he workshop of the world. Her wealth
had increased beyond her wildest dreams; but the unequal distribution of
that wealth was a spectacle to make angels weep. The invention of machinery
at first threw thousands of skilled hand workers out of employment; in
order to protect a few agriculturists, heavy duties were imposed on corn
and wheat, and bread rose to famine prices just when laboring men had the
least money to pay for it. There followed a curious spectacle. While
England increased in wealth, and spent vast sums to support her army and
subsidize her allies in Europe, and while nobles, landowners,
manufacturers, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude of
skilled laborers were clamoring for work. Fathers sent their wives and
little children into the mines and factories, where sixteen hours' labor
would hardly pay for the daily bread; and in every large city were riotous
mobs made up chiefly of hungry men and women. It was this unbearable
economic condition, and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which
occasioned the danger of another English revolution.

It is only when we remember these conditions that we can understand two
books, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_,
which can hardly be considered as literature, but which exercised an
enormous influence in England. Smith was a Scottish thinker, who wrote to
uphold the doctrine that labor is the only source of a nation's wealth, and
that any attempt to force labor into unnatural channels, or to prevent it
by protective duties from freely obtaining the raw materials for its
industry, is unjust and destructive. Paine was a curious combination of
Jekyll and Hyde, shallow and untrustworthy personally, but with a
passionate devotion to popular liberty. His _Rights of Man_ published in
London in 1791, was like one of Burns's lyric outcries against institutions
which oppressed humanity. Coming so soon after the destruction of the
Bastille, it added fuel to the flames kindled in England by the French
Revolution. The author was driven out of the country, on the curious ground
that he endangered the English constitution, but not until his book had
gained a wide sale and influence.

All these dangers, real and imaginary, passed away when England turned from
the affairs of France to remedy her own economic conditions. The long
Continental war came to an end with Napoleon's overthrow at Waterloo, in
1815; and England, having