absolutely and completely, was to be found in their proposal that the Act should extend to the whole of Great Britain, though it was admitted on all sides, themselves included, and was indeed evident to all men, that the occurrences which the Bill was meant to check were confined entirely to one part of the country—namely, Lancashire, Cheshire, some districts in Yorkshire, and some parts of Scotland. The attempt was made by the popular party in the House to limit the sphere of the Act, but that would not have suited the purpose of the Government, and they declined to give way. On one point, however, from very shame sake, they were obliged to make a concession. After much pressure they gave way as to the permanency of the Act, and contented themselves by fixing the period in which it was to remain in force as five years, and to the end of the next session of Parliament-that is to say, till about the middle of the year 1825. The second reading of the Bill was carried by 351 to 128 in the House of Commons, or a majority of 223, and it soon became law. Outside the House but little effort was made to stay the hands of the Government whilst the Bill was under discussion. Experience had proved to the people that such efforts were useless. Parliament and the Regent ever turned a deaf ear to all their complaints, and, moreover, the legislation was hurried through Parliament with such rapidity that but little time was available for remonstrating. Westminster, true to the last, held a meeting on 8th December, and petitioned against the proposed legislation. Sir F. Burdett presided. He laid down very clearly his views on the right of which they were about to be deprived. He considered the right of public meeting to be a right of nature, derived from no Government, and too sacred to be interfered with by any set of men. "When God gave to them the means of communicating their thoughts one to another, He sanctioned that communication, and sanctioned also the best means by which that communication could be effected."

The Petition was ordered to lie on the table, and to be printed, but nothing more came of it.

Before, and whilst this Act was being obtained from Parliament, the Government had been putting the ordinary law into action in their efforts to silence the Platform. To give the

result of the prosecutions it will be necessary to trench somewhat on the history of the next year or two, but for the sake of getting a view of their action as a whole, it will be convenient to mention those results here.

Immediately after the Manchester meeting of 16th August Hunt, Bamford, and eight other men, and one woman, were charged with "high treason." This charge was too preposterous to be sustainable, and the Government had to content itself with proceeding on a lesser one.

On the 16th of March 1820 Hunt and nine others, including Samuel Bamford, were tried at the Spring Assizes at York on an indictment of several "counts" for conspiracy and unlawful assembling. Five of them were found "not guilty" on any of the "counts." Hunt, Bamford, and three others were convicted only on one-namely, that they "unlawfully, maliciously, and seditiously did meet and assemble themselves together, with divers other persons, for the purpose of raising and exciting discontent and disaffection in the minds of the liege subjects of the King, and for the purpose of moving and exciting them to hatred and contempt of the Government and Constitution of the realm as by law established "; and thus, by a verdict in a court of law, the celebrated Manchester or Peterloo meeting was declared to have been an illegal one. Hunt was sentenced to two years' and six months' imprisonment, and then to find security for his good behaviour for five years. Bamford and two others to one year's imprisonment and then security.

Other prosecutions were also persevered in. On the 1st of April (1820) eight men who had participated in the Habergham Eaves meeting, near Burnley, which has already been described, were tried "for unlawfully conspiring to assemble an unlawful meeting, for attending an unlawful meeting, and for causing people to go armed to a public meeting." Two were acquitted, the rest convicted. Knight and two others. got two years' imprisonment; one, eighteen months' imprisonment; one, fifteen months'; one, a year's imprisonment.

On the 10th of April 1820 Sir C. Wolseley, the "Legislatorial Attorney" and representative of Birmingham, and the Rev.

1 Bamford, vol. i. pp. 249-251.

* 2 State Trials, New Series, vol. i. p. 171, etc.

J. Harrison, were indicted for attending "an unlawful assembly at Stockport on 28th of July 1819, and for a conspiracy to cause a riot." They were found guilty and each sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment.

Curiously enough, one of the cases which one might naturally have thought the Government would have been anxious to press forward before all others, was delayed. The trial of five of the principal men who had taken part in the celebrated meeting at Birmingham on the 12th July 1819, at which Sir C. Wolseley had been elected, did not take place for more than a year after their offence-namely, on the 3d of August 1820. The charge against them was, "Devising and intending to raise and to excite discontent and disaffection in the minds of some of the liege subjects of the King, and to move them to hatred and contempt of the Government and Constitution of the realm as by law established, and that they unlawfully and seditiously did combine and conspire together to nominate, elect, and appoint a person to be the representative of the inhabitants of Birmingham, and to claim admission as such into the Commons House of Parliament as a member thereof"; also for assembling for the purpose of hearing divers scandalous seditious and inflammatory speeches, etc., and several other intricate legal charges, or, as they are technically called, "counts." The prisoners were convicted. A legal point being reserved, they were not sentenced till the following May. Then the judge, in sentencing them, delivered a political homily: "Now, having gone through the detail of the speeches which were used at that time, can any man doubt that those speeches were calculated to raise in the minds of those persons by whom they were heard dissatisfaction and belief that they were deprived of certain rights, and to excite contempt and dislike of the Commons House of Parliament?" He commented on the gravity of the offence, and said: "That a very heavy offence had been committed." He inveighed against the argument that every man had a right to a vote, and stated that "Every man has not a right to concur in

2

1 There is a slight mistake in the report of these cases in the volume of State Trials. The date of the trial is there given throughout as 1821. It took place a year earlier-namely, in August 1820.

2 State Trials, New Series, vol. i. p. 946.

the appointment of his own legislators. Every man is represented by every member of Parliament, and when a member of Parliament is returned to Parliament, he acts, not merely for those individuals by whom he is sent, but it is his bounden duty to act for every individual throughout the whole of the kingdom. . . . It is one of the principles of our law that though a particular place elects a member, as soon as he is elected, he is not to be considered as the representative of the particular place only, but of the kingdom at large."

Edmunds was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, Maddocks eighteen months', Wooller fifteen months', and all to give security for good conduct for five years; Cartwright, being very old, was let off with a fine of £100.

It is unnecessary to pursue this branch of the matter further. Doubtless, were we to rake still further among the dusty files of legal records, we should find numerous enough traces of other prosecutions. Thus at Pontefract Sessions, in 1820,1 one Mitchell, otherwise unknown to fame, was found guilty "of having uttered certain seditious words" in a speech at a meeting near Halifax, and was sent to prison for six months, and then had to find bail.

Sufficient instances have been given to show the determination of the Government to suppress the Platform by every means within their reach or power.

Twice, then, within the brief period of three years, had Lord Liverpool's Ministry, in their last and desperate effort to check the rising demand for Parliamentary reform, done their utmost to suppress public meetings and freedom of speech.

The violence of some of the language used on the Platform, the imposing numbers at meetings, were in themselves sufficiently grave and disconcerting occurrences to some of the more timid classes. But when Ministers, for their own party ends, stirred once more into flame the nearly extinguished embers of the horror excited by the Reign of Terror, and threw upon these speeches and these meetings the dread light of revolution, the agitation assumed to many an aspect of imminent danger and impending revolution.

These large and formidable-looking meetings were undoubt1 The Examiner, p. 261, 1820.

edly more demonstrations of physical force than meetings for deliberation, but following as they did on the outrages and disturbances of 1812, they show a distinct progress or improvement in popular action. In 1812 there had been no platforming, no petitioning, only nocturnal gatherings and secret oaths, and recourse to physical force. Now the people came together in open public meetings; there may not have been much deliberation at their meetings, but the first step towards it was taken once they adopted the Platform, trying to voice their complaints and distresses; there was a display of physical force, but that, with public speech, was better than dumb physical force, venting itself in outrage and violence.

But instead of welcoming the expression of popular wants and grievances, as throwing light on the needs of the people, and affording a guide for a policy which would tend to good order, prosperity, and contentment, the Government, irritated and vexed beyond measure, betrayed to the world their deepseated virulent antipathy to the people.

The truth was, they did not care to hear anything from the people they did not want to know anything about themthey scouted their opinions or wishes-they repudiated their claims to just government, much more their claims to a voice in the government-they jeered at their asserted rights as founded on the pernicious teaching of French revolutionists.

One needs to peruse the political speeches of the day to realise at all the apprehensions, real or assumed, which filled the breasts of some of the leading politicians, the fury with which others of them stigmatised every one, and everything that made for a reform of the existing state of the Constitution. In their furious wrath language was used by them, often far more hostile to liberty, more treasonable to the public weal, and more destructive to freedom than any used against the Constitution by the most rabid demagogue who was prosecuted for seditious language. The shifts to which they were put in their endeavours to combat the claims of the people for a share in the Government were extreme. Often were they so glaringly absurd that we can scarcely credit the speakers with believing them. The most indefensible abuses that helped to that end were defended. Even sinecures found