In view of the fervent loyalty manifested on all sides, Ministers might surely have trusted to the majority to control the restless minority. Auckland expressed the general opinion when he said that the country in the proportion of ten to one was sound and loyal.[326] As the majority was armed, while the malcontents had but small stores of pikes, there was little cause for fear, though in the minority were some desperate men. In particular, Richard Davison, a prominent member of the Sheffield Constitutional Society, recommended the clubs of London and Norwich to buy consignments of pikes in order to resist the "newly-armed minions of the bare-faced aristocracy of the present Administration"; and it afterwards appeared that he could sell them at twenty pence each.[327] This letter was sent off on 24th April, 1794, seventeen days after the holding of a mass meeting on Castle Hill, Sheffield, at which the chairman, Henry Yorke (_alias_ Redhead), declared that, when the sun of Reason shone in its fullest meridian, the people would turn out the 558 gentlemen from Westminster. The meeting resolved that, as the people ought to demand universal suffrage as a right, and not petition for it as a favour, they would never again petition the House of Commons on this subject.[328] Contemptuous epithets were now constantly hurled at Parliament. On 2nd May, that genial toper, Horne Tooke, of Wimbledon, declared at a dinner of the Constitutional Society in London that Parliament was a scoundrel sink of corruption, and that the scoundrel Opposition joined the scoundrel Government in order to destroy the rights of Englishmen. In order to add weight to his epithets he called the company to witness to his complete sobriety.[329] Pitt and his colleagues now decided to strike at the leaders who were planning a British Convention. Of these the most formidable was the Secretary of the London Corresponding Society. Accordingly, early on 12th May, some Bow Street officers made their way into Hardy's shop, No. 9, Piccadilly, arrested him, seized his papers, ransacking the room where Mrs. Hardy was in bed. The shock to her nerves was such as to bring on premature child-birth with fatal results. On the same day a royal message came to Parliament announcing that the efforts of certain Societies to summon a Convention in defiance of Parliament had led him to order the seizure of their books and papers. Those of the Corresponding and Constitutional Societies were brought, sealed up, to the House of Commons on the morrow, whereupon Pitt moved for the appointment of a secret committee to examine them. He himself, Dundas, and nineteen other members soon drew up the Report. When presented on 16th May, it contained a statement of all the threatening symptoms of the time, and so far ignored the legal efforts of those Societies as to form a very alarming diagnosis.[330]