led by a Wesleyan minister, a religious, sentimental opponent of child-labour, and a philanthropic employer, falls into line with all these earlier movements. It is racy of the soil, and a most remarkably interesting revival of a popular religious sentiment, dead since the Tudors, and brought to life again by the disciples of John Wesley.
Relying thus on a higher sanction than that of the State, the popular leaders urged their followers to resist the Act even to the extreme of armed rebellion. The movement was thus of extraordinary vehemence and violence. The rank and file were men already rendered desperate by continuous and increasing poverty, ignorant and unlettered men deprived, or fearing to be deprived, of a resource on which they had long counted, men coarsened by evil surroundings and brutalised by hard and unremitting toil, relieved only by periods of unemployment in which their dulled minds brooded over their misfortunes and recalled their lost prosperity. The popular agitation was entirely without organisation. It centred exclusively in the personality of a few leaders. Its methods were thus far removed from those of the Anti-Corn Law League or the London Working Men's Association. It was not educative; it appealed not to reason but to passion and sentiment. Its leaders were not expert agitators, aiming at the conversion of public and Parliament, but mob orators, stirring up passions and spreading terror, hoping to frighten the Government into a suspension or a repeal of the hated Act. Hence there was always an element of futility in the movement. The Reformed Parliament could not be terrorised; it was too strongly supported by the mass of educated and propertied people. Perhaps a glimmering notion that this was the case explains the ease with which the leaders of the agitation were persuaded to range their followers under the Chartist standard.
Cobbett having died in 1835, the leadership of the agitation in the North devolved largely upon his colleague in the representation of Oldham, John Fielden of Todmorden. Fielden came of a manufacturing family which had risen to fortune during the Industrial Revolution. He and his brother were owners of extensive spinning and weaving factories at Todmorden, where the family reigned in semi-feudal state over an obedient population. In politics and sympathies Fielden was a Tory, though, being a Free Trader, he was classed as a Radical in Parliament. He was distinguished by an attitude of Owenite benevolence towards his workpeople. In earlier days
