It will scarcely be maintained that the lazzaroni who sleep under the porticoes of Naples, or the beggars who besiege the convents of Spain, are in a happier situation than the English commonalty.
The distress which has lately been experienced in the northern part of Germany, one of the best governed and most prosperous regions of Europe, surpasses, if we have been correctly informed, anything which has of late years been known among us.In Norway and Sweden the peasantry are constantly compelled to mix bark.
with their bread; and even this expedient has not always preserved whole families and neighbourhoods from perishing together of famine.An experiment has lately been tried in the kingdom of the Netherlands, which has been cited to prove the possibility of establishing agricultural colonies on the waste lands of England, but which proves to our minds nothing so clearly as this, that the rate of subsistence to which the labouring classes are reduced in the Netherlands is miserably low, and very far inferior to that of the English paupers.No distress which the people here have endured for centuries approaches to that which has been felt by the French in our own time.The beginning of the year 1817 was a time of great distress in this island.But the state of the lowest classes here was luxury compared with that of the people of France.We find in Magendie's Journal de Physiologie Experimentale a paper on a point of physiology connected with the distress of that season.
It appears that the inhabitants of six departments, Aix, Jura, Doubs, Haute Saone, Vosges, and Saone-et-Loire, were reduced first to oatmeal and potatoes, and at last to nettles, beanstalks, and other kinds of herbage fit only for cattle; that when the next harvest enabled them to eat barley-bread, many of them died from intemperate indulgence in what they thought an exquisite repast; and that a dropsy of a peculiar description was produced by the hard fare of the year.Dead bodies were found on the roads and in the fields.A single surgeon dissected six of these, and found the stomach shrunk, and filled with the unwholesome aliments which hunger had driven men to share with beasts.Such extremity of distress as this is never heard of in England, or even in Ireland.We are, on the whole, inclined to think, though we would speak with diffidence on a point on which it would be rash to pronounce a positive judgment without a much longer and closer investigation than we have bestowed upon it, that the labouring classes of this island, though they have their grievances and distresses, some produced by their own improvidence, some by the errors of their rulers, are on the whole better off as to physical comforts than the inhabitants of an equally extensive district of the old world.For this very reason, suffering is more acutely felt and more loudly bewailed here than elsewhere.We must take into the account the liberty of discussion, and the strong interest which the opponents of a ministry always have, to exaggerate the extent of the public disasters.There are countries in which the people quietly endure distress that here would shake the foundations of the State, countries in which the inhabitants of a whole province turn out to eat grass with less clamour than one Spitalfields weaver would make here, if the overseers were to put him on barley-bread.In those new commonwealths in which a civilised population has at its command a boundless extent of the richest soil, the condition of the labourer is probably happier than in any society which has lasted for many centuries.But in the old world we must confess ourselves unable to find any satisfactory record of any great nation, past or present, in which the working classes have been in a more comfortable situation than in England during the last thirty years.When this island was thinly peopled, it was barbarous: there was little capital; and that little was insecure.It is now the richest and most highly civilised spot in the world; but the population is dense.Thus we have never known that golden age which the lower orders in the United States are now enjoying.We have never known an age of liberty, of order, and of education, an age in which the mechanical sciences were carried to a great height, yet in which the people were not sufficiently numerous to cultivate even the most fertile valleys.
But, when we compare our own condition with that of our ancestors, we think it clear that the advantages arising from the progress of civilisation have far more than counterbalanced the disadvantages arising from the progress of population.While our numbers have increased tenfold, our wealth has increased a hundredfold.Though there are so many more people to share the wealth now existing in the country than there were in the sixteenth century, it seems certain that a greater share falls to almost every individual than fell to the share of any of the corresponding class in the sixteenth century.The King keeps a more splendid court.The establishments of the nobles are more magnificent.The esquires are richer; the merchants are richer;the shopkeepers are richer.The serving-man, the artisan, and the husbandman, have a more copious and palatable supply of food, better clothing, and better furniture.This is no reason for tolerating abuses, or for neglecting any means of ameliorating the condition of our poorer countrymen.But it is a reason against telling them, as some of our philosophers are constantly telling them, that they are the most wretched people who ever existed on the face of the earth.
We have already adverted to Mr.Southey's amusing doctrine about national wealth.A state, says he, cannot be too rich; but a people may be too rich.His reason for thinking this is extremely curious.