ABSTRACT
T h e State Trials of 1794 procured no convictions, but they nearly succeeded in choking the reform movement. The two societies which had attracted middle class and aristocratic support were, in fact, strangled. The Constitutional Society seems never to have met again, and the Friends of the People languished and soon died. Nor are there any traces of the Sheffield organisation after 1794. The workmen and shopkeepers of the Corresponding Society held together under extraordinary difficulties. Their officials were arrested as fast as they elected them. Undetected spies attended regularly, persuading them to furnish written evidence in their minutes, and even competing against one another for official positions.1 The Government was furnished with regular accounts of their proceedings, but no informer had the prophetic insight to report the election in June of a journeyman tailor, Francis Place, who was to hand on the tradition of reform and workmen’s politics to a more hopeful day.2
