4 The Triumph of Agitation. 



influence, iniquity, inhumanity, and lawless power flourished at home and 

 abroad ; the rights of man were trampled in the east and in the west ; 

 and England was " sung and proverbed " over all the habitable world for 

 a nation of hypocrites, and a people whose God was Mammon. A power 

 so enormous, that the sinews of the country cracked under its pressure; 

 and so deeply rooted in the system of society, in all our institutions, civil, 

 military, and ecclesiastical, that it seemed almost unconquerable by any 

 effort of popular force short of revolutionary fury. 



Yet, against this enormous power, this profligate confederacy, the cause 

 of the people has not only prevailed, but prevailed peaceably and blood- 

 lessly. There was no crime, no violence, no excess, none of the turmoil, 

 none of the outrage, which have so often disfigured popular struggles and 

 discredited the cause of liberty. There was nothing but the moral might, 

 (or, should we not rather say, the omnipotence ?) of a high-minded and 

 resolute people, who wielded intellect instead of iron, 



" And weaponless themselves 

 Made arms ridiculous." 



The English people have made themselves an example to the injured 

 and insulted of all nations : they have shewn that there is a shorter and 

 safer road to the redress of wrongs, than by tumult and blood; and that 

 force of mind, exhibited in combination, is more formidable a thousand 

 times, than force of arms displayed in mutiny and broil. Had they 

 appealed to the sword, they would have committed the blunder of en- 

 countering oppression with the weapon, at the use of which oppression 

 is most expert : for this they were too sagacious or well-informed : the 

 men to whose political conduct they confided their fortunes, had taught 

 them the great lesson, that the battles of freedom are best fought with 

 intellectual and moral arms the " vivida vis animi " a weapon of 

 higher temper, keener edge, more resistless force, than Toledo or Damas- 

 cus ever fabricated. 



Too much praise it is impossible to bestow upon the manner in which 

 the country was awakened and organized by the Political Unions ; nor 

 upon the conduct of these associations and their leaders. The nation 

 owes them '* a debt immense of endless gratitude," first, for the success 

 of the bill ; secondly, for the success of it without that anarchy and effu- 

 sion of blood, which the desperate resistance of the Tories would 

 inevitably have brought upon the country, had not popular feeling been 

 provided with these extraordinary vents for its expression, and had not 

 the people, under their tuition, been thoroughly impressed with the im- 

 portant truths, that to commit violence was to play the game of the 

 enemy, and to take the only course by which it was possible the cause 

 of Reform could be defeated. The quiet success of the bill may truly 

 be said to be the triumph of the Unions. They were not only popular 

 confederacies, but, in the truest sense of the word, conservative bodies. 

 While they roused the spirit of the country, they gave it a steady and 

 peaceable direction : peaceableness was, indeed, the principal lesson they 

 inculcated, and the main-spring of the victory they obtained. The direct 

 tendency of the tiger-like tenacity with which the borough-mongering 

 oligarchy clung to their usurpations, was to excite the people to tumult 

 and disorder. Hence arose the demand for the constitutional agitator 

 a better suppressor of sedition than the dragoon, inasmuch as reason is 

 better than the rabre to govern Englishmen. Sedition was against his 



