less than three times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital. The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom, but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires. In truth a large part of the country beyond Trent was, down to the eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes had concurred to prevent civilization from spreading to that region. The air was inclement: the soil was generally such as required skilful and industrious cultivation; and there could be little skill or industry in a tract which was often the theatre of war, and which, even when there was nominal peace, was constantly desolated by bands of Scottish marauders. Before the union of the two British crowns, and long after that union, there was as great a difference between Middlesex and Northumberland as there now is between Massachusetts and the settlements of those squatters who, far to the west of the Mississippi, administer a rude justice with the rifle and the dagger. In the reign of Charles the Second, the traces left by ages of slaughter and pillage were still distinctly perceptible, many miles south of the Tweed, in the face of the country and in the lawless manners of the people. There was still a large class of moss. troopers, whose calling was to plunder dwellings and to drive away whole herds of cattle. It was found necessary, soon after the Restoration, to enact laws of great severity for the prevention of these outrages. The magistrates of Northumberland and Cumberland were authorized to raise bands of armed men for the defence of property and order; and provision was made for meeting the expense of these levies by local taxation.* The parishes were required to keep bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting the freebooters. Many old men who were living in the middle of the eighteenth century could well remember the time when those ferocious dogs were common.† Yet, even with such auxiliaries, it was often found impossible to track the robbers to their retreats among the hills and morasses. For the geography of that wild country was very imperfectly known. Even after the accession of George the Third, the path over the fells from Borrowdale to Ravenglas Statutes 14 Car. II. c. 22; 18 & 19 Car. II. c. 3; 29 & 30 CarII. c. 2. Nicolson and Bourne, Discourse on the Ancient State of the Border, 1777. was still a secret carefully kept by the dalesmen, some of whom had probab y in their youth escaped from the pursuit of justice by that road.* The seats of the gentry and the arger farm-houses were fortified. Oxen were penned at night beneath the overhanging battlements of the residence, which was known by the name of the Peel. The inmates slept with arms at their sides. Huge stones and boiling water were in readiness to crush and scald the plunderer who might venture to assail the little garrison. No traveller ventured into that country without making his will. The judges on circuit, with the whole body of barristers, attorneys, clerks, and serving men, rode on horseback from Newcastle to Carlisle, armed and escorted by a strong guard under the command of the sheriffs. It was necessary to carry provisions; for the country was a wilderness which afforded no supplies. The spot where the cavalcade halted to dine, under an immense oak, is not yet forgotten. The irregular vigor with which criminal justice was administered shocked observers whose life had been passed in more tranquil districts. Juries, animated by hatred, and by a sense of common danger, convicted housebreakers and cattle-stealers with the promptitude of a court martial in a mutiny; and the convicts were hurried by scores to the gallows. Within the memory of some who are still living, the sportsman who wandered in pursuit of game to the sources of the Tyne, found the heaths round Keeldar Castle peopled by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California, and heard with surprise the half-naked women chanting a wild measure, while the men with brandished dirks danced a war dance.‡ Slowly and with difficulty peace was established on the bor der. In the train of peace came industry and all the arts of life. Meanwhile it was discovered that the regions north of the Trent possessed in their coal beds a source of wealth far more precious than the gold mines of Peru. It was found that, in the neighborhood of these beds, almost every manu. facture might be most profitably carried on. A constant stream of emigrants began to roll northward. It appeared, by the returns of 1841, that the ancient archiepiscopal province *Gray's Journal of a Tour in the Lakes, Oct. 3, 1769. + North's Life of Guildford. Hutchinson's History of Cumberland, parish of Brampton. See Sir Walter Scott's Journal, Oct. 7, 1827, in his Life by Mr. Lockhart. * of York contained two sevenths of the population of England. At the time of the revolution, that province was believed to contain only one seventh of the population. In Lancashire the number of inhabitants appears to have increased ninefold, while in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Northamptonshire, it has hardly doubled.t Of the taxation we can speak with more confidence and precision than of the population. The revenue of England, under Charles the Second, was small, when compared with the resources which she even then possessed, or with the sums which were raised by the governments of the neighboring countries. It was little more than three fourths of the revenue of the United Provinces, and was hardly one fifth of the rev. enue of France. The most important head of receipt was the excise, which, in the last year of the reign of Charles, produced five hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds, clear of all deductions. The net proceeds of the customs amounted in the same year to five hundred and thirty thousand pounds. These burdens did not lie very heavy on the nation." The tax on chimneys, though less productive, raised far louder murmurs. . The discontent excited by direct imposts is, indeed, almost always out of proportion to the quantity of money which they bring into the Exchequer; and the tax on chimneys was, even among direct imposts, peculiarly odious; for it could be levied only by means of domiciliary visits; and of such visits the English have always been impatient to a degree which the people of other countries can but faintly conceive. The poorer householders were frequently unable to pay their hearth money to the day. When this happened, their furniture was distrained without mercy; for the tax was farmed; and a farmer of taxes is, of all creditors, proverbially the most rapacious. The collectors were loudly accused of performing their unpopular duty with harshness and insolence. It was said that, as soon as they appeared at the threshold of a cottage, the children began to wail, and the old women ran to hide their earthen Dalrymple, Appendix to Part II. Book I. The returns of the hearth money lead to nearly the same conclusion. The hearths in the province of York were not a sixth of the hearths of England. +I do not, of course, pretend to strict accuracy here; but I believe that whoever will take the trouble to compare the last returns of hearth money, in the reign of William the Third, with the census of 1841, will come to a conclusion not very different from mine. ware. Nay, the single bed of a poor family had sometimes been carried away and sold. The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundred thousand pounds.* When to the three great sources of income which have been mentioned we add the royal domains, then far more extensive than at present, the first fruits and tenths, which had not yet been surrendered to the Church, the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the forfeitures and the fines, we shall find that the whole annual revenue of the crown may be fairly estimated at about fourteen hundred thousand pounds. Of the PostOffice, more will hereafter be said. The profits of that estab lishment had been appropriated by parliament to the Duke of York. The king's revenue was, or rather ought to have been, charged with the payment of about eighty thousand pounds a year, the interest of the sum fraudulently detained in the Exchequer by the Cabal. While Danby was at the head of the finances, the creditors had received their dividends, though not with the strict punctuality of modern times; but those who had succeeded him at the Treasury had been less expert, or less solicitous to maintain public faith. Since the vi-tory won by the court over the Whigs, not a farthing had been paid and no redress was granted to the sufferers, till a new dynasty *There are, in the Pepysian Library, some ballads of that age on the chimney money. I will give a specimen or two:— 46 "The good old dames, whenever they the chimney man espied, Unto their nooks they haste away, their pots and pipkins hide. There is not one old dame in ten, and search the nation through, But, if you talk of chimney men, will spare a curse or two." Again, "Like plundering soldiers they'd enter the door, In the British Museum there are doggerel verses composed on the same subject and in the same spirit:— Or, if through poverty it be not paid, For cruelty to tear away the single bed, On which the poor man rests his weary head, I take this opportunity, the first which occurs, of acknowledging most gratefully the kind and liberal manner in which the Master and Vice-master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, gave me access to the valuable collections of Pepys. had established a new system. There can be no greater erro than to imagine that the device of meeting the exigencies of the state by loans was imported into our island by William the Third. From a period of immemorial antiquity it had been the practice of every English government to contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of honestly paying them.* By plundering the public creditor, it was possible to make an income of about fourteen hundred thousand pounds, with some occasional help from France, support the necessary charges of the government and the wasteful expenditure of the court. For that load which pressed most heavily on the finances of the great continental states was here scarcely felt In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, armies, such as Henry the Fourth and Philip the Second had never employed in time of war, were kept up in the midst of peace. Bastions and ravelins were every where rising, constructed on principles unknown to Parma or Spinola. Stores of artillery and ammunition were accumulated, such as even Richelieu, whom the preceding generation had regarded as a worker of prodigies, would have pronounced fabulous. No man could journey many leagues in those countries without hearing the drums of a regiment on march, or being challenged by the sentinels on the drawbridge of a fortress. In our island, on the contrary, it was possible to live long and to travel far, without being once reminded, by any martial sight or sound, that the defence of nations had become a science and a calling. The majority of Englishmen who were under twenty-five years of age had probably never seen a company of regular soldiers. Of the cities which, in the civil war, had valiantly repelled hostile armies, scarce one was now capable of sustaining a siege. The gates stood open night and day. The ditches. were dry. The ramparts had been suffered to fall into decay, or were repaired only that the townsfolk might have a pleas ant walk on summer evenings. Of the old baronial keeps many had been shattered by the cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, and lay in heaps of ruin, vergrown with ivy. Those which remained had lost their martial character, and were now ural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with * My chief authorities for this financial statement will be found in the Commons' Journals, March 1 and March 20, 1689. |