in 1844 O'Connor was welcoming MacDouall back to the orthodox fold and that the Glasgow Chartists raised the chief difficulties in the way of the ostentatiously repentant sinner.[1] There was no finality in the loves and hates of men of the calibre of O'Connor and MacDouall.
Though its prospects were increasingly unhopeful the Complete Suffrage agitation was not yet dead. At Sturge's suggestion a new attempt was made to bridge over the gulf between Suffragists and Chartists, which was found impossible to traverse at the Birmingham Conference. With this object a second Conference met on December 27, 1842, also at Birmingham. Sturge once more presided over a gathering which included representatives of both parties. The Suffragists were now willing to accept the Chartist programme, but they were as inveterate as ever against the use of the Chartist name. To the old Chartists the Charter was a sacred thing which it was a point of honour to maintain. Harney thus puts their attitude:
Give up the Charter! The Charter for which O'Connor and hundreds of brave men were dungeoned in felons' cells, the Charter for which John Frost was doomed to a life of heart-withering woe! … What, to suit the whim, to please the caprice, or to serve the selfish ends of mouthing priests,[2] political traffickers, sugar-weighing, tape-measuring shopocrats. Never! By the memories of the illustrious dead, by the sufferings of widows and the tears of orphans he would adjure them to stand by the Charter.[3]
The Conference was carefully packed by the O'Connorites, but there was more than O'Connorism behind the pious enthusiasm that clung to the party tradition. Nor can the Sturgeites be acquitted of recourse to astute tactics to outwit their opponents. Knowing that they were likely to be in a minority, they got two lawyers in London to draft a new Bill of Rights which they laid before the conference in such a way
- ↑ Northern Star, August 1 and 8, 1846.
- ↑ An allusion to Thomas Spencer, Herbert Spencer's uncle. Herbert Spencer himself was a "Sturgeite" delegate for Derby at the Conference. Ibid. December 24, 1842.
- ↑ Ibid. January 14, 1843. Harney was a representative of Sheffield at the Conference along with three like-minded colleagues.
of a Working Man (1848), pp. 474-8. It is only fair to say that Somerville was bitterly prejudiced against MacDouall as a violent and cowardly apostle of physical force. In the time of the 1839 riots Somerville had written his dissuasive Warnings to the People on Street Warfare. He was now quite out of sympathy with Chartism and a strong critic of O'Connor's Land Scheme. Cobden in 1849 suggested him to Bright as the best man to write a "temperate and truthful" history of Chartism," reviewing with advantage the bombastic sayings and doings of Feargus and his lieutenants." "It would be certain to elicit a howl from the knaves who were subjected to the ordeal of the pillory" (Morley's Life of Cobden, ii. 54).
