Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/33

Rh fists to the story of their political wrongs, till they looked like an army massed for battle. But the small hand of one of their fellow-townsmen waving above the surging host, with the other "grasping the banner of strange device"—"Peace, Law, and Order"—curbed and kept down the brute force of the mighty sentiment, and held the people back from violence. The white folds of that unstained flag, as it waved over Constitution Hill, seemed to shed outward on the breeze an influence that reached and moved and moulded the common mind of the nation. The motto and motive principles of the Birmingham banner of reform were not happy-worded theories which were easy to utter and as costless to practise. 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; and some of them two apiece. There were boroughs possessing thirty seats in the House of Commons whose