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ple were considered as indifferently well off, from which to form some estimate. The parish contained eight hundred and forty acres, of which about one-eighth was barren. This land was inhabited by one hundred and sixty-six persons, who paid no less a sum than nine hundred and ten pounds sterling in taxes, and tithes, and poor rates. About one-fourth of this sum was for tithes. I repeat again, my dear brother, that this is by no means any thing like an extreme case; it is hardly a medium.

Since the repeal of the income tax, the tenantry in this country have paid at least five-sixths of the taxes, either directly, or indirectly as consumers. They pay the expenditures of government, and the interest on the public debt, which amounts to more than seven hundred and fifty millions sterling a mere trifle! This debt is principally held by Englishmen, and so much the worse. Nearly eight hundred millions of property, belonging to Englishmen, is thus placed out of the reach of taxation, and, at the same time, the tenantry obliged to pay the interest on this enormous sum.

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This

So

engine works both ways: it withdraws one man's
property from the reach of the tax-gatherer, and
places it out, where the interest is to be paid by
the labours and property of another. Is it any
wonder that the tenantry are ground to the earth,
the land sweated to the soul, and the landholders
ready to buy into the funds at all hazards?
long as there is any land left to sell or mortgage in
England, so long will the holders be ready to invest
it in the funds, where it pays no taxes, and taxes
others to pay interest. This is the secret of the
public credit here. A man will rather trust to the
fate of a bubble, than leave his property in the
certain road to the tax-gatherer's pocket.

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Under all these circumstances, you cannot wonder if the agricultural interest is in a state of great depression; that the people have no heart to labour, since neither industry nor economy can keep them from want. That must be a wretched country, where the two great virtues of the labouring class, industry and economy, cannot keep the wolf from the door. Such is the case with England. The tenantry find the produce of their fields decreasing in value, while their rents remain the same, and the taxes and poor rates are increasing. The consequence is, abject poverty among a large portion, and approaching poverty among the remainder.

I have never been among a people I pitied so much as this industrious, patriotic, abused, and deceived tenantry. No body of people on the face of the earth, or that ever were upon the face of the earth, have made such sacrifices for their country. They have patiently endured for years a system of taxation without example, and have freely given to their country all that they could spare, and more besides. They have worked, and watched, and starved for their country, and contributed to what they believed to be her safety or her glory, almost as many millions as they have given to their own comforts. They looked to the banishment of Napoleon and the re-establishment of peace, as the end of their sacrifices, and they found it but the beginning of their sufferings. They discovered, too late, that they had sacrificed their substance for a shadow, and riveted their own chains while they believed themselves breaking those of Europe. Yet they are neither turbulent nor disaffected to the extent which their sufferings would justify. They look to parliamentary reform, and the consequent reduction of taxes, as the means of relieving their distresses, and remain

quiet in the hope of future impossibilities. They deserve a better fate; for, though in some degree debased by want and its natural result, dependence, they have still the elements of an honest, hardy, enduring, and worthy people. Could they by any possibility be relieved from their burthens, and rise to a state of comparative competency, they would be, what they once were, worthy of being the ancestors of our countrymen. But such is not even to be hoped, without a revolution. The government cannot, if it would, diminish the taxes, and would not, if it could. The landlords make subscriptions and form societies for giving them charity; but they do not diminish their rents to any great extent, nor do the clergy relinquish a tittle of their tithes, either for the love of man or the love of heaven.

In comparing the situation of the manufacturing with that of the agricultural labourers, I found the balance against the former in every point of view. There is more misery, as well as vice and ignorance, among them. Their wages are actually and literally entirely insufficient to satisfy the wants of nature, where a man has a family to support. In many of the manufactories of Birmingham and Manchester, they labour only half the time, three days in the week, because there is not work for them, and this at one-third, and sometimes onehalf less wages, than they received during the war. No one, that has not seen can conceive the squalid and miserable looks of these people, between the dirt and unwholsomeness of their employment, the ignorant worthlessness of their characters, and the shifts the poor creatures are obliged to resort to in order to exist. It is not to be wondered at, if, in the madness of misery, and cast out as it were from a participation in the common benefits of society, they become turbulent, seditious, and danger

ous. It is because they are hungry, and their children are starving, and not because they have read Thomas Paine or William Cobbett, that they are become radicals, as is the phrase of the day. Give them plenty to eat, and they will lie down as contentedly as a pig in the sty. Probably more than two-thirds of them cannot read; what absurdity then to suppose, or what hypocrisy rather to pretend to suppose, they are excited to acts of violence by books!

No books, however eloquent or insidious, can, I imagine, set this nation in opposition to its government on a mere abstract principle. The common people must be excited by something beyond this. They must be either religious fanatics, or they must be ill governed, and feel themselves so, before they will rush into actual violence. against their rulers. In my own opinion, and I think experience and example will support me, when a general disaffection reigns among a people, it can be produced only by oppression. Not all the arts of turbulent demagogues, nor the intrigues of disappointed ambition, can make a whole community believe they suffer what they do not suffer, or instil into them a spirit of disaffection towards a government, under which they live in the free exercise of their rights, and the reasonable enjoyment of their usual and ordinary comforts. Partial and immaterial tumults may occasionally be created by the instigation of designing persons, but they will be such as the civil power is capable of suppressing, with the aid of the well affected people. There will be no necessity for quartering soldiers in the neighbourhood of towns, to trample upon the people at the command of a military officer, instead of a civil magistrate. And let me tell you, brother, although the advocates of military despotism pretend to the contrary here, there is a vast VOL. I.

difference between a magistrate being assisted by the posse comitatus in the execution of his office, and by a body of regular troops.

In the first case, the people execute the laws; and the people, notwithstanding their obligation to assist the magistrate at his call, will never, it is to be presumed, uphold him in oppressing the people. If they refuse to execute the command of the ma-gistrate, they know they must be tried for the offence by the people, by the country, which will pever condemn them for refusing to become instruments in oppressing their neighbours. But the army is a body distinct from the people, governed by its own peculiar laws, and subject to its own officers. When a party of soldiers, therefore, is called out to the assistance of a magistrate, they are not bidden as subjects, but soldiers; and, having neither habits nor interests in common with the people, are just as likely to oppress them as not. Nay, if their officer command them, they must do so, for the disobedience of orders is mutiny, and mutiny is death, not by the verdict of a jury of the people, but by sentence of a court martial, having nothing in common with the people. For this reason, soldiers always have been, and, I fear, always will be, instruments in the hand of power to oppress the citizen. It may therefore safely be concluded, I think, that when they become the ordinary instruments for enforcing obedience to the laws, the people are under the worst species of oppression, a military despotism. This is at present the situation of many parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland, especially in the manufacturing districts, where the sufferings of the people, with their numbers and proximity, have produced a state of fermentation, which the civil authority is too weak to control. It was made an argument for keeping up the present army, that the numbers

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