they had endorsed the suggestion of O'Brien that Chartists should help neither party, but that Chartist candidates should be put forward at each nomination and carried at the hustings on the show of hands. But on May 29 and June 19, 1841, O'Connor came along with the advice to Chartists to support the Tories rather than the Whigs in the actual polling. On this O'Brien joined issue with his wonted vehemence. Unless, he said, fifty real Chartists are elected to the House of Commons or two or three hundred, elected by show of hands, are summoned to a great national council, there would be a bloody revolution. Such a council would be a means of rescuing the people from desperate courses. How, it is not clear. O'Brien denounced O'Connor's advice to vote Tory as madness. It would mean the annihilation of Chartism if the Tories were returned.[1] He further objected to O'Connor's habit of assuming to speak for the whole Chartist body, and of regarding his (O'Brien's) views as those of an individual.[2] He said that O'Connor's paper ought to have been moving in the election campaign three months before, instead of coming with its Chartist-Toryism at the last moment. O'Connor replied that he was advocating election plans as early as 1835 and referred to an article of September 1839 on the subject. He defended his advice. If, he said, the Whigs were re-elected they would have another seven years in which to exercise their callousness. The Tories were bound to be weaker than the Whigs, so that the latter would not be badly defeated, but adversity would tame them into accepting the alliance of the Chartists in future. O'Brien replied that O'Connor had favoured him with eight columns, when half a column would have said enough to show him that O'Connor would never convince him that it was right for Chartists to vote Tory.[3] In controversy O'Brien was more than a match for his opponent.
In the ensuing election, neither O'Connor nor O'Brien seems to have carried the day with the Chartists. Certainly the Tories won, and it is possible that Anti-Poor Law feeling, which was at the bottom of a good deal of Chartism, induced many Chartists to go with the Tories. It certainly was so at Leicester, as Cooper relates. So far O'Connor's advice was the feeling of a great part of the Chartists. The Salford Chartists on the other hand, after careful consideration, decided to support Brotherton, a prominent Anti-Corn Law man,[4] who, perhaps
