A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Wairarapa Age, 21 March 1925, Page 4

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

A hundred years ago we had recently emerged from a long and straining war, which had dislocated the trade of the world and therefore caused grave unemployment, over a long series of years, among the working people of Britain, says a contributor to the “Westminster Gazette.” We were loaded with debt, and the activities of the nation were crippled by heavy taxation. Europe, sick of war, was hoping that it had found the means of banishing war: in 1819 the Powers, meeting at Aix-la-Chapelle, issued a protocol in which they announced the beginning of the “era of permanent peace.” Their method was to guarantee the inviolability of the treaty settlement of Vienna. In every part of Britain the distresses of the time were stimulating a very remarkable working-class movement, wh ch threatened a violent revolt against the whole existing social and economic order. Robert Owen was organising the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (the forerunner of the One Big Union movement of to-day) which was intended, by a universal strike, to bring about the sudden and complete downfall of the capitalist system. A whole school of writers were working out the theory of Socialism. There was universal fear of violent revolution, and the Liberal Leader, Lord Grey, said in 1819 that he saw little hope of escaping from the horrors of class war, which would bring nothing but. ruin and the destruction of lib. erty, whatever its outcome. Eventually, prosperity took the place of distress. The fear of revolution vanished. With the increase of wealth, the burden of debt became less. And England entered upon a period of im- ' mensc prosperity and general contentment. .