Page:The English Peasant.djvu/288

 and stockjobbing, and linked it with the decline of the true greatness and prosperity of England. During the two years he was in prison he wrote that famous series of letters to the people of Salisbury, which he afterwards published under the title of "Paper against Gold, or the History and Mystery of the Bank of England." He therein strives to show that ever since the introduction of the Funding System, taxation, pauperism, misery, and crime have all increased; but his chief aim was to convince his countrymen that a paper currency must in the end destroy public credit.

For twenty years the British Government had exerted all its energies in order to crush the Revolution. To this end the lives of hundreds of our soldiers and sailors had been sacrificed, and the productive energies of the country mortgaged to all time. Meanwhile the rulers who had directed the war, and the people by whose opinion it had been sustained, had alike suffered. The misery, bankruptcy, and crime, which had prevailed among the latter, were, as we have seen, terrible, but so also was the strain the public men of those days had to endure. The war killed Pitt quite as much as it did Nelson. Neither Fox nor Canning lived to be sixty. Whitbread, Romilly, and Castlereagh all destroyed themselves. Percival was shot at the door of the House of Commons by a Liverpool merchant who had become bankrupt and mad, and who attributed his ruin to the policy of the Government.

To find that after all this frightful expenditure of treasure and strength the Revolution was not only alive, but raising its head in their own country, was provoking to the last degree. Samson was waking up from his sleep, and shaking his chains, blindly stretch ing forth his hands, intent upon doing some damage to his masters. Not only were the Midland weavers breaking the new frames, but in Wales the ironworkers had assembled to the number of ten or twelve thousand, and were putting out the furnaces. The Staffordshire colliers were marching up to London to present a petition to the Regent, while the starving agricultural labourer were firing the ricks and destroying the threshing machines. In (Manchester the artisans were proposing to march in a body to London, each man with a blanket strapped to his back and a