Democratic structure From the beginning, the LCS was viewed with suspicion by the British government, and was infiltrated by spies on the government payroll. In addition to domestic subversion, the state authorities feared collaboration with French agents, against whose entry and circulation within the country they had introduced the
Aliens Act 1793. Partly in response to the surveillance, and in express "imitation of the societies in and about
Sheffield" whose cutlers had repudiated deference to Whig constitutionalists, the society adopted a decentralised, democratic structure. The LCS organised in "divisions" In contrast to some of Whig-establishment reform clubs, the organisation allowed all subscribers to participate in open debate, and to elect members to leadership positions such as tithing-man, divisional secretary, sub-delegate, or delegate. Rules also ensured that discussion was not monopolised.
Francis Place recalled that "no one could speak a second time [on a subject] until every one who chose had spoken once". The LCS issued its first public statement in April 1792. In addition to Sheffield (the "
Faubourg Saint Antoine to an English Revolution")
Social composition By May 1792 the LCS comprised nine separate divisions, each with a minimum of thirty members. The height of its popularity in late 1795 it may have had between 3,500 and 5000 member organised in 79 divisions They were the committeemen.[John] Ashley, a shoemaker, [John] Baxter, a journeyman silvermith; John Binns (journalist)|[John] Binns, a plumber, John Boyne, a Holborn bookseller, Alexander Galloway, a mathematical machine- maker . . .,
Thomas Evans, a colourer of prints and (later) a patent brace-maker, Richard Hodgson, a master hatter, John Lovett, a hairdresser, [John] Luffman, a goldsmith, [John] Oxlade, a master book-binder ... While the LCS remained primarily a forum for "a politically conscious and articulate artisan population", men of a more prominent social and professional standing did join, drawn in many cases from existing debating societies. They brought with them important political connections and skills. Barristers such as
Felix Vaughan and attorneys like
Joseph Gerrald (who had practiced law in
Philadelphia, and there associated with Paine) were especially useful given near continuous entanglement of members in court proceedings. Among the physicians were SCI member
James Parkinson, a prolific propagandist, and
John Gale Jones, an accomplished orator. But the Society's egalitarian constitution accorded them no definitive preference. Hardy in particular was wary of placing them in positions of authority lest ordinary members be discouraged from "exerting themselves in their own cause". While it counted among its members men like
Thomas Spence and Dr William Hodgson (
The Female Citizen) who did advocate political rights and equality for women, the LCS appears to have been a male fraternity. The venues in which its divisions met – taverns and coffee houses – were predominantly male spaces, and reference to women in records of their proceedings are few. In August 1793, the Society's General Committee approved a motion calling for the formation of a female Society of Patriots. By September, a government spy reported that there was a Society of Women meeting in Southwark. The LCS arranged to send two of its delegates to instruct them. But it does not appear that female patriots were ever admitted as members to the LCS itself. Women did turn out for major LCS demonstrations.
Noted members The society had an early celebrity recruit, the ex-slave, free
West-Indian black and
abolitionist,
Olaudah Equiano. In 1791–92, Equiano was touring the British Isles with his autobiography,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African. Drawing on abolitionist networks he brokered connections for the LCS, including what may have been the society's first contacts with the
United Irishmen. In
Belfast (where civic outrage had defeated plans to commission vessels for the
Middle Passage) Equiano was hosted by the leading United Irishman, publisher of their Painite newspaper the
Northern Star,
Samuel Neilson. Paine subscribed to the Society; as did the radical poet
William Blake;
Joseph Ritson the noted antiquarian and founder of modern vegetarianism; and
Basil William Douglas, Lord Daer, who held concurrent membership of the Society for Constitutional Information and the Scottish Association of the Friends of the People.
London's sans-culottes Despite such notables, the government were assured by their most trusted informer, "'Citizen' Groves", that the real body of the club was made of "the very lowest order of society". They took little persuading that within the LCS English
Jacobins were leading on the equivalent to the
sans-culottes of the
revolutionary Paris sections. Some of the working class membership did take the republican doctrines of Paine to their extreme, posing the claims of an absolute political democracy against those of monarchy and aristocracy. Of these radical democrats, the most renowned was
Thomas Spence. Originally from
Newcastle, where he had protested the
enclosure of
commons, Spence re-issued as
The Real Rights of Man a penny pamphlet he had produced in 1775, ''Property in Land Every One's Right''. His vision was of a society based on common ownership of land administered democratically, by men and women alike, at the parish level. In 1797, in response to
Thomas Paine's
Agrarian Justice, he wrote
The Rights of Infants which, in the course of vindicating the right of children to freedom from want and abuse, proposed an
unconditional and universal basic income. ==Political equality not social "levelling"==