principles--which, it seemed, led straight to the
Terror--frightened many good men, who would otherwise have been
reformers, into supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism.
The elder generation of poets had been republicans in their
youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it was
"bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had
even planned to found a communistic society in the New World.
Now all three were rallied to the defence of order and
property, to Church and Throne and Constitution. From their
seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and Wordsworth praised the
royal family and celebrated England as the home of freedom;
while Thomson wrote "Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though
they never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were to a
home-grown tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than
that of Napoleon. England had stamped out the Irish rebellion
of 1798 in blood, had forced Ireland by fraud into the Union of
1800, and was strangling her industry and commerce. Catholics
could neither vote nor hold office. At a time when the
population of the United Kingdom was some thirty millions, the
Parliamentary franchise was possessed by no more than a million
persons, and most of the seats in the House of Commons were the
private property of rich men. Representative government did
not exist; whoever agitated for some measure of it was deported
to Australia or forced to fly to America. Glasgow and
Manchester weavers starved and rioted. The press was gagged
and the Habeas Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second
rebellion in Ireland, when Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young
hands in Erin's gore," was suppressed with unusual ferocity.
In England in 1812 famine drove bands of poor people to wander
and pillage. Under the criminal law, still of medieval