‘On the Importance of Avoiding Personal Factions and Divisions Among the Friends of Reform’

This chapter presents the lecture by John Thelwall on the 'Importance of avoiding personal Factions and Divisions, among the Friends of Reform'. In the lecture Thelwall directly addresses ‘the growth of a disposition to envy, faction, and division that had come to characterize the ‘friends of liberty and reform’. The lecture was clearly intended to rally Thelwall's audience and raise their confidence as he outlined the main purpose of the reformist cause, whilst also being careful to stress that the cause of ‘universal equality’ that he supported was not one of levelling property. Thelwall pointed to the chronic factionalism that defined revolutionary France and the terrible problems enabled by the chronic factionalism.