But with the French Revolution came a change for
the worse. The Revolution terrified too many of the upper, and excited too
many of the lower classes; and the stern Tory system of repression, with
its bad habit of talking and acting as if "the government" and "the people"
were necessarily in antagonism, caused ever increasing bad blood. Besides,
the old feudal ties between class and class, employer and employed,
had been severed. Large masses of working people had gathered in the
manufacturing districts in savage independence. The agricultural labourers
had been debased by the abuses of the old Poor-law into a condition upon
which one looks back now with half-incredulous horror. Meanwhile, the
distress of the labourers became more and more severe. Then arose Luddite
mobs, meal mobs, farm riots, riots everywhere; Captain Swing and his
rickburners, Peterloo "massacres," Bristol conflagrations, and all the
ugly sights and rumours which made young lads, thirty or forty years ago,
believe (and not so wrongly) that "the masses" were their natural enemies,
and that they might have to fight, any year, or any day, for the safety of
their property and the honour of their sisters.
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