As it was the new brides clung to their husbands, half afraid of those noisy demonstrations, and were not sorry to get clear of the crowd, and thread their way to Ancoats Lane, where the thriving butcher, assisted by Mrs. Ashton, Mrs. Clowes, and Mrs. Clough, had prepared a dinner which bore no proportion to the “short commons” of every-day fare.
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH.
PETERLOO.
PEOPLE had been naturally sanguine that the conclusion of peace would inaugurate prosperity, that commerce would flourish with the flourish of pens on the parchments of a treaty. But the war had been of too long continuance, too universal, too destructive of life and property and crops. When grounds lie untilled for years: when swords reap harvests that should have been left for the sickle; when cattle are slaughtered wholesale for unproductive soldiery, or for lack of provender; when orchards and vineyards which have taken years to mature are given to the flames, there can be no sudden re-adjustment of commercial matters. Food products are the staple of trade, which is only a system of exchange facilitated by coin and paper.
What could a food-producing continent, down-trod by the iron hoof of war, have to offer in exchange for our textile fabrics and hardware?
Trade could not revive, until there was food to sustain it. Yet the mass of the people in 1816, still further impoverished by a deficient home harvest, imputed the evil to defective legislation, and the exclusion of foreign corn save at famine prices; and discontent became universal.
Strangely enough, the agricultural districts which the Corn Laws were supposed to protect, were the first to cry out against them, and to break out into riot—not Manchester, Oldham, Nottingham, and the manufacturing centres.
This year closed on a popular demand for Parliamentary reform, but not a riotous one. Sunday schools had created readers on humble hearths, and William Cobbett supplied them with books and pamphlets bearing on their own rights and wrongs. They were read with avidity, and he became a power. He counselled peaceful persistence, not armed resistance. Hampden Clubs were formed all over the country, in which the political questions of the day were discussed with as much freedom as stringent law permitted. Public speakers and poets, of whom Samuel Bamford was one, arose from the ranks of the working classes; and the men banded together under such leadership called themselves Radical Reformers, a title which soon degenerated into Radicals.
The members of these rapidly-spreading clubs subscribed a penny a week each. Delegates were sent to meet and debate together; and on the 4th November, 1816, a large meeting was held in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester (strangely enough, the site of the present Free Trade Hall), “to take into consideration the distressed state of the country.”
Other meetings were held by the Reformers and their delegates; and on the 13th January, 1817, their political opponents held a counter-meeting, to consider the “necessity of adopting measures for the maintenance of the public peace;” for certainly the meeting of large masses of disaffected people, however peacefully disposed in the outset, and individually, becomes threatening in the aggregate. No one cares much for a grain of gunpowder; but mass the grains into pounds, and the pounds into tons, and there is certainly need of precaution in dealing with it.