That he and his club were the cause of the riots will not be disputed; for, had they not given an insulting notice of their intention to celebrate the horrors of the 14th of July, accompanied with an inflammatory hand-bill, intended to excite an insurrection against the Government, Ref 008 no riot would ever have taken place, and consequently its disastrous effects would have been avoided. But it has been said, that there was nothing offensive in this inflammatory hand-bill; because, forsooth, “the matter of it (however indecent and untrue) was not more virulent than Paine’s Rights of Man, Mackintosh’s Answer to Burke, Remarks on the Constitution of England, &c. &c., which had been lately published without incurring the censure of Government.” So, an inflammatory performance, acknowledged to be indecent and untrue, is not offensive, because it is not more virulent than some other performances which have escaped the censure of Government! If this is not a new manner of arguing, it is at least an odd one. But this hand-bill had something more malicious in it, if not more virulent, than even the inflammatory works above mentioned. They were more difficult to come at; to have them, they must be bought. They contained something like reasoning, the fallacy of which the Government was very sure would be detected by the good sense of those who took the pains to read them. A hand-bill was a more commodious instrument of sedition: it was calculated to have immediate effect. Besides, if there had been nothing offensive in it, why did the club think proper to disown it in so ceremonious a manner? They disowned it with the most solemn asseverations, offered a reward for apprehending the author, and afterwards justified it as an inoffensive thing. Here is a palpable inconsistency. The fact is, they perceived that this precious morsel of eloquence, in place of raising a mob for them, was like to raise one against them: they saw the storm gathering, and, in the moment of fear, disowned the writing. After the danger was over, seeing they could not exculpate themselves from the charge of having published it, they defended it as an inoffensive performance.
The Doctor, in his justificatory letter to the people of Birmingham, says, that the company were assembled on this occasion “to celebrate the emancipation of a neighbouring nation from tyranny, without intimating a desire of any thing more than an improvement of their own constitution.” Excessive modesty! Nothing but an improvement! A la françoise, of course? However, with respect to the church, as it was a point of conscience, the club do not seem to have been altogether so moderate in their designs. “Believe me,” says the Doctor, in the same letter, “the Church of England, which you think you are supporting, has received a greater blow by this conduct of yours, than I and all my friends have ever aimed at it.” They had then, it seems, aimed a blow at the established church, and were forming a plan for improving the constitution; and yet the Doctor, in the same letter, twice expresses his astonishment at their being treated as the enemies of church and state. In a letter to the students of the College of Hackney, he says, “A hierarchy, equally the bane of Christianity and rational liberty, now confesses its weakness; and be assured, that you will see its complete reformation or its fall.” And yet he has the assurance to tell the people of Birmingham that their superiors have deceived them in representing him and his sect as the enemies of church and state.
But, say they, we certainly exercised the right of freemen in assembling together; and even if our meeting had been unlawful, cognizance should have been taken of it by the magistracy: there can be no liberty where a ferocious mob is suffered to supersede the law. Very true. This is what the Doctor has been told a thousand times, but he never would believe it. He still continued to bawl out, “The sunshine of reason will assuredly chase away and dissipate the mists of darkness and error; and when the majesty of the people is insulted, or they feel themselves oppressed by any set of men, they have the power to redress the grievance.” So the people of Birmingham, feeling their majesty insulted by a set of men (and a very impudent set of men too), who audaciously attempted to persuade them that they were “all slaves and idolaters,” and to seduce them from their duty to God and their country, rose “to redress the grievance.” And yet he complains? Ah! says he, but, my good townsmen,
“——— you mistake the matter:
For, in all scruples of this nature,
No man includes himself, nor turns
The point upon his own concerns.”
And therefore he says to the people of Birmingham, “You have been misled.” But had they suffered themselves to be misled by himself into an insurrection against the Government; had they burnt the churches, cut the throats of the clergy, and hung the magistrates, military officers, and nobility, to the lamp-posts, would he not have said that they exercised a sacred right? Nay, was not the very festival, which was the immediate cause of the riots, held expressly to celebrate scenes like these? to celebrate the inglorious triumphs of a mob? The 14th of July was a day marked with the blood of the innocent, and eventually the destruction of an empire. The events of that day must strike horror to every heart except that of a deistical philosopher, and would brand with eternal infamy any other nation but France: which, thanks to the benign influence of the Rights of Man, has made such a progress in ferociousness, murder, sacrilege, and every species of infamy, that the horrors of the 14th of July are already forgotten.
What we celebrate, we must approve; and does not the man who approved of the events of the 14th of July, blush to complain of the Birmingham riots? “Happily,” says he to the people of Birmingham, “happily the minds of Englishmen have a horror for murder, and therefore you did not, I hope, think of that; though, by your clamorous demanding me at the hotel, it is probable that, at that time, some of you intended me some personal injury.” Yes, sir, happily the minds of Englishmen have a horror for murder; but who will say that the minds of English men or English women either, would have a horror for murder, if you had succeeded in overturning their religion and constitution, and introducing your Frenchified system of liberty? The French were acknowledged to be the most polite and amiable people in all Europe: what are they now? Let La Fayette, Brissot, Anacharsis Cloots, or Thomas Payne himself, answer this question.
Let us see, a little, how mobs have acted under the famous Government that the Doctor so much admires.
I shall not attempt a detail of the horrors committed by the cut-throat Jourdan and his associates in Provence, Avignon, Languedoc, and Rousillon—towns and villages sacked, gentlemen’s seats and castles burnt, and their inhabitants massacred; magistrates insulted, beat, and imprisoned, sometimes killed; prisoners set at liberty, to cut the throats of those they had already robbed. The exploits of this band of patriots would fill whole volumes. They reduced a great part of the inhabitants of the finest and most fertile country in the whole world, to a degree of misery and ruin that would never have been forgotten, had it not been so far eclipsed since, by the operation of what is, in “that devoted country,” called the law. The amount of the damages sustained in property, was perhaps a hundred thousand times as great as that sustained by the revolutionists at Birmingham. When repeated accounts of these murderous scenes were laid before the National Assembly, what was the consequence? what the redress? “We had our fears,” says Monsieur Gentil, “for the prisoners of Avignon, and for the lives and property of the inhabitants of that unhappy country; but these fears are now changed into a certainty: the prisoners are released; the country seats are burnt, and”—Monsieur Gentil was called to order, and not suffered to proceed; after which these precious “Guardians of the Rights of Man” passed a censure on him, for having slandered the patriots. It is notorious, that the chief of these cut-throats, Jourdan, has since produced his butcheries in Avignon, as a proof of his civism, and that he is now a distinguished character among the real friends of the revolution.
Does the Doctor remember having heard any thing about the glorious achievements of the 10th of August 1792? Ref 009 Has he ever made an estimate of the property destroyed in Paris on that and the following days? Let him compare the destruction that followed the steps of that mob, with the loss of his boasted apparatus; and when he has done this, let him tell us, if he can, where he would now be, if the Government of England had treated him and his friends as the National Assembly did the sufferers in the riots of the 10th of August. But, perhaps, he looks upon the events of that day as a glorious victory, a new emancipation, and of course will say, that I degrade the heroes in calling them a mob. I