tions

hand weavers began the practice of machine breaking, taking the name "Luddites" from an idiot boy named Ludd, who several years before had destroyed some machinery in a fit of passion. Banding together in riotous mobs, the Luddites destroyed the machines almost as fast as they could be procured by the manufacturers. The militia sympathized with the machine breakers. The revolt spread to the farm laborers, who attacked especially the thrashing machines; and the riots ceased only after a younger generation had grown up, trained from childhood to work with machines.

All this disturbance hindered instead of aiding the movement for political reform. Before the second war with France 552. Politi- (1803), Pitt, Fox, Burke, and Grey proposed various cal condi- schemes for purifying Parliament and making it more representative, but while France was in turmoil Parliament refused to try experiments. In 1807 a bill abolishing the slave trade was passed after years of agitation, but Grey's bill to remove Catholic disabilities failed. George III. believed that to sign a bill giving political rights to Catholics would be to violate his coronation oath "to maintain the Protestant religion as by law established"; and since the discussion of the question provoked attacks of insanity, to which he was sub ject, the agitation was stopped during Portland's and Perce val's ministries (1807-1812). In the year 1810 the king became permanently insane, and his disreputable son (afterward King George IV.) was made regent, with restricted powers.

reform

During Lord Liverpool's ministry (1812-1827) the clamor for reform was continuous, especially after the restoration of 553. Ex- peace in 1815; but beyond making some concessions to cesses of the dissenters (1812) and admitting Catholics to all ranks of the army and navy (1817), the Tories refused to give up their political and ecclesiastical monopoly. Citizens of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and other great towns held monster meetings to attack the outworn system which

movement

left them without representation. At one meeting in St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, where forty thousand people of both sexes and all ages were gathered (1819), an attempt to arrest the orator of the meeting resulted in a general riot in which seventy-five persons were killed, and one hundred injured, an event long known as the "Peterloo" massacre. The immediate result of these agitations was the passage of "the Six Acts" in 1819, for punishing (1) the holding of outdoor meetings, (2) seditious publications by the press, (3) the circulation of libels, and (4) private military drill; and for securing (5) the speedy trial of rioters and (6) the seizure of arms in sixteen counties where riots had been most frequent. By this means order was gradually restored.

554. Union

of Ireland and Great Britain

Throughout the French wars, Ireland was a cause of endless worry. The extreme patriots-organized into the society of the United Irishmen - sought to make Ireland an independent republic; the loyal Catholics refused to pay tithes to the Protestant clergy; and even the hitherto peaceable Protestants of Ulster demanded parliamentary reforms and relief from English dictation in their government. In 1798 the United Irishmen, under the leadership of Wolf Tone, actually invoked the aid of France for a general uprising against England. The movement failed, and many of the leaders were executed, but the danger was acute.

As a safeguard against further trouble, Pitt conceived the idea of merging the British and Irish legislatures into one. The Irish Parliament, consisting of the pro-British residents in Ireland, made little objection. The principal protest came from the owners of boroughs (who were unwilling to lose their chance to sell seats and votes in the Irish Parliament), and Pitt silenced their opposition by binding the government to pay them £1,200,000 (or £5675 a seat) for the losses sustained. By this means an Act of Union was passed in 1800, by which the two Parliaments were united: the Irish peers were to

(1800)

choose twenty-eight of their number to sit in the new House of Lords, and one hundred representatives of the Irish boroughs and counties were to sit in the new House of Commons. The cross of St. Patrick was added to that of St. Andrew and St. George on the royal flag, and the country was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Unable to secure further reforms which Pitt had promised them, the Irish again rebelled in 1803, under the leadership of Robert Emmet. Mobs in Dublin and Ulster were dispersed with difficulty; but Emmet's uprising was imperfectly organized, and the Irish failed to act promptly and unitedly. Emmet was executed, and the rebellion was stamped out so effectually that Ireland remained quiet, though discontented, for many years.

555. Ex

India

In 1798 the government of India was intrusted to Richard Wellesley (later Marquis). Finding that French officers were intriguing with native princes and drilling their armies, Wellesley adopted the vigorous policy of deposing pansion in princes who seemed to be friendly to France, and substituting others who favored England. Over other states he established "protectorates"; in other words he assumed the right to control their relations with other powers, but left the native rulers in control of the local government.

The most notable event of Wellesley's Indian career was his conquest of the Mahratta states in the region between the Dekkan and Delhi. Holkar and Scindia were the leading Mahratta chiefs, and in 1803 an expedition was dispatched against them from the south. In this expedition, resulting in victories at Assaye and elsewhere, Colonel Arthur Wellesley (brother of the Governor of India, and later Duke of Wellington) first proved the high quality of his soldiership. Two years later another army was sent toward Delhi from the north, along the Ganges valley. The two expeditions resulted in bringing the Grand Mogul under British influence, and in

establishing a protectorate over much of the conquered territory. As a result of Wellesley's triumphs, "the Company were forced by irresistible facts to accept their position as rulers of half India, and suzerains of the rest.”

Tout, History of England,

1689-1890

The agitation of the times is reflected in the literature of the period. Robert Burns (1759-1796), the national poet of 556. Liter- Scotland, voiced it in his revolt against pride of birth (A man's a man for a' that!), his burning patriotism (Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled), and his sympathy

ature:

Burns, Coleridge, Southey

with the poor and downtrodden (The Cottar's Saturday Night). A similar spirit animated Samuel Coleridge (17721834), Robert Southey (1774-1843), and William Wordsworth (1770–1850) — called the "Lake Poets" because they lived in the lake region of Westmoreland. It was the revolutionary impulse that led Coleridge in early youth to suggest a communistic state (the Pantisocracy) to be founded "somewhere on the Susquehanna"; but his genius turned to the imaginative, and his finest works (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel) are purely romantic. Southey was associated with Coleridge in the Pantisocracy scheme, and his earlier poems (Wat Tyler, Joan of Arc) were revolutionary in tone; but he soon became an ardent Tory, and a hater of Napoleon, whose downfall he ridiculed in the spirited March to Moscow.

Wordsworth was Southey's successor as poet-laureate. During a tour in France in 1791, he became fired with a pas557. Words- sion for "liberty, equality, and fraternity"; but the fate worth of the French under Napoleon taught him that man's

true happiness depends not on political liberty but on the freedom of his spirit from bigotry, luxury, and folly. His great poems are therefore those which set forth in simple but wonderfully beautiful language the value of "plain living and high thinking." His Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and his numerous sonnets depicting the beauties of nature are unsurpassed in English literature.