The Land from the Citizens Standpohit. 385 



sathedral closes, and in the manor houses of fox-hunting 

 squires.^ 



On the other hand, the landlords and the farmers would 

 perhaps have clothed their jaundiced sentiments of town life 

 in the language of the poetically-prejudiced Southey. Every- 

 thing connected with manufactures " presents features of 

 unqualified deformity. From the largest of Mammon's temples 

 down to the poorest hovel in which his helotry are stalled ; 

 these edifices have all one character. Time will not mel- 

 low them, nature will neither clothe nor conceal them, and 

 bhey will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the 

 Ciind."^ 



To tempers chafed by the interference of the trader, the 

 manufacturing system, though it had largely benefited, and 

 was still more largely to benefit agriculture, appeared exactly 

 in the light which this same poet afterwards represented it. 

 " It was more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a 

 system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies 

 and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it," and 

 the only hope for England was that foreign competition should 

 drive it out of the field and exterminate it.^ 



Such exaggerated caricatures of the sober truth tended to 

 work incalculable mischief to both these monied interests. 

 The merchant, quick enough to detect the weak point in his 

 adversary's harness, enlisted the sympathies of labour on his 

 side ; but though, by thus making capital out of the grievances 

 of the peasantry, he contracted a formidable alliance, he, at 

 the same time, aroused a power which one day might prove 

 too strong for his control. 



Unfortunately, for our present purpose, the common dangers 

 and necessities of property, personal as well as real, were not 

 to bring about a reunion between the two chief factors in the 

 National Capitalist class for nearly a century ; and the rest of 

 our History must be mainly occupied by the struggles of the 

 one side to retain, and of the other side to wrest, advantages 



* Critical Essays : Life and Writings of Addison. 

 ^ Southey's Colloquies on Society. 



* Id. Ibid. Maucaulay's Critical Essays. 



II. CO 



