"The most inflammatory publications had been issued in the principal towns, at a price which put them within the reach of the poorest classes of society.

The training and military drilling of large bodies of men under regular leaders had been carried on to a great extent for some time, chiefly by night; and there was no doubt that an extensive manufacture of arms was going on." What was a hardly inferior symptom of danger was a system of intimidation which prevailed to a most serious degree.

Many magistrates had received notices threatening their lives, and combinations had been formed to withhold custom from publicans and shopkeepers who had come forward to support the civil power.

In many parts of the two counties the grand-juries declared "that no warrant of arrest or other legal process could be executed; the payment of taxes had ceased, and the landlords were threatened with the discontinuance of their rents." It was admitted that the spirit of disaffection was local, confined to three or four counties; but those counties were, next to Middlesex itself, the most populous and among the most important in the kingdom, and there was danger lest the feeling, if not checked, might spread.

The crisis seemed so momentous, that some even of the Opposition leaders volunteered their counsels and aid to the ministers in dealing with it.
And the ministers, after long deliberation, decided on calling Parliament together in November, and introducing some bills which they conceived necessary to enable them to restore and preserve tranquillity.
They were six in number; and--perhaps, with some sarcastic reference to Gardiner's Six Acts in the sixteenth century--they were very commonly spoken of as Lord Sidmouth's Six Acts, that noble lord being the Home-secretary, to whose department they belonged.