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374 the country had been lessened in popular estimation at the time, by the chivalrous sentiment of the people, and the hardships they would entail forgotten in the excitement of the strife; while an artificial prosperity was produced in certain departments of trade, by the very expenses of the contest. When European commerce was set free, and things relapsed to their natural level, much alarm, miscalculation and misery ensued. Public obligations remained at their original standard, and consequently pressed more heavily through the rapid rise in price of all necessary commodities, while the crop of the following year fell considerably below the usual average. With distress came disaffection, and interested men were not backward in fanning the embers into a flame, and in preaching insubordination and irreligion. Their pernicious doctrines spread to the most retired nooks and corners of the land. "A club of atheists met twice a-week at an alehouse at Keswick, and the landlady of their way of thinking." And this state of things was general. Southey combated the policy of disaffection with unfaltering energy, and the invective with which he was assailed sufficiently testifies to the dread he inspired, and the good it was feared he would effect. He advocated with untiring assiduity, as the surest means of cutting the ground from under the feet of demagogues, and of enlightening the people to their real position, a more general system of education based upon religious teaching, the diffusion of cheap and wholesome literature, and the importance of training-schools for the neglected swarms of children that were left to wallow in premature vice and wretchedness in the streets of our more populous towns. He urged the establishment of savings' banks, some organized system of emigration, and the imperative interference of government in behalf of the operatives and children that the factory task-masters held in less regard than the machinery they tended. Many of