All the machinery of repression was put to work. Books were written against the Revolution, and paid for by pensions drawn from the common treasury. Sermons were preached against the Revolution, and paid for in salaries drawn from the State funds. Parliament was set in motion to enact rigorously oppressive laws, and courts were set in motion to enforce the statutes. The political system in England might be ever so bad, but the people should not discuss it. Public meetings became criminal; public reading rooms, unlicensed, were criminal. By the plain letter of the law of Christian England, if any citizen opened his house or room “for the purpose of reading books, or pamphlets, or newspapers,” such citizen became a criminal and such house “a disorderly house.” Before the citizen could permit others to use his books for pay, he must secure the approval and the license of bigoted Tory officials. No public meeting at all could be held unless a notice of such meeting signed by a householder, and stating the object of the meeting, should be inserted in a newspaper at least five days previous to the meeting. And even then the Tory justice of the peace was empowered to break up the meeting and imprison the persons attending it, if he thought the language held by the speaker of the meeting was calculated to bring the King or the government into contempt. Not even in the open fields could any lecture, speech, or debate be had without a license from a Tory official. The government spy, the paid informer, went abroad, searching, listening, reporting, persecuting, and prosecuting. No privacy was sacred, no individual rights were respected, terrorism became a system. Paine’s _Rights of Man_ threw the upper classes into convulsions; his _Common Sense_ became a hideous nightmare. Men were arrested like felons, tried like felons, punished like felons for reading pamphlets and books which are now such commonplace exponents of democracy that they are well-nigh forgotten. It was a time of misrule, of class legislation, of misery among the masses. It was a time when the laborer had almost no rights, almost no opportunities, almost no inducement to live, beyond the animal instinct which preserves the brute. It was a time when the landlord was almost absolute master of land and man; when the nobleman controlled the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. It was a time when a duke might send half a dozen of his retainers to take seats in Parliament, or when he might advertise the seats for sale and knock them down to the highest bidder. It was a time when a close corporation of hereditary aristocrats controlled England like a private estate, taxed her people, dictated her laws, ruled her domestic and foreign policies, and made war or peace according to their own good pleasure. It was a time when it might have been said of most English towns as the town-crier reported to his Tory masters in reference to the village of Bolton--that he had diligently