PROFITEERING RIOTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 150, 22 December 1938, Page 14

PROFITEERING RIOTS

The many suggestions that have been made for bringing to book, by publishing names or otherwise, all persons who used the crisis'for profiteering purposes prompts the thought that it is just as well that people are more patient in such matters than they were, for insance, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, says the "Manchester Guardian." Then mobs were most ready to take things into their own hands and the kind of treatment administered to those who were accused of making profits out of the country's need is shown in a cartoon of Cruikshank's illustrating an event at Bishop's Clyst, Devonshire, in August, 1800. A farmer is being dragged along with a halter round his neck; the mob cheers, an old woman follows, kicking and beating him with the tongs; some sacks of corn are marked 255. "How much now?" shouts the mob. "How much now, you rogue in grain?" The unfortunate farmer is pleading, "Oh, pray, let me go and I'll let you have it for a guinea. Oh, I'll let you have it at fourteen shillings."

In the towns there was much violence, for people were convinced that there were profiteers who bought food cheap and held it till they could make the largest possible profit out of the poor, a belief which produced serious riots.