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 vigorous government interference, strict magisterial vigilance; when necessary, prompt military coercion.

Mr. Yorke wished to know whether this interference, vigilance, and coercion would feed those who were hungry, give work to those who wanted work and whom no man would hire: he scouted the idea of inevitable evils; he said public patience was a camel, on whose back the last atom that could be borne had already been laid, and that resistance was now a duty: the wide-spread spirit of disaffection against constituted authorities, he regarded as the most promising sign of the times; the masters, he allowed, were truly aggrieved, but their main grievances had been heaped on them by a “corrupt, base, and bloody” government (these were Mr. Yorke’s epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh, mischievous idiots like Perceval were the tyrants, the curses of the country, the destroyers of her trade. It was their infatuated perseverance in an unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war which had brought the nation to its present pass. It was their monstrously oppressive taxation, it was the infamous “Orders in Council”—the originators of which deserved impeachment and the scaffold, if ever public men did—that hung a mill-stone about England’s neck.

“But where was the use of talking?” he demanded—“What chance was there of reason being heard in a land that was king-ridden, priest-ridden, peer-ridden—where a lunatic was the nominal