Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/29

Rh of resistance, in refusing the arms to the royal cause, and in raising them against it. Birmingham, also, has had a little political revolution of its own, which produced a severe scrimmage between its domestic parliamentarians and royalists. 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; but in this movement it was sharply divided against itself. Two years after the taking of the Bastile, the liberals of the town assembled at a dinner party to commemorate that event or what it signified. A counter demonstration was incited by this expression of sympathy with the French cause, and it seemed to have been intensified by a religious element. In the first place a wide and deep impression had been produced upon the public mind that no one could favour that cause without sympathizing with the utter atheism and infidelity of which the French revolutionists were accused. Then there was a bitter theological odium attaching to Dr. Priestley, who was not only the most distinguished