The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2]Shelley, Percy Bysshe
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The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1 [of 2]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
English prose literature
the title of public creditors, either by gambling in the funds, or
by subserviency to government, or some other villainous trade. They
are not the “Corinthian capital of polished society,” but the petty
and creeping weeds which deface the rich tracery of its sculpture.
The effect of this system is, that the day labourer gains no more
now by working sixteen hours a day than he gained before by working
eight. I put the thing in its simplest and most intelligible shape.
The labourer, he that tills the ground and manufactures cloth, is the
man who has to provide, out of what he would bring home to his wife
and children, for the luxuries and comforts of those whose claims are
represented by an annuity of forty-four millions a year levied upon the
English nation. Before, he supported the army and the pensioners, and
the royal family, and the landholders; and this is a hard necessity
to which it was well that he should submit. Many and various are the
mischiefs flowing from oppression, but this is the representative
of them all--namely, that one man is forced to labour for another
in a degree not only not necessary to the support of the subsisting
distinctions among mankind, but so as by the excess of the injustice to
endanger the very foundations of all that is valuable in social order,
and to provoke that anarchy which is at once the enemy of freedom, and
the child and the chastiser of misrule. The nation, tottering on the
brink of two chasms, began to be weary of a continuance of such dangers
and degradations, and the miseries which are the consequence of them;
the public voice loudly demanded a free representation of the people.
It began to be felt that no other constituted body of men could meet
the difficulties which impend. Nothing but the nation itself dares
to touch the question as to whether there is any remedy or no to the
annual payment of forty-four millions a year, beyond the necessary
expenses of State, for ever and for ever. A nobler spirit also went
abroad, and the love of liberty, and patriotism, and the self-respect
attendant on those glorious emotions, revived in the bosoms of men. The
government had a desperate game to play.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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