The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into disuse. But the panic soon passed away for sheer want of material to feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason, their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which lay before it. But though the public terror passed, it left a terrible legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which threatened change to an existing institution, beneficial though the change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of revolution.