persons, if there be any such, who would keep the people ignorant because they rely upon their ignorance as a preservative, are not more lamentably erroneous in judgment than ignorant themselves of the state of the society in which they live. Where one who can read is to be found, all who have ears can hear. The weekly epistles of the apostles of sedition are read aloud in tap-rooms and pot-houses to believing auditors, listening greedily when they are told that their rulers fatten upon the gains extracted from their blood and sinews; that they are cheated, oppressed, and plundered; that their wives and children are wanting bread, because a corrupt majority in parliament persists in carrying on a war which there was no cause for beginning, and to which there can be no end in view; that there is neither common sense nor common honesty in the government; that the liberty of the press has been destroyed, and they are, in fact, living under military law; that they are a flogged nation, and flogging is only fit for beasts, and beasts they are, and like beasts they deserve to be treated, if they submit patiently to such wrongs and insults. These are the topics which are received in the pot-house, and discussed over the loom and the lathe men already profligate and unprincipled, needy because they are dissolute, and discontented because they are needy, swallow these things when they are getting drunk, and chew the cud upon them when sober. The lessons are repeated day after day, and week after week. If madder be administered to a pig only for a few days his bones are reddened with its die; and can we believe that the bloody colouring of such "pig's-meat"* as this will not find its way into the system of those who take it for their daily food?

They who are labouring to seduce the people, fail not to allure them (like the tempter of old) with promises of unattainable good, perverting to vile purposes the sacred names of laws, and liberty, and constitution, and dealing out vague generalities and inapplicable truisms, while their main appeal is to the vanity and the evil passions of an uninstructed multitude. Marat and Hebert were continually talking to the people of their rights, and representing themselves as the enlightened friends of humanity. Our sappers and miners tread faithfully in their steps as far as they have hitherto gone, and there are but too many circumstances which favour the machinations of such mischievous and wicked men.

Among these circumstances the manufacturing system again presents itself in the first rank. The extent to which it has been

"Pig's meat, ," "hog's wash," and "food for the swinish multitude," were titles of seditious brochures published by Daniel Isaac Eaton and Spence, the earlier and honester but less dexterous' apostles of anarchy in this country. Both these men were political fanatics. Pure profligacy, rather than mistaken principle, instigates some of their successors.

carried makes a large part of our population dependent for employ, which is, in fact, for subsistence, upon other countries; and when the tyranny of a frantic barbarian in Europe, and the servility or corruption of a ruling faction in America, shut us out from our accustomed market, distress and riots in the manufacturing districts are the consequence. Let it not be supposed that we are among the wholesale declaimers against foreign commerce; or that, because we perceive the fatal consequences which result from the manufacturing system, carried on as it has hitherto been, we would, in the spirit of radical reform, destroy it root and branch. Doubtless it has been productive of great and essential benefit. But as nations may be too warlike for their own happiness, or even their own security, so they may be too commercial. What one of the wisest of the heathens has told us, is applicable in policy as well as in ethics ;-Τὰ δὲ ἐκ ἐφ' ἡμῖν, ἀσθενῆ, δῆλα, κωλυτὰ, ἀλλότρια. When the evil is discovered, one great step is made towards the cure, and that it is an evil to have whole districts dependent for support upon the pleasure of a foreign cabinet is now proved by our own experience. Want will make even those persons turbulent who would be otherwise every way disposed to be industrious and peaceable: what facilities, then, must it afford to those who, by every imaginable means, are labouring to excite mutinous feelings, and set the people against the government? Malesuada is the epithet by which Virgil characterizes hunger; and the old rebels in Henry the Eighth's time felt themselves, beyond all doubt, fully justified in their insurrections when they told the Duke of Norfolk that "Poverty was their captain, the which, with his cousin Necessity, had brought them to that doing."

In other times we have had men thrown out of employ by the fluctuations of foreign politics, but their numbers have been comparatively trifling, and the effect partial; nor were there in those days public speakers and public writers ready to inflame their discontents and array them against their rulers. The rapid increase of manufactures, and the wider scale upon which hostility is carried on against us, have caused the effect now to be felt over every part of the country; and a cause which arises out of our real improvement, and the high civilization to which we have attained, has given consistency to the danger. Bodies of men, associating for unlawful purposes in England, are at no loss how to organize themselves; for nowhere in the world has the principle of political association ever been so well and so generally understood. We have not only the imperium in imperio of the quakers, and that of the Arminian methodists, (each of them perfect in its kind,) but every sectarian community, every joint company, every parish club, affords a model; and, as some or other of these institutions exist in every village throughout the kingdom, the peo

ple are everywhere familiarly versed in such practical details of business as are applicable upon the widest scale. Our benefit societies, (in their origin as old as the Saxon gilds,) which, in their right application, are so excellent, and which have so properly been encouraged by the legislature, have been perverted to the most perilous purposes. The number of persons who belonged to these societies ten years ago, when the poor-returns were made, amounted to 704,350, of whom nearly half, at least, may be supposed to belong to the manufacturing class. When the Luddites began to organize themselves, the funds of the societies to which they belonged afforded them a ready supply, and when farther resources were needful, they knew how to raise a revenue as well as the skilfullest financiers of Downing-street. In this country, journeymen have long been accustomed to combine for the purpose of obtaining higher pay from their employers; each trade has its fund for such occasions, raised by weekly or monthly payments; the different trades assist each other in their combinations, and the business is managed by secret committees. In this manner the shoemakers, when they struck work, two or three years ago, were enabled to support a loss of wages to the amount of nearly half a million! Besides this resource, it has been ascertained that the Luddites, under pretext of defraying the expenses of a petition for parliamentary reform, levied a contribution of half-a-crown a man upon their fellow-workmen throughout an extensive part of the country where no disturbances were apparent.

Such, then, are the means which the disaffected part of the populace have in their hands. If at any former time the mob were inflamed with sedition, they were a headless multitude, bound together only by the momentary union of blind passion; they are now an organized association, with their sections, their secret committees, and their treasury. These are fearful facts, even if temporary distress were the only cause of the existing spirit of insubordination. But in addition to this, there is to be taken into the account of danger a circumstance which few have noticed, and of the importance which fewer still are aware, that jacobinism having almost totally disappeared from the educated classes, has sunk down into the mob; so that since the year 1793, our internal state has undergone as great a change as our foreign relations, and a far 1 more perilous one. There was a wild cosmopolite character about the democracy of the last generation. Old men of warm hearts and sanguine spirits, sung their nunc dimillis; and young men of

* This is inferred from the proportion which the manufacturing bears to the agricultural class. The late population returns state the number of families in Great Britain at 2,544,000, of which 896,000 are engaged in agriculture, 1,129,000 in trade, manufactures and handicraft occupations. All others, that is to say, the very poor, the very rich, and the professional, amount to 519,000.

season;

ardent mind and generous inexperience became enthusiastic disciples of a political faith which ushered itself into the world with the İying annunciation of Peace on earth, Good will among men. Their talk was not merely of the rights of man, but of the hopes and destinies of the human race, of rapid improvement and indefinite progression. The populace were incapable of entering into such views; they beheld nothing in these visionaries but their direct political bearing; and finding them hostile to the war, regarded them as men who preferred France to England, and therefore as enemies to their country. That this was the feeling of the populace twenty years ago, is notorious to every one who remembers that stirring wherever any riots broke out, Church and King was the cry of the mob, and their fury was directed against those whom they considered as the enemies of both. Time passed on; the character of the French.revolution developed itself: that which had been fondly worshipped at its uprise as "the day-star of liberty" -the star in the east guiding us to political redemption-proved to be a baleful comet shedding pestilence and destruction over the nations. Jacobinism died under the sword of military despotism in France, the fate which universally must terminate its success: of its partisans in England some sunk into contempt; some were cooled by years, others sobered by experience: their dreams were dissipated; their philosophy grew out of fashion; their irreligion was hooted out of sight: the great experiment to which they appealed had failed; and such is the deadening effect of disappointed hope upon those who have no strength of mind to reclaim them when they have gone wrong, or support them when they are right, that many of those persons who had been warmest in their admiration of the French revolution, looked now upon the struggle of the Spaniards with utter apathy, prophecied their failure, depreciated their exertions, exulted over their losses, and, learning to hate the people whom coldness of heart and error of intellect had made them injure, laboured to the utmost to assist in accomplishing their own predictions.

While the spirit of jacobinism had thus evaporated from the top of the vessel, its dregs were settling at the bottom. New demagogues appeared upon the stage, children of Mammon, and wiser in their generation. They understood the temper of the vulgar too well to preach to them of fine fabrics of society, the diffusion of general knowledge, and the millennium of wisdom and philosophy; and they understood the laws too well to recommend openly the destruction of monarchy, and the abolishment of all distinctions of rank. There is no danger in advertising journals, the professed object of which is, "to exhibit to the people the hideous system by which they are at once cajoled and coerced, thereby to rouse them to an united call for reformation too general to be mistaken, and too VOL. II. New Series.

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potent to be resisted." Radical reform is a safer text than revolution-the same sermon will suit either; the same end is effectually furthered by both. The folly and stupidity of ministers, the profligacy of public men, the oppressiveness of government, and the waste of public money, are the anarchists' constant theme. Knowing also that

they omit no opportunity of vilifying the royal family. In this manner have they for years been addressing themselves to the passions of the vulgar; flattering their vanity, by telling them that wisdom and virtue must proceed from them, and that the way to remedy all evils is to have all elections popular, and make the representative receive instructions from his constituents; exciting their indignation against their rulers, and provoking their selfishness and pride at the same time, by persuading them that they are plundered by government, and cheated by the public servants.Their changes are rung upon corruption, peculation, inquiry, and justice; and reform, radical reform, is still the burden of the song.

It has been confidently asserted, that some of the anarchist writers are in the pay of France. We do not believe it; and whether it be so or not is altogether unimportant, for what occasion has the enemy to hire agents when there are so many who act for him gratuitously? To slander public and private characters has become a regular trade in England, and miscreants of one description take to it just as miscreants of another to the more dangerous, but not more nefarious, practices of thieving and robbing; they begin upon players and they end upon princes. There is another class less noxious to society, and in themselves less detestable, but enemies in like manner to public order. A forum orator some years ago published a tour, in which he described the gratification which he felt in the act of being overturned in a stage coach, because, never having experienced such an accident before, it gave him a new sensation. Gentlemen whose lives and limbs are matters of such trifling concern to themselves, may be equally well disposed to try what sort of sensation the overthrow of a government would produce. It is no new thing for wretches to set fire to a house, for the purpose of plundering during the confusion; ought we, then, to doubt that there may be those who would commit state-arson for motives of a like nature? But whether they commence their career thus without principle, or under the influence of erroneous notions and mistaken zeal, personal feeling brings them to the same state of mind: they get within reach of the law at some time or other, and then beginning in good earnest to abhor the government which has corrected them,