affirming the same opinion with more or less of confidence; but he had troubled the House with instances enough, to show the general prevalence of the notion, that the meeting at Manchester was a legal meeting.

Now allowing all due weight to the authority of those Resolutions, yet, as they turned out to have been founded in mistake, was it not to be fairly presumed that the meetings which passed them had been taken by surprise; and had, under an entire misconception, come to decisions which they themselves would now admit to be no longer maintainable?

But it was not in matters of law only, that the meetings in the country appeared to have been misled. It was impossible to overlook those flagrant misrepresentations of fact, by which the public mind had been worked up to a fearful state of irritation. It had happened to him (Mr. C.) to take the reports of a part of the daily press on these transactions in the gross; a course of reading which brought exaggerations and contradictions into view, much more clearly than a perusal from day to day. The first thing that had convinced him of the extreme caution with which the testimony of these records was to be received, was an allegation, that the magistrates of Manchester were necessarily actuated by hostile feelings towards the people, from the circumstance of their being generally "mastermanufacturers." His connection with Liverpool had given him acquaintance enough with the general state of things in Lancashire, to make him quite sure that, however true such a circumstance might have been in any other county, it could not be so in the county of Lancaster; it being (as he had often heard, and had had some opportunities of knowing) an invariable rule in that county, not to put into the commission of the peace persons connected with the manufacturing establishments. No person, who had ever

conversed with a Lancashire man, but might have informed himself of this rule; and surely no honest man would have hazarded such an allegation without inquiry. That care, at least, every man was bound to take, before he asserted a fact to the injury of his neighbour; especially when the prejudice excited by the statement was to extend to the remotest verge of the kingdom, and to hold up those who were the objects of it to abhorrence and detestation. The allegation, however, passed current for some days; then, indeed, came an acknowledgment that it was incorrect; accompanied, however, with the observation, that though the master manufacturers were not in the commission of the peace, the argument built on that assumption was not the less true. How many persons must have read that assertion, who, perhaps, to that hour, were not aware of its untruth! How many persons in the country, remained even up to the meeting of Parliament, under the influence of that alarming but delusive impression! Was it not obvious that such an impression must materially have influenced the Resolutions of any meeting where it was received as true? In that proportion, therefore, was a deduction to be made from the authority of all such Resolutions.

But was this the only misrepresentation? By no means. At the meeting of the city of York came forward an honourable gentleman (the member for that city), for whose general character and conduct he (Mr. C.) entertained the highest respect, and stated, that the sabres of the cavalry were sharpened with a view to the conflict of the 16th of August. It was unnecessary to say that this information from such a man came with a weight absolutely overwhelming. Afterwards, the honourable gentleman was convinced that he had been led to assert what was not founded on fact; and, like an honourable and upright man

as he was, he publicly retracted it. He could do no more. But, in the mean time, the Resolutions at York had passed; and who could estimate the share which such an assertion, made when it was made, must have had in producing that temper in the meeting which sanctioned those Resolutions? Persons who had read the statement might be subsequently disabused by the correction; and, so far as they were concerned, the mischief might therefore be cured: but could any man calculate the extent to which such a statement, while it remained uncontradicted, must have acted on the public feeling at many other meetings than that at which it was first promulgated? Another honourable gentleman, the member for Norfolk, had been led into a like error, purely unintentional, no doubt, but calculated like the former to do extensive mischief, respecting a woman said to have been saved by an officer of dragoons from the barbarous rage of the yeomanry cavalry. The honourable gentleman had taken an opportunity, in this debate, to disavow the authority on which he told this story. He had done rightly. But what might not have been the effect and operation of the story in the mean time?

Deduct, therefore, the amount of the impression made by these, and abundance of other similar fables; deduct the effect of the persuasion (the assumed, uncontroverted, and unquestioned persuasion) that the Manchester meeting was a legal meeting; and then judge, whether public meetings, proceeding to discussion under such influences, could have decided with equity and temper; whether we should not do those meetings the greatest possible injustice if we were to imagine that they would, under better information, persevere in decisions so unfairly and surreptitiously obtained? "No, Sir, it is not till all the meetings which assembled during the prevalence of these mistakes and delusions,

shall have re-resolved all their resolutions, with the full knowledge that the Manchester meeting was illegal-that the magistrates were not "master manufacturers"—that the swords of the yeomanry were not sharpened with a view to the 16th of August, and that the horrible stories, of which that related by the member for Norfolk is a specimen, were not true, that we can have a pretence for granting a Parliamentary inquiry, on the ground that the country demands it.

Undoubtedly, Sir, the meeting at Manchester was attended with great and grievous calamities. Much suffering was occasioned by it to all classes of the inhabitants of that place; and the loss of lives which occurred in the dispersion of the assembly must be deplored by every mind that has the smallest tincture of humanity. In deploring those occurrences, I yield to no man living. But I know how cautiously I must deal with matters of this kind. I know well the nature of the artifices too successfully practised by those who endeavour to pervert the public judgment by the slander of individual character. Experto credite. The process is of this kind:-An incendiary narrator of what passed at Manchester, affirms, perhaps, that one hundred persons were slain.' Suppose, indignant at this extravagant falsehood, I answer, No, no, not a hundred; the number of sufferers was six only.' 'Six only!' is then the exclamation, 'O barbarian! it is thus that you trifle with the sacrifice of human life!' This, Sir, is the common trick. It consists in first putting forth a monstrous exaggeration of calamity, for the express purpose of inviting contradiction; and then holding up to public indignation the man who reduces the exaggeration to the reality, as if he were the unfeeling defender and approver of whatever part of the calamity he does not deny. The trick is at last found out; but it has unhappily too often done its work for the day,

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before detection. The agents who employ it know their lesson well. The school in which they learned it is that of the French Revolution. It is the old trick of 1794 and 1795; the too-successful expedient of Marat and Robespierre. But, deplorable and extensive as the calamities of the 16th of August were, to whom are they to be attributed? Is it not to those, who, actuated by selfish motives of ambition-(no, I will not say ambition; I will not squander a word often applied to nobler aspirations on such base designs)-is it not to those who seek mischief for mischief's sake-who would let loose the whirlwind, though with the conscious incapacity to direct it—who would lay the fabric of social order in ruin, not so much in the hope of rising upon that ruin, as for the satisfaction of contemplating the havoc and desolation which they had madewho, outcasts of society, would revenge themselves upon society by scattering and dissolving the very elements of which it is composed? Is it not to such persons-to the assemblers of those alarming multitudes, under the preposterous pretence of petition or deliberation, but in fact for the purposes of intimidation and disorder-that are to be justly attributed all the consequences which follow upon assemblages so wantonly congregated, and upon passions so wickedly inflamed? To them the widowed mother and orphan child must trace their miseries! On their heads be for ever fixed the responsibility of all the blood that has been shed!"

He came now to the speech of his Honourable and Learned Friend.* His Honourable and Learned Friend was far too wise and too wary to pledge himself to an opinion in favour of the legality of the meeting of the 16th of August: he knew well, moreover, that if any excess

*Sir J. Mackintosh.