e
obedience. Among the lower classes in the great city, and not merely
that portion of the lower classes who are qualified by the appellation
of the dangerous classes, but in strata where at least a moderate
degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of
lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become
the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian
brigands. The hideous institution of the pillory stimulated and
fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose better instincts no
decent system of education sought to appeal. Ignorance, and poverty,
and dirt brooded over the bulk of the poorer population, to breed their
inevitable consequences. Murder was alarmingly common. Riots that
almost reached the proportions of petty civil wars were liable to arise
at any moment between one section of the poorer citizens and another.
The horrors of the Brownrigg case show to what extent lust of cruelty
could go. The large disbandments that are the inevitable consequence
of peace after a long war had thrown out of employment, and thrown upon
the country, no small number of needy, unscrupulous, and desperate men,
only too ready to lend a hand to any disturbance that might afford a
chance of food and drink and plunder.

[Sidenote: 1752--Mob violence in London]

Mob law ruled in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of
the eighteenth century. It reached a high pitch, but not its highest
pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty. London
was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which
followed upon the Middlesex election and the imprisonment of the
popular hero. But for the time the audacity of the mob seemed to have
gone its farthest. The temper of the {123} mob was insolent, its
insolence was brutal. It hated all foreigners--and among foreigners it
now included Scotchmen--and it manifested its hatred in vituperation,
and when it dared in violence. A white man would hardly be in more
danger in a mid-African village than a foreigner was in the streets of
London. There is a contemporary account written by a French gentleman
who travelled in England, and who published his observations on what he
saw in England, which gives a piteous account of the barbarous
incivility to which he, his friends, and his servants were exposed when
they walked abroad. The mob that jeered and insulted the master very
nearly killed the serv