It is impossible to conceive the extent of suffering and desolation inflicted upon society, almost every family being involved, more or less, in the general calamity. Flourishing firms were bankrupt, opulent merchants impoverished, the masses of working people suddenly thrown out of employment, and reduced to destitution; and all from causes with which the majority had nothing to docauses that could have been prevented by a proper monetary system. If Bank of England notes had been a legal tender, to all intents and purposes supplying the place of gold as currency; if these notes had been supplied to the country banks in any quantities they required, ample security being taken to have assets equal to their respective issues, then the currency would have had an elastic, self-adjusting power, expanding or contracting according to the requirements of commerce. Inordinate speculation would not have been stimulated by a reckless system of credit, and business would have been conducted in a moderate and judicious manner, instead of rushing on at a high pressure that rendered a crash inevitable. The Government, after anxious and repeated deliberations, supplied a remedy on this principle. They determined to issue one-pound and two-pound notes of the Bank of England, for country circulation, to any amount required. In the meantime the Mint was set to work with all its resources in the coining of sovereigns[244], which, for the course of a week, were thrown off at the rate of 150,000 a day. The notes could not be manufactured fast enough to meet the enormous demand for carrying on the business of the country. In this dilemma the Bank was relieved by a most fortunate discoverya box containing 700,000, in one- and two-pound notes that had been retired, but which were at once put into circulation. The people having thus got notes with Government security, the panic subsided, and the demand for gold gradually ceased. The restoration of confidence was aided by resolutions passed at a meeting of bankers and merchants in the City of London, declaring that the unprecedented embarrassments and difficulties under which the circulation of the country laboured were mainly to be ascribed to a general panic, for which there were no reasonable grounds; that they had the fullest confidence in the means and substance of the banking establishments of the capital and the country; that returning confidence would remove all the symptoms of distress caused by the alarms of the timid, so fatal to those who were forced to sacrifice their property to meet unexpected demands. The new measures so promptly adopted and so vigorously carried into effect, raised the circulation of the Bank of England notes in three weeks from 17,477,290 to 25,611,800. Thus the regular and healthful action of the monetary system was restored by an adequate circulation of paper money, on Government security, without specie to sustain it. There were at the time of the crash 770 country bankers; 63 stopped payment, 23 of them having subsequently resumed business, and paid twenty shillings in the pound; and even those that were not able to resume, paid an average of seventeen shillings and sixpence in the pound. It was estimated that the total loss to the country by this panic was one hundred million pounds.
From the affairs of the royal family, we turn to a more important subject, the partition of Poland. Poland, lying contiguous to Russia, had for ages been in a condition calculated to attract the cupidity of ambitious neighbours. Its nobles usurped all authority. They kept the whole mass of the people in hopeless serfdom; they usurped the whole of the land; they elected their own king, and were too fond of power themselves to leave him more than a puppet in their hands. To make the condition of the country worse, it was violently divided on the subject of religion. One part of the nobles consisted of Roman Catholics, another of what were called Dissidents, made up of members of the Greek Church, and Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Arians. Although by what was called the Pacta Conventa the Dissidents had been admitted to an equality of rights, this was totally disregarded by the overbearing Roman Catholics; and in 1736 the Pacta Conventa was formally abolished. Every Dissident was, by this measure, for ever excluded from government, and from all interest in it.A number of satires and other poems appeared at this time which deserve only a mere mention. These are "The Pursuits of Literature," by Thomas James Mathias; "Anticipation," by Richard Tickell, being an anticipation of the king's Speech, and the debates of Parliament; "An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers," by Mason, under the assumed name of Malcolm Macgregor; "The Rolliad," also a political satire, in 1785. To this succeeded "Probationary Odes," from the same party. These were eclipsed by the publications of Dr. John Wolcot, under the name of Peter Pindar, who for twenty years kept the public laughing by his witty and reckless effusions, in which the king especially was most unmercifully ridiculed. Wolcot had the merit of discovering Opie, the painter, as a sawyer in the neighbourhood of Truro, and pushing him forward by his praises. Of the Royal Academicians he was a relentless enemy, and to them addressed several odes, of the most caustic and damaging kind. Later on came the inimitable poems of the "Anti-Jacobin," written by Canning, Hookham Frere, and others, among which it is sufficient to recall the "Needy Knife-grinder," and the satires on the Addington Administration. But now there came a voice from Scotland that filled with envy the crowd of second-rate poets of London, and marked the dawn of a new era. A simple but sturdy peasantwith no education but such as is extended to every child in every rural parish of Scotland; "following the plough along the mountain side," laboriously sowing and reaping and foddering neat; instead of haunting drawing-rooms in bob-tailed coat and kid gloves, dancing on the barn-floor, or hob-nobbing with his rustic chums at the next pot-houseset up a song of youth, of passion, of liberty and equality, so clear, so sonorous, so ringing with the clarion tones of genius and truth, that all Britain, north and south, stood still in wonder, and the most brazen vendor of empty words and impudent pretensions to intellectual power owned the voice of the master, and was for a moment still. This master of song was Robert Burns (b. 1759; d. 1796). Need we say more? Need we speak of the exquisite beauty of the "Cotter's Saturday Night"?of the fun of "Tam o' Shanter"?of the satiric drollery of his laughter at antiquarian and other pretenders?of the scathing sarcasms on sectarian cant in "Holy Willie's Prayer," and a dozen other things?of the spirit of love and the spirit of liberty welling[186] up in his heart in a hundred living songs?of the law of man's independence and dignity stamped on the page of eternal memory in the few words"A man's a man for a' that"? Are not these things written in the book of human consciousness, all the world over? Do not his fellow-countrymen sing them and shout them in every climate under heaven? At the time when they appeared the poems of Robert Burns clearly showed that true poetry was not altogether extinct, and effectually put an end to that fatal rage of imitation of the artificial school of Johnson and Pope which then prevailed.
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[See larger version]LORD CLIVE. (After the Portrait by Gainsborough.)During the whole of these scenes the attitude of Government was not merely indifferent, but absolutely repulsive. At no time had so cold and narrow-spirited a Ministry existed. The names of Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and Lord Eldon as Lord Chancellor, recall the memory of a callous Cabinet. They were still dreaming of additional taxation when, on the 17th of March, they were thunderstruck by seeing the property-tax repealed by a majority of forty. The Prince Regent had become utterly odious by his reckless extravagance and sensual life. The abolition of the property-tax was immediately followed by other resistance. On the 20th of March a motion of disapprobation of the advance of the salary of the Secretary to the Admiralty, at such a time, from three to four thousand pounds a-year was made, but lost. On this occasion Henry Brougham pronounced a most terrible philippic against the Prince Regent, describing him as devoted, in the secret recesses of his palace, to the most vicious pleasures, and callous to the distresses and sufferings of others! Mr. Wellesley Pole described it as "language such as he had never heard in that House before."
