HE history of 1825 and 1826 has shewn us the state of English capitalists; the rapacity and ignorance of some, and the consequent sufferings of all. How was it with the labourers, among whom it is natural to look for a worse cupidity, a deeper ignorance, and a fiercer suffering?

From the time when the false prosperity of the country began to decline, there was much rioting. The first impulse of sufferers too ignorant to know the causes of their suffering, is to rebel against the order of things under which their misery takes place. The first serious rioting was at Sunderland, in August 1825, just after the tide of prosperity was seen to have turned. The association of seamen, who were not on good terms with the ship-owners, saw a collier quietly leaving the port, manned by strangers, and went out to attack the vessel. The principal ship-owners, who had been sworn in as special constables, put off after them, but could make little resistance against overwhelming numbers; the rioters being at least four hundred. The ship-owners, and all the obnoxious crew, except the master and the mate, were thrown into the sea, whence they were picked up in no condition for further fight. A party of dragoons was brought up; the Riot Act was read; but on the opposite side of the river from that where the proceedings of the rioters, had collected a mob of men, women, and children. Some stones were thrown from the midst of this mob, who had not heard the reading of the Riot Act. The soldiers fired, and five persons were killed; one of whom was a carpenter, at work on his stage, and another a labourer, returning from the field. The funeral of the victims was solemn, with banners and flags, and a band of singers; and for mourners, twelve hundred seamen, with each a crape round the left arm, walking hand in hand, two and two.

The circumstances had, however, been too fatal for the courage of the men; and they yielded the points for which they had struck.

A more successful stand against authority and law was made in the Isle of Man the next November, when the island was kept in a state of uproar for a week, by the resistance of the poor to the collection of the tithe of potatoes by the proctors of the bishop. The people overturned the laden carts, stood guard over the potatoes, pursued the bishop's proctors, rescued such of their own body as were apprehended, defied the constables, evaded the magistrates and military, and obtained from the bishop, at the end of a week, the following written

declaration, which was delivered by his lordship himself into the hands of a deputation from the malcontents: 'Whereas it has been reported by evil-minded persons, that a tithe of potatoes will be taken from the poor tenants of this island, and from persons little able to pay the same-they are hereby assured that such tithe will not be demanded from them, either this year or at any future time.' These poor people needed only the assurance that their potatoes should not be taken from their children to be given to the church; and the bishop saw that it would be little for the advantage of religion to give the food of the poor to the church. So there was grace on the one side, and cheering on the other; and the affair was over for the time.

By the spring of the next year, 1826, there was such fearful suffering among the poor of the manufacturing districts, that no one could wonder much at the spirit of violence which broke out in Lancashire. The people rose up against the powerlooms, which they believed to be the cause of the r distress; and in one day, every power-loom in Blackburn, and within six miles of it, was destroyed. It is worthy of note, that the rioters took the utmost care not to injure any spinning-machinery. Time was when the hand-spinners were as much exasperated against spinning-jennies as the hand-loom weavers now were against power-looms. They had discovered the value of the spinning-machinery by this time, but could not be persuaded that they should ever derive any benefit from weavingmachinery. It was a mournful spectacle in Lancashire, that week in April; the mob going from town to town, from factory to factory; snatching their food from bakers' shops and public-houses; throwing stones at the soldiers, and being shot down, rather than give up their object, believing sincerely that their very lives depended on the destruction of these looms; leaping from two-story windows to escape the soldiery, after having cut up every web, and hewn down every beam and stick within; striking at their pursuers with table-knives made into pikes; with scythes and sledge-hammers; swimming canals, hiding in woods, parading the streets of towns, to the number of 10,000 at a time, frightening the night with cries of hunger and yells of rage-all this was terrible; but it came at the end of many months of such sore distress as rouses the fiercest passions of men. On the first day, three persons were killed by the soldiers; on another day, nine: here, it might be seen that wounded men were carried away across the fields; there, the street was found, when emptied, to be much stained with blood.' Here, a poor creature was loading his rusty gun with marbles, while the manufacturers were bringing up cannon to plant round their factories; there, haggard men were setting buildings or fire, and snatching buckets from the hands of those who would have supplied water to the engines. Between Monday morning and Saturday night, a thousand power-looms were destroyed. The immediate money-value of this machinery was £30,000; but it had a greater value as the only means of bread of a large number of people who were now left idle and destitute.

In the first week in May, the Manchester

time it appeared as if there would be no oats or pulse at all. Oats are generally highest in June, when the preceding year's crop is coming to an end. This year, oats were 22s. 11d. in the middle of June; and the price went on rising, instead of falling, through July and August, till, on the 1st of September, it had risen to 30s. There was so little grass, that the cattle were fed on dry fodder on the richest meadowlands in England, which were brown and burnt as if a fire had passed over them. The deer in noblemen's parks died of drought; ponds and reservoirs were shrunk to muddy pools; hard-working people sat up all night to watch the springs-some to carry home drink to their children-others to have a commodity of cold water to sell in the morning. In some highlying towns, the richest people made presents to one another of little pitchers of fresh water; and the consumption of beer increased much among those who were disgusted with the warm and stagnant water yielded by the brooks when the wells were all dry. All the accounts from the north of Europe told of a rise in the price of oats and pulse, like that at home; and this increased the alarm. By the 1st of September, the importation price was passed; but before the ports could be opened, the average must be struck of the price above the importation price; and the first average would not be struck till the 15th of November. The ministers decided not to wait for the quarterly average, but to issue an order in council at once for the admission of oats, rye, beans, and pease. What was in bond was brought into the market immediately; and the fresh imports were subjected to additional duties, to be confirmed by parliament when it should meet. Thus, after all, ministers were reduced to forestall the action of parliament, and to seek an act of indemnity for themselves. Such a necessity was not without its good results. It tended, like every perplexity and irregularity of the kind, to disgust sensible people with that system of restriction on food which was to be put an end to by a member of the administration of that time.

The miserable are always restless. Hunger roams from land to land, as pain tosses on the bed it cannot leave. The famished and cold cannot sit still on the bare ground while there is life within them, and a capacity of hope which points to food and warmth which may be had elsewhere. The poor Irish, with their wistful looks and their tatters, are poured out upon the coasts of England and Scotland every year; and when they are too many for the existing work and food, or when the work and food fall short from other causes, the grave and decent poor of England and Scotland wander away too, shipping themselves off westwards, or to our furthest settlements in the east. The subject of emigration must, sooner or later, become one of interest and importance to every civilised state; and soonest to an insular kingdom. It may be theoretically a question whether, if the English nation had been altogether wise-had assumed the conduct of its own civilisation, instead of being the subject, and in some sense the victim, of its own civilisation-the time would have yet arrived for sending abroad any of its people. It may be a question whether, if we were

all wise and all of one mind about social affairs, there is not enough for every one to do and to enjoy on his native soil. This is a theoretical question now, which may become a practical one any day; and the sooner the better. But it has, for a course of years now, been a prominent question how best to arrange matters for the needy among our people, who will and must roam, because they have no food for their little ones, and no home for their own hearts. The restlessness which forces upon us the question of emigration is of course greatest in seasons of adversity; and in the adversity of the year 1826 it was fierce enough to originate what may prove to be an important period in our national history.

In 1825, it was announced to the country that the business of the colonial office had so increased of late years, that it had become necessary to have an additional under-secretary of state. Mr R. Wilmot Horton was the existing under-secretary; and Mr R. W. Hay was now appointed in addition. It may be well that a future time should see what amount of business was apportioned to our colonial secretaries in 1825, when emigration, in the modern import of the word, first began seriously to engage the attention of society. It is still our way to approve of our colonial minister as we approve of ministers for home offices, on account of his general character and qualifications, without much regard to his capacity for a function requiring a special and elaborate training. It is still our way to permit our colonial minister to go out and come in at short intervals, as if the stability of the administration were not of the highest importance, when his administration extends over various and distant countries. It is still too probable that a colonial minister's first business is to shut himself up in his study, and find out on the globe where the territories lie which he has to set about governing. But we are beginning to learn how absurd it is to expect the machinery of the colonial office to do the necessary work; to understand the growing magnitude of the business of colonisation, and to be prepared for a reconstitution and prodigious enlargement of the office which is to superintend it. When this impending change is made, men will look back with astonishment on this list furnished in 1825, of the colonies whose affairs at head-quarters had to be managed by Mr Wilmot Horton and Mr Hay.

Mr R. Wilmot Horton: Jamaica, Barbadoes, St Christopher, Nevis and Tortola, Antigua and Montserrat, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent, Tobago, Trinidad, Demerara and Essequibo, Berbice, Honduras, Bahamas, Bermuda, Lower Canada, Upper Canada, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, New Brunswick, Prince Edward's Island, Newfoundland. Commission of Inquiry and Criminal Justice, West Indies; and Apprenticed Africans.

Mr Hay: Gibraltar, Malta, Ionian Isles, Marocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Missions to the Interior of Africa, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Cape of Good Hope, Heligoland, New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, Ceylon, Mauritius, East Indies. Commission of Inquiry, Cape, Mauritius and Ceylon: Sierra Leone.

The work of assisting emigration was henceforth

CHAP. X.]

to be looked forward to by the colonial office as a part of its business. Since 1822, government had given occasional aid to emigration to Canada; and now it heard on every side of expectations from individuals and societies that it would assist in conveying the needy to new fields of labour. The landowners of a Scotch county applied to ministers for encouragement to their poor to emigrate; and the working-men formed themselves into societies, in many parts of the country, whose object was to obtain funds for emigration from rich neighbours and from the government. Government was compelled to deliberate on this important subject. It would not do to go on giving sums of money here and there, without inquiring what was done with it. It was not right to continue supplying grants without knowing how the former schemes had issued. It was not possible to keep at home the poor creatures, rendered desperate by want, who were resolved to try their fortunes abroad; and it was cruel to let them go wholly unprepared and destitute. It became known, by this time, how piteous was the lot of the emigrant when he found himself among the snows of Canada, with the remnant of his family about him-the few whom hardship and fever and the miseries of the voyage had spared-and no possessions whatever but the axe on his shoulder and the tatters they wore. It became known how the Irish who flock to the United States are naturally regarded as a nuisance in their ports; and how they die in the swamps, digging canals which the Americans will not work at, and crouching in shanties which no American would enter-unless it were the missionary and the priest. Society had not yet awakened to the perception of what emigration ought to be; had not yet admitted the conception of a small, complete society, removed with all needful appliances to a new scene where it would be bound together as at home by its mutual wants and aids; by its capital and its labour; its church, its schools, its gradations of ranks and employments, and sufficient powers of self-government. Such a conception as this had not yet entered the mind of the government or of the nation; but all were aware that the desperate and random emigration of the time was bad, and must give place to something better.

On the 14th of March 1826, Mr R. Wilmot Horton moved 'that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of encouraging emigration from the United Kingdom.' He detailed the circumstances of the experiments of the years 1823 and 1825, when, first, 268 persons emigrated from Ireland to Canada at the expense of £22 each; and next, 2024 persons followed at an expense of £20 each. It had never been the intention of government to go on making grants for the removal of paupers in this mode; but it was thought that the issue of these first attempts was sufficiently favourable to indicate further inquiry and consideration. As the scheme was advocated on the ground of its being a successful method of removing paupers, it was opposed as an expensive and fruitless remedy for pauperism, as the numbers removed could never perceptibly reduce the superabundance of labour at home. The wider considerations of the benefits of

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calling new regions into fertility, and of creating new markets, and thus feeding and employing many who remained behind; the considerations of the proper ages of those who were to go; of their mutual apportionment and co-operation as capitalists and labourers; of the means of making emigration presently self-supporting and expansive - these points were not yet discussed, because they were not yet thought of. The great subject which was soon to become a science was as yet treated superficially, partially, and empirically. But a beginning was made. The committee asked for was appointed; and it presented its report and evidence before the dissolution of parliament, with a recommendation that the subject should be pursued without loss of time.

It was a disastrous year, this year 1826; but if we have seen what miseries marked its progress, we have witnessed, too, the birth of a great redeeming blessing. It is possible that from the woes and the terror and the clamour of that fearful season may have sprung the fertilisation and peopling of vast new regions abroad, and the redemption of future generations at home.

CHAPTER X.

HE year 1825 was marked by nothing more conspicuously than by a great change in the aspect and conduct of the Catholic question. In a preceding page of this History, a proImise was given of a brief narrative of this great question; and here, at the beginning of its final stage, we seem to be

at the right point for a rapid review of its history.

The difficulty of most or all perilous political questions lies in the relation they bear to the long distant past; a past which did not involve social principles that have since become of primary importance, and by whose rule the matter must be finally disposed of. For long before the present date, there had been an incessant and unmanageable confusion, in the general mind of the anti-Catholic party, between the religious and political mischiefs of admitting the Catholics to an equality of civil rights with the Protestants; and this confusion itself was modern, compared with the sufferings of the Catholics. This was because the sufferings of the Catholics began in an age when there was no distinction between civil and religious rights. When the distinction rose into recognition, the Romanists were actively persecuted, sometimes on the religious, and sometimes on the political ground; and when the persecution became negative, and therefore confined to the political ground, their enemies had still not arrived at any clearness of thought, or any common agreement, as to the basis of their opposition to the Catholic claims. This is illustrated by the whole course of the history of those claims.

The Reformation is, of course, the point from

which the separate story of the Catholic body must date. When Henry VIII., by his emissaries, demolished the holy shrine of St Kieran, and turned out its relics into the street, and burned the costly crosier of St Patrick, he did not persecute the Irish Catholics as Irish, but as Catholics; but his acts had the immediate effect of uniting in a general hostility to England the chiefs and tribes who were before incessantly at feud with each other. Nobody then thought of the distinction which grew up in a subsequent age. There was so little call for a religious reformation in Ireland, that we have it on good authority that there were not sixty Protestants in the island when Elizabeth became queen. During her' vigorous rule' in Ireland, she and her ministers made no nice distinctions between her functions of head of the Church and head of the State, in the penal laws decreed against the Irish Catholics, and the legalised force by which she put down the Irish malcontents. In spite of the talk of the reformed religion in both countries, and the laws against the exercise of the Catholic religion, the conflicting parties were evidently full of political matters, and not of religious. The English government employed Catholic officials in the most important and confidential services in Ireland; even, if they belonged to the Pale, in repelling the Spanish invasions which took place on account of her anti-Catholic laws and policy. The Catholics of the Pale fought against those out of the Pale; and in the reign of James I., as a fierce Catholic, O'Sullivan, tells us, 'the eyes even of the English Irish'-the Catholics of the Pale were opened, and they cursed their former folly for helping the heretic.' Elizabeth's wars were waged against the chiefs of savages; chiefs whose tribes knew nothing of tillage, of homes, of property, or comforts; who, in the remoter parts of the island, went almost unclothed, and lay down round fires to sleep on the ground. These chiefs had lands to be robbed of. There will be lands for those who want,' said Queen Elizabeth, by way of stirring up her officials, when there were tidings that O'Neal was about to rise; and it would, no doubt, have been exactly the same-the whole course of her conquest of the rebels, whatever had been their religion, of all that existed, from pole to pole. Meantime, her Protestant Church of sixty members did not expand to her wish, though she gave bounties to it, and proscribed its enemies. When it did expand, it was not from conversions in Ireland, but by the accession of the colonists of her successor, and the settlement of the soldiers of Cromwell.

The confusion which arose after the incursion of these new dwellers gave rise to the Act of Settlement, by which 7,800,000 acres of land were transferred from Irish Catholic to English Protestant proprietors. At the first possible moment-that is, during the brief season when James II. held up his head in Ireland-the native parliament, in which only six Protestants sat, repealed the Act of Settlement, against the will of the king. The battle of the Boyne presently overthrew whatever had been done; and it is not to be wondered at that the popery laws which succeeded were excessively severe. Though they said a great deal about religious error, they

were imposed in dread of a political foe, whose physical force was truly formidable. The Protestant ascendency of Ireland,' says the Edinburgh Review of Sir J. Throckmorton's work on the Catholic question, 'cared very little about purgatory and the seven sacraments. They acted upon principles simply political; and their severity was not derived from polemical rancour, but from the two great springs of bitterness, which turn the milk of human nature into gall-revenge and fear. They knew what the vanquished had done in the hour of success; they looked at their numbers with dread, and sought to strengthen the barriers of law against the rude arm of physical power. The system of the popery laws, indeed, in Ireland, must be looked at as a whole. In their present state (1806) they are folly, caprice, feeble and petulant tyranny. As they stood originally, they were vigorous and consistent; the firm, well-riveted fetters of conquest, locking into one another, and stretching down the captive giant to the floor.'

More forfeitures ensued as soon as King William had driven out his cuemy. The estates transferred on this occasion are declared to have covered 1,060,793 acres. The one circumstance which softened their political adversity to the Irish was that, by the Treaty of Limerick, framed when the struggle was over, the free exercise of their religion was secured to them for the future, on the strength of the king's guarantee for himself, his heirs, and successors, as far as in him lay. By the words of the treaty it was expressly declared, that 'the Roman Catholics should enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of Charles II.; and their majesties, as soon as they can summon a parliament in this kingdom, will endeavour to procure the said Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance on account of their religion.' These articles, afterwards published in letters-patent under the great seal, were signed by the English general on the 3d of October 1691; and for three weeks the Irish Romanists were hopeful and happy. But it was only for three weeks; and then followed a scason of oppression so cruel as to provoke the question how it could have been borne, in an age of the world so advanced. Of the English government of that time, Burke says: The severe and jealous policy of a conqueror in the crude settlement of his new acquisition, was strangely made a permanent rule for its future government.' And of the oppressed party, Swift declared that it was 'just as inconsiderable in point of power as the women and children.' In this weakness lay their strength. It was nourishing the germ of that future Catholic question which was soon to begin disturbing cabinets, and with more and more power, till, a century after, it should be looked upon with constant dread as the explosive force which was to shatter one administration after another for five-and-thirty years together, and threaten at last to revolutionise the empire. Little did the government of Queen Anne foresee the consequences of setting its heel on the neck of the Catholic interest; but, though it could not