structure, and fitted up with old machinery, now become
inefficient and out of date, he had from the first evinced the strongest
contempt for all its arrangements and appointments: his aim had been to effect a
radical reform, which he had executed as fast as his very limited capital would
allow; and the narrowness of that capital, and consequent check on his progress,
was a restraint which galled his spirit sorely. Moore ever wanted to push on:
Forward was the device stamped upon his soul; but poverty curbed him: sometimes
(figuratively) he foamed at the mouth when the reins were drawn very tight.
    In this state of feeling, it is not to be expected that he would deliberate
much as to whether his advance was or was not prejudicial to others. Not being a
native, nor for any length of time a resident of the neighbourhood, he did not
sufficiently care when the new inventions threw the old work-people out of
employ: he never asked himself where those to whom he no longer paid weekly
wages found daily bread; and in this negligence he only resembled thousands
besides, on whom the starving poor of Yorkshire seemed to have a closer claim.
    The period of which I write was an overshadowed one in British history, and
especially in the history of the northern provinces. War was then at its height.
Europe was all involved therein. England, if not weary, was worn with long
resistance: yes, and half her people were weary too, and cried out for peace on
any terms. National honour was become a mere empty name of no value in the eyes
of many, because their sight was dim with famine; and for a morsel of meat they
would have sold their birthright.
    The »Orders in Council,« provoked by Napoleon's Milan and Berlin decrees,
and forbidding neutral powers to trade with France, had, by offending America,
cut off the principal market of the Yorkshire woollen trade, and brought it
consequently to the verge of ruin. Minor foreign markets were glutted, and would
receive no more: the Brazils, Portugal, Sicily, were all overstocked by nearly
two years' consumption. At this crisis, certain inventions in machinery were
introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing
the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and
left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened.
Distress reached its climax. Endurance, over-goaded, stretched the hand of
fraternity to sedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt
heaving under the hills of