Doubtless the embargo caused suffering. The West Indian negroes and the artisans of Staffordshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire were reduced to the verge of famine; but the shipowners rejoiced, and the country-gentleman and farmers were enriched. So ill balanced had the British people become in the excitement of their wars and industries that not only Cobbett but even a man so intelligent as William Spence undertook to prove[277] that foreign commerce was not a source of wealth to England, but that her prosperity and power were derived from her own resources, and would survive the annihilation of her foreign trade. James Mill replied[278] at great length to the eccentricities of Spence and Cobbett, which the common-sense of England would in ordinary times have noticed only with a laugh. The population of England was about ten millions. Perhaps two millions were engaged in manufactures. The embargo by raising the price of grain affected them all, but it bore directly on about one tenth of them. The average sum expended on account of the poor was £4,268,000 in 1803 and 1804; it was £5,923,000 in 1811; and in 1813, 1814, and 1815, when the restrictive system had produced its full effect, the poor-rates averaged £6,130,000. The increase was probably due to the disturbance of trade and was accompanied by a state of society bordering on chronic disorder. Probably at least five thousand families of working-men were reduced to pauperism by the embargo and the decrees of Napoleon; but these sufferers, who possessed not a vote among them and had been in no way party to the acts of either government, were the only real friends whom Jefferson could hope to find among the people of England; and his embargo ground them in the dust in order to fatten the squires and ship-owners who had devised the Orders in Council. If the English laborers rioted, they were shot: if the West Indian slaves could not be fed, they died. The embargo served only to lower the wages and the moral standard of the laboring classes throughout the British empire, and to prove their helplessness.