16 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



had lately been so profitable became for a time derelict. 

 For twenty-five years the depression continued. Distress 

 was general, and fell with great severity on the labouring 

 classes, who were goaded to riot and revolt in town and 

 country alike. The Luddites broke up machinery, while 

 gangs of rural labourers destroyed threshing machines, 

 or avenged their grievances against farmers by burning 

 farmhouses and ricks, or wrecking the shops of butchers 

 and bakers. In the riots of 1830-31, agrarian fires blazed 

 from Dorsetshire to Lincolnshire. This revolt of the 

 labourers — " the event which never happened at all — 

 the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolu- 

 tion," as a recent writer paradoxically describes it, 1 was, 

 like the French Revolution, though in a less degree, the 

 culmination of a period of misery. Through times of 

 agricultural prosperity and adversity alike the labourers 

 had suffered. High prices had not benefited them, and 

 low, or comparatively low, prices had brought them no 

 relief. The causes were complex. Some historians seem 

 to attribute all the woes of the poor to the callousness 

 and brutality of the ruling classes. If this were so it is 

 difficult to explain — except on the hypothesis of cruel 

 hypocrisy — the immense amount of inquiry and discus- 

 sion, the innumerable schemes for the alleviation of the 

 distress, which fill the proceedings of Parliament and the 

 literature of the time. It seems more reasonable to 

 believe that attempts to deal with the distress were 

 well-intentioned, but mistaken. Unfortunately, good 

 intentions, though they may, as the old saying has it, 

 be adapted for road material, are an inadequate equipment 

 for social reformers. No single cause, perhaps, was 

 more potent in demoralising and pauperising the poor 

 than the Speenhamland system, the outcome of a meeting 

 of magistrates in 1795, which started with a resolution 

 " that the present state of the poor does require further 

 assistance than has generally been given them," and 

 1 Chesterton, " The Victorian Age in Literature," p. 17. 



