Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

8 страница из 44

If sometimes in the presence of the spectacles of ignorance, crime, irreligion, and corruption in our own day, we are filled with a sense of despair for the prospects of society, it may be well to take a retrospect of what society was in England at the commencement of the last century. When George III. ascended the throne the population of England was not much over five millions; at the commencement of the present century it was nearly eleven millions; but with the intensely crowded population of the present day, the cancerous elements of society, the dangerous, pauperised, and criminal classes are in far less proportion, not merely relatively, but really. It was a small country, and possessed few inhabitants. There are few circumstances which can give us much pleasure in the review. National distress was constantly making itself bitterly felt; it was the age of mobs and riots. The state of the criminal law was cruel in the extreme. Blackstone calculates that for no fewer than one hundred and sixty offences, some of them of the most frivolous description, the judge was bound to pronounce sentence of death. Crime, of course, flourished. During the year 1738 no fewer than fifty-two criminals were hanged at Tyburn. During that and the preceding years, twelve thousand persons had been convicted, within the Bills of Mortality, for smuggling gin and selling it without licence. The amusements of all classes of people were exactly of that order calculated to create a cruel disposition, and thus to encourage crime; bear-baiting, bull-baiting, prize-fighting, cock-fighting: on a Shrove Tuesday it was dangerous to pass down any public street. This was the day selected for the barbarity of tying a harmless cock to a stake, there to be battered to death by throwing a stick at it from a certain distance. The grim humour of the people took this form of expressing the national hatred to the French, from the Latin name for the cock, Gallus. It was in truth a barbarous pun.