Henry Hunt

“ Hunt, whose elocution, though bad, is not attended with any embarrassment, a token either of a clouded intellect, or of conscious finesse, spoke, in order to set himself and those who so nearly and furiously persecuted him in a clear point of view before the people assembled at the hustings, which he had a right to do, of the prisoners at Derby, of his own conduct towards them, which was most courageous and humane, and of the conduct of the party at Westminster on the same occasion, which was assuredly supine to a frightful degree, to speak in no stronger language. ”

“ Hunt has promised you to be a candidate at Bristol at every future election, as long as he has life and health, unless he should be a member when a vacancy takes place for your city. This promise ensures you an election; it secures you against being sold like dumb creatures; it secures you the exercise of your right of voting, and the right of now and then openly reproaching and loading with just maledictions any of the wretches who may betray you. To be a member for Bristol, in future, a man must stand an election of some days, at any rate; no one will be able to get in by a mere day's parade ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mills and Elton and Walker exclaim, "no! we will have none of your aid; we will die rather than be saved by you, who have broken your marriage vows!" Would they say this? No; but would crawl to him, would supplicate him, with tears in their eyes. And yet, suffer me to say, Gentlemen, that such a physician in a plague would not be more necessary in Bristol than such a man as Mr. Hunt now is; and that the family affairs of a Member of Parliament is no more a matter of concern with his constituents than are the family affairs of a physician a matter of concern with his patients. ”

“ Would it tend to make the world believe that the Government is good, and is beloved by the people? Would it tend to lessen the mass of misery that is now in existence? Would it tend to enable the Landlords and Farmers to pay the interest of the Debt? And, if it would have no such tendency, what good could arise to the Government from the producing of even undeniable proof of the existence of a Plot of any sort, however extensive?
"But, as clearly appears from all their publications, the main hope of Corruption's sons has been to trace a Plot to YOU! ”

“ I have never praised Napoleon, or at least I have never intended to eulogise him, as a friend of freedom. I have characterised him as a brave and noble-minded man; and the reason why I have been led away sometimes, perhaps, to be too general in my praises and admiration of the man is, not because he was not a tyrant himself, but because I always found him more disposed to tyrannize over mighty tyrants than he was to crush the weak and the unprotected. Possibly all mankind are by nature tyrannical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Hunt during his speech, that he himself wished he had uttered in more select phrases; but, who is there who is so very choice upon such occasions? If any one say, that he would do better to remain in Hampshire or Wiltshire, and take care of his farms, the answer is, that he is seemingly of a different opinion. He chooses to take a part in public matters. He prefers this bustle to the tranquillity of a country life. The boisterous hallooing of multitudes is more pleasing to his ears than the chinkling of the plough traces, the bleating of lambs, or the song of the nightingale. ”

“ TO THE INDEPENDENT ELECTORS OF BRISTOL. GENTLEMEN,—Before I resume the subject, upon which I addressed you in my last, give me leave to explain to you what I mean by an independent elector. I do not mean a man who has money or land enough to make him independent; for, I well know, that money and land have no such effect; as we see every day of our lives, very rich men, and men of what is called family too, amongst the meanest and most dirty dependents of the ministry or the court. Independence is in the mind ”

“ They see that I am uniting the mind with the muscle of the country; and, above all things, they see, and they tremble at, my incessant, and I hope, successful efforts, to convince the labourers and the journeymen, that they are men who have rights, and that the way to obtain those rights is to pursue a peaceable and orderly conduct. They hate every one who dwells upon the miseries of the country; for, to them, it is confusion to acknowledge that misery exists. The Courier asserted, only the other day, that there was no suffering in or near London, and abused the people for complaining! ”

“ Amiable alliance! what a disgrace to the character of Wellington! Ney was a brave soldier, and to execute such a man, under such circumstances, was the height of treachery and baseness. Talk of keeping faith, indeed! This is another proof that tyrants never keep their faith with God or man, any longer than they think it their interest to do so. My opinion is, that Ney deserted and betrayed Napoleon, after the battle of Waterloo, by not doing his duty when he returned to the French capital; but that was no excuse for the gross and cowardly violation of the terms of the capitulation of Paris. ”

“ Men who, in the nineteenth century, regardless of every personal consideration, and anxious only to perform conscientiously what they considered to be a sacred duty to their country, had the courage and the honesty to give their votes agreeable to the dictates of their hearts, in spite of the terror and threats of lawless power; in defiance of the corrupt influence of the corporation, the clergy, and the merchants of Bristol, and all the bribes that were held out to seduce them from giving me their support. Men such as these deserve to be remembered with honour. ”

“ This is the plan, the plot, the conspiracy, and the insurrection scheme! And, what an impudent, what an incorrigible, what a hardened impostor, must this writer be, who can tell the public, that this hand-bill excited much apprehension! Apprehension, I believe, indeed, in him and his associates and encouragers; for it furnishes the clue to unravel all their falsehoods and to expose them to scorn and to detestation; but, it is calculated to excite 'apprehension' in nobody else. The public indignation is fast collecting and winding up to a high pitch ”

“ We know Sir F. Burdett to be a profound politician, a real and steady friend of Liberty, and a truly great man, yet in the House of Commons he carries no more weight from his being the Representative of the great city of Westminster, than he would do if he were only the Representative of Old Sarum, or any other rotten borough. Such is the abject state to which, by their dirty intrigues, the Rump have reduced this once great and high-minded city, by the exertions of which the whole kingdom was wont to be agitated! ”

“ Great bodies of people had assembled and marched to the spot in regular order, each striving with the other which should contribute most to the respectability of the meeting by peaceable conduct; every one appeared to be animated with the greatest enthusiasm and devotion to the cause for which they had come together; that cause being solely either to petition, to address, or to remonstrate with, the throne, for a redress of insupportable grievances. ”

“ 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 shall, perhaps, be told by some who read this, that I am inconsistent to express such a horror at blood-stained tyrants, and yet take every opportunity of extolling Napoleon, who was as great a tyrant as any of those whom I condemn. To the unthinking, an explanation is certainly necessary from me; for I fully concur in the opinion that CONSISTENCY is absolutely necessary to form the character of a useful and honourable public man; that amongst the dangerous failings in a public character, inconsistency is the most dangerous. ”

“ And is he, who can find no entrance into their columns, without covering his paragraph with gold, to abstain from uttering a word against them when he comes before a public meeting, lest the people should espouse his cause and demolish their windows? Whence have they derived this privilege of assaulting him with impunity? He has no newspaper in his hands. He has no means of answering them through the press. They assail him, sitting snugly in their offices. They assail him daily. ”

“ At any rate, he has proved himself to be the man for you; he has done for you what none of the milk-sop, miawling orators at Sir Samuel Romilly's meetings would have dared even to think of. They talk of freeing the city from the trammels of corruption; they talk of giving you freedom of election; they talk of making a stand for your rights. What stand have they made? What have you had from them but talk? They saw the enemy within your walls; they saw him offer himself for the choice of the people of Bristol ”

“ The Meeting separated very quietly; never did any Meeting partake less of riotous behaviour. In the evening of the same day, a mob of boys and others attacked some bakers' and butchers' shops. But, whose fault was this? Was it Mr. Hunt's, who seems to have spent a quarter of an hour in endeavouring to convince his hearers, that to commit such acts was to prove themselves unworthy of relief; or, was it the fault of those pestiferous vehicles of falsehood, the Courier and the Times, who are incessantly inveighing against the avarice of bakers and butchers? ”

“ Only think of those impudent imposters who supported the infamous breach of national faith in the year 1797, by passing a law to protect the Bank of England from paying their notes; only think of those barefaced swindlers now whining and canting about national faith; only think of the impudence of those who, at the very moment that they are blustering about national faith, and pretending to be shocked at the bare mention of reducing what they call the national debt ”

“ If I should become a member of the House of Commons, I will leave no stone unturned, at whatever hazard to myself, to cause such investigation to take place. We were detained in separate cells, in solitary confinement, for eleven days. I was once brought privately before the worthies, and questioned, but as it would not do, as they could make nothing of me, they gave it up, and we were at last brought up in open Court, and ordered to be held to bail, for a CONSPIRACY to overturn the Government, by frightening out of their seven senses all the old women in breeches who resided at Manchester. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Do you think that the present rents are the cause of the tenants not being able to obtain a fair profit, corn being at eight shillings a bushel; or does it arise from the price of labour, the amount of poors' rates, taxes, and other expenses?—I do not myself think the rents are too high, taking them at a general average; in fact, I do not think the gentlemen of landed property can now live at the present rents with the same comforts their forefathers have done on the same estates; that if the rents are to be lowered, the gentlemen of landed property must be sunk in their scale in society. ”

“ If I am asked whether I should like to live under such a tyrant and such a tyranny as existed in France, during the latter days of Napoleon's reign, I answer NO. But if I must submit to a tyrant, let it be to one that I can look up to, and whose superior qualities I can admire, rather than to a despicable wretch, who has not one noble quality, but, on the contrary, is deserving of contempt, derision, and execration. ”

“ The Parliament was, in this case, like the shepherd boy, who so often cried "wolf," for fun to alarm the people, that when the wolf really came and attacked his flock, nobody either believed or heeded his cries. Thus it was with the Parliament; they had so repeatedly promised the people that they would make the Bank of England pay their notes, and they had so frequently broken this promise, that the people firmly believed that payments in cash would never be made. ”