164 Political Economy, 
with double fascination to those v/hose intellectual pbwers are stag- 
nant at home ; the coarseness of boisterous mirth acts upon them 
with double excitement ; and if they give themselves up to the 
lowest vices, ought we to wmnder at this, when their better facul- 
ties have never been brought into action ? Scarce lower than the 
angels in the capacity of his nature, man is yet, when left to hini" 
seif, scarcely above the brutes ; and if he be depraved, as well as 
ignorant, he is then chiefly distinguislied from them by the fatal 
prerogative of possessing a wicked will and greater powers of 
mischief. When his diviner part has never been called forth, the 
mere animal is ail that remains, and mere animal gratification must 
be the natural end and aim of his blind desires. 
These are not the mere imaginations of a speculative moralist. 
It is notorious that tlie manners of the people in manufacturing dis- 
tricts are peculiarly dissolute. Saint Monday is the only saint in 
the journeymards calendar ; and there are many places where one 
of the working-days of the week is regularly set apart for drunken- 
ness, like a sabbath of irreiigion. However high the wages may 
be, profligacy of every kind keeps pace and draws after it its inevi- 
table punishment of debility, disease, poverty, want, and early 
death. For the main cause of the increase of pauperism it is need- 
less to go farther than the increase of manufactures,— that very 
increase which has so often been triumphantly appealed to in 
proof of the prosperity of the country. Even in quiet times, and 
when to all outward appearances, the country was flourishing be- 
yond all example in former ages, the evil was felt, an evil in itself 
of sufficient magnitude, but of the most frightful nature when 
those circumstances are considered which give it a direct political 
bearing. This tendency was noticed some years ago in Espriella’s 
Letters, a book in which, amid lighter matter, grave subjects are 
sometimes touched with a deeper spirit of thought than appears 
upon the surface. 
‘ Two causes,’ says the author of that book, ^ and only t-wo v/ili 
rouse a peasantry to rebellion ; intolerable oppression, or religious 
zeal either for the right faith or the Vt/-rong : no other motive is 
powerful enough. A manufacturing poor is more easily instiga.t- 
ed to revolt. They have no local attachments ; the persons to 
whom they look up for support they regard more with envy than 
respect, as men who grow rich by their labour ; they know e- 
nough of what is passing in the political world to think themselves 
politicians ; they feel the v/hole burthen of taxation, which is not 
the case with the peasant, because he raises a great part of his 
own food ; they are aware of their own numbers ; and the moral 
feelings which in the peasant are only biimted are in these men 
debauched. A manufacturing populace is always ripe for riotingt 
the direction which this fury may take is accidental. In 1780 it 
ran against the Catholics; in 1790 against the dissenters. Go- 
vernments who found their prosperity upon manufactures sleep 
upon gunpowder. 
^ Do I then think,’ continues the writer, ^ that England is in 
danger of revolution ? If the manufacturing system continues to 
be extended, increasing as it necessarily does increase, the num- 
ber, the misery, and the depravity of the poor, I believe that revo- 
