It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating
the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly. They were ahead
of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the
vital importance of a reformed Parliament. They were far ahead of
England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months
before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for
Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious
tolerance--witness the Gordon riots in London two years before. Their
Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot
Assembly. For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in
the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their
irregular power. Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would
yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the
Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the
Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which,
although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic
questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps
an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the
Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to
the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their
quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their
humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary
representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some
reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in
them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to
confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the
cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied
_mutatis mutandis_ from the American petitions prior to the war, and was
to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with