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Weaver

.—Let the most unfeeling, the most hardened, the most cruel and inflxible of our statesmen, (I don’t know which to choose, Windham, or his master Pitt, for they are both superlatives) pay a visit to any of our manufacturing towns, where this useful class of citizens, once were seen with busy faces, carrying their looms work home to their employers; it matters not where, whetr at Manchester, Norwich, Leeds, Halifax, or any other manufacturing town, still it is the same; nothing but misery and wretchedness; he will do well to avoid stumbling over shittles, weavers’ beams, looms, and every other, the implements of a lost occupation! Let this man Windham, if he be really a man, lift up the latchet of the door of one of the thousands of miserable huts which abound in every one of these flourishing towns. After satiating his gladdened eyes with the misery before him—after glutting his ravished fight, in the voluptuous luxury of beholding wretchedness in its maximum—let him thus address the starving groupe in the true and sincere languaeg of his heart—“You are a set of factious and discontented fellows, who are alwys complaining— never satisfied. You are as well off as you deserve to be;—there always must be poor people in all countries, and Providence has selected you to be of the number; therefore it is impious as well as disloyal to murmur. If it be true, that you can get no work, and are starving, go to the workhouse.”

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Entry taken from A Political Dictionary, by Charles Pigott, 1795.

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Weaver