It cannot be said that the industrial prosperity of Great Britain, while of advantage to her people as a whole, was necessarily so to individuals. While one portion of the nation amassed enormous wealth, the bulk of the people sank into the deepest poverty. The factory system brought with it oppression and misery which it would need a century of industrial revolt to overcome. The costly wars, the crushing taxation, the oppressive corn-laws, which forbade the importation of foreign corn, the extravagant expenses of the court and salaries of officials, all conspired to depress the people. Manufacturies fell into the hands of the few, and a vast number of artisans were forced to live from hand to mouth, and to labor for long hours on pinching wages. Estates were similarly accumulated in the hands of the few, and the small land-owner and trader tended to disappear. Everything was taxed to the utmost it would bear, while government remained blind to the needs and sufferings of the people and made no effort to decrease the prevailing misery. Thus it came about that the era of Great Britain's greatest prosperity and supremacy as a world-power was the one of greatest industrial oppression and misery at home, a period marked by rebellious uprisings among the people, to be repressed with cruel and bloody severity. It was a period of industrial transition, in which the government flourished and the people suffered, and in which the seeds of revolt and revolution were widely spread on every hand. This state of affairs cannot be said to have ended. In truth the present condition of affairs is one that tends to its aggravation. Neither the manufacturing nor commercial supremacy of Great Britain are what they once were. In Europe, Germany has come into the field as a formidable competitor, and is gaining a good development in manufacturing industry. The same must be said of the United States, the products of whose workshops have increased to an enormous extent, and whose commerce has grown to surpass that of any other nation on the earth. The laboring population of Great Britain has severely felt the effects of this active rivalry, and is but slowly adapting itself to the new conditions which it has brought about, the slow but sure revolution in the status of the world's industries. CHAPTER IX. The Great Reform Bill and the Corn Laws. [=A Period of Riot and Tumult=]