Britain 721
Charging dues of only a penny a week, the London Corresponding Society
within a few months had a membership of about 2,000, divided into neighbor-
hood units that held their own local meetings. It took its name from the intention
to correspond with similar societies that were being organized throughout the
country, with a view to bringing a concerted pressure of the literate working
classes upon Parliament. Its enemies tried to fix in the public mind the idea that
it was established to correspond with the French Jacobins. There was never much
more than an exchange of compliments between the Jacobins and the British
clubs, in whose activities, when later closely studied by Parliament, no Frenchman
was ever detected. The London Corresponding Society was like the Paris Jacobins
in that it was not at all secret; it differed altogether from them in its primarily
working- class membership.
It was one of the chief activities of the popular clubs to distribute propaganda,
or, as they would say, to instruct the public on the real circumstances of the coun-
try. Most especially, they reprinted the works of Thomas Paine, the Second Part
of whose Rights of Man appeared in February 1792. In it, Paine went beyond
ideas that were merely political. He denounced in detail the fiscal system by
which taxes were thrown heavily onto articles of common consumption. He pro-
posed a progressive inheritance tax, so designed that income in the bracket be-
tween £12,000 and £13,000 would be taxed at 50 percent, and all income above
£22,000 a year would be confiscated in toto. His purpose was not to give land to
the poor, nor even to take it away from the rich as a group, but to oblige the
wealthiest families to divide their landed estates among their heirs—to do away,
in short, with primogeniture and “aristocracy.” The point, in fact, was to force the
rich to live on their own incomes, instead of being obliged to find emoluments
for younger sons in church and state. Such ideas threatened the social system at
its foundation. Before much could be accomplished, however, it was necessary to
alter the way in which the Commons were chosen. In the First Part of the Rights
of Man readers could find a comparison, or rather a contrast, between the British
and the French Constitutions. In the latter, Paine pointed out, every man who
paid 2s. 6d. in taxes had a vote, and each member of the French parliament rep-
resented an equal number of persons, counted as persons—not boroughs, counties
or corporations of absurdly various size and importance. This was what was called
“universal representation.”
In May, faced with these tracts of Paine’s, and with a swelling volume of similar
literature, much of it written in angry refutation of Burke, the government issued
a proclamation against seditious writings. The effect, if anything, was to extend
their circulation. While Paine, indicted for his Part Two, escaped to Calais, the
clubs remained relatively quiet during the summer, in breathless expectation of
what would follow upon the Austro- Prussian invasion of France. Then came the
fall of the French monarchy in August, and the September Massacres. These
events further estranged the British upper classes from the French Revolution.
They had no such effect on the democratic clubs. After Valmy and the French
invasion of Belgium, as it seemed that the newly born Republic would triumph,
the clubs reached a feverish height of excitement. Bonfires at Sheffield in October
celebrated the Prussian retreat. At Dundee, in November, a thousand people ri-