“Of all the features which mark the political character of the English nation the most striking and remarkable is a perpetual jealousy of prerogative.... Ask an Englishman what sort of Judge, Crown Lawyer, or Minister, he most dreads: his uniform answer is a _prerogative_ Judge, a _prerogative_ Lawyer, a _prerogative_ Minister. Is then a _prerogative_ King of so little danger to us that we are all at once to forget these jealousies, which seem to have been twisted with our existence, and to fall into a miraculous fondness for that prerogative which our ancestors have shed their dearest blood to check and limit? Let the people of England once confederate with the Crown and the Lords in _such_ a conflict, and who is the man that will answer for one hour of legal liberty afterwards? “Can the people confide in His Majesty’s secret advisers? I say NO. And I demand one instance, in the twenty-three years of this wretched reign, when a regard to the liberty of the people can be traced in any measure to the _secret system_.” This document, which went on in a similar strain to a great length, was handed about from house to house; no doubt a copy was given to the King. A general meeting of all the electors was called on March 14, in Westminster Hall. This assemblage proved everything that could be desired; the hall was completely packed with an uproarious mob, chiefly on the King’s side; the hustings were made a battlefield for the possession of the chair, which was pulled to pieces in the struggle; then the hustings broke down, and a good many on either side were trampled upon and injured. Nobody could be heard; when it was understood that the meeting was asked to express an opinion on the Address to the King, nearly all the [Illustration: THE ENTRANCE TO SPEAKER’S YARD AS IT APPEARED BEFORE THE FIRE.] hands went up. Fox tried to speak; a bag of asafetida was thrown in his face; his friends carried him out on their shoulders; finally he addressed the crowd from the bow-window of the King’s Head Tavern, in Palace Yard. After the speech they took the horses from his carriage and dragged him all the way to Devonshire House, in Piccadilly, with shouts and cheers. A so-called report of the meeting was then drawn up by Fox’s friends, stating that the chair had been taken by Fox and that a new Address to the King had been unanimously adopted. At the outset, therefore, neither side was in the least degree desirous to present the bald, bare, cold, unsatisfying truth. On March 19 the Friends of Liberty held a great banquet at Willis’s Rooms. They numbered five hundred; the dinner was fixed for half-past five, but such was the ardor of the company, so great their determination to do justice to the feast, that they began to assemble at half-past three.