Justin McCarthy’s statement of the case is instructive:[[128]]
“There was widespread distress [in 1816]. There were riots in the counties of England arising out of the distress. There were riots in various parts of London.... The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended.... A large number of working men conceived the idea of walking to London to lay an account of their distress before the heads of government [Perfectly reasonable?].... The nickname of Blanketeers was given to them because of their portable sleeping arrangements. (Every man carried a blanket.) ... The ‘Massacre of Peterloo’ ... took place not long after.... It was a vast meeting—some 80,000 men and women are stated to have been present.... The yeomanry, a mounted militia force, ... dashed in upon the crowd, spurring their horses and flourishing their sabres. Eleven persons were killed and several hundred were wounded. The government brought in ... the famous Six Acts. These Acts were simply measures to render it more easy to put down and disperse meetings ... and to suppress any manner of publication which they chose to call seditious.... It was the conviction of the ruling class that the poor and the working classes of England were preparing a revolution.... In 1818, a motion for annual parliaments and universal suffrage was lost by a majority of 106 to nobody.”
Says Professor Jesse Macy:[[129]]
“By a series of repressive measures popular agitation was arrested.... Popular agitation was brought to an end by force. So complete was the repression that there occurred no great political consequences until the movement which carried the Reform Bill [1832].”
“Silence!” is always the order of despotism when the “bruised lips” of starving slaves speak loud for freedom.
Thus did the proud, “patriotic” masters of England spit in the faces of the starving working class who supported the war and laugh to scorn the old working class soldiers who had fought the long and horrible war. Thus were the battle-scarred heroes—and their families—sabred and bayoneted. Thus were some of the rights they already had, torn from their hands. Thus were they denied a voice in the government they served. Thus were the toilers and veterans outraged—duped, despised, snubbed—during and after the “glorious” Napoleonic wars.
The shameless Caesars who constituted the English government of the time heaped wrong upon wrong by sending police spies into the great public meetings of the ragged veterans of war and industry to stir them up to violence, thus furnishing the government excuse for its brutalities and repressive legislation.[[130]]
An anonymous author furnishes interesting fact and comment:[[131]]
“The world will have to revise its notions of patriotism in the light of modern commerce.... Look at the strength of the interests. Where is the Government that would dare prohibit Birmingham firms from executing [filling] orders for a foreign Government? Even in our small frontier wars [British] soldiers must expect to be shot at with British rifles.”
At one time in the Napoleonic wars English manufacturers, “patriotic business men,” of course, filled one order for 16,000 military coats, 37,000 jackets, and 200,000 pairs of shoes to be used, as the commercial patriots knew, by the French army while slaughtering English soldiers.[[132]] That was about a hundred years ago. But the silk-hat patriot is still the same hypocrite, talking loudly about “honoring the hero” whom he despises both socially and industrially. British veterans of the Boer War of recent years—tens of thousands of them—have cursed the day they enlisted, with the patriotism of ignorance, to serve in South Africa. The Government broke its promises with them shamelessly and wholesale; and many of these veterans, on returning from the war, were scorned at the English factory door, turned down at the shops and mines, and had to beg on the streets of London and other cities. It is the old story: duped, tricked, teased to the trenches—then snubbed, as usual.