The mounted militia was sent to disperse a meeting of fifty thousand unarmed men and women at Manchester, on August 16, 1819, in behalf of parliamentary reform. The people were packed together so closely that they were unable to separate quickly. Fear that some of the young gentlemen who had ridden into the throng might get hurt led the magistrates to order several hundred hussars to charge, without notice, into the dense crowd. The meeting was soon reduced to heaps of fallen men and women, who had been overthrown in the general struggle to escape or cut down by the soldiers; and the field was covered with bloody hats, shawls, and bonnets. Six people were killed, and more than thirty others wounded severely. There was indignation everywhere against this wanton cruelty; and the Common Council of London voted their censure; but Parliament passed laws that same year which made public meetings almost impossible, and put cheap pamphlets under a prohibitory tax, by requiring that they must have such an expensive stamp as kept newspapers beyond the reach of people generally. Arrests for printing and selling unstamped publications were thenceforward frequent. There were many bloody riots; and a conspiracy for assassinating the Ministry was organised in 1820. A dangerous revolution might then have broken out, if food had not been made plenty by abundant harvests. Roman Catholics were still forbidden to hold any office under the British Government. They could not sit in either House of Parliament, or be married legally in Ireland, where they formed four-fifths of the population, and almost all the offices on that island were filled by Protestants who had been sent over from England, or else elected by close corporations containing scarcely any Catholics. The disfranchised nation was all the more indignant on account of such facts as that two-thirds of the soil of Ireland had been taken away without compensation by English invaders before 1700, and that the share of the Irish in 1800 was only one-tenth. This was held mostly in great estates, as was the rest of the island. Rents were everywhere high and wages low, for population was superabundant; manufactures had been crushed by laws to protect British interests; the people were left ignorant, even of agriculture; and there were frequent famines. Both the land and the government were mismanaged by an anti-Irish minority which took little pains to keep its own partisans from lawless violence, but did its utmost to extort money for a legion of priests, who were merely servants of oppression to nine-tenths of the people. How little they cared about their professed duty may be judged from the case mentioned by a traveller named Inglis (vol. i., p. 349), of a bishop who drew four or five hundred pounds a year for calling himself rector of a parish where there was no pretence of any public worship but the Catholic. Indignation of Irish Presbyterians had been one main cause of the bloody