Liberty or death was vociferated from every mouth’ runs the caption of a lurid cartoon – The Female Reformers of Blackburn! – which I have.

It’s of a tumultuous street meeting in town, on August 12 1819.

The cartoon, in colour, is by the celebrated cartoonist George Cruikshank (who illustrated Dickens’ Oliver Twist).

It shows a group of women, made to look as grotesque as possible, and with a banner of a female St George, physically dominating the platform, with men as onlookers.

The then Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh is described as a ‘Cannibal’.

Britain was in turmoil at this time. The wartime boom of the Napoleonic Wars (which ended in 1815) had given way to slump.

Many were without work, or on short-time. Food prices were high, only a small proportion could vote; there was no secret ballot; intimidation (and violence) at the polls was rife; some constituencies had as few as eight voters.

Corruption was endemic.

Faced with trouble on the streets, the government of the day resorted not to concession, but to coercion and suppression.

Basic rights including those of assembly were removed. The media were tightly controlled. High taxes imposed on papers to put them out of reach of most.

Four days after this demo, there was an even bigger one at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester.

To disperse the crowd, troops were put in; eleven were killed, 500 injured – and the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ immortalised in history.

In those days ‘democracy’ was a dirty word for the ruling elite, a term of abuse against those who wanted to hand over government to the ‘ignorant mob’.

The argument came down to claims there was a stark choice between stability and democracy. ‘Democracy’ led to bloody, violent, chaotic revolution – as happened in France 30 years before.

Egypt today is not Blackburn of 1819. Of course, not.

But it is striking how the ‘stability-democracy’ choice is being posed by some British politicians and experts to justify a continuation of President Mubarak’s 30-plus year reign.

Anxieties abound that ‘the wrong people’ – like the Muslim Brotherhood – may get elected if there are free and fair elections.

That’s the problem with democracy. You can’t guarantee the result. People for whom you may have utter contempt may get elected.

But as well as being right in itself, there’s more guarantee of real, long-term stability within a democratic system than there is with any possible alternative.

Those ‘female reformers of Blackburn’ had an important point.