Money went much further in those days than it does in ours. Fifty thousand pounds a year must have been a magnificent fortune for a Prince of Wales in the earlier part of the last century. On the other hand, George the Second was literally stuffed and bloated with money. He had between eight and nine hundred thousand a year, and his wife was richly provided for. Odious bad taste, selfishness, and griping avarice were exhibited on both sides of the dispute; it would be hard to say which side showed to the lesser advantage. There was much poverty all this time in London, and indeed over the whole country. Trade was depressed; employment was hard to get; within a stone's-throw of St. James's Palace men, women, and children were living in a chronic condition of semi-starvation. The Court and the Parliament were wrangling fiercely over the question whether a king with a revenue of nearly a million could afford to give his eldest son an extra fifty thousand a year, and whether a Prince of Wales could live in decency on fifty-three thousand a year. The patient, cool-headed people of England who knew of all this--such of them as did--and who hated both king and prince alike, yet put up with the whole thing simply because they had come to the conviction that nothing was to be gained by any attempt at a change. They had been passing through so many changes, they had been the victims of so many experiments, that they had not the slightest inclination to venture on any new enterprise. They preferred to bear the ills they had; but they knew that they were ills, and put on no affectation of a belief that they were blessings.