"Oh! the fools! Could not the settled reputation of being the most consummate of knaves content them? Was it necessary, in order to satisfy their ambition, to stand unrivalled through the world for folly as well as for knavery?
"Gratified, however, as you must be by these demonstrations of the impotent malice of such men, I hope, and indeed, I am sure, that a more gratifying consideration with you will be, as it ought to be, that these vile men have added to your power of serving your country, and which you will now be the better able to serve, because, having given such ample proofs of earnestness and resolution, you may safely moderate your zeal without risking any imputation of a want of that super-excellent quality. That quality, in which so many men are deficient, you possess to a redundance. Guard against this excess in future: take in a little sail, and add a little to your ballast: exchange a little of the courage of the lion for a little of the wisdom of the serpent: give up a little, and only a very little, of the stubbornness of the oak, for a little, and only a very little, of the pliancy of the reed: do this, and trust to the folly and knavery of these stupid and malignant wretches to make you a great man.
"The situation of the country is becoming day after day more and more perilous, and there can be no relief without a radical cure. The Prince in his answer to the City of London (which I shall fully notice by and by) confesses, as he well may, the existence of national distress and difficulty. These are important words, and especially the last. This is a great change produced since the beginning of last session of Parliament, when the wondrous prosperity of the country was a prominent theme of the Speech, and when your Wiltshire County Member, Mr. Paul Methuen, congratulated the House, that this country bad become the pillar of legitimacy all over Europe! Alas! how soon things have changed! Misery is a greater teacher than Messrs. Lancaster and Bell both put together.
"The Spitalfields subscription swells at a great rate, and, as a means of immediate relief, I am glad it does, though I shall always contend, that whatever degree of good may thereby be done, is due to you more than to any other person, and more than to all other persons put together; for, it is impossible that the misery should not have existed before the first Meeting in Spa-fields; and why, then, was it not before relieved? Mr. Buxton must have long known the facts which he so eloquently and so affectingly described; and why did he not then describe them sooner? The miserable sailors have long been perishing about the streets with hunger and cold; and why, then, has no measure of relief for them been adopted until now? I do not pretend to say, nor do I believe, that the greater part of those who now so freely subscribe, did not before feel for the unhappy sufferers; but, this I am quite sure of, that it was your first meeting and your petition which roused their feelings into immediate action; I do not say, nor do I believe, that the greater part of the subscribers had no real charity in them; but I defy any one to say, that their charity, which before lay dormant, was not quickened by your exertions. One of your flags, or rather of the flags of the Meeting, which had on it 'FEED THE HUNGRY,' 'CLOTHE THE NAKED,' was called by the Courier 'a standard of rebellion;' but, it is a standard under which the subscribers have hastened to range themselves; for they are serving out soup and old clothes in all directions! But, this very Courier, after the first Meeting, expressly stated, that the people in and near London, were not in want. He said, that, though work had fallen off and wages had been lowered in the country, it was not so in London; and he called the poor starving multitudes mutinous, lazy, and rebellious. He charged them with designs to overset the Government, and plainly and distinctly asserted, that they stood in no need of relief! How quickly he changed his tone! And how clear is that change to be traced to you!
"But, in the general subscription for the poor creatures of Spital-fields, you see only a small part of the effects of your labours. There have been meetings in almost all the parishes of the metropolis for similar purposes. Large subscriptions are going on in every direction. Just as if the poverty and misery were not as great a month ago as they are now! Great indeed they are, and they are producing symptoms so horrible that one sickens but to think of them. Amongst others, take the facts described in a placard now sticking against the walls. 'PUBLIC NOTICE.—United Parishes of Saint Andrew, Holborn, above Bar, and St. George the Martyr, Queen's Square. At a meeting of the overseers held this day in consequence of MANY PERSONS DESERTING THEIR FAMILIES,—It was resolved, That, in future, all persons, who desert their families, whereby they become chargeable to these parishes, or when the reputed parents of an illegitimate child abscond, such persons shall be advertised in the public papers, or in posting bills, with a full description of their persons, residence, and calling, and other particulars, and a reward offered for their apprehension. And all inhabitants harbouring persons for the night, for the like purpose, will be prosecuted accordingly.'
"To what are we come at last! And this is the age of our glory, is it? This is the situation we are in, when immense sums are voted for the erection of monuments to commemorate the deeds of the last 25 years! This is the state which not to be proud of, Mr. Vansittart said was proof of baseness in an Englishman! It is in this situation of the country, that Pitt Clubs have the insolence to hold their triumphal carousals!—Shall we never see these men in sackcloth? These insolent men, while wallowing in wealth, do not reflect on the pangs which must wring the poor man's heart before he can so far subdue the feelings of the husband and the father as to make him "desert his family;" or, if they do reflect on them, they must be more cruel than the storms and the waves. The labouring men in England, generally speaking, are the kindest and most indulgent of husbands and of parents. It has often been observed by me, that they are generally so to a fault. If a boy or girl belonging to them behave ill towards their employers, their father and mother are very hard to be convinced of the fact.—I have often to remonstrate with them upon this subject, and to remind them of how much more indulgent they are to their children than I am to mine. 'Aye, Sir,' said a very good woman to me a little while ago, 'but your children have their belly full of victuals.' The answer was a silencer. And this is the true cause of their indulgence, and of their excessive affection too. They see their children in want; they grow up in continual suffering; they are incessantly objects of compassion over and above the love which nature has implanted in the parent's breast. Their obstinate perseverance in justifying the conduct of their children upon all occasions is a fault; but it arises from the most amiable of human weaknesses; and though it may, and often is, injurious in its effects, it is the least censurable of all the frailties of the heart.
"If I have here, as I am sure I have, given the true character of the English labourer, as a parent and a husband, what must that state of things be, which has rendered the desertion of family so frequent an offence as to call forth a hand-bill and placard such as that which I have quoted above? And, in a state of things like this, are men to be called promoters of sedition, because they endeavour to point out the real cause of this horrible evil, and also endeavour to point out the remedy? Aye, but in doing this we point at the same time, to the weight of taxes; and we cite Mr. Preston in support of our doctrine, who says, that every poor man, who earns eighteen pounds in a year, pays away ten pounds of it in taxes. Mr. Preston's words are these:—'Every family, even of the poorest labourer, consisting of five persons, may be considered as paying, in indirect taxes, at least ten pounds a-year, or more than half his wages at seven shillings a week?' And, in another place he says: 'It should always be remembered, that every eighteen pounds a-year paid to any placeman or pensioner, withdraws from the public the means of giving active employment to one individual at the head of a family; thus depriving five persons of the means of sustenance from the fruits of honest industry and active labour, and rendering them paupers!
"What! is this rebellious on the part of Mr. Preston? He is a lawyer of great eminence. A Member of Parliament. A man of great landed estate. Could he write and publish this from rebellious, from treasonable motives? What he says is certainly true; and is he not to say it, because the saying it may be disagreeable to those who live upon the taxes thus collected? Is it not clear, that, if the money, which the labourer and journeyman now pay in taxes, were to be suffered to remain in their pockets, they would not stand in need of parish or subscription relief? And, if this be not true, why does not some one of the numerous tax-eating tribe attempt to prove it to be false? Have not they their full share of the press at their command? Aye, and more than their share. The sons of corruption are spreading about answers to me at a penny each, and some of them are given away. There must be money, somewhere, found for this. The sums necessary to do it must be very large too. Are they not content with this superiority? I have no means of giving papers away. They say that my writing is trash; they call the Letter to the Luddites seditious trash; they say that I am an ignorant fellow, a shallow man, and so forth. Why, then, are they in a passion? Why not laugh at me and my trash? Why name me at all? Why break silence after so long a period? They are continually vowing that they will never notice my trash again; but their hatred, like the love of the swain, returns the next hour with more ardour than ever, and scatters their vows to the winds. The most furious amongst them is a Sinecure Placeman, who writes in the Times newspaper, and upon whom the droppings of my pen seem to have the same effect as the crumbling of blue-stone or lump-sugar on the proud flesh of a galled jade. He winces and dances, and kicks and flings about at a fine rate. Amidst his ravings he swears that he will cause me to be hanged; and if he should not succeed, he would, I am sure, if he had any decency, finish his career by tucking up himself, and that too in his ribbon of the order of St. Lewis.
"The truth is, that these men and their assistants and encouragers see their certain doom in the enlightening of the people. They see clearly enough, that conviction must follow facts and arguments like mine rendered familiar. They see that I am uniting the mind with the muscle of the country; and, above all things, they see, and they tremble at, my incessant, and I hope, successful efforts, to convince the labourers and the journeymen, that they are men who have rights, and that the way to obtain those rights is to pursue a peaceable and orderly conduct. They hate every one who dwells upon the miseries of the country; for, to them, it is confusion to acknowledge that misery exists. The Courier asserted, only the other day, that there was no suffering in or near London, and abused the people for complaining! Such men would kill you or me or any man who talks of the people's sufferings. They call the complaints of hunger sedition. These writers are like the wretch, who, unable to force his poor worn-out and starved horse to drag his load along any further, took out his knife and cut his throat. And, I have not the least doubt, those men would see one half of the people's throats cut in order to reduce the rest to silent submission. The following case, taken from their own accounts of Wednesday last, will serve as a specimen of what is going on in London. This is dying quietly, according to the recommendation of Mr. Jabet's Old Townsman, who gave such just offence to the people of Birmingham. 'Between twelve and one o'clock on yesterday morning, a poor fellow was found in a passage in High-street, Bloomsbury, by Sullivan and Hogan, the watchmen of that district; he had taken shelter for the night. They requested him to walk on to his lodgings; he did not answer, but walked towards Monmouth-street, and they walked the contrary road. Between two and three o'clock they again found him lying upon a step in the same street; they asked him if he had no lodgings he tried to answer, but could only move his lips, which gave no utterance. They raised him upon his feet to assist him to the watch-house; he walked a few yards, and from weakness fell upon his knees. They got him upon their shoulders to carry him to the watch-house, but before they arrived with him he appeared to be dead. The watchman took him to the workhouse, and called up the house surgeon, who examined the body, and said it was useless to bleed him, or use any method to restore him, as he was quite dead. The deceased is apparently about fifty years of age, the most complete picture of human misery, having no linen upon his back, and his bones almost through his skin. By his dress he appears to be a workman out of employ. He has not been OWNED.'—Look at this, ye vile miscreants, and then say, whether it was a crime to call a meeting of the distressed to petition for relief! Hundreds must perish in this way. Only five days ago I saw more than twenty sailors on Westminster Bridge, neither of whom had any linen on, and some neither shoes, stockings, nor hat. But, the numbers who have perished and who are perishing from the diseases occasioned by want are not to be counted. And yet, it was a crime in you, and the sanguinary sons of corruption called for your instant execution, because you obeyed the call of the distressed to hold a meeting of them in Spafields! Not to have obeyed that call would indeed have been a crime; but, it was a crime of which your nature was incapable.
"I now come to the City Petition and the answer of the Prince Regent. This is a very important matter, and, therefore, I shall insert the documents themselves previous to making any remarks on them.