[232] Hutchinson, u. s.
[233] Annual Register, 1766, p. 220. The King’s Speech on 11 Nov. was chiefly occupied with the dearth. The use of wheat for distilling was prohibited by an order of Council of 16 Sept. 1766. Gent. Magaz. p. 399. To show the hardships of the rural population at this time, Mr Gladstone, in a speech at Hawarden in 1891, read the following words copied from a stone set up in the park of Hawarden to commemorate the rebuilding of a mill: “Trust in God for bread, and to the king for protection and justice. This mill was built in the year 1767. Wheat was within this year at 9s., and barley at 5s. 6d. a bushel. Luxury was at a great height, and charity extensive, but the poor were starved, riotous, and hanged.”
[234] Lecky, III. 115.
[235] Gent. Magaz., series of letters by various hands in 1766. See also a long essay in the Annual Register for 1767 (then edited by Edmund Burke), “On the Causes and Consequences of the present High Price of Provisions,” p. 165. The evidence of a rise in the standard of living, in the matter of dress and luxuries as well as of food, is equally clear from Scotland in the articles written by the parish ministers for the ‘Statistical Account.’
[236] For a judicious estimate of the value of the Parish Clerks’ bills of mortality see the elaborate paper by Dr William Ogle, Journ. Statist. Soc. LV. (1892), 437.
[237] Diseases of the Army. New ed. 1775, pp. 334-5. Pringle admitted, however, that “in some of the lowest, moistest and closest parts of the town, and among the poorer people, spotted fevers and dysenteries are still to be seen, which are seldom heard of among those of better rank living in more airy situations.”
[238] Medical Sketches, Lond. 1786, p. 464.
[239] Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II. 636, generalizes the facts as follows: “The wealthy employer ceased to live among his people; the quarters of the rich and of the poor became more distant, and every great city soon presented those sharp divisions of classes and districts in which the political observer discovers one of the most dangerous symptoms of revolution.”
[240] “This disease, as it appears in jails and hospitals, has been well described by Sir John Pringle; and other authors have given accounts of it on board of ships, especially crowded transports and prison-ships, but I do not find that its originating in the families of the poor in great cities during the winter has been taken notice of.” Med. Trans. Coll. Phys. III. 345.
[241] He has been immortalised by Johnson’s verses: