and sending out commanders whose movements
itself managed to cripple. The Yorkshire
clothiers—indeed, nearly all the men in the
manufacturing districts—petitioned for peace,
in which the "Mercury" supported them.
Time and events strengthened their case. As
the war lasted, the distress in the country
grew worse. In 1812, soon after the assassination
of Mr. Percival, there were riots in
Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, caused by
the introduction of machinery. Fourteen
rioters were hanged by a paternal government
at York, in January, 1813. A bill was
passed, enabling the magistrates to search for
arms, and disperse tumultuous assemblages.
Debt and distress accumulated. Mr. Baines
did whatever it was in the power of a
journalist to do, by decently representing the
wrongs of these matters through his columns;
and by putting up with the abuse, misrepresentation
and angry hubbub which greeted
him from his opponents, like a philosopher.
When the late Lord Sidmouth brought
forward a bill for "placing restrictions on the
preaching of Dissenting ministers," our sensible
and active friend took the field at once.
What! prevent people from teaching those
who believe in them? This was a sort of
blasphemy against common sense at which he
might well be indignant. The bill took itself
in again. On the other side, even-handed, Mr.
Baines duly snubbed those Dissenters who
refused Roman Catholics the same freedom for
themselves. In all these things, he acted
like a keen, honest man; and, plainly, it was
because the Truth lay behind all he did that
he gained general respect, a good hearing and
an ultimate triumph.

Napoleon, having broken from Elba in the
astonishing manner known to mankind, was
finally flung into St. Helena, once for all; and
the great wars ended in not only checking him,
but in putting down the French Revolution,
and (as the Tories fancied) the European
movement party generally. England was left
with illuminated cities and financial distress.
The landed interest got a Corn Law put on,
amidst general rioting. Mr. Baines was its
opponent from the first, and lived to see it
repealed.

About this time Edward Baines found
another way of exercising his personal
influence; he took to the platform. He attended
all the great Leeds meetings against the
Income Tax; all those in favour of religious
liberty: always the same clear, energetic
specimen of the middle class. Reform and
Economy were Mr. Baines's objects. We do
not find him rising into any high flights of
inspired indignation at abuses; what he
hated in them was their absurdity. His
career was a perpetual admonition to Governments
to be reasonable. "Sense, gentlemen;
for mercy's sake, a little sense!" In 1817
he was working away at the Parliamentary
Reform movement. They called the old
system a representation; when little
two-penny villages—where the very highway was
overgrown with grass and weeds—returned
members, while large towns, containing the
very bones and blood of the country, had no
members at all. Mr. Baines held forth that
year, once, during a snow-storm; and, it seems
the innocent, solid man was openly stigmatised
as a traitor. We find this about the
only time that he was stung into expressions
of indignation; it simmered, however, rather
than boiled over, in two or three far from
violent "leaders" in the "Leeds Mercury."

It cannot be denied that tilings were looking
very bad in the country then. Mr. Henry
Hunt, an orator of the inflammable kind, was
blazing like a furnace, first in one place and
then in another. Toryism, of course,
attributed everything that was wrong to the cry
for Reform. Accordingly, information was
sent to Ministers, in a notorious "green
bag," of conspiracies in various parts of the
kingdom: secret committees of both Houses
were held, and the Habeas Corpus Act was
suspended. The Spy System was in full force.
Obscure scoundrels, in the employ of Government,
instigated poor people to mischief. Mr.
Baines, through the "Mercury," vas one of
those who most completely exposed this
infamous organisation, and courageously
denounced its tools by name.

For the next year or two he went on
chiefly occupied with civic matters, aiding
public baths, literary societies, and savings
banks. The year 1819 brought distress with
it again; distress brought Henry Hunt, and
Petre, a tailor, who had exchanged the
shopboard for the "stump." There were, moreover,
loud cries for radical reform. Mr. Baines
helped to keep some moderation in the matter.
This year produced the well-known Peterloo
Massacre, of infamous memory. Seventy or
eighty thousand persons were assembled in
St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, to petition for
Parliamentary Reform. Hunt was addressing
them, when the magistrates ordered the
yeomanry to take him into custody. Into
all that helpless crowd of working men,
assembled there with their wives and families
to utter honest complaints, broke an armed
inflamed amateur soldiery sabre in hand,
slaying wherever slaying was easiest. Several
of the multitude were killed—hundreds were
gashed and gored, and the crowd was
scattered. So far from the acred bumpkins
who dictated this murder getting any punishment,
they received the thanks of the Prince
Regent. The great Whig gentry of Yorkshire
met to petition for an inquiry and for
assisting in that object, Earl Fitzwilliam was
dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of the
West Riding.

George the Fourth ascended the throne,
in 1820, and diverted attention from the
odium of the laws against liberty known as
the Six Acts, by diverting it to his royal
person, by his celebrated Bill of Pains and
Penalties against Queen Caroline. Here,