To any kind of popular sorrow and misery, however, 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 really relieve them but returning prosperity, and that depended more on events which could not be foreseen than on legislation itself.

Such was the condition, in general terms, of high and low, rich and poor, in England in the year 1815, and I have now to show what occupied the attention of the government for the next fifteen years, during the reign of George IV. as regent and as king.  But first let us take a brief review of the men prominent in the government.