“I have received no further communication from Bedford, which is very well, as I must finish some few things, and rid my hands of them, before I set seriously to work in the good cause. Meantime the subject occupies my mind in all intervals of employment. . . . . I shall take a wide range; and I feel just now as if it were in my power to produce a work which, whatever might be its immediate effect, should be referred to hereafter as a faithful estimate of these times.
“Davy was here last week, and told me a valuable fact. A friend of his who, applying philosophical knowledge to practical purposes, has turned manufacturer at Clitheroe, went abroad immediately after the peace, not to seek for orders, but to examine with his own eyes the state of the manufacturers on the Continent. He returned with a conviction that it was necessary to draw in; reduced his produce in time, and in consequence is doing well, while his neighbours are breaking all around. Certain it is that manufactures depending upon machinery advanced very rapidly during the last war. No prohibition or penalties, however severe, can prevent machinery and workmen from finding their way abroad; to this we must make up our mind, and it is better that it should be so. A little time sets these things to rights.
| 214 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 43. |
“I incline to think there will come a time when public opinion will no more tolerate the extreme of poverty in a large class of the community, than it now tolerates slavery in Europe. Meantime it is perfectly clear that the more we can improve the condition of the lower classes, the greater number of customers we procure for the home market; and that if we can make people pay taxes instead of claiming poor-rates, the wealth as well as security of the State is increased. The poor-rates are a momentous subject, and I have long believed you were the only man who could grapple with it. I see, or think I see, palliatives and alteratives, in providing the labourers with garden and grass land, in establishing saving banks, in national education, and in affording all possible facilities and encouragement for emigration, and in colonising at home upon our waste lands.
“The state of the Church is another important question,
assailed as it is on all sides. I think it would be possible to take in the
Methodists as a sort of Cossacks, or certainly to employ those persons
henceforward in aid of the Establishment, who, if not thus employed, will swell
the numbers of the Methodists and act against it. There are no differences of
doctrine in the way; it is but to let the licence come from the clergyman
instead of the magistrate, to invent some such name as coadjutor for those who
have a ‘call;’ let them catechise the children, convert the women,
reclaim the reprobates, and meet on week days, or at extra hours on Sundays in
the church, to expound or sing psalms;
| Ætat. 43. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 215 |
“By nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian, and a political writer I know not how; by accident, or the course of events. Yet I think I can do something towards awakening the country, and that I can obtain the confidence of well-disposed minds by writing honestly and sincerely upon things in which all persons are concerned.
“Were I to accept a good berth, which is held out to me, it would very much counteract the impression which I am aiming to produce. Instead of attempting to answer my arguments and assertions, the anarchists would then become the assailants, and attack me as one who had sold himself.
“God bless you!
