While all this misery was being accomplished abroad, how were our ministers employed at home? Why, in feeding the bloated mammoth of sinecure, in weighing the farthings of some poor clerk's salary, in preparing Ireland for a garrison, and England for a poor-house,--in furnishing means for their spendthrift master to erect Chinese palaces, to decorate dragoons with his "tasteful" inventions, to purchase gold and silver baubles, and to load his mistresses and his minions with the produce of the people's industry! We had also, at this period, a "saint" in the Exchequer, who studied Scripture for some purpose: the famishing people cried out for _bread_, and the pious Vansittart gave them _stones_! But the idea that a man like Vansittart should entail a debt of above four hundred millions of pounds on the country; the idea that "the least, the meanest" of the Pitt tribe should make the House of Commons vote that the Bank note, worth twenty worn shillings, was as valuable as the guinea worth twenty-seven good ones, will hardly be credited by future generations. The weakest man that ever held office under a crown may well boast that he reduced the parliament of England to the lowest degradation, to the most abject servility, that a public assembly of gentlemen was ever trodden to. Yet, strange as it must appear, it was for such services that this same Vansittart was created--a lord!! Lord Bexley was consequently sent to the "Upper House," as a proof of the high approbation in which his talents were held by his admiring master! In that situation, he has since zealously exerted himself to preserve every existing abuse, and his ill-acquired title has ever figured in the list of those who vote against the people.
To keep up such an iniquitous state of affairs, it was deemed necessary to persecute those who struggled to bring back the constitution to its original principles. Hence the employment of spies and informers; hence systematic massacre, imprisonment, and cruelty; hence the regular manufacture of forged seditious placards for the purpose of affording a pretext for the military execution against the reformers at Manchester and elsewhere; and hence, for such atrocities could happen under no other system upon earth, the murders, the cold-blooded murders, recorded in our preceding pages.