“After the riots in Birmingham it was the expectation, and evidently the wish of many persons, that I should immediately fly to France or America. But I had no consciousness of guilt to induce me to fly from my country. On the contrary, I came directly to London, and instantly, by means of my friend, Mr Russell, signified to the King’s ministers that I _was_ there and ready, if they thought proper, to be interrogated on the subject of the riots. “Ill-treated as I thought I had been, not merely by the populace of Birmingham, for they were the mere tools of their superiors, but by the country in general, which evidently exulted in our sufferings, and afterwards by the representatives of the nation, who refused to inquire into the cause of them, I own I was not without deliberating upon the subject of emigration; and several flattering proposals were made to me, especially from France, which was then at peace within itself and with all the world; and I was at one time much inclined to go thither, on account of its nearness to England, the agreeableness of its climate, and my having many friends there. “But I likewise considered that if I went thither I should have no employment of the kind to which I had been accustomed; and the season of active life not being, according to the course of nature, quite over, I wished to make as much use of it as I could. I therefore determined to continue in England, exposed as I was not only to unbounded obloquy and insult, but to every kind of outrage; and after my invitation to succeed my friend Dr Price I had no hesitation about it....” He then goes on to show how insecure his position was, and how impossible it was to follow his avocations in peace, in face of the odium and insult he continually met with:— “These facts not only show how general was the idea of my particular insecurity in this country, but what is of much more consequence, and highly interesting to the country at large, an idea of the general disposition to rioting and violence that prevails in it, and that the Dissenters are the objects of it. Mr Pitt very justly observed, in his speech on the subject of the riots at Birmingham, that it was ‘the effervescence of the public mind.’ Indeed, the effervescible matter has existed in this country ever since the civil wars in the time of Charles I., and it was particularly apparent in the reign of Queen Anne. But the power of Government under the former princes of the House of Hanover prevented its doing any mischief. The late events show that this power is no longer exerted as it used to be, but that on the contrary there prevails an idea, well or ill founded, that tumultuary proceedings against Dissenters will not receive any effectual discouragement.