was
partial. During the fifteen years which preceded Waterloo, the number of
the population rose from ten to thirteen millions, and this rapid
increase kept down the rate of wages, which would naturally have
advanced in a corresponding degree with the increase in the national
wealth. Even manufactures, though destined in the long run to benefit
the labouring classes, seemed at first rather to depress them; for one
of the earliest results of the introduction of machinery was the ruin of
a number of small trades which were carried on at home and the
pauperization of families who relied on them for support. In the winter
of 1811 the terrible pressure of this transition from handicraft to
machinery was seen in the Luddite, or machine-breaking, riots which
broke out over the northern and midland counties; and which were only
suppressed by military force. While labour was thus thrown out of its
older grooves, and the rate of wages kept down at an artificially low
figure by the rapid increase of population, the rise in the price of
wheat, which brought wealth to the landowner and the farmer, brought
famine and death to the poor, for England was cut off by the war from
the vast corn-fields of the Continent or of America, which nowadays
redress from their abundance the results of a bad harvest. Scarcity was
followed by a terrible pauperization of the labouring classes. The
amount of the poor-rate rose fifty per cent; and with the increase of
poverty followed its inevitable result, the increase of crime.

[Sidenote: Political Progress.]

The natural relation of trade and commerce to the general wealth of the
people at large was thus disturbed by the peculiar circumstances of the
time. The war enriched the landowner, the farmer, the merchant, the
manufacturer; but it impoverished the poor. It is indeed from these
fatal years that we must date that war of classes, that social severance
between employers and employed, which still forms the main difficulty
of English politics. But it is from these too that we must date the
renewal of that progressive movement in politics which had been
suspended since the opening of the war. The publication of the
_Edinburgh Review_ in 1802 by a knot of young lawyers at Edinburgh
marked a revival of the policy of constitutional and administrative
progress which had been reluctantly abandoned by William Pitt. Jeremy
Bentham gave a new vigour to political speculation by his advocacy of
the doctrine o