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William Roupell easily persuaded his mother to carry out the pretended intentions of his late father by making a deed of gift, conferring the greater part of the estates on himself. He thus became possessed of an enormous property, and soon obtained that social position which the possession of large landed property generally commands. He stood for the borough of Lambeth, and by a lavish expenditure of money he obtained the seat. His return was petitioned against; and some proposals for the compromise of the petition were received by him with a lofty indignation, which would have been very natural and very edifying in a man of pure and unsullied virtue. At length the collapse came. By gambling and extravagance he quickly ran through his large fortune. Finding detection inevitable, he burnt the true will, and fled the country. His youngest brother, the rightful heir of the property which he had fraudulently appropriated, followed him to Spain. What passed between them is not known; but the result of their interview was a determination on his part to return to England, and meet the charges against him. He accordingly came back, attended service in Richmond church, was apprehended and committed for trial. His brother having brought an action against a person named Waite, who had purchased Norbiton-park farm, near Kingston, from William Roupell, the latter was removed from the place of his confinement and put in the witness-box, where, under oath, he gave a full account of his frauds and forgeries. He was afterwards tried before Mr. Justice Byles at the Central Criminal Court. He there pleaded guilty to the charge of forgery, and was sentenced to penal servitude for life. A man well able to judge of the truth of his assertion, said to the author of this work respecting William Roupell, He obtained his seat for Lambeth by the expenditure of 10,000l.; and if he were released from his prison, and would expend another 10,000l., he would again be the representative of Lambeth.' Such assertions as these ought to be weighed. If they rest on any solid foundation, they show that much yet remains to be done before our representative system can be said to be in a satisfactory condition.

We have already seen the distress which prevailed in the manufacturing districts; the heroic cheerfulness with

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which the cotton operatives bore the privations to which they were exposed; and the noble generosity with which contributions and supplies of every sort were sent up for their relief from all parts of the kingdom. But there was one feature in this liberality that we did not then remark, because it had not begun to manifest itself fully till towards the close of this year. The contributions which were sent came not only from landowners and men of great wealth, but also from those who had very little to give, and who were obliged to deny themselves in order that they might give. Out of their deep poverty many of the ill-paid agricultural labourers of the south, depriving themselves almost of the necessaries of life, supplied the wants of those whose poverty was even greater than their own. Nor was this calamity, so nobly endured and so nobly met, so fruitful of moral and religious advantages, without its attendant benefits of other kinds. It was remarkable that during the enforced temperance of this period there was a marked diminution in the number of deaths, throughout the districts most affected by the famine. Another satisfactory circumstance attending it was the establishment of schools for the instruction of adults, who gladly devoted the time thus placed at their disposal to procuring for themselves that elementary education which they had not been able to obtain in their youth. Sewing-schools were also established in all parts of the manufacturing districts, by which that most useful, but hitherto much-neglected branch of female education was taught; so that many a woman who had previously been unable to mend a hole in her child's shirt, before the conclusion of the famine, became an accomplished sempstress, able to instruct her own daughters in the useful art she had thus acquired. In this and in many other ways good came out of evil, and the famine left behind it beneficial as well as injurious traces.

Meanwhile the government was not idle. Amongst other means of diminishing the distress of the manufacturing districts, it attempted to secure a better and more scientific cultivation of the cotton plant in India and the other dependencies of the British empire. It also endeavoured to introduce the use of better machinery for the cleansing of it; to promote the construction of railways,

and the improvement of the roads and the means of transport from the interior to the sea-board. By these efforts, aided by those of private individuals, stimulated to increased exertion by the high price which the cotton commanded, the supply was slowly increased; and though it was not probable that it would be adequate to the demands of this country as long as the civil war lasted, it served to improve our manufacturing prospects, and to give employment to many distressed factory operatives. Thus, not only in the East Indies, but in the West Indies also, in Australia, in New Zealand, and even in countries lying outside the British empire-such, for instance, as Brazila great impulse was given to the cultivation of the cotton plant, and hopes were entertained that at the end of some years, if the war should still be prolonged, our cotton supply would be equal in quantity, if not in quality, to that we had been accustomed to receive. Attempts were also made by blockade-runners to obtain supplies of cotton from the southern states; and notwithstanding the strict watch which was maintained by the Northern belligerents, light swift steamers, constructed for the purpose, managed to elude their vigilance or escape their pursuit. But the cost and risk were too great even at the high prices which American cotton then commanded.

While, however, the high price of cotton stimulated production elsewhere, it had a noteworthy effect in Africa. The supply from that quarter, instead of increasing with the rise of the price, ceased altogether. The natives of those countries, like children, were only willing to work under the stimulus of necessity. The increase in the price of their cotton enabled those who carried the cotton to the shore to support themselves without labour for some time; and they ceased from working until their hoards were exhausted.

In consequence of the efforts we have mentioned there was a very perceptible diminution in the number of those who were dependent on public and private charity. The worst was evidently past; and though the factory operatives complained somewhat bitterly of the dirt and inferior quality of the 'Surat,' and the greater difficulty with which its manufacture was attended, they were glad to obtain the means of supporting themselves under every dis

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advantage and difficulty, and to look forward to a time when, the struggle in America being brought to a conclusion, they would once again be supplied with their favourite material. Thus there was a gradual return to the habits of manly independence by which the population of the manufacturing districts had always been distinguished; and on the other hand care was taken that, on Christmas-day at least, every one of those who were still obliged to depend on charitable support should have a good English Christmas dinner of roast beef and plumpadding. They were also cheered by the knowledge that the sympathy felt, and the assistance given, proceeded not from England only, but that there was scarcely any part of the world whence help and good-will did not come to them. But no assistance was welcomed with greater satisfaction than that which was transmitted to them from the northern states of America, from which, notwithstanding the demands made on its resources by the war, and the irritation caused by the countenance and encouragement given to the rebel states by some of our countrymen, large and liberal relief was sent to the suffering population of our manufacturing districts.

But while that relief was crossing the Atlantic, there also came across it the voice of loud and angry complaint on account of the mischief which was being done to the commerce of the United States by the Alabama, and by some other vessels which had been constructed in the dockyards of Mr. Laird, a shipbuilder of Birkenhead, and which, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the American minister, Mr. Adams, had been allowed to escape from the Mersey, had been fitted up as privateers, and had done and were still doing enormous damage to the shipping of the United States, seizing their merchant-vessels, appropriating the more valuable and portable portion of the cargoes they contained, and then burning or sinking them. It was alleged, on the part of the Americans, that our government had been guilty of culpable remissness, if not of actual illintention, in allowing the departure of these vessels; and they demanded compensation for the damage done by them to their shipping. To these demands the English government replied by insisting that all proper care had been taken by them; that no civil or international law had been

violated; that no proofs of the character and destination of this vessel had been laid before them that would have warranted them in detaining her; and that they could not, under any circumstances, be fairly held responsible for the damage they had done. These replies by no means satisfied the American government and people; but it would clearly have been the height of folly on their part at such a moment to add England to the number of their enemies, and to force her to throw the weight of her arms and influence into the scale of the rebel states-an example which would probably have been followed by France, and perhaps by other European countries; they therefore prudently allowed their claim to remain dormant for the present, promising themselves, however, to revive it at some future and more convenient season.

Severe as were the sufferings of our manufacturing population, and greatly as our commerce with the United States had diminished, there were many indications that the wealth of the country as a whole had not been seriously affected by this great local calamity. The advantages of free trade, the results of the French treaty and of the great changes that had been made in the tariff, enabled the country to go through this severe trial with little injury, and left us at the close of the year 1862 with almost undiminished resources.

The manner in which the distress that prevailed in the manufacturing districts during the period of the American civil war was borne by their inhabitants was in no slight degree owing to the moral and material results of societies which had been established throughout them, and which were known by the name of 'coöperative societies.' We have already seen that it was especially in these districts that chartism had sprung up and flourished, and that with chartism socialistic and communistic theories largely mingled. As the absolute impossibility of obtaining the charter became more and more evident, and as each successive attempt to agitate for it brought nothing but ruin on those by whom it was made, the thoughts of the more intelligent of the working classes were more and more turned towards the realisation of those socialistic and communistic ideas with which their minds had been imbued; and their faith in these ideas was a great advantage to them,

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