the alarmists.
But members generally were of his opinion. In vain did Fox, Erskine,
Grey, and Sheridan deprecate the attempt to confuse moderate Reform with
reckless innovation. Burke illogically but effectively dragged in the
French spectre, and Windham declared that the public mind here, as in
other lands, was in such a state that the slightest scratch might
produce a mortal wound.

The gulf between Pitt and the reformers now became impassable. His
speech of 10th May against any relaxation of the penal laws against
Unitarians is a curious blend of bigotry and panic. Eleven days later a
stringent proclamation was issued against all who wrote, printed, and
dispersed "divers wicked and seditious writings." It ordered all
magistrates to search out the authors and abettors of them, and to take
steps for preventing disorder. It also inculcated "a due submission to
the laws, and a just confidence in the integrity and wisdom of
Parliament." Anything less calculated to beget such a confidence than
this proclamation, threatening alike to reformers and levellers, can
scarcely be conceived. On 25th May Grey opposed it in an acrid speech;
he inveighed against Pitt as an apostate, who never kept his word, and
always intended to delude Parliament and people. The sting of the speech
lay, not in these reckless charges, but in the citing of Pitt's opinions
as expressed in a resolution passed at the Thatched House Tavern in May
1782, which declared that without Parliamentary Reform neither the
liberty of the nation nor the permanence of a virtuous administration
was secure. Pitt's reply, however, convinced all those whose minds were
open to conviction. He proved to demonstration that he had never
approved of universal suffrage; yet that was now the goal aimed at by
Paine and the Societies founded on the basis of the Rights of Man. The
speech of Dundas also showed that the writings of Paine, and the
founding of clubs with those ends in view, had led to the present action
of the Cabinet.

Undoubtedly those clubs had behaved in a provocative manner. Apart from
their correspondence with the Jacobins Club (which will be described
later), they advocated aims which then seemed utterly subversive of
order. Thus, early in May 1792, the Sheffield Society declared their
object to be "a radical Reform of the country, as soon as prudence and
discretion would permit, and established on that system which is
consistent with the Rights of Man." Furth