Genre:

News-Commentary

Subjects:

Radicalism, Scientific Practitioners, Disease, Putrefaction

    Reports that five thousand people from the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton had petitioned Parliament requesting that they should be transported if no labour could be found for them. Observes that this situation has resulted from the petitioners' own 'credulity and ignorance'; 'Some of those who pray for transportation as a blessing [...] may probably recollect that the learned, just, and patriotic Priestly [sic], was driven from that part of the country by a church and king mob' (210). Observes: 'The strength, the sinews of the nation, are in a state of unnatural relaxation that threatens immediate dissolution; and although some of the excrescences of the state seem to flourished [sic] like fungus upon a rotten tree, yet it is evident that all must ultimately sink into the vortex of misery' (211). Paraphrases government opinion as being that 'the poor, in a natural healthy state of society, bear all the burthens of the state' (213). Observes, on this premise, that 'when the labouring poor are destitute of the means of subsistence, there is a canker-worm eating into the Constitution, which will, if not extracted, find its way into the hear[t] of society, and unhinge the present frame' (213–14).