THREE:Besides succeeding to the government of a country whose chief province was thus exhausted, the finances of the Company were equally drained, both in Calcutta and at home, and the Directors were continually crying to Hastings for money, money, money! As one means of raising this money, they sent him a secret order to break one of their most solemn engagements with the native princes. When they bribed Meer Jaffier to depose his master, by offering to set him in his seat, and received in return the enormous sums mentioned for this elevation, they settled on Meer Jaffier and his descendants an annual income of thirty-two lacs of rupees, or three hundred and sixty thousand pounds. But Meer Jaffier was now dead, and his eldest son died during the[324] famine. The second son was made Nabob, a weak youth in a weak government, and as the Company saw that he could not help himself, they ordered Hastings to reduce the income to one-half. This was easily done; but this was not enough, disgraceful as it was. Mohammed Reza Khan, who had been appointed by the Company the Nabob's Minister, on the ground that he was not only a very able but a very honest man, they ordered to be arrested on pretended pleas of maladministration. He and all his family and partisans must be secured, but not in an open and abrupt way, which might alarm the province; they were to be inveigled down from Moorshedabad to Calcutta, on pretence of affairs of government, and there detained. Nuncomar, the Hindoo, who had been displaced, in order to set up Mohammed, who was a Mussulman, and who had been removed on the ground of being one of the most consummate rogues in India, was to be employed as evidence against Mohammed. Hastings fully carried out the orders of the secret committee of the India House. He had Mohammed seized in his bed, at midnight, by a battalion of sepoys; Shitab Roy, the Minister of Bahar, who acted under Mohammed at Patna, was also secured; and these two great officers and their chief agents were sent down to Calcutta under guard, and there put into what Hastings called "an easy confinement." In this confinement they lay many months, all which time Nuncomar was in full activity preparing the charges against them. Shitab Roy, like Mohammed, stood high in the estimation of his countrymen of both faiths; he had fought on the British side with signal bravery, and appears to have been a man of high honour and feeling. But these things weighed for nothing with Hastings or his masters in Leadenhall Street. He hoped to draw large sums of money from these men; but he was disappointed. Though he himself arranged the court that tried them, and brought up upwards of a hundred witnesses against them, no malpractice whatever could be proved against them, and they were acquitted. They were therefore honourably restored, the reader will think. By no means. Such were not the intentions of the Company or of Hastings. Whilst Mohammed and Shitab Roy had been in prison, Hastings had been up at Moorshedabad, had abolished the office of Minister in both Patna and Moorshedabad, removed all the government business to Calcutta, cut down the income of the young Nabob, Muharek-al-Dowla, to one half, according to his instructions, and reduced the Nabob himself to a mere puppet. He had transferred the whole government to Calcutta, with all the courts of justice, so that, writes Hastings, "the authority of the Company is fixed in this country without any possibility of competition, and beyond the power of any but themselves to shake it."(After the Picture by Laslett J. Pott, by permission of Ephraim Hallam, Esq.)
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THREE:On the 7th of July the British and Prussian forces entered Paris. The former encamped themselves in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Prussians bivouacked along the Seine. There they came into full view of the Bridge of Jena, so named to commemorate the victory of Buonaparte on that field, so fatal to the Prussians, and of the column in the Place Vend?me, erected with cannon taken from the Austrians, and bearing insulting mementoes of the defeats of Prussia. The Prussians had already lowered the statue of Napoleon from the top of the column, and were beginning to demolish the bridge, when the Duke of Wellington interfered. He represented that, although these objects were justly offensive to Prussia, they ought to be left to the decision of the King of France, in whose capital they were, and that the name of the bridge might be changed. Blucher was unwilling to give way, and also insisted on the levy of a military contribution on the city of Paris of one hundred million francs, as some reparation for the[104] spoliations of the French in Berlin. Wellington suggested that these matters should be left for the determination of the Allied sovereigns, and at length prevailed.Meanwhile, the attention of the Western Powers was called to the constitutional monarchy of Spain. For, whatever were its merits in comparison with the systems that preceded it, it had not the merit of securing good government, protecting life and property, and maintaining public tranquillity. During the summer of 1836 that country, always more or less disturbed, was the scene of fresh tumults and insurrections, breaking out at different points, at Malaga, Cadiz, Seville, and Cordova. The Constitution of 1812 was proclaimed, and provincial juntas were established in defiance of the queen's authority. Madrid was also the scene of insurrection, which was repressed, and the city was put in a state of siege. Soon afterwards a more determined demand was made for the Constitution of 1812, when a regiment of militia forced themselves into the apartments of the queen regent, in spite of the remonstrances of the French and British Ambassadors, and extorted from her a promise to accept that Constitution. This daring act was the signal for a general rising in the capital. The Prime Minister, Isturitz, fled to Lisbon, and there took ship for England. He was fortunate in escaping with his life, for had he fallen into the hands of the enraged populace he would probably have shared the fate of General Quesada, the military governor of Madrid, who was caught about three miles from the capital and killed. Order was at length restored by the queen regent proclaiming the Constitution, subject to the revision of the Cortes and by the appointment of a decidedly Liberal Administration, which commenced by calling for a conscription of 50,000 men to carry on the war against the Carlists, who were still in active rebellion. The Constitution so imperatively demanded by the people was first proclaimed at Cadiz in 1812, and again by Riego in 1820. It now was brought forward once more, and on the 24th of February, 1837, adopted by the general Cortes assembled for the purpose, having been previously revised by a committee.
by Daniel Nyari View on Dribbble
FORE:These occurrences in Ireland led to hostile demonstrations against the Government in Parliament. On the 7th of March Mr. Shaw, the Recorder of Dublin, as the representative of the Irish Protestants, commenced the campaign by moving for returns of the number of committals, convictions, inquests, rewards, and advertisements for the discovery of offenders in Ireland from 1835 to 1839, in order to enable the House to form a judgment with regard to the actual amount and increase of crime in that country. The debate was adjourned till the following Monday, when it was resumed by Mr. Lefroy, after which the House was counted out, and the question dropped; but it was taken up in the Lords on the 21st of March, when Lord Roden moved for a select Committee of inquiry on the state of Ireland since 1835, with respect to the commission of crime. His speech was a repetition of the usual charges, and the debate is chiefly worthy of notice on account of the elaborate defence by Lord Normanby of his Irish administration. "I am fully aware," said the noble marquis, "of the awful responsibility that would lie upon my head if these charges rested upon evidence at all commensurate with the vehemence of language and earnestness of manner with which they have been brought forward; but they rest upon no such foundation. I am ready, with natural indignation, to prove now, on the floor of this House, that I have grappled with crime wherever I have found it, firmly and unremittingly, and have yielded to none of my predecessors in the successful vindication of the laws." Among the mass of proofs adduced by Lord Normanby, he quoted a vast number of judges' charges, delivered from time to time between 1816 and 1835, which presented only one continuously gloomy picture of the prevailing practice of violence and atrocious outrage. Passing from this melancholy record, he proceeded to refer to numerous addresses of judges delivered on similar occasions since 1835. All of these contained one common topic of congratulationthe comparative lightness of the calendara circumstance, the noble marquis argued, which went far to establish his position, however it might fail to prove the extinction of exceptional cases of heinous crime. With regard to the wholesale liberation of prisoners, Lord Normanby distinctly denied that he had set free any persons detained for serious offences without due inquiry; or that any persons were liberated, merely because he happened to pass through the town, who would not have met with the same indulgence upon facts stated in memorials. "No; this measure," he insisted, "had been adopted upon the conviction that, in the peculiar case of Ireland, after severity had been so often tried, mercy was well worth the experiment. It was one which was not lightly to be repeated; but while he had received satisfactory evidence of the success of the measure, it was in his power to produce the testimony of judges with whom he had no political relations, to the pains taken in the examination of each case, and the deference shown to their reports."On the 7th of July the British and Prussian forces entered Paris. The former encamped themselves in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Prussians bivouacked along the Seine. There they came into full view of the Bridge of Jena, so named to commemorate the victory of Buonaparte on that field, so fatal to the Prussians, and of the column in the Place Vend?me, erected with cannon taken from the Austrians, and bearing insulting mementoes of the defeats of Prussia. The Prussians had already lowered the statue of Napoleon from the top of the column, and were beginning to demolish the bridge, when the Duke of Wellington interfered. He represented that, although these objects were justly offensive to Prussia, they ought to be left to the decision of the King of France, in whose capital they were, and that the name of the bridge might be changed. Blucher was unwilling to give way, and also insisted on the levy of a military contribution on the city of Paris of one hundred million francs, as some reparation for the[104] spoliations of the French in Berlin. Wellington suggested that these matters should be left for the determination of the Allied sovereigns, and at length prevailed.
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THREE:For a few weeks the cottiers and small farmers managed to eke out a subsistence by the sale of their pigs, and any little effects they had. But pigs, fowls, furniture, and clothing soon went, one after another, to satisfy the cravings of hunger. The better class of farmers lived upon their corn and cattle; but they were obliged to dismiss their servants, and this numerous class became the first victims of starvation; for when they were turned off, they were refused admission by their relations, who had not the means of feeding them. Tailors, shoemakers, and other artisans who worked for the lower classes, lost their employment and became destitute also. While the means of support failed upon every side, and food rose to such enormous prices that everything that could possibly be eaten was economised, so that the starving dogs were drowned from compassion, the famine steadily advanced from the west and south to the east and north, till it involved the whole population in its crushing grasp. It was painfully interesting to mark the progress of the visitation, even in those parts of the country where its ravages were least felt. The small farmer had only his corn, designed for rent and seed. He was obliged to take it to the mill, to ward off starvation. The children of the poor, placed on short allowance, were suffering fearfully from hunger. Mothers, heart-broken and worn down to skeletons, were seen on certain days proceeding in groups to some distant dep?t, where Indian meal was to be had at reduced prices, but still double that of the ordinary market. As they returned to their children with their little bags on their heads, a faint joy lit up their famine-stricken features. Those children, who had lived for two days and two nights on a dole of raw turnips, would now be relieved by a morsel of nourishing food. The fathers, who had absented themselves from home in order to avoid the agony of listening to their heart-piercing cries, might now sit down and look their little ones in the face. But, if the mother failed to obtain the relief for which she had travelled so far, what then? Yesterday no breakfast, no dinner, no supper; the same to-day; no prospect of better to-morrow. The destitute rushed to the workhouses, which soon became crowded to excess by those who had been able-bodied men and women, while the aged, the sickly, and the children were left to starve. Overpowered by hunger, they lay down helpless, the ready victims of the pestilence that walked close upon the footsteps of famine, and died in thousands. Let us consider the state of a population such as has been described. Scattered over remote districts, with no gentry resident within many miles, none to whom a complaint could be made but the clergyman, whose energies were overtaxed, how utterly helpless must have been the condition of those doomed people!
by Daniel Nyari View on Dribbble
FORE:SIR JOHN MOORE.A great proportion of these results had been produced by the rapid growth of manufactures. The introduction of steam, and the inventions of the spinning-jenny and other kinds of machinery, had given such a development to manufactures, that the value of these at the end of the reign made three-fourths of the whole exports. Agriculture had made considerable progress, and of this art the king was a zealous patron, especially of the improvements in the breed of sheep, importing himself merinos from Spain at great cost. There were also great promoters of improvements in stock, such as Bakewell, Culley, and others, and the high price of corn and of all kinds of agricultural produce during the war acted as stimulants to farming. The value of land also caused the enclosure of vast tracts, and much planting of trees was done, especially in Scotland, which had previously been very neglectful in that respect.
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THREE:Perhaps a still more remarkable man of the same denomination was William Huntington, originally a coalheaver, struggling with severe poverty; yet, believing himself called to the ministry, he boldly followed his conceived duty, through much discouragement and persecution. He has left an autobiography, in which his perfect faith in and reliance on God are justified by the most remarkable supply of all his wants, and support in a widely extended and useful ministry. After the death of his first wife he married the wealthy widow of Sir James Sanderson, a London alderman, and passed his latter years in affluence.CHAPTER IX. REIGN OF GEORGE III. (continued).
by Daniel Nyari View on Dribbble
FORE:NAPOLEON I. (From the Portrait by Paul Delaroche.)[453]
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TWO:BARTHOLOMEW FAIR, LONDON, IN 1721. (From a Painting on a Fan.)
