days public speakers and public writers ready to inflame their discontents and array them against their rulers. The rapid increase of manufactures, and the wider scale upon which hostility is carried on against us, have caused the effect now to be felt over every part of the country; and a cause which arises out of our real improvement and the high civilization to which we have attained, has given consistency to the danger. Bodies of men associating for unlawful purposes in England, are at no loss how to organize themselves; for nowhere in the world has the principle of political association ever been so well and so generally understood. We have not only the Imperium in Imperio of the quakers, and that of the Arminian methodists, (each of them perfect in its kind,) but every sectarian community, every joint company, every parish club affords a model; and, as some or other of these institutions exist in every village throughout the kingdom, the people are every where familiarly versed in such practical details of business as are applicable upon the widest scale. Our benefit societies, (in their origin as old as the Saxon gilds,) which, in their right application, are so excellent, and which have so properly been encouraged by the legislature, have been perverted to the most perilous purposes. The number of persons who belonged to these socie ties ten years ago, when the poor-returns were made, amounted to 704,350, of whom nearly half at least, may be supposed to belong to the manufacturing class. When the Luddites began to organize themselves, the funds of the societies to which they belonged afforded them a ready supply, and when farther resources were needful, they knew how to raise a revenue as well as the skilfullest financiers of Downing-street. In this country, journeymen have long been accustomed to combine for the purpose of obtaining higher pay from their employers; each trade has its fund for such occasions, raised by weekly or monthly payments; the different trades assist each other in their combinations, and the business is managed by secret committees. In this manner, the shoemakers, when they struck work, two or three years ago, were enabled to support a loss of wages to the amount of nearly half a million! Besides this resource, it has been ascertained that the Luddites, under pretext of defraying the expenses of a petition for parliamentary reform, levied a contribution of half-a-crown a man upon their fellow-workmen throughout an extensive part of the country where no disturbances were apparent.

This is inferred from the proportion which the manufacturing bears to the agricultu ral class The late Population Returns state the number of families in Great Britain at 2,544,000 of which 896,000 are engaged in agriculture, 1,129,000 in trade, manufac tures and handicraft occupations. All others, that is to say, the very poor, the very rich, and the professional, amount to 519,000.

Such

Such then are the means which the disaffected part of the populace have in their hands. If at any former time the mob were inflamed with sedition, they were a headless multitude, bound together only by the momentary union of blind passion: they are now an organized association, with their sections, their secret committees, and their treasury. These are fearful facts, even if temporary distress were the only cause of the existing spirit of insubordination. But in addition to this, there is to be taken into the account of danger a circumstance which few have noticed, and of the importance of which fewer still are aware, that jacobinism having almost totally disappeared from the educated classes, has sunk down into the mob; so that since the year 1793, our internal state has undergone as great a change as our foreign relations, and a far more perilous one. There was a wild cosmopolite character about the democracy of the last generation. Old men of warm hearts and sanguine spirits sung their Nunc dimittis; and young men of ardent mind and generous inexperience became enthusiastic disciples of a political faith which ushered itself into the world with the lying annunciation of Peace on earth, Good will among men. Their talk was not merely of the rights of man, but of the hopes and destinies of the human race, of rapid improvement and indefinite progression. The populace were incapable of entering into such views; they beheld nothing in these visionaries but their direct political bearing; and finding them hostile to the war, regarded them as men who preferred France to England, and therefore as enemies to their country. That this was the feeling of the populace twenty years ago, is notorious to every one who remembers that stirring season; wherever any riots broke out, Church and King was the cry of the mob, and their fury was directed against those whom they considered as the enemies of both. Time passed on; the character of the French revolution developed itself: that which had been fondly worshipped at its uprise as the day star of liberty,'-the star in the East guiding us to political redemption,-proved to be a baleful comet shedding pestilence and destruction over the nations. Jacobinism died under the sword of military despotism in France, the fate which universally must terminate its success: of its partizans in England some sunk into contempt; some were cooled by years, others sobered by experience: their dreams were dissipated; their philosophy grew out of fashion; their irreligion was hooted out of sight: the great experiment to which they appealed had failed; and such is the deadening effect of disappointed hope upon those who have no strength of mind to reclaim them when they have gone wrong, or support them when they are right, that many of those persons who had been warmest in their admiration of the French revolution, looked now upon the struggle of the Spaniards

with utter apathy, prophecied their failure, depreciated their exertions, exulted over their losses, and, learning to hate the people whom coldness of heart, and error of intellect had made them injure, laboured to the utmost to assist in accomplishing their own predictions.

While the spirit of jacobinism had thus evaporated from the top of the vessel, its dregs were settling at the bottom. New demagogues appeared upon the stage, children of Mammon, and wiser in their generation. They understood the temper of the vulgar too well to preach to them of fine fabrics of society, the diffusion of general knowledge, and the millennium of wisdom and philosophy; and they understood the laws too well to recommend openly the destruction of monarchy, and the abolishment of all distinctions of rank. There is no danger in advertising journals, the professed object of which is to exhibit to the people the hideous system by which they are at once cajoled and coerced, thereby to rouse them to an united call for reformation too general to be mistaken, and too potent to be resisted. Radical reform is a safer text than revolution-the same sermon will suit either; the same end is effectually furthered by both. The folly and stupidity of ministers, the profligacy of public men, the oppressiveness of government, and the waste of public money, are the anarchists' constant theme. Knowing also that

• Majesty
Needs all the props of admiration
to bear it up on high-

they omit no opportunity of vilifying the royal family. In this manner have they for years been addressing themselves to the passions of the vulgar; flattering their vanity, by telling them that wisdom and virtue must proceed from them, and that the way to remedy all evils is to have all elections popular, and make the representative receive instructions from his constituents; exciting their indignation against their rulers, and provoking their selfishness and pride at the same time, by persuading them that they are plundered by government, and cheated by the public servants. Their changes are rung upon corruption, peculation, inquiry, and justice; and reform, radical reform, is still the burthen of the song.

It has been confidently asserted, that some of the anarchist writers are in the pay of France. We do not believe it; and whether it be so or not is altogether unimportant, for what occasion has the enemy to hire agents when there are so many who act for him gratuitously? To slander public and private characters has become a regular trade in England, and miscreants of one description take to it just as miscreants of another to the more dangerous, but

not

not more nefarious, practices of thieving and robbing; they begin upon players and they end upon princes. There is another class less noxious to society, and in themselves less detestable, but enemies in like manner to public order. A forum orator some years ago published a tour, in which he described the gratification which he felt in the act of being overturned in a stage coach, because never having experienced such an accident before, it gave him a new sensation. Gentlemen whose lives and limbs are matters of such trifling concern to themselves, may be equally well disposed to try what sort of sensation the overthrow of a government would produce. It is no new thing for wretches to set fire to a house, for the purpose of plundering during the confusion; ought we then to doubt that there may be those who would commit state-arson for motives of a like nature? But whether they commence their career thus without principle, or under the influence of erroneous notions and mistaken zeal, personal feeling brings them to the same state of mind: they get within reach of the law at some time or other, and then beginning in good earnest to abhor the government which has corrected them, they labour in their vocation with hearty virulence, hoping one day to change places with the attorney-general.

Men of these various descriptions have been writing to the populace for years past: they are not without employment in the daily press; but the weekly press is almost exclusively their own, and this is of far more importance, for it is the weekly paper which\ finds its way to the pot-house in town, and the ale-house in the country, inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer, and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace. He receives no account of public affairs (and these are times in which the remotest peasant feels an anxiety concerning them which was never known before) but what comes through these polluted sources. The murderers of Overbury destroyed him by seasoning with poison whatever he took, his food, his drink, and his medicine: so every thing is drugged which passes through the hands of the anarchist journalists. Victory is depreciated, and represented as matter of regret, because it tends to lengthen a war which the anarchists and the despondents have pronounced hopeless; failure is exaggerated and made matter of consolation, or ill-concealed joy, because it brings us nearer to an abandonment of the conWith whatever enemy we may be engaged, upon whatever cause, in whatever quarrel, it is England which is wrong, it is England which ought to yield. If Buonaparte be spoken of, his crimes are palliated or concealed, his success blazoned, his talents magnified, and held up for awe and admiration; his policy

test.

de

described as infallible; his means inexhaustible; his power not to be resisted. Thus do these men labour to destroy in their readers all sympathy with their country; all joy in her triumph; all natural pride in her glories; all generous exultation in her name; all interest in her cause. At home every thing is represented in the darkest colours; nothing but imbecillity, venality, profligacy, profusion, waste and peculation on the part of the rulers; on the part of the people distress, misery, hunger: the populace are reminded of their numbers, they are told of their strength, and they are reproached for their patience,

'Pack-bearing patience, that base property

And silly gift of the all-enduring ass.'

Every topic is made subservient to the same conclusion, that things are bad and must be changed; that corruption must be cut up by the roots; that the soil must be cleared by the plough and the harrow.

When corn has become damaged it is said to evolve a specific poison for the human system: poison of this kind being administered in the daily bread of the people has been producing slowly, but surely, the effect for which it was intended. It is now become 'rank, and smells to heaven.' But though the eruption did not show itself till a fit opportunity occurred last year, the infection had long been taken. The famous text* in Ezekiel, which is the watch-word of the Luddites, was current among the manufacturers of the north, more than seven years before they made any public manifestation of a seditious spirit. There is another circumstance equally serious in itself, and which ought to operate as a warning upon those persons whom it concerns. The secret directors of these people, who have given sufficient proofs of their ability for mischief, lose no opportunity of encouraging their confederates, by producing authorities in their favour, and they are at no loss where to look for them. Speeches which produce no other effect in parliament than that of exciting indignation at the effrontery of those who deliver them, or wonder at their infatuation, operate very differently when they are reported in a condensed shape, and all exposure of their futility and falsehood is withheld. For this, no doubt, they are designed, as far as is consistent with regular party policy; but the Luddite committees make a farther use of them, and the most inflammatory harangues of this description are printed like dying-speeches,

And thou profane prince of Israel, whose day is come, whose iniquity shall have an end, Thus, saith the Lord God; remove the diadem and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high.-I will overTurn, overturn, overturn it,-xxi. 25, 6, 7.

and