lightning, the tornado, or earthquake, in sudden, wasting or wasteful explosions. Under the leader ship or inspiration of Thomas Attwood public opinion won the greatest victory it had ever achieved without blood. Under him it was raised from an impulsive brute force to a moral power which the mightiest wrong could not resist. It was a perilous crisis for England. In almost every town or village there was the sharp crack of fiery sparks, showing how the very air the people breathed was charged with the electricity of their passionate sentiment. The approaching tempest gathered blackness, and its thunder-clouds revealed the bolts that were heating and hissing for their work of wrath and ruin. Very few thoughtful men of the nation can now doubt that the storm would have burst upon the country with all the desolation of civil war, if Thomas Attwood and the men of Birmingham had not drawn the lightning out of the impending tempest by the rod of moral force, which was grasped and wielded by his steady hand. From the central hill of the town he lifted up his revolutionary standard, with this new device: "Peace, Law, and Order!" This white flag, and not the bloody banner of brute force and brute passion which had been raised in other times, at home and abroad, to right political wrongs, was the drapeau of the Political Union, which he formed and headed
