18 CONTEMPORARY CARICATURES. found vent in violent speeches at large popular meetings, and was encouraged by the free diffusion of "seditious handbills" and "ribald ballads." The caricatures of the Thus, one from the time are sufficiently expressive. fertile and incisive pencil of Gillray, represents Pitt as Death on the White Horse (the insignia of the House of Hanover), riding over a drove of pigs, the representatives of Burke's "swinish multitude." In another, Pitt is seen at work with a grinding-mill, in which John Bull is being converted into money. The Prince of Wales draws off a portion of the golden stream to pay the debts incurred by his profligacy, while the ministerial pensioners, Burke, Dundas, and Lord Loughborough, scramble for the rest. An absurd report that Pitt had suggested that people should eat meat to save bread, equivalent to a Duke of Norfolk's suggestion in our own days that the poor should live on curry-powder soup, was the subject of a caricature called 'The British Butcher,' in which the minister serves John Bull with high-priced meat to stop his demand for cheap bread. The epigraph attached to it runs thus:· "Since bread is so dear (and you say you must eat), The agitation continued to spread, and immense meetings were held in the metropolis and the principal towns. On the morning of the 29th of October, the day on which the King was to open Parliament in person, crowds collected along the route of the procession, until A LONDON MOB. 19 as many as 200,000 people were assembled. The King's carriage moved on at first amid gloomy silence. Not a hat was raised; not a single cheer was heard. After awhile, the angry feelings of the multitude sought relief in groans and hisses, and in loud shouts of "Give us peace and bread!" "No war!" "No Pitt!" "Down with George!"; and as the royal vehicle passed through Margaret Street, a pebble or bullet, shot from an air-gun,* broke the window. Still wilder grew the tumult on the King's return, and he did not reach St. James's Palace without considerable difficulty. Thence, in his private coach, he proceeded to Buckingham House, but again the populace pressed around him, shouting, "Bread! bread! peace! peace!" and a strong detachment of the Guards was required to release him from his inconvenient situation.† There was no pretence for treating this wild outbreak of a hungry mob as a revolutionary movement; yet Pitt made it the excuse for a series of enactments unparalleled since the time of Charles the 1st. One was intended for the repression of seditious meetings; the other widened the definition and more liberally applied the penalties of high treason. The former provided that every public meeting, for the discussion of questions affecting the Church or State, was to be summoned by previous advertisement, signed by resident householders, and all assemblages not convened in this manner "When a stone was thrown at one of his glasses in returning home, the King said, 'That is a stone; you see the difference from a bullet.'' Lord Colchester. + Lord Colchester's 'Diary,' i. 2, 3. 20 THE "GAGGING ACT." A were declared illegal. Moreover, even legally constituted meetings were subjected to the operation of the Riot Act, if, in the opinion of any two justices, they were dangerous to the public peace. Lecture-rooms, and gatherings in the open air, to which admittance was obtained by payment, were required to be licensed, and were placed under police supervision. The second Bill extended the crime of treason in the most outrageous manner. "Writing, preaching, and speaking, which, under the existing law, would be criminal only if accompanying overt acts, were themselves constituted overt acts, and rendered the offender guilty of treason. new offence was created, which subjected to the penalties of a high misdemeanour any person who, by writing, preaching or speaking, should incite or stir up the people to hatred or dislike of His Majesty's person, or the established Government and Constitution of the realm." * These arbitrary and unconstitutional measures were warmly opposed by the Whig leader, and the few Whigs who yet remained true to the old Whig principles. Fox gave way to his emotions in a strain of fervid and indignant eloquence. Better at once, he said, to declare that after experience, and upon a review of the condition of the world's affairs, a free constitution was no longer suitable to England! He hoped, however, that the people, while still allowed to meet, would assemble and express their abhorrence of such tyrannical propositions; for if they were to be denied a legal mode of making known their grievances, they would sink to the * Massey, iv. 16, 17. FOX'S BOLD LANGUAGE. 21 level of those unhappy creatures who had no alternative between armed resistance and servile submission. In spite of this protest, the Bills were voted by enormous majorities. Fox declined, when they were in committee, to discuss their details; he hoped, he said, they would pass in their integrity, that the people might fully understand the nature and the extent of the attack which had been made upon their liberties. "If ministers are determined," he continued, "by means of the corrupt influence they possess in the two Houses of Parliament, to pass the Bills in direct opposition to the declared sense of a great majority of the people, and if they should be put in force with all their rigorous provisions; then, if my opinion were asked by the people as to their obedience, I should tell them that it was no longer a question of moral obligation and duty, but of prudence." Language so ardent did not fail to bring down Pitt's censure on the head of its speaker. He was told that he incited the people to appeal to the sword, and desired to plunge the country in anarchy and bloodshed.* But the words of Fox will not justly bear such a construction; and it was well, as Mr. Massey says, that at a time when the current of public opinion ran violently in a direction opposite to freedom, and the Government seemed possessed by a panic fatal to cool reflection and prudent statesmanship, * On the motion for leave to introduce the Bill, the minority was only 42. When its details were on the point of being discussed in committee, Fox, Erskine, Charles Grey, Whitbread, and other leading Whigs, withdrew from the House. They reappeared on the third reading, and voted against it; but the Bill passed by a large majority, 266 to 51.-LORD COLCHESTER, 'Diary,' i. 11. Fox, in 1797, moved the repeal of this and the Treasonable Practices Act, but obtained only 52 supporters. 22 A LEGAL DESPOTISM. a great Englishman should stand forward, even if alone, and reassert and defend that precious cause of liberty and justice for which an Eliot had perished in prison, a Hampden on the battle-field, and a Sidney on the scaffold. We can fancy the shade of Chatham turning with disgust from the historic arena where he had so often and so nobly contended on behalf of the principles of freedom, when his son appeared in the character of their bitter enemy, and essayed to lay sacrilegious hands on the ark of the Constitution. Pitt carried his measures; but he shrank from putting them into operation, and the only use of their presence in the Statute Book is to show into what follies a great statesman may be hurried, when he allows his fear to prevail over his reason, and subordinates his convictions to the supposed exigencies of party. On the evidence of his own followers, such arbitrary proceedings were unnecessary, and, therefore, unjustifiable. They boasted, and not without cause, that the ministry was supported by the great body of the people, as well as by the Crown, the Church, and the landed gentry. What, then, was to be apprehended from the irregularities of a mob? Why encroach upon the liberties of the subject to do what the civil power was quite competent to do? But the minister still continued his imperious career. The country was infested with a plague of spies and informers. The windy nonsense uttered in the taproom was held sufficient to call for the rigour of the law. Thus, a low attorney, having boasted in a coffeehouse, from which the company afterwards kicked him, that he was an advocate of "equality" and republicanism, was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to |