At home, a crazy king and a profligate
heir-apparent presided over a social system in which all civil evils
were harmoniously combined. A despotic administration was supported by a
parliamentary representation as corrupt as illusory; a church, in which
spiritual religion was all but extinct, had sold herself as a bondslave
to the governing classes. Rank and wealth and territorial ascendency
were divorced from public duty, and even learning had become the
handmaid of tyranny. The sacred name of justice was prostituted to
sanction a system of legal murder. Commercial enterprise was paralyzed
by prohibitive legislation; public credit was shaken to its base; the
prime necessaries of life were ruinously dear. The pangs of poverty were
aggravated by the concurrent evils of war and famine, and the common
people, fast bound in misery and iron, were powerless to make their
sufferings known or to seek redress, except by the desperate methods of
conspiracy and insurrection. None of the elements of revolution were
wanting, and the fates seemed to be hurrying England to the brink of a
civil catastrophe.
"The general sense of insecurity and apprehension, inseparable from such
a condition of affairs, produced its effect upon even the robust minds.
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