Two Parliaments Escape Reform 223
influence of the crown, and urged the need of economical reform. They declared
that a degenerate government would do nothing except under organized public
pressure, and to illustrate their meaning they pointed with approval to what was
happening in Ireland. They set up a committee of correspondence to establish con-
tact with similar meetings elsewhere. Wyvil, moderating his own desire for elec-
toral reform, let them emphasize economical reform as offering a broader basis of
agreement.
News of the Yorkshire meeting was hailed with enthusiasm in London, to
which Wyvil repaired, and which became the main center of the whole movement.
“Join as the Irish do!” cried one London newspaper. “It is not by speaking or voting
in the House of Commons, Sir, that this country is to be saved,” said another. “The
Associations in America,” declared a third, meaning the non- importation and
other pre- revolutionary associations in the colonies, “have set an example.... This
example has been followed in Ireland.”^6
Throughout England, in towns and counties, meetings on the model of the
Yorkshire meeting assembled, and after a few resolutions, appointed committees,
in which a few leading spirits took on the management of affairs. In February
1780, the London and Westminster committees sent a circular to all the others,
inviting them to send deputies to an assembly in London, “to consider a Plan of
Association.” Only twelve counties and four towns responded, apparently because
of shortage of time, but these in turn resolved to form a General Association, or
what Sir George Savile proposed to call a National Assembly. This association was
to examine the public accounts, and to work for parliamentary reform, that is, for
annually elected Parliaments, for “tests” by which candidates must promise to ad-
here to programs demanded by their constituents, and for the addition of one
hundred county members. It may be recalled that four- fifths of the members of
the House of Commons sat for boroughs, and that though most burgesses were
country gentlemen the rural population was thus underrepresented; the point,
however, was that the boroughs were highly susceptible to manipulation, so that an
increase of county members was a commonly proposed means to assure a freer and
purer House.
Meanwhile, certain of the Parliament Whigs, including Charles James Fox, had
become active in the town and county meetings. Fox had now become a reformer,
and even a tribune of the people, delivering eloquent speeches in the Westminster
meeting, praising the American rebels (with whom England was still at war), and
loudly applauding the Irish Volunteers. The Whigs, indeed, at this time, in But-
terfield’s phrase, adopted a doctrine of “near revolution.”^7 To their old fondness
for the Revolution of 1688 they added a taste for the conveniently distant revolu-
tion in America, for the revolutionary ferment in Ireland, and for appeals to the
majesty of the people of England, compounding all into a terrible medicine to be
inflicted on Lord North and King George III. Fox declared that the Irish Volun-
teers were a good thing even if they were illegal, and he even endorsed the radical
idea that members of Parliament were only “delegates” of the people. Scion of a
6 Quotations from Butterfield, op.cit., 210.
7 Ibid., 172–73.