You know what a popular agitation means. It means a little reasoning and a great deal of abuse of the other side. Before 1832 the employers did not confine themselves to pointing out the absurdity of allowing a couple of cottages owned by a county aristocrat to send a member to Parliament when the city of Birmingham was not represented there. Most people thought it quite natural that great folk should have great privileges, and cared nothing about Birmingham, which they had heard of only as a dirty place where most of the bad pennies (Brummagem buttons) came from. The employers therefore stirred up public feeling against the landed gentry by exposing all their misdeeds: their driving of whole populations out of the country to make room for sheep or deer; their ruthless enforcement of the Game Laws, under which men were transported with the worst felons for poaching a few hares or pheasants; the horrible condition of the laborers’ cottages on their estates; the miserable wages they paid: their bigoted persecution of Nonconformists not only by refusing to allow any places of worship except those of the Church of England to be built on their estates, but by nominating to the Church livings such clergymen as could be depended on to teach the children in the village schools that all Dissenters were disgraced in this world and damned in the next; their equally bigoted boycotting of any shopkeeper who dared to vote against their candidates at elections; with all the other tyrannies which in those days made it a common saying, even among men of business, that “the displeasure of a lord is a sentence of death”. By harping on these grievances the employers at last embittered public opinion against the squires to such a pitch that the fear of a repetition in England of the French Revolution broke down the opposition to the Reform Bill. The employers, after propitiating King William IV by paying his debts, were able to force Parliament to pass the Bill; and that event inaugurated the purseproud reign of the English middle class under Queen Victoria.