Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/34

20 whole population put together did not equal that of Birmingham. And, what aggravated this disparity, many of these were "pocket boroughs," and the pockets that held them belonged to peers of the realm, who had and exercised the right to do what they would with their own. Thus, the House of Commons was at the risk if not in the condition of being a mere apanage to the House of Lords, and the creature and agent of its will and interest.

These were some of the political wrongs which Thomas Attwood and other orators of the Birmingham Political Union put in fervid and graphic exposition before the swaying, heaving masses of the town and district; thousands of them being the sons of the rioters of 1791, who burned out Priestley and mobbed the liberals for their sympathy with the French revolutionists. It is said that at some of these monster gatherings of strong-willed and strong-handed men, with fierce faces begrimed with the grease and coal-dust of their factories, forges, and mines. Attwood's face would pale at the thought of the deluge that would follow the outburst of all that brute power, should it break the holding of his hand and trample upon his banner of new device—"Peace, Law, and Order." But it held them fast to the end. Even when the town elected two members and sent them to Parliament without a license from the