"That your petitioner, still actuated by a sincere desire to see his country free and happy, and holding a high character in the world, has lately been using his humble endeavours to assist peaceably and legally in promoting applications to Parliament for a Reform in your Honourable House, that measure appearing to your petitioner to be the only effectual remedy for the great and notorious evils under which the country now groans, and for which evils, as no one attempts to deny their existence, so no one, as far as your petitioner has heard, has attempted to suggest any _other_ remedy.
"That your petitioner, in pursuit of this constitutional, and, as he hopes and believes, laudable object (an object for which, if need be, he is resolved to risk his life against unlawful violence) lately took part in a public meeting of the City of Bristol, of which he is a freeholder; and that though a large body of regular troops and of yeomanry cavalry were placed in a menacing attitude near the place of our meeting, the meeting was conducted and concluded in the most peaceable and orderly manner, and the result of it was a petition to your Honourable House, voluntarily signed by upwards of twenty thousand men, which petition has been presented to, and received by, your Honourable House.
"That your petitioner, who had met with every demonstration of public good-will and approbation in the said city, was surprised to see in the public newspapers an account of a boy having been sent to gaol by certain Police Officers and Justices, for having pulled down a posting-bill, which alleged your petitioner to have been hissed out of the City of Bristol, and containing other gross falsehoods and infamous calumnies on the character of your petitioner, calculated to excite great hatred against your petitioner, and to prepare the way for his ruin and destruction.
"That your petitioner, who trusts that he has himself always acted an open and manly part, and who has never been so base as to make an attack upon any one, who had not the fair means of defence, feeling indignant at this act of partiality and oppression, came to London with a view of investigating the matter, and this investigation having taken place, he now alleges to your Honourable House, that the aforesaid posting-bills, containing the infamous calumnies aforesaid, were printed by _J. Downes_, who is the printer to the Police; that the bill-sticker received the bills from the said Downes, who paid him for sticking them up; that the bill-sticker was told by the said _Downes_, that there would be somebody _to watch him_ to see that he stuck them up; that Police Officers were set to watch to prevent the said bills from being pulled down; that some of these Bills were carried to the Police-office at Hatton Garden, and there kept by the officers, to be produced in proof against persons who should be taken up for pulling them down; that Thomas Dugood was seized, sent to gaol, kept on bread and water, and made to lie on the bare boards from the tenth to the twenty-second of January, 1817, when he was taken out with about fifty other persons, tied to a long rope or cable, and marched to Hicks's Hall, where he was let loose, and that his only offence was pulling down one of those bills; that a copy of Dugood's commitment was refused to your petitioner; that your petitioner was intentionally directed to a wrong prison to see the boy Dugood; that the Magistrate, William Marmaduke Sellon, who had committed Dugood, denied repeatedly that he knew any thing of the matter, and positively asserted that Dugood had been committed by another Magistrate, a Mr. Turton, who Mr. Sellon said, was at his house very ill, and not likely to come to the office for some time.