TWO:The demoralisation appeared further in the abuses connected with the distribution of relief. The reports of the Commissioners have stated that, in those districts where the relief committees worked together with zeal and in good faith, the administration was excellent, checking fraud and imposture, while it relieved the really distressed. But in some districts this was unhappily not the case. Abuses existed, varying from apathy and neglect to connivance at frauds and misappropriation of the funds. Gross impositions were daily practised by the poor. The dead or absent were personated; children were lent for a few days in order to give the appearance of large families, and thus entitle the borrowers to a greater number of rations. Almost the whole population, in many cases, alleged poverty and looked for relief; and then, conceiving the receipt of cooked food a degradation, they endeavoured to compel the issue of raw meal. One universal spirit of mendicancy pervaded the people, to which in several places the committees offered no opposition. Yielding to intimidation, or seeking for popularity, they were willing to place the whole population indiscriminately on the lists to be supported by public charity.
THREE:The Emperor of Germany was delighted at the Spanish offer. He had always felt himself aggrieved by the conditions of the Quadruple Alliance. He was afraid of France, and hated George of England for his German policy. He had, moreover, embroiled himself with both England and Holland, by establishing at Ostend an East India Company, which was declared to be in violation of the Treaty of Westphalia, and was, at all events, regarded with particular jealousy by both England and Holland. This being the case, Ripperda, the envoy of Spain, a Dutch adventurer, who had been the tool of Alberoni, completed with ease a treaty with the Emperor at Vienna, which was signed on the 30th of April, 1725.The year 1843 opened amid gloom and depression. The newspapers published the fact that the revenue for the quarter ending on the 5th of January, as compared with the corresponding quarter of the previous year, had decreased no less than 940,062, occasioned mainly by diminished consumption of articles used by the industrial classes of the community; and the Times remarked, "It appears to us very clear, whatever our Free Trade friends may say, that any alteration which may be made in the Corn Laws ought not to be made irrespective of financial considerations: we cannot at these times afford to throw away revenue." In the same paper appeared a statement that flour was 30 per cent. dearer in London than in Paris. The Queen opened Parliament on the 2nd of February, and the Speech delivered from the Throne regretted the diminished receipts from some of the ordinary sources of revenue, and feared that it must, in part, be[506] attributed to the reduced consumption of many articles caused by that depression of the manufacturing industry of the country which had so long prevailed, and which her Majesty had so deeply lamented. But it suggested no measure of relief for the people.
TWO:About this time two publications occurred, which produced long and violent controversiesthose of the pretended "Poems of Rowley," by Chatterton, and "Ossian's Poems," by Macpherson. Chatterton, who was the articled clerk of an attorney at Bristol, a mere youth, pretended[183] that he had discovered Rowley's poems in the muniment room of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. These poems, written on yellow parchment, and in a most antiquated style, by a boy of sixteen, were palmed upon the world as the genuine productions of one Thomas Rowley, and took in many well-known authors and literary antiquaries, very wise in their own conceit. As the productions of a boy of that age these poems are marvellous, and nothing besides which Chatterton, in his short, neglected life, produced approached them in merit. This, too, was the case with Macpherson, who professed to have collected the poems of Ossian, an old bard of Morven, in the Highlands, and simply translated them into English. He was warmly accused of having written them himself; but as Chatterton, so Macpherson, steadily denied the authorship of the poems thus introduced, and as in Chatterton's case, so in Macpherson's, no other compositions of the professed collector ever bore any relation to these in merit. There can now be very little doubt that Macpherson founded his Ossianic poems on real originals to some extent; but that Chatterton, if he received Rowley's poems from Rowley, did so by inspiration.
