Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/132

 Ii8 History of the Radical Party in Parliament. [1815- the public burdens, or increasing the public liberties. It is from this time, therefore, that we date the commencement of the long and earnest agitation, both in and out of Parliament, on behalf of Parliamentary reform.* For a long time the outside agitation was the more active, and in some respects the more important, since it marked the growth of opinion in the nation which at length swept away all opposition. The direct history of this rise and progress of what became known as the Radical movement in the country is not within the scope of our present inquiries, but the manner in which it acted upon Parliament, the sympathy and the antagonism which it aroused, had great and permanent effects upon the relations of political parties, and especially drew with great clearness the line dividing the Radical from the Whig section of Liberals. The distinction began now to be for the first time formally recognized, and men had to find a name by which the new fact could be described. The " middle way of steering " characteristic of the Whig proper was never more manifest than during the ten years which followed the close of the great war. The Tories in Parliament, the ministers and their followers, knew exactly how they meant to treat the demand which began to be made for constitutional reform. Repression, com- plete and thorough, was the method they adopted. National discontent was to them not a symptom indicating a disease in the body politic calling for a remedy ; it was itself a disease to be eradicated only by the knife. Freedom of political action was entirely denied ; freedom of speech was restrained within the narrowest limits ; freedom of thought was as far as pos- sible suppressed. The remedy was speedily applied when any popular political activity was displayed. In 1816 Cartwright, Cobbett, Hunt, and others, were carrying on an agitation for evoked in the British Parliament. . . . But the ' Worthy Pioneer ' got above ground in 1816, and when he was fairly loosened to the open sky, he was not quite so tame and innocent and stupid a spirit as his ordinary supporters and his systematic revilers had been in the habit of believing him to be." Martineau's " History of the Thirty Years' Peace," vol. i. pp. 46, 47.
 * " Up to the close of 1816, the spirit of Parliamentary reform was seldom