He certainly began his speech with references to the general distress, but he soon drifted on to the subject of Reform, and tried to excite his audience by drawing attention to the Royal, and other Incomes. Here is a specimen of his oratory: "You have all heard of George Canning, that impudent dog, that vile, unprincipled, unmanly calumniator of the people--that miscreant, whose language failed him in applying disgraceful epithets to you: but you do not know his family; nay, I do not believe he knows his own grandfather. Yet Mother Hunn, who brought this hopeful cub into the world (without knowing who was his father), had £500 for the useful event, and her worthy daughters had also £500 each."[24] And in another part of his speech is reported to have said: "I know well the superiority of _mental_ over _physical_ force: while we have the power of exercising the _former_, we cannot be justified in resorting to the latter." This might be construed into a sort of "Don't nail his ear to the pump"--and was remembered as such on the 2nd of December. [Footnote 24: Hunt must have known he was lying, for George Canning was born in London in 1770. His family was originally of Foxcote, in Warwickshire, and one of his ancestors had emigrated to Ireland, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, as agent of a company of Londoners in the plantation of Ulster, and settled at Garvagh, in the county of Londonderry. His father, George Canning, who had been educated for the bar, to which he was called by the Society of the Middle Temple, having offended his parents by marrying a lady inferior to him both in rank and fortune, was cut off by them with a pittance of £150 per annum. Finding himself thus discarded by his family, who possessed considerable property in Ireland, he left that country, and removed with his wife to London, where, after unavailing efforts to enlarge the means of subsistence, he died broken-hearted, in a year after the birth of his son.] Well, he made his Speech, and proposed some Resolutions which were cut and dried, and moved that they be embodied in a Petition to the Regent, which was to be personally presented to him. This Motion was carried by acclamation, and it was afterwards moved that Mr. Hunt, and Sir Francis Burdett, should present it. Hunt said he never had been to Court--that he never wished to go there, and, therefore, he requested that the meeting would not send him there.