The manufacturing districts unfortunately continued in a most melancholy and alarming situation. Riots, disorder, and distress, universally prevailed. To relieve the people's grievances, however, the king returned eight thousand pounds more of the public money to the distressed weavers of Spitalfields. But we cannot help thinking, that such an inadequate sort of relief very much resembled a bankrupt's paying one farthing in the pound, and then claiming the gratitude of his ruined creditors!
Let not our readers suppose that the _worthy_ parliament were idle this year. The matter printed for the House during its short sitting, from February to May, occupied twenty-nine bulky folio volumes, independent of the journals, votes, private acts, and other matters of equal importance to the nation! In this brief session, also, no less than seventy-nine new acts of parliament were added to the already ponderous and indigestible statute-book. Here was industry indeed! But, good reader, in all this mass of business, not a single act was passed for the amelioration of the distressed condition of the people.
The health of the Duke of York now began to decline; and, although he had been in the receipt of such enormous sums from the people, he was actually destitute of a home,--at least of one he could call his own. Here was a disgraceful circumstance!--the heir presumptive to the throne of England, through his abominable and reckless extravagance, obliged to accept the hospitality of an acquaintance! An accumulation of diseases, arising from excesses of every kind, soon became manifest, and the duke was at length declared to be seriously indisposed. On the 14th December, he was pronounced, by his medical attendants, to be in the most imminent danger.
The revenue was deficient in its returns from the former year, two hundred and thirty-three thousand, nine hundred, and forty pounds! which arose from the very general stagnation of trade and the paralization of commerce. This enormous deficiency in the country's income, however, had no effect upon the men in power; for the most wanton expenditure was still kept up, both at home and abroad. Our ambassadors appeared the very type of their sight-loving and spendthrift master, and thousands were swallowed up in glittering baubles and unmeaning pageantry. At the time the "Dandy of Sixty," (as the ingenious and patriotic Mr. Hone usually termed him) was meditating on the most expeditious way of squandering the hard-earnings of the poor, his wicked and unmanly ministers pampered the royal appetite in all its childish wishes and unconstitutional desires, verifying the words of Pope,