University of Virginia Library

What a knitter of stockings is in a family, since the invention of the stocking-loom, Peel is in Parliament. The improved machinery of the human mind has, to this hour, wrought no beneficial effect upon him. He is still a knitter, painfully taking up spinster's stitches, worth, in a pair of stockings, fourpence! Place him in his natural position, take the pins from his fingers, force into his hand a book containing the alphabet of political science, and before the close of another year, he will cease to be overtopped in mental stature by any mechanic's apprentice. He is not a goose, and if he were, plucking one does not enable it to fly better; why, then, does he pluck himself? He is blinded by the glare of the cruel sunshine which fortune has cast upon him. Strip him of his artificial advantages, and you give him an eagle's wing. Sprung from the people, why does he not lead public opinion? The reek of the aristocratic dunghill covers him, like a nightmare, forcing on him a dream of vulgarity hostile to his noble nature. Why should such a man wish to be a Stanley? By no possible process can the healthy verjuice of humanity be turned into aromatic vinegar, acceptable in Puppydom. Upperthorpe, 3rd Feb., 1837.

This poem is founded on some incidents in the life of a late breadtaxing palaced-pauper, who unable to give vast estates to each of his many sons, (and though succeeding pretty well, yet not so well as they wished, in quartering them on the public purse,) was constantly hectored by them, and told that he had better have sent them to plough; as if they could not have tried ploughing, without leave asked of him, and with a clear saving of all the bluster!

See Coleridge's Hymn to Sunrise.

Are the philosophers of the Gun and Standard, who pray for the destruction of trade, aware that six adults are sufficient for the cultivation of one hundred arable acres, and that, if the profits of trade failed to furnish other consumers with an equivalent for the produce, the only cultivated portion of every cultivable hundred acres in Britain would be that alone which is required for the maintenance of six adults and their families? It is of little importance to us what becomes of Messrs. Gun and Standard, but it might be well for them to take into their sapient consideration the possibility, in such a case, of the surplus of victims taking possession of the land, and the certainty that, without capital, they could not cultivate it. What, then, would happen, oh, sages of the Gun and Standard? Before the inventions of Watt and Arkwright, the people depended on the land for subsistence; they have since depended on the profits of those inventions, the landlords pocketing the surplus profits both of trade and agriculture. Destroy the profits of trade, and the landlords, with two-thirds of the people, must perish, unless the displaced population, seizing the land, can also appropriate capital previously amassed. But perhaps Messrs. Gun and Standard have really nothing to lose?

My late fellow-townsmen, having discovered that it is the unemployed workman who brings wages down, will, I trust, soon experience that where free trade is an unemployed workman is a prodigy.

I say not that man's hand is his mind; but, had he not possessed that thumbed implement, I doubt whether his mind, with his powers of communicating and accumulating ideas, could have raised him to his present intellectual eminence. Given a jack-plane, he might have stuck it in his mouth, and worked with it; but what sort of a jack-plane could he have made with his teeth? To his hand principally he is indebted for his success in tool making; and it is as a toolmaker, or manufacturer of such things as spades, ploughs, steam-engines, and railroads, that he has wrought all his wonders. One of our most reverend doctors calls the population of such towns as Sheffield extrinsic; not seeming to know that till there was a manufacturer there could be no agriculture, unless finger-grubbing for pignuts deserve that name. The first toolmaker was the first gardener; he put an end to finger-grubbing for pignuts, and called agriculture into existence. He, and subsequent toolmakers, may truly be said to have created every ounce of food which industrial skill has since produced. If any population deserves to be called intrinsic, it is that which can enable a hundred acres of land, cultivated commercially, to maintain more people than any ten thousand acres, cultivated agriculturally, ever yet did. About eight hundred acres of land at Leeds, cultivated commercially, maintain a hundred and forty thousand persons;—where shall we find a hundred thousand acres, cultivated agriculturally, maintaining an equal number? Had there never been a manufacturer, a few hordes of savages, fighting with the bears for roots, would now have constituted the words intrinsic population.

The cream of this dismal jest is that the aristocracy are incurring the odium of the gamelaws, chiefly for the benefit of their imitators! The Puppydom of a town or district establishes a shooting-club; that of another a fishing-club; and in both prosecution is persecution— to the glory of the squires! It sometimes happens that a Hunt is got up in a manufacturing village; and this is as it should be. The magistracy, called upon to make good the broken fences of the farmer, are not a little betwittered. And if the hedgegapper happens to be—not a red or green-back, belonging to his whipper-in—but some filth of a filesmith, or glueboiler, or other “low varment,” Tomkins blusters tremendously!

The magnum bonum, a plum bigger and better than his ancestors, if he is descended from the sloes, as Mr. Adams suggests, in his masterly article on Human Progress.

Printed some years before the fall, in honour of Monopoly's greatest and worthiest champion.

They who could, and do not, prevent an evil, are, in part, its authors. Our law-making class, who are said to have gained more by the late Railway-Madness than any other class, could have prevented that madness, without leaving us one railway too few, by enacting that no projector of a Railway should cease to be a shareholder until the work was finished; and that no share in any unfinished railway (such shares being mere bets in writing,) should be saleable, or legally depositable as a security for money lent. But a further enactment is necessary for the safety of good-faith shareholders in all joint-stock companies. No deviation from an obtained Act of Parliament, if it would involve an additional outlay of twenty-five per cent. or more, should take place without the consent first had in writing of two-thirds of the shareholders in number and value; their consent to be afterwards confirmed by the majority of a public meeting, specially called.

It is a fact, that on the third of December 1845, the good-faith shareholders in a job-of-jobs which will cost eight millions—and which I will call The Gorse, Ling, Rabbit-Skin, and Shrimp Railway—were induced by their directors to guarantee forever the interest of about six hundred thousand pounds, to the proprietors of sundry dead canals, not worth sixpence! the vendors of one of which publicly feted the secretary of the purchasers! Need we wonder, if, some three years later, the shareholders of this Railway were urged by their directors to oppose government surveillance? If the history of the concern were truly written, I believe, such a plica polonica of folly or wickedness would be laid bare, as never yet met public exposure.

I am indebted for this drama to T. et P. of L., near Sheffield, Esq.; for it originated in a conversation which I lately had with that gentleman in a railway carriage, when Landlordism in Ireland was destroying its victims by hundreds of thousands! he asserting the worn-out and infernal blasphemy, That the Cornlaws were enacted to benefit the consumers! One would think that our Protectionists (if they are, as they seem never tired of proving, at once, the worst and the most insolent of criminals,) might be satisfied with having escaped hanging; yet they continue to act as if they thought themselves still privileged to outrage the common sense of every victim whom they have not yet quite succeeded in stamping into the grave! August 21st, 1847.