Elihu Burritt

“ These were some of the political wrongs which Thomas Attwood and other orators of the Birmingham Political Union put in fervid and graphic exposition before the swaying, heaving masses of the town and district; thousands of them being the sons of the rioters of 1791, who burned out Priestley and mobbed the liberals for their sympathy with the French revolutionists. It is said that at some of these monster gatherings of strong-willed and strong-handed men, with fierce faces begrimed with the grease and coal-dust of their factories, forges, and mines. ”

“ There were boroughs possessing thirty seats in the House of Commons whose whole population put together did not equal that of Birmingham. And, what aggravated this disparity, many of these were "pocket boroughs," and the pockets that held them belonged to peers of the realm, who had and exercised the right to do what they would with their own. Thus, the House of Commons was at the risk if not in the condition of being a mere apanage to the House of Lords, and the creature and agent of its will and interest. ”

“ It is computed that full 100,000 men—and three-fourths of them stalwart men of the hammer and pick, spade and file—were numbered in some of these outdoor meetings, who were swayed with indignant emotion, and listened with wrathful eyes and clenched fists to the story of their political wrongs, till they looked like an army massed for battle. ”

“ Law, and Order," no other flag has been reared, and no other force than it represented has been contemplated by any party or part of the English people with a view to political or social change. The ends for which the Political Union, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Anti-Corn-Law League laboured, and the triumphs they won, were of immeasurable value in themselves; but the educational means they employed in enlightening the mind of the masses, in teaching them to think, reflect, compare, and observe for themselves, produced results of equal importance. ”

“ At that time the town numbered full 100,000 inhabitants, and no population of equal census in the kingdom was more intelligent and vigorous-minded. Their mechanical industries and occupations, involving and exercising so much science, thought, and skill, tended to quicken and expand the political conceptions and sensibilities of the artisans. No town in the realm could have felt more keenly the aggravated disparities to which it was subjected. Small villages, and even hamlets, in the south and west of England, had each its member of Parliament ”

“ Ill-natured persons of a suspicious turn of mind, might infer or expect that the people of Birmingham would delight in foul weather and ill winds to other communities, and would cry with Ephesian zeal at the prospect of war—"Great is Mars!" ”

“ It erected public opinion into a mighty power and enginery for the public good; a power ever ready to be worked against any evil that legislation could remove, or the enlightened mind and conscience of the people could abolish by moral action. It was worked to a glorious victory against slavery in the British West Indies, and to an illustrious triumph at home against the Corn Laws. From the time, to use the old threadworn figure, that "victory perched upon the standard" of the Birmingham Political Union, "Peace. ”

“ Birmingham, in its mechanical industries and productions, has followed the fashions and customs of the world very closely, and supplied every art and occupation with all the working tools and appliances it needed. ”

“ At the time of the great upturning in France," politics ran high," as they say, in England. It stirred the fountains of public sentiment to the very bottom, lees and all. Had not the drops of blood that dripped from the severed neck of Marie Antoinette drowned more than half the fire of English popular enthusiasm in behalf of the French revolutionists. Napoleon and Wellington might never have fought at Waterloo. Birmingham was just the town to be moved intensely by the great ground swell of the French revolution ”

“ If they had burst forth into violence under the pressure, and had been followed by thousands in other towns, the powerful and determined opponents of reform, who had all the military resources of the nation at their command, would have been able and willing to crush the movement by sword, bomb, and bayonet. ”

“ Since his day, the one street "a quarter of a mile long," has threaded out into streets that count up an aggregate mileage of about 100 miles in length, while the number of dwelling houses increases at the rate of 4,000 per annum; and it is probable every month adds to the population a greater number of inhabitants than the town contained in 1538. ”