This was as a red rag to Windham, a prominent recruit from the Whigs, who now used all the artifices of rhetoric to terrify his hearers. He besought them in turn not to repair their house in the hurricane season, not to imitate the valetudinarian of the "Spectator," who read medical books until he discovered he had every symptom of the gout except the pain. These fallacious similes captivated the squires; and Pitt himself complimented the orator on his ingenious arguments. For himself, he declared his desire of Reform to be as zealous as ever; but he "could see no utility in any gentleman's bringing forward such a motion as the present at that moment," and feared that the cause might thereby suffer disgrace and lose ground. Fox, on the other hand, ridiculed all thought of panic on account of the French Revolution, but he admitted that the majority both in Parliament and the nation did not want Reform. Grenville, Wilberforce, and Burke opposed the motion, while even Duncombe declined to vote for it at present. It was accordingly adjourned sine die.[22]
Disappointment at the course of these debates served to band Nonconformists and reformers in a close alliance. Hitherto they had alike supported Pitt and the royal prerogative, especially at the time of the Regency struggle. In May 1789, when Pitt opposed the Nonconformist claims, Dr. Priestley wrote that Fox would regain his popularity with Dissenters, while Pitt would lose ground.[23] Now, when the doors of the franchise and of civic privilege were fast barred, resentment and indignation began to arouse the groups of the unprivileged left outside. The news that Frenchmen had framed a Departmental System, in which all privileges had vanished, and all men were citizens, with equal rights in the making of laws and local regulations, worked potently in England, furthering the growth of an institution little known in this country, the political club. As the Jacobins had adapted the English idea of a club to political uses, so now the early Radicals re-adapted it to English needs. "The Manchester Constitutional Society"[24] was founded by Walker and others in October 1790, in order to oppose a "Church and King Club," which High Churchmen had started in March, after the news of the triumph of their principles in Parliament. The Manchester reformers struck the key-note of the coming age by asserting in their programme that in every community the authority of the governors must be derived from the consent of the governed, and that the welfare of the people was the true aim of Government. They further declared that honours and rewards were due only for services rendered to the State; that all officials, without exception, were responsible to the people; that "actions only, not opinions, are the proper objects of civil jurisdictions"; that no law is fairly made except by a majority of the people; and that the people of Great Britain were not fully and fairly represented in Parliament.[25]
The Church and King Club, on the contrary, reprobated all change in "one of the most beautiful systems of government that the combined efforts of human wisdom has [sic] ever yet been able to accomplish." The issue between the two parties was thus sharply outlined. The Tories of Manchester gloried in a state of things which shut out about half of their fellow-citizens from civic rights and their whole community from any direct share in the making of laws. In their eyes the Church and the monarchy were in danger if Nonconformists became citizens, and if a score of Cornish villages yielded up their legislative powers to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other hives of industry.
Scotland also began to awake. The torpor of that keen and intellectual people, under a system of misrepresentation which assigned to them forty-five members and forty-four to Cornwall, is incomprehensible, unless we may ascribe it to the waning of all enthusiasm after the "forty-five" and to the supremacy of material interests so characteristic of the age. In any case, this political apathy was now to end; and here, too, as in the case of England, Government applied the spur.
On 10th May 1791 Sir Gilbert Elliot (afterwards Earl of Minto) brought forward a motion in Parliament for the repeal of the Test Act, so far as it concerned Scotland. He voiced a petition of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and declared that the Presbyterians felt the grievance of being excluded from civic offices unless they perverted. On wider grounds also he appealed against this petty form of persecution, which might make men hypocrites but never sincere converts. Henry Dundas and his nephew, Robert Dundas (Lord Advocate for Scotland), opposed the motion, mainly because it would infringe the terms of the Act of Union; but Henry added the curious argument that, if Scottish Presbyterians were relieved from the Test Act, then the English Dissenters would have been "unjustly, harshly, and cruelly used." Pitt avowed himself "not a violent friend, but a firm and steady friend" of the Test Act, as being essential to the security of the Church and therefore of the civil establishment of the country. Accordingly, Elliot's motion was defeated by 149 votes to 62.[26] It is curious that, a month earlier, the House had agreed to a Bill granting slightly wider toleration to "Catholic Dissenters."[27]
While Pitt was thus strengthening the old buttresses of Church and State, the son of a Quaker had subjected the whole fabric to a battery of violent rhetoric. It is scarcely too much to call Thomas Paine the Rousseau of English democracy. For, if his arguments lacked the novelty of those of the Genevese thinker (and even they were far from original), they equalled them in effectiveness, and excelled them in practicability. "The Rights of Man" (Part I) may be termed an insular version of the "Contrat Social," with this difference, that the English writer pointed the way to changes which were far from visionary, while the Genevese seer outlined a polity fit only for a Swiss canton peopled by philosophers. Paine had had the advantage of close contact with men and affairs in both hemispheres. Not even Cobbett, his literary successor, passed through more varied experiences. Born in 1737 at Thetford in Norfolk, Paine divided his early life between stay-making, excise work, the vending of tobacco, and a seafaring life. His keen eyes, lofty brow, prominent nose, proclaimed him a thinker and fighter, and therefore, in that age, a rebel. What more natural than that he, a foe to authority and hater of oppression, should go to America to help on the cause of Washington? There at last he discovered his true vocation. His broadsides struck home. "Rebellious staymaker, unkempt," says Carlyle, "who feels that he, a single needleman, did by his 'Common Sense' pamphlet, free America; that he can, and will free all this world; perhaps even the other." Tom Paine, indeed, had the rare gift of voicing tersely and stridently the dumb desires of the masses. Further, a sojourn in France before and during the early part of the Revolution enabled him to frame a crushing retort to Burke's "Reflections." The result was Part I of the "Rights of Man," which he flung off at the "Angel" in Islington in February 1791.[28]
The general aims of the pamphlet are now as little open to question as the famous Declaration which he sought to vindicate. Paine trenchantly attacked Burke's claim that no people, not even our own, had an inherent right to choose its own ruler, and that the Revolution Settlement of 1688 was binding for ever. Paine, on the contrary, asserted that "every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." Further, on the general question at issue, Paine remarked: "That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke." In reply to the noble passage: "The age of chivalry is gone … ," Paine shrewdly says: "In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are that there are no Quixotes to attack them."
After thus exposing the weak points of the royalist case, Paine proceeded to defend the mob, firstly, because the aristocratic plots against the French Revolution were really formidable (a very disputable thesis), and secondly, because the mob in all old countries is the outcome of their unfair and brutal system of government. "It is by distortedly exalting some men," he says, "that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is