Northern Star, And Warren And Bristol Gazette

NORTHERN STAR.
WARREN, SATURDAY MORNING SEPT. 9.

The following account of the distress
under which all classes are labouring
in England and Ireland, is copied from
the London Times. Whether these
afflictions are owing to a pernicious policy
pursued by ministers, whether they
are caused by an over charged manufacturing
population, which the perfecting of like
pursuits in this country has thrown out
of employ, is a matter of doubt in the
minds of politicians and domestick
economists; this much, however, is
certain, that the increase of labour saving
machinery has been the immediate cause
of throwing thousands into the streets,
without employment and without bread,
to plunder or to starve. Adam Smith, in
his "Wealth of Nations," and many other
writers on the same subject, while they
have, by the help of logarithms, shown the advantages
arising from the introduction of manufactories
into communities have neglected to point
out a method to feed a starving multitude,
created by the increase of this business
and thrown out of employment by the
depression of the same.

The commercial affliction of the
country continues unabated. The writers
in the pay of the Trinidad Planters
have been lately drawing comparisons
to prove that the negroes are better off
than our own peasantry and manufacturers.
They have published in a Trinidad paper
the following picture of the free white
population of this country, which we
blush to say is not overcharged:

It is an appalling picture of human
misery, confessed by the masters
themselves, and published to the world
in the journals they pay and support—
thousands of wretched beings without
the means of subsistence in every part
of the kingdom—women and helpless
children unfed, unhoused, in that relentless
climate thirty thousand wandering
about in the metropolis, under the eyes
of the Legislature—in Leeds the labourers
literally starving—in Manchester in
extremes!—in Glasgow dying from
premature exhaustion and over exertion—and
in Bolton, gracious heaven! feeding
with the hogs on brewers grains, and
coveting a morsel of horse flesh as a
luxury! Well may these unhappy wretches
envy the state of our African labourers.

All that can be said in reply to this
terrible truth is, that the manufacturers
are not subject to the branding iron and
the cart whip. We must confess, however,
that no scourge of pestilence, war or
famine, was ever at any period of the
world more terrible than the sword which
is now decimating a tenth of the English
industrious population. We talk with
horror of the scourge of Gothick or
Scythian irruption in former ages, but
they were minor evils to this, which,
after the cupidity of traffick has nursed
millions of human beings into artificial
existence, is now starving them down
again to the level of subsistence. The
multitudes cut off by the inroads of
barbarous warfare, died at once; they
had not to endure the protracted misery—the
living death of seeing their families
perish piecemeal before their eyes. The
picture of Ugolino perishing gradually in
despairing hunger with his four sons, as
described by Dante, has been thought to
be the ne plus ultra of imaginary horror:
but Dante nor no poet ever conceived
the idea of myriads dying piecemeal for
long months with their children. The
miserable people, meanwhile, are as
silent as Count Ugolino, and the silence
becomes their despair. Their case is
beyond words; besides, they cannot eat
bayonets! What a picture of Albion's
green Isle!