F. — ^ECONOMICS. 117 



relatively small. Demobilisation left hardly a ripple on the surface of 

 her economic life. 



The German States were far more rural in chai-acter even than 

 France. There were a few industrial districts, of a sort, in the West 

 and in Saxony ; a few trading towns of some size, like Hamburg and 

 Frankfurt ; but there was nowliere a city comparable to Paris. In 1819 

 the twenty-five cities which were to become in our day the greatest 

 of the modern German Empire had not 1,250,000 inhabitants between 

 them. Paris alone at that time had about 700,000. German statesmen, 

 when peace came, were occupied not with problems arising from the 

 situation of the urban wage-earner, though such problems existed, but 

 with how to emancipate the peasants from the condition of semi- servility 

 in which they had lived during the previous century. Here, too, demo- 

 bihsation presented few of the problems familiar to us. Probably not 

 one man in ten demobilised was a pure wage-earner. The rest had 

 hnks with the soil. The land, neglected during the war, was crying out 

 for labour, and every man had his place, even if it was a servile place, 

 in rural society. 



Things were different in England; but our demobilisation problem 

 ^^■as smaller than that of our Continental allies or enemies, who had 

 mobilised national armies, though not of the modern size. On the other 

 hand, we had kept an immense fleet in commission, the crews of which 

 were rapidly discharged. Early in 1817 Lord Castlereagh stated in 

 Parliament that 300,000 soldiers and sailors had been discharged since 

 the peace. In proportion to population, that would be equivalent, for 

 the whole United Kingdom, to nearly 750,000 to-day. For these men 

 no provision whatever was made. They were simply thrown on the 

 labour market; and the vast majority of them were ex-wage-earners or 

 potential wage-earners, industrial, mercantile, or agricultural. The 

 United Kingdom was not urbanised as it is to-day ; but the census of 

 1821 showed that 21 percent, of the population lived in cities of 20,000 

 inhabitants and upwards, and probably about 27 per cent, (as compared 

 with France's 10 per cent.) lived in places of 10,000 and upwards. As 

 industry in various forms, especially coal-mining, spinning, and weaving, 

 was extensively carried on in rurul or semi-rural districts, it is certain 

 that at least one demobihsed man of working age in every three was a 

 potential wage-earner of industry or commerce. And as Great Britain 

 had lost most of her peasant-holders, whether owners or small working 

 farmers, the remainder of the demobilised rank and file were nearly all 

 of the agricultural labourer class. They had to find employment; there 

 was not a place in rural society \\aiting for them, as there was for the 

 average French or German peasant soldier. It is not surprising that 

 the years from 1815 to 1820 were, both economically and politically, 

 probably the most wretched, difficult, and dangerous in modern English 

 history. 



Tilings were at theh' worst in 1816-17, both for England and for her 

 Continental neighbours. Western Europe was very near starvation. 

 Had the harvest of 1815 not been excellent, so providing a carry-over 

 of corn, or had the harvest of 1817 been much below the average, 

 there must have been widespread disaster; so thorough and universal 



