'On December 6th I spoke at Birmingham Town Hall, and Chamberlain, who was Mayor, and who was my host, had the whole borough police force present or in reserve, and had every interrupter (and there were several hundred) carried out singly by two policemen, with a Conservative Chief of Police to direct them, after which I delivered an extremely humdrum speech to a very dull assembly. [Footnote: He spoke on the House of Lords.] Chamberlain was more lively, and made a speech in ridicule of Second Chambers, in which I still (1895) agree. On the other hand, in Chelsea we carried the war into the enemy's camp. The "loyal inhabitants" tried to hold a meeting at the Vestry Hall to censure me, on which occasion no article or piece of furniture larger than a match was left in existence in the room, and the meeting concluded with a vote of confidence in me, carried in the dark after the gas had been put out. The second attempt was made outside the borough, at the Duke of Wellington's Riding School at Knightsbridge, but the result was the same. Although the meeting was a ticket meeting, the hall was stormed, and the loyal address to the Queen captured and carried off in triumph by my friends. It is still (May, 1905) at the Eleusis Club--the centre for the Radical working men in Chelsea.' Hostility concentrated on Sir Charles because the courage and cogency with which he expounded views shared by many men of standing, and men far senior to himself at this time, marked him out for the public as the leader: 'Fawcett had taken a far more active republican line, as had Chamberlain, and both of them had joined republican clubs in towns, while Fawcett had himself founded one in the University of Cambridge, which had but a short existence. I had refused to join these clubs, and to work in any way in connection with republican propaganda, but it was difficult to get people to understand my position, and the perfect legality of holding republican opinions was even denied by many, while the wisdom of expressing them was denied by almost all. Some thought that I was of opinion that an immense amount of revolutionary feeling existed in the country, and that I wished to lead a storm to my own profit. Some thought that I was sorry I had said what I did.