the conduct of State affairs was inculcated on those in authority.

But the agitation had a wider result than this. The Platform had been again tried as the mouthpiece of popular opinion outside Parliament, and had again proved itself of the utmost service; and the engrafting on it of a system of organisation had enhanced its power, giving it a cohesion and unity of direction which added immensely to its strength.

Nor were the results of the work of the Platform in this agitation confined to the agreement in favour of the Petitions. The speeches which had been made at the numerous meetings, and which were pretty fully reported in the newspapers, spread far and wide throughout the country a fuller knowledge of political principles. They established on a far stronger and broader basis than ever before the right of publicly discussing and criticising the measures and conduct of the Government; and both those who participated in the meetings, and those who heard or read the reports of the speeches, having been roused from comparative inanition to a proper sense of their status and rights in the Constitution of the country, and having once tasted the pleasures of political excitement, were never likely to sink back into a state of lethargic longsuffering or fatalistic indifference.

Scarcely had the excitement of this struggle somewhat subsided when a most exciting and impressive event occurred, the discredit of which was at once laid to the charge of the Platform, and which was fastened on as exhibiting the danger of public speech and public meeting.

Hume, in his Essay on the Liberty of the Press, incidentally refers to the danger: "We need not dread from this liberty (of the Press) such ill consequences as "followed from the harangues of the popular demagogues of Athens and tribunes of Rome. A man reads a book of pamphlet alone, and coolly. There is none present from whom he can catch the passion by contagion. He is not hurried away by the force and energy of action. And should he be wrought up to never so seditious a humour, there is no violent resolution presented to him by which he can immediately vent his passion. The liberty of

1 Hume's Essays, fourth edition, p. 11.

the Press, therefore, however abused, can scarcely ever excite popular tumults or rebellion."

The liberty of the Platform, or free verbal discussion and deliberation, was as yet only associated, in even thoughtful minds, with the violent harangues of Athenian demagogues and Roman tribunes; and that popular tumults and violence must ensue from public meetings, and public speeches, was, as we shall find, the uniform view of the Platform held by a succession of even great statesmen. Even the right of "petitioning" was regarded with suspicion and ill-concealed jealousy and dislike, as tending dangerously towards government by the populace.

In May 1778 an Act of Parliament had been passed repealing an Act of William III.'s reign which imposed certain disabilities on Roman Catholics in England. In the following winter the Scotch, believing the Act was about to be extended to Scotland, formed several local associations to resist concession to the Roman Catholics there.

These associations did everything in their power to inflame the zeal and arouse the bigotry of the people; but as the Platform was unknown in Scotland at the time, the work was done by pamphlets and hand-bills, and by the pulpit.

In the following year serious anti-Catholic riots took place in Glasgow and in Edinburgh. Houses and chapels were burnt down and destroyed, and Catholics, and even Protestant sympathisers with them, had to fly for their lives, the local authorities almost conniving at these proceedings. Soon afterwards a Protestant Association was formed in England to obtain the repeal of the objectionable Act, and to foster a belief that the concessions made to the Roman Catholics would be attended with immediate danger to the State, and to the Protestant religion.

In November 1779 Lord George Gordon, at that time a member of the House of Commons, was elected President of the Association, and several public meetings were held in London -1800 persons being present at one of them,—at which speeches were made, tending to raise a spirit of intolerance and fanaticism in the minds of the hearers.

By May "this mad lord," as Horace Walpole very truly calls him, determined on more energetic action; and on Monday,

29th May, a meeting was held at Coachmaker's Hall, pursuant to public advertisement, in order to consider the mode of presenting a Petition to the House of Commons on the subject of the Act. Lord George Gordon took the chair, and delivered a long and most inflammatory harangue.1 He endeavoured to persuade his hearers of the rapid and alarming progress that popery was making in this kingdom; and he proceeded to observe that the only way to stop it was going in a firm, manly, and resolute manner to the House and showing their representatives that they were determined to preserve their religious freedom with their lives; that, for his part, he would run all hazards with the people; and if the people were too lukewarm to run all hazards with him when their conscience and their country called them forth, they might get another president; for he would tell them candidly, that he was not a lukewarm man himself, and that if they meant to spend their time in mock debate and idle opposition they might get another leader. He then proposed that the whole body of the Protestant Association should attend in St. George's Fields on the next Friday, to accompany him to the House of Commons on the delivery of the Protestant Petition. He further informed them that if less than 20,000 of his fellow-citizens attended him on that day he would not present their Petition; and for the better observance of order, he said, they should arrange themselves in four divisions; and that they might know their friends from their enemies, he added that every real Protestant and friend of the Petition should come with blue cockades in their hats.

On the Friday following, accordingly, a large multitude gathered at St. George's Fields-some 30,000 to 40,000 persons at the very lowest computation. Thence they proceeded to the Houses of Parliament with the Petition, which had been signed, it was said, by some 120,000 people. With no one to offer them the slightest resistance, or no force of any sort to keep even a vestige of order-for the Ministers had made no preparations whatever against disorder,-they forced their way into the passages and lobby of the Houses of Parliament, and becoming excited and violent, assaulted several members of both Houses, and generally intimidated the Parliament. With

1 See Annual Register, 1780, p. 190, et seq.

much difficulty, and not without grave risk, was this crisis surmounted; but almost immediately afterwards the most desperate riots followed-first directed against Catholics, or Protestant sympathisers with them, and then, as the Government appeared to have abdicated all its functions, against everybody and everything indiscriminately.

Day by day the riots increased in intensity. "Never," says the Annual Register, "did the metropolis, in any known age, exhibit such a dreadful spectacle of calamity and horror; or experience such real danger, terror, and distress, as on the day and night of the 7th. It is said that it was beheld blazing in thirty-six different places from one spot. Some of these conflagrations were of such a magnitude as to be truly tremendous. . . . Those who were on the spot or in the vicinity say that the present darkness, the gleam of the distant fires, the dreadful shouts in different quarters of the rioters, the groans of the dying, and the heavy regular platoon-firing of the soldiers formed, all together, a scene so terrific and tremendous as no description or even imagination could possibly reach. . . . The metropolis presented, in many places, the image of a city recently stormed and sacked.”1

"Nothing ever surpassed the abominable behaviour of the ruffian apostle who preached up this storm," . . . wrote Horace Walpole. "The frantic incendiary ran backwards and forwards naming names for slaughter to the mob."

And Burke, who was present at the time, has thus described this occurrence: "In the year 1780 there were found in this nation men deluded enough on pretences of zeal and piety to make a desperate attempt which would have consumed all the glory and power of this country in the flames of London, and buried all law, order, and religion, under the ruins of the metropolis of the Protestant world. . . . All the time this horrid scene was acting, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude continued without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of the populace with a continued blast of pestilential libels which infected the very air we The main drift of all these libels, and all the

breathed in.

1 Annual Register, 1780, p. 194.

2 Walpole's Letters, vol. vii. p. 378.

riots, was to force Parliament (to persuade us was hopeless) into an act of national perfidy which has no example."

For nearly a week the rioting and burning and plundering continued-jails were fired and destroyed, and the prisoners let loose.

So dilatory were the Ministers in taking measures to suppress the rioting, that they laid themselves open to the charge of "a meditated encouragement to this fanatic tumult, in order to discountenance the Association, which had more serious objects in view, and to render odious and contemptible all popular interposition in affairs of State."

At last, however, the King himself intervened; vigorous military action was taken; and after some 300 lives or more had been lost, order was restored. The slower, but none the less sure, process of the civil law followed; many of the rioters were tried and executed, and the lesson was taught, in letters of life's blood, that violent methods of seeking the enforcement of particular views could not be tolerated.

It was

For many a long year afterwards this unfortunate episode was made political capital of against any popular movement, and more especially against the use of the Platform. said that the riots were the offspring of the Petition, and the lamentable consequences of this particular Petition and Association were deemed good ground for discouraging all Petitions and Associations. It is true that the violent outrages perpetrated by the rioters followed the action of a political association, which had, in part, furthered its aims by means of meetings and speeches; and that the immediate cause of the horrible outrages was the direct incitement of the President of the Association, in a speech which was published in the newspapers, to a course which was fraught with danger, and which might lead, as it did, to most disastrous results. But it was in the most eminent degree unfair to use this event, as so many have done, as a final and decisive argument against the Platform. In the first place, the riots would never have occurred except for the criminal negligence, if not connivance, of the Government. Any, even moderate precautions would have prevented them, or at any rate have at once checked them. Where no effort is made to maintain order, order will not be maintained, even though no Platform incitement to dis