usion of the Peninsular war, and the earlier stages of
the war between Great Britain and the United States.

The nation was contented to leave the guidance of home and foreign
policy at that critical time to the existing ministers, all honest,
experienced, and high-minded statesmen, but none gifted with any signal
ability, and inferior both in cleverness and in eloquence to the leaders
of the opposition. Napoleon was not far wrong in regarding the British
aristocracy, which they represented, as his most inveterate and powerful
enemy; but he was grievously deceived in imagining that this
aristocracy, in withstanding his colossal ambition, had not the British
nation at its back. The electoral body, indeed, to which they owed their
parliamentary majority, was but a fraction of the population, and the
public opinion which supported them may seem but the voice of a
privileged class in these days of household suffrage. But there is
little reason to doubt that, if household suffrage had then prevailed,
their foreign policy would have received a democratic sanction; nor is
it at all certain that some features of their home policy, now generally
condemned, were not justified, in the main, by the exigencies of their
time.

[Pageheading: _INDUSTRIAL DISTRESS._]

The "condition of England," as it was then loosely termed, was the
first subject which claimed the attention of Liverpool's government.
While Perceval was congratulating parliament on the elasticity of the
revenue, a widespread depression of industry was producing formidable
disturbances in the midland counties. This depression was the
consequence partly of the continental system, crippling the export of
British goods to European countries; partly of the revival, in February,
1811, of the American non-intercourse act, closing the vast market of
the United States; and partly of the improvements in machinery,
especially those in spinning and weaving machines introduced by the
inventions of Cartwright and Arkwright. Unhappily, this last cause,
being the only one visible to artisans, was regarded by them as the sole
cause of their distress. During the autumn and winter of 1811 "Luddite"
riots broke out among the stocking-weavers of Nottingham. Their name was
derived from a half-witted man who had destroyed two stocking frames
many years before. Frame-breaking on a grand scale became the object of
an organised conspiracy, which extended its operations from
Nottinghamshire in