r, the government seemed
indifferent; and this was followed of course by discontent and crime,
riots and incendiary conflagrations, murders and highway robberies,--an
incipient pandemonium, disgusting to see and horrible to think of. At
the best, what dens of misery and filth and disease were the quarters of
the poor, in city and country alike, especially in the coal districts
and in manufacturing towns. And when these pallid, half-starved miners
and operatives, begrimed with smoke and dirt, issued from their
infernal hovels and gathered in crowds, threatening all sorts of
violence, and dispersed only at the point of the bayonet, there was
something to call out fear as well as compassion from those who lived
upon their toils.

At last, good men became aroused at the injustice and wretchedness which
filled every corner of the land, and sent up their petitions to
Parliament for reform,--not for the mere alleviation of miseries, but
for a reform in representation, so that men might be sent as legislators
who would take some interest in the condition of the poor and oppressed.
Yet even to these petitions the aristocratic Commons paid but little
heed. The sigh of the mourner was unheard, and the tear of anguish was
unnoticed by those who lived in their lordly palaces. What was desperate
suffering and agitation for relief they called agrarian discontent and
revolutionary excess, to be put down by the most vigorous measures the
government could devise. _O tempora! O mores!_ the Roman orator
exclaimed in view of social evils which would bear no comparison with
those that afflicted a large majority of the human beings who struggled
for a miserable existence in the most lauded country in Europe. In their
despair, well might they exclaim, "Who shall deliver us from the body of
this death?"

I often wonder that the people of England were as patient and orderly
as they were, under such aggravated misfortunes. In France the oppressed
would probably have arisen in a burst of frenzy and wrath, and perhaps
have unseated the monarch on his throne. But the English mobs erected no
barricades, and used no other weapons than groans and expostulations.
They did not demand rights, but bread; they were not agitators, but
sufferers. Promises of relief disarmed them, and they sadly returned to
their wretched homes to see no radical improvement in their condition.
Their only remedy was patience, and patience without much hope. Nothing
could real