y the public distress, uses every means to
prolong it, by preventing a return to habits of regular industry. The
suffering produced by the compulsory cessation from labour which these
committees command, often for an incredibly long period, never could be
borne but by men inflamed by the spirit of party, and contending for what
they ignorantly deem their best interests. It equals all that we read of
in heroic besieged towns, enduring the extremities of famine before they
submit to the besiegers. The Committee of Public Salvation was often
shaken by a scarcity of provisions in the capital, and never failed to
tremble at the forests of pikes which, when want became severe, issued
from the Faubourg St Antoine; but a trades'-union committee succeeds in
compelling men, by threats of the torch and the dagger, to remain in
idleness for months together, and surrender their birthright and
inheritance, the support of themselves, the food of their children, to the
commands of an unknown power, which retains them in the agonies of want
till suffering nature can no longer endure. The actual suffering resulting
from this unparalleled tyranny, while it continues, is the least of its
evils. A far greater, because more durable and irremediable calamity, is
to be found in the demoralizing of the poor, by depriving them of
occupation, and dividing society, by arraying whole classes against each
other.

Industry, during the feudal ages, was often exposed to the most ruthless
violence from the hand of power, and men possessed scarce any security
against the occasional oppression of arbitrary monarchs, or the savage
devastation of martial incursions. But great as these political evils
were, it may be doubted whether they occasioned, in the long run, so
serious an invasion on human happiness and the springs of human virtue, as
the _social evils_, which, on the cessation of these political disorders,
have, unobserved, insinuated themselves through society. The annals of the
middle ages are filled with the most heart-rending accounts of the
outbreaks of savage violence to which the people were subjected; and it
appears impossible that society could ever have recovered the dreadful
devastation to which it was frequently exposed. Yet it invariably did
recover, and that, too, in an incredibly short space of time. The Crusades
were the overflow of the full nations of Europe, after two centuries of
that apparently withering hostility. We read of no s