Hardy is said to have been distinguished in radical company by never speaking "but to the purpose at hand" and by his "high organising ability". But in promoting the new society, he and his friends rode a wave of popular political engagement lifted by the two-part publication (March 1791, February 1792) of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man". Selling as many as a million copies, Paine's reply to Edmund Burke in defence of the French Revolution (and of Dr. Richard Price) was "eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsman, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north".