with Great Britain the sons of Erin tried to free themselves from the English domination. In 1803 Robert Emmet took up arms, but was defeated and put to death.
In 1811 the English peasants, brought to despair by the competition of steam machinery in modern industry, resorted to violence under the leadership of Ludd; they broke into factories, destroying the machinery and burning down buildings. This riot was suppressed and numbers of the rioters were executed.
It was only during the reign of George III that the press acquired the right of reporting Parliamentary debates, whereas under the Stuarts and the Tudors it would have been highly dangerous for members of Parliament to make public their criticism of the government.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the condition of England could still admit of vast improvement; punishments were of an excessive and barbarous nature, men of birth flocked to the prisons to look on at the flogging of wretched women; even children were hanged for petty larceny. And not only were the jails dens of misery and disease, but also schools of iniquity and crime.
After centuries of existence there was little safety in the capital of Great Britain. The streets of London were dark and dangerous by night and highway robberies were of frequent occurrence; the streets began to be properly lighted only toward the close of the reign of George IV. "In the country the great mass of the people were nearly as ignorant as they were in the darkest part of the Middle Ages. Hardly a peasant over 40 years of age could be found who could read a verse in the Bible, and not one in ten could write his name."[1] When George IV ascended the throne (1820-1830) the condition of the people was still very bad; such was the scarcity of food that they were on the verge of famine; and a great majority could not
- ↑ D. H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of English History, p. 352.
