Street to this
place the moment the council was up and tell us everything."

"Ah! those were the good old gentleman-like times," said Mr Berners,
"when members of Parliament had nobody to please and ministers of State
nothing to do."

The riots of Birmingham occurred two months after the events that closed
our last volume. That period, as far as the obvious movements of the
chartists were concerned, had been passed in preparations for the
presentation and discussion of the National Petition, which the
parliamentary embroilments of the spring of that year had hitherto
procrastinated and prevented. The petition was ultimately carried down
to Westminster on a triumphal car accompanied by all the delegates of
the Convention in solemn procession. It was necessary to construct a
machine in order to introduce the huge bulk of parchment signed by
a million and a half of persons, into the House of Commons, and thus
supported, its vast form remained on the floor of the House during the
discussion. The House after a debate which was not deemed by the people
commensurate with the importance of the occasion, decided on rejecting
the prayer of the Petition, and from that moment the party in the
Convention who advocated a recourse to physical force in order to obtain
their purpose, was in the ascendant. The National Petition and the
belief that although its objects would not at present be obtained, still
that a solemn and prolonged debate on its prayer would at least hold out
to the working classes the hope that their rights might from that date
rank among the acknowledged subjects of parliamentary discussion and
ultimately by the force of discussion be recognized, as other rights of
other portions of the people once equally disputed, had been the means
by which the party in the Convention who upheld on all occasions
the supremacy of moral power had been able to curb the energetic and
reckless minority, who derided from the first all other methods but
terror and violence as effective of their end. The hopes of all,
the vanity of many, were frustrated and shocked by finding that the
exertions and expenditure of long months were not only fruitless,
but had not even attracted as numerous an assembly or excited as
much interest, as an ordinary party struggle on some petty point of
factitious interest forgotten as soon as fought. The attention of the
working classes was especially called by their leaders to the contrast
between the inte