he complained, that it was "calculated to harden the hearts of the public to the distress of the working classes." We shall not make the useless attempt of explanation to a man who can fall into any mistake so extravagant ; but those who heard or have read Mr. Newdegate's speech, (delivered with awful solemnity, we suppose, as the Standard prints the ex- tract in Italics,) and have not our context before them, ought to be made aware that we were not then talking of the "working classes," but that we treated the case of railway labourers, thrown out of work, as one altogether exceptional. And so it is. Navi- gators and the labourers on the rougher work of railways are a peculiar people. For the most part drawn from rural districts, or from Ireland, they are untaught and rude. Thoughout the hey- day of railway speculation they have lived a life of plenty, not to say of luxury ; devouring, daily, enormous quantities of meat and beer. They are a pampered race, with large unrestrained appetites ; they are a nuisance and a terror in neighbourhoods where they abound. These men are to be suddenly transferred from brisk work and high living to idleness and privation. The consequences, we should have thought, would be easily foresee' by any one having half the wit even of a Newdegate. We sus- pect that the unfortunate gentleman has been disordering his facul- ties to such a degree with Currency research as not to know quite clearly what he is reading. Or perhaps, clinging too indiscrimi- nately to Lord George Bentinck's dogma that railways are abso- lutely good, he thinks that railway navigators must be absolutely- virtuous. Otherwise he would know that the pampered uaviga-
for is no type of the " working classes "; and that the dangers which we pointed out, for warning, had already been experienced, on a smaller scale, in the neighbourhoods where railways were under construction. The '.' working classes" themselves will need protection from such an incubus "ender every bush and every tree."
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