[t)8o England at the Close of 1831. [Dkc. 



prosperity and strength of character, which have raised England to 

 undisjjuted supremacy. 



The unquestionable fact is, that no man of common means or common 

 understanding in the country, can desire any thing revolutionary. But it 

 is equally unquestionable, that a spirit of extraordinary discontent is 

 striding through the land. This is obvious in a hundred different 

 ways. In the burning and destruction of farm-stock and utensils, in 

 the riotous conduct of the peasantry, in the " turns out" of the manu- 

 facturers, in the assaults of the populace upon the King's troops, in the 

 public harangues of some of the men who proclaim themselves the 

 friends of the people, in the Political Unions, in the popular Jour- 

 nals, &c. 



That those discontents do not proceed from any desire of general 

 overthrow, we fully believe ; that they were excited by foreign agents has 

 been asserted, and that those foreign agents are now flowing into the 

 country by tens of thousands, has also been asserted, but neither do we 

 believe ; and that they have been stirred up to further the purposes of 

 party, we as little believe. They are too broad, too palpable, and too 

 rtiischievous, to be within the competence of any single instrument. 

 The cause is undoubtedly deeper ; and we must look much below the 

 surface, into a source of public impulses immeasurably deeper than the 

 frothy harangues of mob-orators, or the contrivances of party, for the 

 general disturbance that now penetrates through every part of the 

 English mind. Nothing can be more capable of proof than that Eng- 

 land, in her three great branches of industry, her tillage, commerce, and 

 manuftictures, has for some years been subject to a most extraordinary 

 progress of depression. To account for this we probably need have 

 recourse but to the one intelligible principle, that as wealth is only the 

 superflux of expenditure, so every man and every nation must be poor, 

 whicii spends more money than it makes. The difference of wealth 

 between nations or individuals, is not the quantity of money received, 

 but the quantity kept. National evil may even be connected with the 

 larger receipt of money ; as greater anxiety, labour, or misery, may be 

 the purchase. A nation may make a hundred millions a year more than 

 its neighbours, by compelling its pojmlation to more harassing exertion, 

 by locking up one-tenth of them in manufactories for sixteen hours a 

 day, by burying another tenth in mines, by condemning another to spend 

 life in a variety of sickly, sedentary, wretched occupations, lucrative, but 

 depriving man of every genuine object for which life was given; and so on. 

 It is equally obvious, that if money-making be the sole object, a nation 

 might make money by trading in slaves, by selling its own poorer popu- 

 lation ; or if this seemed too formidable an experiment for Europe, 

 though it has succeeded for so many ages in Africa, at least by hiring out 

 its convicts and criminals to any power that would pay for them. 



By those means vast sums of money might doubtless be made. Yet 

 if the national expenditure still rose with the income, the national wealth 

 would not be increased in the slightest degree, the same pecuniary 

 pressure would continue, and the only diff'erence would be our giving 

 more labour, and undergoing more misery, struggle, and mortality, 

 than our neighbours. And this is the state of England at the present 

 hour. 



It may be heresy to pronounce this. The Englishman's prejud ce 

 for toiling like a beast of burthen until he dies, may be up in armsiat 

 the mention of a syllable against manufactures, and yet the truth must 



