Wesley Corpus

To the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies Date: HAVERFORDWEST, August 23, 1775. Source: The Letters of John Wesley (1775) Author: John Wesley --- MY LORD,--A letter which I received from Mr. Lowland yesterday occasions my giving you this trouble. You told him the Administration have been assured from every part of the kingdom that trade was as plentiful and flourishing as ever and the people as well employed and as well satisfied. Sir, I aver from my own personal knowledge, from the testimony of my own eyes and ears, that there cannot be a more notorious falsehood than has been palmed upon them for truth. I aver that in every part of England where I have been (and I have been east, west, north, and south within these two years) trade in general is exceedingly decayed and thousands of people are quite unemployed. Some I know to have perished for want of bread; others I have seen creeping up and down like walking shadows. I except three or four manufacturing towns, which have suffered less than others. I aver (2) that the people in general all over the nation are so far from being well satisfied that they are far more deeply dissatisfied than they appear to have been even a year or two before the Great Rebellion, and far more dangerously dissatisfied. The bulk of the people in every city, town, and village where I have been do not so much aim at the Ministry, as they usually did in the last century, but at the King himself. He is the object of their anger, contempt, and malice. They heartily despise His Majesty and hate him with a perfect hatred. They wish to imbue their hands in his blood; they are full of the spirit of murder and rebellion; and I am persuaded, should any occasion offer, thousands would be ready to act what they now speak. It is as much as ever I can do, and sometimes more than I can do, to keep this plague from infecting my own friends. And nineteen or twenty to whom I speak in defense of the King seem never to have heard a word spoken for him before. I marvel what wretches they are who abuse the credulity of the Ministry by those florid accounts.