"Several chapels have been destroyed, and several inoffensive Papists have been plundered, but the high sport was to burn the gaols. This was a good rabble trick. The debtors and the criminals were all set at liberty; but of the criminals, as has always happened, many are already retaken; and two pirates have surrendered themselves, and it is expected that they will be pardoned.
"Government now acts again with its proper force; and we are all under the protection of the King, and the law. I thought that it would be agreeable to you and my master to have my testimony to the public security; and that you would sleep more quietly when I told you that you were safe.
"There has, indeed, been a universal panic, from which the King was the first that recovered. Without the concurrence of his ministers, or the assistance of the civil magistrates, he put the soldiers in motion, and saved the town from calamities, such as a rabble's government must naturally produce.
"The public has escaped a very heavy calamity. The rioters attempted the Bank on Wednesday night, but in no great number; and, like other thieves, with no great resolution. Jack Wilkes headed the party that drove them away. It is agreed that if they had seized the Bank on Tuesday, at the height of the panic, when no resistance had been prepared, they might have carried irrecoverably away whatever they had found. Jack who was always zealous for order and decency, declares that if he be trusted with power, he will not leave a rioter alive. There is, however, now no longer any need of heroism or bloodshed; no blue riband is any longer worn.
"Such was the end of this miserable sedition, from which London was delivered by the magnanimity of the Sovereign himself. Whatever some may maintain, I am satisfied that there was no combination or plan, either domestic or foreign; but that the mischief spread by a gradual contagion of frenzy, augmented by the quantities of fermented liquors, of which the deluded populace possessed themselves in the course of their depredations."
THE TRADE OF LONDON IN 1791.
The following account of London's trade at the end of the eighteenth century is, of course, concerned with the manufacturing and commercial activity of the whole country as well as with the particular work of London; but the City was the chief port and centre of a trade which had grown with marvellously rapid strides. The mechanical inventions in the textile industries, the phenomenal growth of manufactures at this time, the stimulus given to English trade by the disturbances on the Continent, all assisted in an amazing development of commerce, of which London was the centre.
Source.—The British Directory, 1791.
The commerce of the world being in perpetual fluctuation, we can never be too watchful, not only for preserving what we are now in possession of, but for availing ourselves of the mistakes or negligences of other nations, in order to acquire new branches of it. Who could have imagined, three hundred years ago, that those ports of the Levant, from whence, by means of the Venetians, England, and almost all the rest of Christendom, were supplied with the spices, drugs, etc., of India and China, should one day come themselves to be supplied with those very articles by the remote countries of England and Holland, at an easier rate than they were used to have them directly from the East; or that Venice should afterwards lose to Lisbon the lucrative trade of supplying the rest of Europe with them; or lastly, that Lisbon should afterwards lose the same to Amsterdam; or that Amsterdam and Haerlem should gradually lose, as in great part they have done, their famous and fine linen manufactures to Ireland and Scotland? At present, our woollen manufacture is the noblest in the universe; and second to it is our metallic manufacture of iron, steel, tin, copper, lead, and brass, which is supposed to employ upwards of half a million of people. Our unmanufactured wool alone, of one year's produce or growth, has been estimated to be worth two millions sterling; and, when manufactured, it is valued at six millions more, and is thought to employ upwards of a million of our people in its manufacture; whereas in former times all our wool was exported unmanufactured, and our own people remained unemployed. Even within the three last centuries, the whole rental or value of all the lands and houses in England did not exceed five millions; but by the spirited exertions of the City of London, seconded by the merchants of the principal trading towns in the country, the rental of England is now estimated at twenty millions per annum, or more; of which vast benefit our nobility, gentry, and landholders begin to be fully sensible, by the immense increase in the value or fee-simple of their lands, which has gradually kept pace with the increase and value of our commercial intercourse with foreign nations, of which the following are at present the most considerable:
To Turkey we export woollen cloths, tin, lead, and iron, solely in our own shipping; and bring from thence raw silk, carpets, galls, and other dyeing ingredients, cotton, fruits, medicinal drugs, etc.