On April 12 Count Rumford passed a resolution to increase the payments of life subscribers to forty guineas and of annual subscribers to four guineas, and to elect a new class of subscribers to the lectures only, the payment being two guineas. A requisition had been drawn up and signed to call a general meeting of the proprietors to enlarge the body of managers and visitors to fifteen, and to stop the election of more proprietors. Count Rumford did not sign this requisition. The managers who signed it were Winchelsea, Morton, Pelham, Banks, Sullivan, and Hatchett. That the management of the Institution at this time was by no means harmonious is seen by a letter of Mr. Webster to his mother, and by his recollections, written some time afterwards, of the failure of the school for mechanics, of which he was to have been master. January 8, 1802. I wish I could give you a more favourable account of my situation at the Institution. I believe I told you it did not by any means answer my expectations; the men who conduct it at present cannot always be its managers, and its very system may and probably will be very much altered at some future period.... Except some change takes place in the domestic arrangements of the Institution, I do not think that I shall sleep there again; I am sorry to say that whatever good qualities the managers possess--and they are by no means deficient in them--they have shown very little attention to the comforts of those employed in it. In his recollections he says: But this project for improving mechanics, well intended as it was, which promised to be so useful, and which had already gained for the Institution ‘golden opinions,’ was doomed to be crushed by the timidity (for I shall forbear to speak more harshly) of a few. I was asked rudely (by an individual whom I shall not now name) what I meant by instructing the _lower classes_ in science. I was told likewise that it was resolved upon that the plan must be _dropped_ as _quietly as possible_. It was thought to have a dangerous political tendency, and I was told that if I persisted I would become a _marked man_! It was in vain to argue--the time was unfavourable--and I found the necessity of yielding. No notice was ever given publicly that the idea of instructing the mechanic was abandoned, and I have no doubt but that in many parts of the kingdom the Institution got the credit of great liberality long after the mechanics’ school had become extinct.