boroughs and
apportioning their seventy-two members to the larger counties, as also
to London and Westminster. In a speech which might have been made by
Pitt in pre-Revolution times Flood declared that the events in France
showed the need of a timely repair of outworn institutions.

This was as a red rag to Windham, a prominent recruit from the Whigs,
who now used all the artifices of rhetoric to terrify his hearers. He
besought them in turn not to repair their house in the hurricane season,
not to imitate the valetudinarian of the "Spectator," who read medical
books until he discovered he had every symptom of the gout except the
pain. These fallacious similes captivated the squires; and Pitt himself
complimented the orator on his ingenious arguments. For himself, he
declared his desire of Reform to be as zealous as ever; but he "could
see no utility in any gentleman's bringing forward such a motion as the
present at that moment," and feared that the cause might thereby suffer
disgrace and lose ground. Fox, on the other hand, ridiculed all thought
of panic on account of the French Revolution, but he admitted that the
majority both in Parliament and the nation did not want Reform.
Grenville, Wilberforce, and Burke opposed the motion, while even
Duncombe declined to vote for it at present. It was accordingly
adjourned _sine die_.[22]

Disappointment at the course of these debates served to band
Nonconformists and reformers in a close alliance. Hitherto they had
alike supported Pitt and the royal prerogative, especially at the time
of the Regency struggle. In May 1789, when Pitt opposed the
Nonconformist claims, Dr. Priestley wrote that Fox would regain his
popularity with Dissenters, while Pitt would lose ground.[23] Now, when
the doors of the franchise and of civic privilege were fast barred,
resentment and indignation began to arouse the groups of the
unprivileged left outside. The news that Frenchmen had framed a
Departmental System, in which all privileges had vanished, and all men
were citizens, with equal rights in the making of laws and local
regulations, worked potently in England, furthering the growth of an
institution little known in this country, the political club. As the
Jacobins had adapted the English idea of a club to political uses, so
now the early Radicals re-adapted it to English needs. "The Manchester
Constitutional Society"[24] was founded by Walker and others in October
1790, in order to oppose