The most notable of all the insurgent publicists Place inspired and counselled, Richard Carlile, an impassable defender of a Free Press, whom pitiless power in the darkest days of its supremacy could not subdue, thus wrote of Place: "Though by circumstances (meaning those of nine years' imprisonment) separated from the immediate acquaintance of Mr. Place for several years past, I can, by experience of eighteen and the well-founded report of forty years, pronounce him a prodigy of useful, resolute, consistent political exertion and indefatigable labour, which evidently continues unabated to this day.... Francis Place, by his assistant labours and advice given to the members of the House of Commons, has produced more effect in that House than any man who was ever a member."* * See article on the "Real Nobility of the Human Character," by A. P. (i.e., Richard Carlile) in the _Monthly Magazine_, May 1835. p. 454. This testimony from one who bore the heat and burden of the day with Place, agrees with all recorded of him. Carlile wrote in 1835, and the public work Place was engaged in then he continued until his death in 1854, at which time he was chairman of the Committee for Repealing Taxes on Knowledge. The Old Postillion was on the saddle to the last. CHAPTER X. MEETING BREAKERS--LIST OF THOSE PAID FOR DOING IT The enfranchisement of the working class, for which Place worked so unceasingly, could not come--in the ordinary course of things English--until the middle class had succeeded in their contest with their feudal masters. By the possession of the vote in 1832, the middle class became a rival power to the aristocracy; and that power would be greatly augmented if the middle class should favour the extension of the franchise to the working class, as many of them were naturally inclined to do. The Tory policy then was to sow animosity between the middle and the working classes, which might prevent them acting together. Their method was to suggest that the middle class, having obtained what they wanted, cared nothing for the people, notwithstanding that Hume, Leader, Roebuck, Grote, Mill, Cobden, and Bright, were the great champions of the franchise for the people, who incurred labour, peril, and obloquy for them.