Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford, leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order. The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution: a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their guard. “Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near at call. In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St. Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily secured; but tact is not a common possession. [Sidenote: _PETERLOO_]