for 331 were elected by only 151,492 votes, that is, one-fortieth of the male adult population had the power to make laws binding upon millions.
This pamphlet was published and scattered broadcast. It became the stand-by of radical orators throughout the country and spread the repute of the Association amongst working people everywhere. The Association published many other pamphlets during 1837, but none attained the celebrity of this one.
In January 1837 the Association accepted an offer of Francis Place to hold a study and discussion circle on Sunday mornings. Place left short notes of these conversations, which apparently consisted of duels between equally convinced exponents of orthodox and Hodgskinite economics. Place confessed his failure to convert the workmen, in a note which he later appended:
In a few, and only a few, instances have I been able to convince some of the trades delegates, who have consulted me, of the absurdity of the notion that everything produced or manufactured belongs solely to the people who made it, and this too without reference to the many hands it has gone through, the manufacturing hands being alone contemplated by them.[1]
This association with so thoroughgoing a supporter of orthodox, "Malthusian" economics as Place was destined very soon to bring the Association into bad odour when the agitation against the new Poor Law became violent, that law being universally regarded as a product of "Malthusian" subtlety.
The Association was growing both in numbers and in influence during the first year of its existence. It received notable recruits, including the redoubtable orator, Henry Vincent, who joined in November 1836,[2] and was quickly elected on the committee. Vincent was a young man of twenty-three or thereabouts, short, slight, extremely prepossessing, and with an unusual gift of speech. Like Hartwell and Hetherington, Vincent was a compositor. By midsummer 1837 the Association was exactly a hundred strong. It had gathered a library of radical and socialistic literature. We read, for example, that Messrs. Williams and Binns of the Sunderland Mechanics' Institution (of whom more hereafter) presented the Association with a copy of Hampden in the Nineteenth Century and were
