Riches, Poverty and Slavery

Clare writing nearly 200 hundred years ago of what we observe all around us:

"Slavery originates with the luxury of tyranny & forced to submit to the crueltys [only] of oppression until the effeminancy of its oppressions grow into dotage     it then rises & regains its liberty like as the lion in his strength overawes the lesser beasts into unjust subjugation     but in the season of age when he looses his teeth [& needs] friends     they oppress him in turn [with injustice] & regain their former freedom     thus Tyrany generally gets paid with its own coin

Tyrants hate liberty the more bitterly because they themselves can enjoy every thing but liberty         they persecute their slaves into obedience but never consciliate them into friends     there for fear makes them the slave of slav[es]   for as they are dreaded by others      yet it is only as one tyrant to many of the oppressed so they more bitterly feel the dreaded vengance of the many enemys which their crueltys have made   recoiling upon themselves"

Pet MS A49 p1

"What a time we live in -- one class have been compaining & from complaints I fear have been encouraging the lower orders to break away from their own intention     this class complain of poverty but show no appearance of it   while the other is so destitute that one almost wonders they should have been silent so long"

Pet MS B5 p5