love of Virtue and praises of Universal Benevolence. We
are impatient of abstractions and shy of capital letters. But it was no
abstraction which carried a man with honour to the fevers and
privations of Botany Bay, when he might have sought safety and fame in
Paris. The English reformers were resolved to brave the worst that Pitt
could do to them, and challenged the fate of their Scottish comrades.
They prepared in their turn to hold a "Convention" for Parliamentary
Reform, and showed a doubtful prudence in keeping its details secret
while the intention was boldly avowed. The counter-stroke came promptly.
Twelve of the leading members of the Corresponding Society, including
Hardy, Horne Tooke and Holcroft were arrested and sent, for the most
part to the Tower, on a charge of high treason. The records of their
preliminary examination before the Privy Council go to show that Pitt
and Dundas had allowed themselves to be persuaded by their spies that
every species of treason and folly was in preparation, from an armed
insurrection down to a plan to murder the King by blowing a poisoned
arrow from an air-gun. The Government had said that there was a
treasonable conspiracy; it had to produce the traitors.

There was some delay in arresting Holcroft. His conduct is worth
recording because it is so typical of the naive courage, the doctrinaire
hardihood of the group. These men whom the reaction accused of
subverting morality, were in fact dervishes of principle, who rushed on
the bayonets in the name of manhood and truth and sincerity. Godwin when
he came in his systematic treatise to describe how a free people would
conduct a defensive war, declared that it would scorn to resort to a
stratagem or an ambuscade. In the same spirit Holcroft hearing that a
warrant was out against him for high treason, walked boldly into the
Chief Justice's court, and announced that he came to be put upon his
trial "that if I am a guilty man, the whole extent of my guilt may
become notorious, and if innocent that the rectitude of my principles
and conduct may be no less public." When a messenger did, in fact, go to
Holcroft's house about the same hour to arrest him, his daughters,
obedient to the same ideal of sincerity, actually invited him to take
their father's papers.

One may doubt whether English liberties have ever run a graver danger in
modern times than at the trial of the twelve reformers. The Government
sought to overwhelm them with a