not be silent.

The elevation of the new ministry to power was so sudden, and the principles declared by Earl Grey to be the basis of his administration were so widely different from those which until then had prevailed, that time was obviously necessary for preparing and maturing his plans, as well of retrenchment and economy as of reform. Those of the ministers who were selected from the House of Commons, by accepting offices from the crown, vacated their seats; and although reeligible, were necessarily absent from the House until returned again. Nothing of importance was transacted except the passage of the Regency Bill before the Christmas holidays, and on the 23d of December Parliament adjourned over to the 3d of January of the ensuing year.

In the meantime the condition of the kingdom afforded but a sorry commentary upon the boast in the royal speech at the opening of the session, that the English people enjoyed more of all that constitutes social happiness, than has fallen to the lot of any other country in the world. At the very moment when these words were spoken, organized bands of famished farmers were ranging round twenty counties of England, and almost within hearing of the royal voice, breaking all the agricultural machinery they could lay their hands on, and consuming cornricks, haystacks, barns and dwelling hous

es

with fire. The distress,

one

have seen in such glowing colors in the numerous petitions to the former Parliament, continued with increasing aggravation; and the disorders, fore-announced in some of those petitions, had broken out with great fury. The constant and regular operation of the national debt, and its oppressive taxation, aggravated by that of the tithes, had, as we have observed, divided the nation into three great masses of population; one with overgrown wealthof paupers unable to obtain subsistence by their labor; and an intermediate class just above indigence, but gradually sinking into and swelling the number of the totally destitute division. The landed property of the kingdom has at the same time, and by the operation of the same causes undergone a corresponding mutation. The small farmers have been obliged to sell their estates, to hold them as tenants upon rent. Time was in England, says Goldsmith, when every rood of ground maintained its man.' There are now no small freeholders in England. The race is as completely extinct, as that of the Squire Westerns of Fielding. The landed estates are principalities — leased at heavy rents and cultivated by poor laborers at wages barely sufficient for their subsistence. The invention of labor-saving machinery throws vast numbers of these out of employment, and then they fall upon the parish. The burden of the poor rates increases with the number of the poor. The quantum of allowance

to these being discretionary with the overseers, was reduced to the very borders of famine, and the result was to gather in every parish multitudes of able bodied men almost starving, idle for want of employment, associating together under the pressure of common wants, instigated to violence by a sense of injustice in the opulent landholders around them, and stimulated to fury against the machinery, which by removing the necessity for their labor took the bread from their mouths. In the County of Kent, great bodies of them had assembled to break agricultural machinery, and to compel the farmers, proprietors and magistrates to raise the rate of wages, while incendiaries had set fire to stack-yards and farmhouses. A general combination seems to have been formed among them, the objects of which were: 1. To destroy the labor-saving machinery. 2. To force the farmers to give them constant employment. 3. To raise their wages and for the attainment of their objects, there was a double system of operations, partly public and partly secret. The combinations for the destruction of machinery, and forcing employment, were open and undisguised. The incendiary practices were secret. On the 29th of August, at Hardres in Kent, four hundred agricultural laborers destroyed all the threshing machines in that neighborhood. Towards the middle of September, two meetings of magistrates, and one of farmers, were held, at which resolutions were passed for suppressing these disorders, and a reward

of five hundred pounds was offered for the conviction of the ringleaders in these transactions. The rioters committed no other depredations of property; but broke up the machinery, or compelled the owners to break it up themselves. Where they failed of this they burnt the barns and wheat stacks. Individuals received by post letters signed by the signal word Swing, threatening the destruction of their houses and barns by fire, and the execution failed not to follow upon the threat. The same portentous word appeared written in chalk on all the walls of Dover, and for several miles on the road to Canterbury. Nine of the machine breakers were tried, and six of them were convicted at the Sessions of East Kent; they were sentenced to three days' confinement and hard labor, after which the burnings and destruction only became more extensive and more frequent. Lenham, two hundred of the rioters, assembled for the avowed purpose of destroying machinery, met and parleyed with the Earl of Winchelsea. They heard him patiently, and declared that want of work was the sole cause of their straying from their homes, and that they had not the means of procuring food for themselves or their starving families.

At

At Guestling, near Hastings, the paupers held a meeting and gave notice to the heads of the parish to attend. About a hundred and twenty laborers were assembled; their demand was a rise of wages to 2s. 3d. a day in winter, and 2s. 6d. in summer. The clergyman, whose demand

upon the parish had been raised to 8007. a year, was required immediately to give up 500l. a year to their employers in order to enable them to comply with their demands; a requisition to which he immediately agreed.

From Kent the work of destruction rapidly spread into the adjoining Counties, and nightly fires were seen blazing in Sussex, Surry. Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Buckingham, Hertford, Bedford, Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, and even in some of the northern counties. The exertions of the magistrates to discover the incendiaries were unavailing. Several persons were arrested upon suspicion and discharged for want of evidence to convict them. The destruction of the machinery was effected in broad day, by parish paupers, who assembled in bands; visited the dwelling houses of the farmers, and sometimes formally sent deputations to demand the keys of the corn houses in which the obnoxious threshing machines were kept. But their movements were regulated by hands unseen, of higher intellectual powers. The letters signed Swing,' were conveyed with impenetrable secrecy to the persons addressed, and the inevitable destruction by which they were followed gave them almost the inexpressible terror of a supernatural visitation. In some cases an explosion resembling the report of a gun immediately preceded the bursting out into flames of the stacks and barns. The fires therefore could be accounted for only by the sup

position that they were kindled by chemical preparations, thrown into them by persons in concert with the laborers of these the usual mode of proceeding was to call a meeting of farmers, and meet them, in numbers from two to six hundred, and sometimes many more-and then they presented their list of grievances, and demanded employment and wages at the rates above mentioned. In some instances they were successfully resisted, but in general the farmers were obliged to comply with their demands. At Avington House, the seat of the Duke of Buckingham, the inhabitants of three villages came in a mass were sworn in as special constables, and kept watch round the house for three successive nights. The same thing was done near Winchester, and in the neighborhood of Hanburg. The inhabitants of Brompton, led by their clergyman, met the rioters and overpowered them, taking their ringleader and ten of his companions into custody. Military aid was in several cases called in. A conflict between the Hindon troop of cavalry and a body of more than 500 rioters in Wiltshire, terminated by a charge in which several were wounded, and one man was killed. At Ringmer, Chichester, Eastbourne, Lamborhurst and numerous other places, the farmers saved their families and their property only by complying, or by compounding with the demands for employment and increased wages.

Of these fires there were, in the space of four months, upwards of one hundred and twenty, at

and loss of property cannot be estimated at less than an average of one thousand pounds sterling to each fire; the destruction of machinery included. There was no political principle connected with these disorders; no demand for Reform of Parliament; no clamor against the aristocracy, nor even against the payment of tithes, was heard among them. It was the cry of famine for bread. The onset of hunger, breaking down stone walls. It was the last result of extreme taxation; of which an enormously disproportionate national debt is the cause, and no mathematical proposition can be more clearly demonstrated than, that until the cause is removed there can be no permanent pacification of these disorders.

Under the influence of the panic excited by these assemblages and of the outrages committed by them, the magistrates upon whom they called to meet and confer with them, gave in several of the counties, their sanction to the engagements which they extorted from the farmers of increased wages, constant employment, and the discontinuance of the use of machinery. This momentary remedy served only to aggravate the disease. The Marquis of Lansdowne, Secretary of State for the home department, issued on the 8th of December a circular, explaining to the county magistrates their legal inability to make such arrangements and pointing out the pernicious tendency of acts grounded upon such principles. The magistrates,' he observed, had no power to

any interference in such a matter could only have the effect of exciting expectations which must be disappointed and of ultimately producing, in an aggravated degree, a renewed spirit of discontent and insubordination.'

It requires no argument to prove that in a land of freedom, the magistrates of a county can as little possess the authority to compel individual farmers to employ more workmen than they need, or to pay them higher wages, than by voluntary consent they stipulate, or to abstain from the use of labor saving machinery, as a riotous assemblage of starving laborers. The moment the freedom of the will is taken away from operations such as these, the relations of society are changed, and the community becomes an association not of freemen governed by equal laws, but of masters and slaves under the dominiou of arbitrary power. But the oppression upon the farmer under such conpulsion may be further illustrated by its necessary consequences. He holds the farm upon a lease for which he is to pay rent to his landlord. The amount of that rent must be calculated upon the prospective product of the land, deducting all the necessary charges of cultivation and leaving a profit to the farmer sufficient for his own subsistence, and that of his family. The use of machinery, reduces the charge of expense for labor. The rate of wages serves him as a rate to caiculate the expense of tillage and the amount of rent that he can afford to pay. Deprive him of

his machinery, force him to employ double the number of workmen that he needs, and to pay them double the amount of wages to the rates which the market would command, and you rob him of all the profits of his labor, you deprive him of the ability to fulfil his engagement with his landlord. The rent day comes with a distress. The farmer is ruined, and the landlord remains unpaid. He too has his engagements, which the loss of his rents disable him from fulfilling, and among them are the grinding taxes payable to the government; these press him down into insolvency, and react again to depress the value of land. Thus ruin spreads over the whole country, and the people become prepared for any revolution. On the other hand, a system of policy, the result of which is to congregate in great numbers, a mass of population in idleness and want, without occupation and without subsistence must be essentially vicious; no external air of prosperity can disguise the essential wretchedness of a nation in such a condition, no reform of Parliament can reach this evil. It is susceptible only of one remedy and that is, relief from excessive taxation.

Besides the employment of military force to suppress these disorders, and the admonition to the magistrates of their incapacity to establish a compulsive rate of wages between the farmers and laborers, the government appointed two special commissions, one on the western and another on the midland circuit, for the trial of the numerous prisoners appre

hended in the commission of these daring outrages. One of these commissions was opened at Winchester on the 20th and the other at Reading on the 27th of December. Three hundred prisoners were tried by the commission at Winchester, six of whom were sentenced to death and eightyeight to transportation for life or for terms of years, after which the commission proceeded to the trial of nearly an equal number of offenders at Salisbury. At Reading one hundred and thirtyeight of the rioters were tried and all sentenced to transportation except two, who were capitally convicted. Thence the same commission proceeded to Aylesbury for the trial of the prisoners apprehended in the county of Bucks.

The immediate effect of these commissions was to shorten the imprisonment of the offenders, who must otherwise have waited for their trial, at the assizes in the following spring; this abridgment, besides relieving the prisoners themselves from the anxieties and agitations of a long term of imprisonment, had a tendency to quiet the alarm and terror of their families and relatives, and to tranquillize the parishes and villages to which they belonged. They afforded the opportunity for a solemn and public exposition of the law, by the judges; of convincing the laboring classes that their condition could not be bettered by such tumultuous and riotous proceedings, and the magistrates that no compliances on their part, with the dictation of a lawless multitude was within the