beginning to enter upon a new phase. The period was
marked by the 'Six Acts' and the 'Peterloo massacre.' The Radical
leaders who upheld the cause in those dark days were not altogether to
the taste of the Utilitarians. After Burdett, John Cartwright
(1740-1824) and Henry (or 'Orator') Hunt (1773-1835), hero of the
'Peterloo massacre,' were the most conspicuous. They were supported by
Cobbett, the greatest journalist of the time, and various more obscure
writers. The Utilitarians held them in considerable contempt. Burdett
was flashy, melodramatic, and vain; Hunt an 'unprincipled demagogue';
and Cartwright, the Nestor of reform, who had begun his labours in
1780, was, according to Place, wearisome, impracticable, and a mere
nuisance in matters of business. The Utilitarians tried to use such
men, but shared the Tory opinion of their value. They had some
relations with other obscure writers who were martyrs to the liberty
of the press. Place helped William Hone in the _Reformer's Register_,
which was brought out in 1817. The famous trial in which Hone
triumphed over Ellenborough occurred at the end of that year. Richard
Carlile (1790-1843), who reprinted Hone's pamphlets, and in 1818
published Paine's works, was sentenced in 1819 to three years'
imprisonment; and while in confinement began the _Republican_, which
appeared from 1819 to 1826. Ultimately he passed nine years in jail,
and showed unflinching courage in maintaining the liberty of speech.
The Utilitarians, as Professor Bain believes, helped him during his
imprisonments, and John Mill's first publication was a protest against
his prosecution.[21] A 'republican, an atheist, and Malthusian,' he
was specially hated by the respectable, and had in all these
capacities claims upon the sympathy of the Utilitarians. One of
Carlile's first employments was to circulate the _Black Dwarf_, edited
by Thomas Jonathan Wooler from 1817 to 1824.[22] This paper
represented Cartwright, but it also published Bentham's reform
_Catechism_, besides direct contributions and various selections from
his works.

The Utilitarians were opposed on principle to Cobbett, a reformer of a
type very different from their own; and still more vitally opposed to
Owen, who was beginning to develop his Socialist schemes. If they had
sympathy for Radicalism of the Wooler or Carlile variety, they
belonged too distinctly to the ranks of respectability, and were too
deeply impressed with the necessity of r