Henry Hunt

“ There is, to be sure, this distinction between you and the butcher; it is his business, it is his profession, by which he gets his daily bread; and, indeed, the sooner he kills his victim the more merciful he is: but as for you, your conduct is ten thousand times more brutal than that of the butcher, inasmuch as you inflict torture upon a human being, merely for the pleasure of inflicting torture. And do you really believe, are you so besotted as to flatter yourselves, that you will escape? Do you really believe, that "Where vice and cruelty go before, vengeance will not follow after?" ”

“ What a disgrace, not only to the administration of the country, but to the character of the age to suffer a malignant fiend to have the control over the liberties of persons sentenced to be confined in a prison! How much have those magistrates and sheriffs to answer for who suffer these devils in human shape to tyrannize over and torture the victims consigned to their custody! ”

“ If the man elected can take the public money, is not the temptation too great for most men? In short, what can be more absurd, what can be more revolting to reason, what more shocking to common sense, than the idea of a man's being a guardian of the public purse, while, at the same time, he votes, in that capacity, part of the people's money into his own pocket? In all the other situations of life we see the payer and the receiver a check upon each other; but, in the case of a Member of Parliament who receives part of the public money, there is no such check. ”

“ How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of crowded routs and fashionable parties in a whole year. ”

“ I beseech you, let no man deceive himself; if he act in this manner, I am persuaded that he may live to be convinced that he has, by losing this opportunity, been in a great degree instrumental in his country's ruin.—Is there a man among you so insensible as not to feel the weight of the present taxes, and yet so hardened as to go to the hustings and give his vote to a mere cypher:—to a man from whom he has not the least reason to expect any thing but a tame acquiescence in the measures of any one who happens to be the minister of the day! ”

“ PITT, a man of brilliant talents, and irresistible eloquence; but a man who turned these great gifts of the Supreme Being to the destruction of human liberty, and who directed his powerful genius, and the great facilities that were given him by his having the direction of the resources of this laborious and enterprising nation at his command, to the very worst of purposes, to the annihilation of the rights and liberties of his countrymen. ”

“ How many riots, how many hangings, how many special commissions we can trace back, all proceeding from the delusions of the public press! How many persons have lost their lives for plundering, pulling down, and burning the property of millers, butchers, and bakers; how much blood has been spilt, every drop of which blood may be fairly placed at the door of those who urged these poor fellows on, and instigated them to acts of violence against those classes of persons, by falsely accusing them of being the cause of the high price of provisions. ”

“ Was there ever violence like this heard of in this world before? And, what is the monstrous crime which has emboldened these literary ruffians to make this savage assault, and which induces them to suppose that they shall finally escape with impunity? They, the vile wretches, are the real mob. They attack in body; they know that defence is impossible; they know, that a hundred times the fortune of Mr. Hunt would not purchase enough of their columns to contain an answer to their falsehoods. Is this manly, is this fairness, is this discussion, is this liberty of the press? ”

“ It is to me in my dungeon a source of never-failing pleasure to reflect that all that it was possible for one man to do to save the life of another I did, to save his life; and at any one moment, after his doom was pronounced by the doctors, I would have sacrificed my life, nay, if I had had a thousand lives I would have died by torture a thousand times, to have saved his life. But he had taught me not only by precept, but by example, to bow to the will of God. There never lived a better man, nor a better father ”

“ Called to the throne of France by Providence, and by the suffrages of the senate, the people, and the army, my first sentiment is a wish for peace. France and England abuse their prosperity. They may contend for ages; but do their Governments well fulfil the most sacred of their duties, and will not so much blood, shed uselessly, and without a view to any end, condemn them in their own consciences? I consider it as no disgrace to make the first step. I have, I hope, sufficiently proved to the world that I fear none of the chances of war ”

“ He was elevated to unlimited power through the rancour and the malice of those who had sworn in their hearts to restore the hated Bourbons, the Pope, the Devil, and the Inquisition. While he exercised that power he subdued all those who resisted him, and his greatest fault, his greatest crime, was his generosity to the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian despots: having had those enemies to liberty and humanity in his power, it was a crime, an offence, in the eye of God and man, not to annihilate them, and thus secure the human race from the continuance of their arbitrary and brutal domination. ”

“ I had as much work done for my money as any man; I paid my servants well; but I did what was of much more consequence to my interest. I treated them with kindness, and addressed them as fellow-creatures and fellow-freemen; instead of doing as many did, and which is unhappily much too frequently the practice, to treat labourers and servants as if they were brutes and slaves. By these means I managed a very large business with the greatest ease imaginable. My servants looked up to me as a friend and protector; as one who was at all times ready to stand forward to shield them from any oppression ”

“ And who are these men that have been the foremost to accuse me? Some of the most degraded, swinish, and abandoned of the human race. And what has been the cause of all their hostility to me? Why, merely because I have been the undisguised and uncompromising advocate of the people's rights and liberties; because I have publicly and unequivocally, upon all occasions, maintained the right of annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and vote by ballot: in this I have been joined by the great mass of the people of England. ”

“ I had business in London, but I put it off, nay neglected it, because I would not make one of the throng of fools who flocked to grace the triumph of these tyrants, who had been so long waging war against the liberties of mankind, and who had caused the shedding of oceans of human blood, for the sole purpose of gratifying their own malignant desire, to destroy every vestige of liberty and rational freedom upon the face of the globe. ”

“ I can conscientiously say, that the mere reading in the Times newspaper the account of your cruel sufferings, my poor countrymen of Kirkeaton, has given me more pain than a years' imprisonment would have done, if I could have known that you were enjoying a fair equivalent for your honest industry. Talk of imprisonment indeed! why it is a perfect Paradise compared with the wants and privations which you are doomed to endure. The situation of a prisoner in this jail, let him be confined for any thing less than high treason or murder, is heaven upon earth compared to your lot. ”

“ If there ever lived one man more deserving the execration of the whole human race than another, Mr. Pitt was that man. He corrupted the very source of justice, by bribing and packing the pretended representatives of the people; but it required the Whigs, the base Whigs, to put a stamp upon the system which Pitt created, to make it a perpetual bar and an everlasting curse to the nation. ”

“ I do not mean to say that a man cannot alter his opinion without being dishonest; far from it; to maintain this proposition would be to deny the possibility of improvement in the human understanding. But that man is to be dreaded and avoided, who can change his principles, or desert his public duty, from private pique, or selfish, interested motives; such a man would sacrifice not only his principles, but he would sacrifice his dearest friends, nay, a whole nation, to gratify his malignant and selfish passion for revenge; such a passion springs wholly from cowardice ”

“ I have always said bolder things, and used more of what is called violent language, in public, than I ever allowed to escape from my lips in my happy privacy. In that privacy I have been in the habit of associating with friends holding different political sentiments from my own, without ever quarrelling with them, or thinking the worse of them, on that account. My safety has, I repeat, arisen from my political honesty. I have never joined in any intrigue, any cabal, any faction; I have openly and boldly contended for the natural and legitimate right of every man to enjoy political freedom ”

“ I shall never forget the serious or rather gloomy appearance of my neighbour and friend, honest John Coward, of Longstreet; his naturally long dark visage was extended to a more than usual length, and the tender pathetic way in which he took leave of Jenny at the door, as he mounted his charger, was a genuine specimen of the mock heroic. At length he entreated me not to make fun of such a momentous and solemn undertaking; then fetching a deep sigh, he said he prayed to God that it might all end well, and that no lives might be lost. ”

“ I am one of those who will never assent to the justice of taking away the life of man in cold blood, upon any other principle than that of law, and laws made, too, by universal consent. A man put to death in cold blood, deliberately executed, in pursuance of any law that is not made by common consent, that is, by the assent of the whole community, I shall always hold to be murdered; this consideration alone is quite sufficient to justify the demand for universal suffrage. ”

“ Cobbett expressed himself as follows: "Rebuke, indeed! as if it was a defeat, as if it was not a complete victory to have compelled the two factions to unite, to exert all their influence, of a public as well as of a private nature, and to come barefacedly forward against the people, against Reform, against every thing that menaced Corruption! As if this was doing nothing! As if this was a defeat! All the magistrates, all the hierarchy, all the squirarchy of the county were assembled, with some few exceptions. ”

“ I sincerely believe if a man once excites jealousy in the breast of his wife, whether well founded or not, the virus that it engenders is of such a corroding nature that it is seldom, if ever, totally eradicated. Married persons, therefore, can never be too circumspect in their conduct. Though I never offered the most distant insult, or ever took even the most innocent liberty, with this young lady, yet I admit that I was guilty of an act of gross and wanton imprudence. I was guilty of great injustice to the young lady, and of greater injustice to Mrs. Hunt ”

“ You will be much happier in so doing, than in getting into all this turmoil of politics, and exposing yourself to so much calumny, and, indeed, to the hatred of those, whose hatred is full of danger to you.' If I were to say this to him, would he not be fully justified in asking me, why I did not myself act upon the principle of my own advice? Times and circumstances create men; or, at least, they call men forth, who would otherwise have remained unknown to the end of their days; and the present are times when it is impossible for such men as Mr. Hunt to remain dormant. ”