Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/340

330 £5,923,000 in 1811; and in 1813, 1814, and 1815, when the restrictive system had produced its full effect, the poor-rates averaged £6,130,000. The increase was probably due to the disturbance of trade and was accompanied by a state of society bordering on chronic disorder.

Probably at least five thousand families of workingmen were reduced to pauperism by the embargo and the decrees of Napoleon; but these sufferers, who possessed not a vote among them and had been in no way party to the acts of either government, were the only real friends whom Jefferson could hope to find among the people of England; and his embargo ground them in the dust in order to fatten the squires and ship-owners who had devised the Orders in Council. If the English laborers rioted, they were shot: if the West Indian slaves could not be fed, they died. The embargo served only to lower the wages and the moral standard of the laboring classes throughout the British empire, and to prove their helplessness.

Each government thus tried to overthrow the other; but that of England was for the moment the more successful. The uneducated force of democracy seemed about to break against the strength of an aristocratic system. When Parliament rose, July 4, domestic opposition was silenced, and nothing remained but to crush the resistance of America,—a task which all advices from the United States showed to be easy; while as though to make ministers invulnerable, Spain suddenly opened her arms to