The distress of the common people was severe, and was aggravated by the follies of magistrates and by the arts of malecontents.  A squire who was one of the quorum would sometimes think it his duty to administer to his neighbours, at this trying conjuncture, what seemed to him to be equity; and as no two of these rural praetors had exactly the same notion of what was equitable, their edicts added confusion to confusion.  In one parish people were, in outrageous violation of the law, threatened with the stocks, if they refused to take clipped shillings by tale.  In the next parish it was dangerous to pay such shillings except by weight.718 The enemies of the government, at the same time, laboured indefatigably in their vocation.  They harangued in every place of public resort, from the Chocolate House in Saint James’s Street to the sanded kitchen of the alehouse on the village green.  In verse and prose they incited the suffering multitude to rise up in arms.  Of the tracts which they published at this time, the most remarkable was written by a deprived priest named Grascombe, of whose ferocity and scurrility the most respectable nonjurors had long been ashamed.  He now did his best to persuade the rabble to tear in pieces those members of Parliament who had voted for the restoration of the currency.719 It would be too much to say that the malignant industry of this man and of men like him produced no effect on a population which was doubtless severely tried.  There were riots in several parts of the country, but riots which were suppressed with little difficulty, and, as far as can be discovered, without the shedding of a drop of blood.720 In one place a crowd of poor ignorant creatures, excited by some knavish agitator, besieged the house of a Whig member of Parliament, and clamorously insisted on having their short money changed.  The gentleman consented, and desired to know how much they had brought.  After some delay they were able to produce a single clipped halfcrown.721 Such tumults as this were at a distance exaggerated into rebellions and massacres.  At Paris it was gravely asserted in print that, in an English town which was not named, a soldier and a butcher had quarrelled about a piece of money, that the soldier had killed the butcher, that the butcher’s man had snatched up a cleaver and killed the soldier, that a great fight had followed, and that fifty dead bodies had been left on the ground.722 The truth was, that the behaviour of the great body of the people was beyond all praise.  The judges when, in September, they returned from their circuits, reported that the temper of the nation was excellent.723 There was a patience, a reasonableness, a good nature, a good faith, which nobody had anticipated.  Every body felt that nothing but mutual help and mutual forbearance could prevent the dissolution of society.  A hard creditor, who sternly demanded payment to the day in milled money, was pointed at in the streets, and was beset by his own creditors with demands which