The tavern instantly erupted with excited shouts:
"Mr. Baxter is right! Hang those corrupt officials!"
"We need true freedom..."
"Give the people back the right to survive!"
"Lower the damned price of sugar first..."
Baxter raised a hand, signaling for quiet, and said loudly, "Whether they are corrupt officials or vicious factory owners and landlords, their privileges all come from the Parliament that shelters them.
"If we want to take back the rights that have been stripped from us, we must abolish the Rotten Boroughs and grant every free Englishman the right to vote! Recently, because sugar prices have soared, people everywhere have been protesting in the streets. We, the London Corresponding Society, must seize this opportunity and organize as many members and workers as possible to petition the government!"
The so-called London Corresponding Society was a civil-rights organization founded five years ago by the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. It advocated universal suffrage, annual re-elections for Parliament, the abolition of Rotten Boroughs, and demanded respect for the people's human rights and freedoms, as well as protection for workers' rights and interests.
Only three years after the London Corresponding Society was founded, it had already developed seventy branches and tens of thousands of members. It could easily organize demonstrations of more than ten thousand people. However, two years ago, Hardy was arrested after being falsely accused of treason, and several senior members of the Society were imprisoned along with him. The Society had once fallen into a low ebb.
This time, however, soaring sugar prices had stirred public resentment to a boil. Industrial workers in particular had suffered the most, and even many factory owners had stood on the workers' side—of course, most of them did so because they could not endure their ever-lower operating rates.
Recently, the number of people applying