The English Masses
Key
| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| Whitman's hand | blue double overline and underline |
| Highlighting | yellow background with top and bottom border |
| Paste-on | gray box with black borders |
| Laid in | white box with black borders |
| Erasure | white text with dark gray background |
| Overwritten | brown with strikethrough |
TThe English Masses
(Talk with Frank Leonard, "Yank," &c—their travels through English towns with the American Circus)
The large mass (nine tenths) of the English people, the peasantry, laborers, factory-operatives, miners, workers in the docks, on shipping, the poor, the diseased, the old, the criminals, the numberless
flunkies of one sort and another, ^have
some of the bull-dog attributes but are all generally minus the best attributes of humanity; they have some of the bull-dog attributes They are
not a race of fine physique, or any spirituality, ^or manly audacity, or with
^—have no clarified faces, candor,
freedom, agility, and quick wit.—They are short, have mean physoiognomies,
(such as you are in the caricatures in "Punch,") and fine-shaped men
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and women, ^city bred, being almost hardly ever met rarely very seldom met with in the scity, and becoming less ^and
less common in the country.—Bad blood, goitre, scro consumption, and the diseases that branch out from venerrealisim, gin-drinkinkingg, and excessive toil, and poor diet, are to-day apparent, to a greater or less degree, in two-thirds of the population of common-people of
Great Bri England.—They are wretchedly poor, own neither houses nor lands for themselves—have no homes—cannot ^look to have any homes—and are acquiring a something fierce, and morose, threatening in their
physiognomy.—In
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their phrenology there is athe most substantial basis of any race known, but with—all that can make a solid nation, and has made it.—
Among the common classes, ^in towns, chastity is not common.— dwindling out.—It All drink—few are virtuous. In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of the people, are belong to the in comparison with the masses of the US. are at least two hundred years behind h us.—With all thisese terrible things about the common people, what grand things must be said about England! Power, wealth, ^materials, energy, individualism, a proud pride, command, are her's—and there is to-day but one nation greater than she is, and that one nation is her own daughter.—
