Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/159

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ENGLAND.
127

of depression in trade has gone on increasing year after year and the "better times" so hopefully prophesied and wished for have not come. Depression in Trade.There is capital in the country which can find no investment, there are goods produced year after year which find no market, there are millions of English labourers in the towns and in the country willing to work for their bread, but who can find no work and are on the brink of starvation. This is a real and a serious evil, and it seems to be a growing one also. The misery and destitution of these people occasionally find vent in acts of violence. The poor unemployed met in the Hyde Park and issued in a procession causing much destruction of property in London last February, and they threatened to issue again in a procession along with the Lord Mayor's show this November. Englishmen feel the gravity of this evil,—but they can scarcely imagine a remedy.

Clear-sighted if somewhat pessimist thinkers and writers offer an explanation which is sufficiently intelligible, though one is loth to accept it as correct. They say that the insular position of England, her comparative freedom from revolutions and foreign invasions, and the wonderful enterprise of her sons gave them a start in the commerce of the world which cannot for ever be maintained. For a time Englishmen monopolized the carrying trade of the world, they manufactured goods for the great marts of the world, and they alone reaped the profits of this wonderful monopoly. Population multiplied accordingly in England more rapidly than anywhere else in Europe, and far exceeded what the