“It appears to me, gentlemen, that we must be all of one opinion. The voice of the people is the voice of God; we must compel the Houses of Parliament to pass our Charter. We compelled them in ‘32 to pass the Reform Bill, and the same means must be used now; but if those means fail, we must follow the example of the people of Paris. We must march our tens of thousands down from Manchester, and the manufacturing towns. We must fill the galleries of the House; we must compel them to sit until they have passed it; we must awe them into submission.” “Right, Thornton,” another said. “We must render refusal out of the question; we must make them carry our wishes into effect.” “But force will be opposed to us,” one of the others remarked, doubtingly. “Then,” William Holl said, resolutely, “it must be met by force. Are we greater cowards than the working men of the other capitals of Europe? and yet in the last month or two we have seen them carry their way against Despots, with armies of ten times the force of ours to back them. Are we greater cowards than the French, who in ‘87, in ‘30, and again now, have insisted on their will being respected? The working men of London may be put down at five hundred thousand; and to oppose us, are only the handful of troops now in it; for none will be spared from other parts. Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, all the great manufacturing towns are with us, and there are not thirty thousand troops in England, and these are of ourselves. Let us always, when interrupted by the police, beat them off. When the soldiers come against us, cheer them and fraternise with them. If the worst comes to the worst, let us defy them.” There was a general sound of applause when he ceased. “But,” said the man who had before objected, “we are not in the same position the French people were; we are quite unarmed.” “You are always timid, Wilkins,” one of the others said; “and timid counsels have had their way long enough; it is the time now for action. At any rate there are paving-stones, and a good supply of paving-stones on the tops of the houses make a street nasty walking for the best soldiers in the world. Besides, there are the gunsmiths’ shops; our first move will, of course, be to possess ourselves of the contents of them, and then to take possession of the arsenal in the Tower; it is not half so strong as the Bastile was.” “Woe be to London if they try and oppose us by force,” a man at the other end of the table said. “We shall only have to call for our friend Turner’s lambs; and it will take more troops than London can bring to keep down St. Giles’s and Westminster.” The man to whom he alluded was a powerful man, with a ruddy face, a low forehead, overhanging eyebrows, and a coarse sensual mouth; he was a butcher of Clare Market, and might have been well drawn for his prototype the famous butcher Lepelletier, the leader of the faubourgs of the French Revolution. He smiled significantly.