paid weekly wages found daily bread; and in
this negligence he only resembled thousands besides, on whom the
starving poor of Yorkshire seemed to have a closer claim.

The period of which I write was an overshadowed one in British history,
and especially in the history of the northern provinces. War was then
at its height. Europe was all involved therein. England, if not weary,
was worn with long resistance--yes, and half her people were weary too,
and cried out for peace on any terms. National honour was become a mere
empty name, of no value in the eyes of many, because their sight was dim
with famine; and for a morsel of meat they would have sold their
birthright.

The "Orders in Council," provoked by Napoleon's Milan and Berlin
decrees, and forbidding neutral powers to trade with France, had, by
offending America, cut off the principal market of the Yorkshire woollen
trade, and brought it consequently to the verge of ruin. Minor foreign
markets were glutted, and would receive no more. The Brazils, Portugal,
Sicily, were all overstocked by nearly two years' consumption. At this
crisis certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple
manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands
necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them
without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened.
Distress reached its climax. Endurance, overgoaded, stretched the hand
of fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were
felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But, as is usual
in such cases, nobody took much notice. When a food-riot broke out in a
manufacturing town, when a gig-mill was burnt to the ground, or a
manufacturer's house was attacked, the furniture thrown into the
streets, and the family forced to flee for their lives, some local
measures were or were not taken by the local magistracy. A ringleader
was detected, or more frequently suffered to elude detection; newspaper
paragraphs were written on the subject, and there the thing stopped. As
to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost
that inheritance--who could not get work, and consequently could not get
wages, and consequently could not get bread--they were left to suffer
on, perhaps inevitably left. It would not do to stop the progress of
invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements; the war
could not be terminated; effi