A GREAT DEMONSTRATION IN LONDON.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume IV, Issue 491, 9 August 1890, Page 3

A GREAT DEMONSTRATION IN LONDON.

The Northampton Mercury makes the following remarks as to the great gathering in Hyde Park, Loudon, on 7th June:— Great as the efforts of the Government were to dissipate and minimiso the effects of the no compensation demonstration on June 7 they were utterly futile. The processionists were harassed and hindered by irritating police interruptions; so that such disturbance of the traffic as was inevitable extended over five hours when it might have been compressed within two hours. The arrangements for the speaking were considerably dislocated by sections of the procession being stopped at various points along the route so that they were an hour, an hour and a half, or two hours behind the time appointed. The Government have gained nothing by their aggravating tactics. They have irritated some of the beet classes of the community, the sober, the thrifty, the law abiding,—the largest and most important sections of the religious and temperance worlds. The men and, women who are working for the social regeneration of England and of the world—these were the people whom the Government and their myrmidons sought to hinder, and whose utterance’hey tried to stifle. But all they could do failed to take away from the magnificent effect of such a demonstration as has probahiy never been before seen within these realms. It was a representative demonstration, including some cf ths most famous, social, religious, and temperance reformers of all classes and creeds. It showed clearly tt.»t the iniquitous proposals of the Government have given rise to a great moral revolt, and that they will be persisted in at their peril. Canon Wilberforce, the descendent of the great emancipator, concentrated the argument against the Bill when he said it was “financially idiotic and morally discreditable ” ; and he put the position in a nutshell when he said that if the Government were determined to force it through by their “ mechanical majority ” it would have to be undone.