An extraordinary meeting of the League was held in the
Free-trade Hall at Manchester, on Thursday, to rebut the insinuations made against Mr. Cobden in the House of Commons on Friday last. The hall will hold ten thousand people ; but it was over-crowded, and many could not obtain admission. In the name of the League and its several mem- bers, Mr. George Wilson, the President, emphatically repudiated the charge that they had ever used any but peaceful, moral, and constitu- tional agents for the attainment of their object : he hurled back the calumny, as " a most atrocious, most wilful, and most audacious false- hood." This disclaimer, the resolutions, and an address to Mr. Cobden, were greeted by the reiterated and prolonged cheers of the vast as- semblage.
Mr. R. S. Bayley, the Dissenting minister of Sheffield, whose speech at the Conference in July last has been so much the subject of com- ment, has written a letter to the Times, in reply to some strictures in that journal. The points of the letter are these. The speech was not delivered on Sunday the 17th July (a mistake, apparently, by Mr. Roe- buck); Mr. Bayley did not know the "gentleman " wh( se conversation he mentioned—the gentleman was not one of his constituents, and the conversation did not take place ifs Sheffield ; he has never advocated the application of force to Parliament ; he did accompany the anecdote with a protest, though only part of that protest was reported ; he men- tioned the anecdote to denounce it, and to show the state of feeling in certain quarters ; and he asks, if such a subject should not be publicly alluded to, why the Times dilates upon it so vehemently ?
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