The Corresponding Society drew the bulk of its members from tradesmen, mechanics and shopkeepers, who contributed their penny a week, and organised itself under Hardy's methodical guidance into numerous branches each with twenty members. It is said to have counted in the end some 30,000 members in London alone. It was a focus of discontent and hope which soon attracted men of more conspicuous talents and wider experience. Horne Tooke, man about town, ex-clergyman, and philologist, who had been at first the friend and lieutenant and then the rival and enemy of Wilkes, was there to bridge the years between the last great popular agitation and the new hopes of reform. He was a man cautious and even timid in action, but there was a vanity in him which led him to say "hanging matters" when he had an inflammable audience in front of him within the four walls of a room. There was Tom Paine, the man who had first dared to propose the independence of the United States, a veteran of revolution who had served on Washington's staff, penned those brilliant exhortations which led the American rebels to victory, and acted as Foreign Secretary to the insurgent Congress. On the fringes of the little inner circle of intellectuals one catches a glimpse of William Blake the poet, and Ritson, the first teacher and theorist of vegetarianism. Not the least interesting member of the group was Thomas Holcroft, the inseparable friend and ally of William Godwin. Holcroft's vivid and masterful personality stands out indeed as the most attractive among the abler members of the circle. The son of a boot-maker, he had earned his bread as cobbler, ostler, village schoolmaster, strolling player and reporter. His insatiable passion for knowledge had given him a mastery of French and German. He went in 1783 to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald, on the modest salary of a guinea-and-a-half a week. It was there that he acquired his familiarity with the writings of the French political philosophers, and performed the quaint achievement of pirating Figaro for the English stage. No printed copy was obtainable, and Holcroft contrived to commit the whole play to memory by attending ten performances, much as Mozart had pirated the ancient exclusive music of St. Peter's in Rome. He was at this period a thriving literary craftsman, and the author of a series of popular plays in which the critics of the time had just begun to note and resent an obtrusive democratic tendency.
Under the influence of these eager speculative spirits, the Corresponding Society must have travelled far from its original business of Parliamentary Reform. Here is an extract from evidence given before the Privy Council, which relates the proceedings at one of its later meetings:
"The most gentlemanlike person took the chair and talked about an equal representation of the people, and of putting an end to war. Holcroft talked about the Powers of the Human Mind.... Mr. Holcroft talked a great deal about Peace, of his being against any violent or coercive means, that were usually resorted to against our fellow-creatures, urged the more powerful operation of Philosophy and Reason to convince man of his errors; that he would disarm his greatest enemy by these means and oppose his Fury. He spoke also about Truth being powerful, and gave advice to the above effect to the delegates present who all seemed to agree, as no person opposed his arguments."
One may doubt, however, whether the whole society was composed of "natural Quakers," who, like Holcroft and Godwin, preached non-resistance before Tolstoy. The dour commonsense of Hardy maintained the theory—he vowed that it was only theory—that every citizen should possess arms and know their use. As the Revolution went forward in France, the agitation in England became increasingly reckless. When the society held its anniversary dinner after the Terror, in May, 1794, at the "Crown and Anchor" Tavern, the band played "Ça ira," the "Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise." The chief toasts were "the Rights of Man," and "the Armies contending for Liberty," which was a sufficiently clear phrase for describing the Republican armies that were at war with England. There followed an ode composed by Sir William Jones, a translation of the Athenian song which celebrated the deeds of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton;
Verdant myrtle's branchy pride
Shall my thirsty blade entwine.
One may doubt whether Sir William Jones ever felt the smallest inclination to satisfy the thirst of his blade, but there was provision enough for more commonplace appetites. Two years before, Hardy's worthy mechanics had supped on porter and cheese and talked of the hardness of the times. Their movement had been captured by a group of eager, sophisticated, literary persons, who went much farther than Parliamentary Reform, and with the aid of claret and the subtler French intoxicants, "turned indignant" as another Ode puts it:
From Kings who seek in Gothic night
To hide the blaze of moral light.
Fill high the animating glass
And let the electric ruby pass.
It was a cheerful indignation, a festive rage.
That dinner must have marked the height of the revolutionary tide in England. The reaction was already rampant and vindictive, and before the year 1794 was out it had crushed the progressive movement and postponed for thirty-eight years the triumph of Parliamentary Reform. It requires a strenuous exercise of the imagination to conceive the panic which swept over England as the news of the French Terror circulated. It fastened impartially on every class of the community, and destroyed the emotional balance no less of Pitt and his colleagues than of the working men who formed the Church and King mobs. Proclamations were issued to quell insurrections which never had been planned, and the militia called out when not a hand had been raised against the King throughout Great Britain. So great was the fear, so deep the moral indignation that "even respectable and honest men," (the phrase is Holcroft's) "turned spies and informers on their friends from a sense of public duty." A mob burned Dr. Priestley's house near Birmingham for no better reason than because he was supposed to have attended a Reform dinner, which in fact, he did not attend. Hardy's bookshop in Piccadilly was rushed by a mob, and his wife, about to be confined, was injured in her efforts to escape, and died a few hours afterwards. A hunt went on all over the kingdom for booksellers and printers to prosecute, and when Thomas Paine was prosecuted in his absence for publishing The Rights of Man, the jury was so determined to find him guilty that they would not trouble to hear the case for the Crown.
Twenty years before, the French philosopher Helvétius, after an experience of Jesuit persecution and Court disfavour in France, made a quaint proposal for re-organising the whole discussion of moral and political questions. The first step, he thought, was to compile a dictionary in which all the terms required in such debates would receive an authoritative definition. But this dictionary, he urged, must be composed in the English language, and published first in England, for only there was discussion free, and the press unfettered. In the reaction over which Pitt and Dundas presided, that envied liberty was totally eclipsed. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended; the Privy Council sat as a sort of Star Chamber to question political suspects, and there was even talk of importing Hessian and Hanoverian mercenaries to check an insurrection which nowhere showed its head. The frailest of all human endowments is the sense of humour. The sense of proportion had been eclipsed in the panic, and most of the cases which may be studied to-day in the State trials impress the modern reader as tasteless and cruel farces. Men were tried and sentenced never for deeds, but always for words. For a sermon closely resembling Dr. Price's, a dissenting minister named Winterbotham was tried at Exeter, and sentenced to four years' imprisonment and a fine of £200. The attorney, John Frost, returning from France, admitted in a chance conversation in a coffee-house that he thought society could manage very well without kings; he was imprisoned, set in the pillory and struck off the rolls. One favourite expedient was to produce a spy who would swear that he had heard some suspect Radical declare in a coach or a coffee-house, that he would "as soon have the King's head off as he would tear a bit of paper" (evidence against a group of Manchester prisoners), or that he "would cut off the King's head as easily as he would shave himself" (case against Thomas Hardy). The climax of really entertaining absurdity was reached when two debtors imprisoned in the Fleet were tried and sentenced for nailing a seditious libel to its doors. The libel was a notice that "This house is to let," that "infamous bastilles are no longer necessary in Europe," and that "peaceable possession" would be secured "on or before the first day of January, 1793, being the commencement of the first year of liberty in Great Britain."