111.] POOR MAN'S FRIEND. 55 



57. This allowance of Mr. ARTHUR YOUNG was 

 made, observe, in 1771, which was before the Old 

 American War took place. That war made some 

 famous fortunes for admirals and commodores and 

 contractors and pursers and generals and commissa- 

 ries ; but, it was not the Americans, the French, nor 

 the Dutch, that gave the money to make these for- 

 tunes. They came out of English taxes; and the 

 heaviest part of those taxes fell upon the working 

 people, who, when they were boasting of " victories" 

 and rejoicing that the "JACK TARS" had got "prize- 

 money," little dreamed that these victories were .pur- 

 chased by them, and that they paid fifty pounds for 

 every crown that sailors got in prize-money ! In short, 

 this American war caused a great mass of new taxes 

 to be laid on, and the people of England became a 

 great deal poorer than they ever had been before. 

 During that- war, they BEGAN TO EAT POTA- 

 TOES, as something to "save bread." The poorest 

 of the people, the very poorest of them, refused, for a 

 long while, to use them in this way ; and even when 

 I was ten years old, which was just about fifty years 

 ago; the poor people would not eat potatoes, except 

 with meat, as they would cabbages, or carrots, or any 

 other moist vegetable. But, by the end of the Ame- 

 can war, their stomachs had come to ! By slow de- 

 grees they had been reduced to swallow this pig-meat, 

 (and bad pig-meat too,) not, indeed, without grum- 

 bling; but to swallow it; to be reduced, thus, many 

 degrees in the scale of animals. 



58. At the end of twenty-four years from the .date 

 of ARTHUR YOUNG'S allowance, the poverty and de- 

 gradation of the English people had made great 

 strides. We were now in the year 1795, and a new war, 

 and a new series of " victories and prizes" had begun. 

 But who it was that suffered for these, out of whose 

 blood and flesh and bones they came, the allowance 

 now (in 1795) made to the poor labourers and their 

 families will tell. There was, in 'that year, a TA- 

 BLE, or SCALE, of allowance, framed by the Magis- 

 trates of Berkshire. This is, by no means, a hard 



