This harrowing event was the last of the painful incidents of that fatal day coming within the scope of this history, which isolated as they are, the writer knows to be true, even though they may not be chronicled elsewhere. The streets grew silent and deserted, save by the military and medical men, as the day and the night advanced: but within the houses of poor and rich there were loud complaints and groans, and murmurings, which did not sink to silence with the day that called them forth. The town was, as it were, in a state of siege: and men of business, whether Tories or Radicals, alike felt the stoppage of trade and commerce in their pockets, whether they felt the cruelty and injustice to the injured in their hearts or not. But chiefly those who had friends wounded by design or accident in the _melee_ were loud in their denunciation of the whole proceedings; and of these neither Mr. Chadwick nor Mr. Ashton was the least prominent, even though the one was paralysed, and they were of contrary shades of politics, the former being what he himself called “a staunch and true out-and-out Tory,” the latter having a leaning towards Liberal—not to say Radical—opinions, and at county elections voting with the Whigs. The stiff “Church and King” man, whose sons had distinguished themselves in the Army and Navy, and whose son-in-law, Walmsley, might also be said to have distinguished himself in the loyal Manchester Yeomanry—he who had been a member of John Shaw’s Club in the Market Place, and called for his P or his Q bowl of punch even before the aroma of Jacobinism ceased to flavour the delectable compound, and while yet John Shaw himself lived to draw his silver spoon from its particular pocket to concoct the same, and (inexorable autocrat that he was) could crack his whip in his poky bar-parlour in the ears of even noble customers who lingered after his imperative “Eight o’clock gentlemen; eight o’clock!” or summon his sturdy factotum, Molly, with mop and pail, to drive thence with wetted feet those whom the whip had failed to influence—he who had stuck to the club even after John Shaw, Molly, and the punch-house itself had gone to the dust—he, Charles Chadwick, whose Toryism had grown with his growth, was foremost in condemning the proceedings of Peterloo.