The Chartist Movement/Chapter 10

by Mark Hovell

CHAPTER X

THE PETITION IN THE COMMONS: END OF THE CONVENTION

(1839)

On July 12, 1839, Attwood brought forward in Parliament a motion for a committee of the whole House to take into consideration the National Petition. Thus for the first time did the claims of the Chartists receive anything like a reasonable amount of attention from the House of Commons, and the Chartist world waited breathless to hear the result. Attwood's speech was restrained. A good speech it certainly was not. It was the utterance of a crank, who was trying with admirable self-control not to intrude his peculiar ideas into a subject which offered an enormous temptation to do so. He described the origin of the Petition and the rise of the Birmingham Union, the great distress of the operatives and the even greater distress, hidden under a mask of pride, of the manufacturer. He suggested rather than declared outright that this distress was due "to the cruel and murderous operation which had pressed for twenty years together on the industry and honour and security of the country." This was practically his only reference to the currency scheme. He defended the various demands of the Charter as part of the ancient constitution of England, and warned the House against disregarding the prayer of a million operatives. He urged the Commons to grant even part of the Petition—Household, if not Universal Suffrage, Triennial if not Annual Parliaments, to repeal the Poor Law, the Corn Law, and the Money Law. He was convinced that the five points of the Petition must be granted, but, he added in a despondent tone, "he only wished he were equally sure they would produce the fruits that were expected from them," a remark which, if it meant anything at all, meant that from the currency scheme alone was salvation to be expected. It was a speech which the Chartists themselves repudiated. It was a middle-class Birmingham Union speech, not a Chartist speech.

Fielden briefly seconded the motion. Both he and Attwood were guilty of confusing the issues. Both had enlarged rather upon the necessity of relieving misery than upon the question of granting civil and political rights. Each offered his own panacea for the prevalent distress, and so turned the discussion on to side issues. Apart from the manifest absurdity of expecting to cure the many-rooted evils of society by a single remedy, this was a bad error in tactics. The Government spokesman was Lord John Russell, and he seized the advantage thus offered. He attacked not the Petition and not even Attwood's speech, but the views which Attwood was known to hold. It was an unfair attack in a way, for Attwood had scarcely mentioned his favourite theme, and his speech does not contain the word "currency" at all. Russell spoke as one who was enjoying the opportunity of suppressing a bore, which Attwood undoubtedly was. He turned Attwood's theories upside down—a feat which required little skill—and finally produced, to give the unfortunate man his quietus, the recently published manifesto of the Convention on the Banking and Paper Money Systems. Attwood saw in the expansion of the Paper Currency a remedy for all social ills. Not so the Convention, which, led by O'Brien, pronounced that "amongst the number of measures by which you have been enslaved, there is not one more oppressive than the corrupting influence of paper money." Lord John proceeded to demonstrate the impossibility of improving the lot of the labouring classes by legislation, and consequently by universal suffrage. He hinted that the granting of the rights demanded by the Petition would bring about the demolition of the Monarchy, of the House of Lords, and of the institutions of the country in general.

Benjamin Disraeli followed. His speech was the most interesting contribution to the debate. It was an attack upon the reformed constitution, not in the Chartist sense but in the sense of an idealised Toryism. "The origin of this movement in favour of the Charter dated from about the same time that they had passed their Reform Bill. He was not going to entrap the House into any discussion on the merits of the constitution they had destroyed and that which had replaced it. He had always said that he believed its character was not understood by those who assailed it, and perhaps not fully by those who defended it. All would admit this: the old constitution had an intelligible principle, which the present one had not. The former invested a small portion of the nation with political rights. Those rights were entrusted to that small class on certain conditions—that they should guard the civil rights of the great multitude. It was not even left to them as a matter of honour; society was so constituted that they were entrusted with duties which they were obliged to fulfil. They had transferred a great part of that political power to a new class whom they had not invested with those great public duties. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class, which had been invested with political station, had not been bound up with the great mass of the people by the exercise of social duties." Disraeli's insight was not at fault. There is no doubt that the Chartist Movement does reflect a certain decline or change in social sympathies which the economic revolutions of the two generations previous had brought about. To this extent Disraeli was right in declaring that the Chartist Movement arose neither out of purely economic causes nor out of political causes, but out of something between the two, that is, to a lack of the lively interest taken by each class in the welfare of others, which Disraeli supposed to be the peculiar merit of pre-1832 society. As a matter of fact, that clever orator might have been embarrassed to declare at what exact period his ideal society had existed, for the aristocracy had taken its full share in breaking down the old social bonds. "The real cause," said Disraeli, "of this, as of all real popular movements, not stimulated by the aristocracy … was an apprehension on the part of the people that their civil rights were invaded. Civil rights partook in some degree of an economical and in some degree certainly of a political character. They conduced to the comfort, the security, and the happiness of the subject, and at the same time were invested with a degree of sentiment which mere economical considerations did not involve." To Disraeli, therefore, civil rights consisted in the claims of the less fortunate upon the more fortunate classes of society. These claims had been ignored, for instance, by the introduction of the New Poor Law, which, though not the cause of, was yet closely connected with, the Chartist Movement. In the passing of that measure both sides of the House were culpable: they had "outraged the whole social duties of the State, the mainstay, the living source of the robustness of the commonwealth." "He believed that the Tory party would yet rue the day when they did so, for they had acted contrary to principle—the principle of opposing everything like central government and favouring in every possible degree the distribution of power." In short, Disraeli was preaching a feudal ideal, with patriarchal benevolence as the basis of social relations. But such an ideal was impossible in those days, when an industrial working class and an industrial middle class had come into existence. This middle class, Disraeli maintained, was the basis of the new constitution. It had received political station "without making simultaneous advances in the exercises of the great social duties"—a charge by no means devoid of truth. Hence it was detested by the working classes. The trial of Chartist leaders before the Birmingham magistrates had demonstrated that. "He was not ashamed to say, however much he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists. They formed a great body of his countrymen: nobody could doubt they laboured under great grievances, and it would indeed have been a matter of surprise, and little to the credit of that House, if Parliament had been prorogued without any notice being taken of what must always be considered a very remarkable social movement." Disraeli concluded with a characteristically scathing denunciation of the Ministry, and gave place to the honest but prosy Hume. His speech is well worthy of study. Had he been possessed of constructive genius equal to his insight, Disraeli would have been a statesman indeed. But there was in his speech too great an air of detachment; it was too objective, regarding Chartism as an interesting phenomenon of which he alone had grasped the true meaning, and not as a tremendous human convulsion involving the welfare of a million struggling and despairing beings; an affair of flesh and blood, of bread and butter, not an affair of party politics or Tory Democracy.

Hume made a brave speech in favour of the Charter, but O'Connell declared that the Chartists had ruined the Radical cause by their insane and foolish violence, whereby they had alienated all the middle class. Several other speakers followed, but, apart from Russell and Disraeli, scarcely any who voted against the motion took part in the discussion. Summer days are scarcely suitable for serious debate, and members were not interested. The ignominious fall and still more ignominious restoration of the Government had scotched political interest generally. Hume and Attwood led 46 followers into the lobby, but five times as many—to be exact, 235—mustered against them. The Petition was dead, slain by the violence of its supporters, the tactlessness of its chief advocates, the inertia of conservatism, and its own inner contradictions.^[1]

The Petition was dead, but Chartism was yet alive. The rejection of the Petition had long been foreseen, but its actual demise left the way clear for the decision on Ulterior Measures about which the Convention had boggled so long. The delegates had now to make up their minds, and that quickly. The excitement throughout the country was higher than ever. The approaching trials of various leaders—Stephens, Lovett, Vincent—the constantly increasing number of arrests, both of leaders and rank and file, all helped to make the tension greater. On the other hand, the gradual shrinkage in the Convention and the undoubted secession of moderates in the country required that some heroic decision should be taken at once, before the repute and prestige of the Convention were wholly destroyed.

Immediately after the rejection of the motion of the 12th, Fielden and Attwood suggested that the Convention should organise another petition, which suggestion the Convention rejected forthwith, thereby breaking finally away from the Birmingham leaders—and in fact from the Anti-Poor Law leaders too. Instead, the Convention now drew from its armoury its most potent weapon—that of the General Strike, the "National Holiday" or "Sacred Month."

The question was brought forward on July 15, a day already fixed for the discussion. Thirty delegates were present. O'Brien, O'Connor, and Dr. Taylor were absent, a fact upon which Carpenter commented bitterly, for it was these men who had made the largest promises to their followers and the strongest threats to the Government. Marsden opened the debate in favour of the strike. Marsden was a desperately poor weaver, who had horrified his audiences with his description of the sufferings of his fellow-weavers. A strike was nothing to him, to whom both work and play alike were synonymous with starvation. His passionate demand for action was answered by James Taylor, a Unitarian minister of Oldham, and Carpenter, who showed with absolute clearness how little their followers were prepared for a strike. Their arguments were not answered. Most of the delegates supported the strike because they did not know what else to do. Having raised such expectations in the minds of their followers, they felt that they must do something to justify themselves. They could not bear the thought that they had deceived themselves as well as their constituents, and so let themselves drift into a general strike without knowing in the least how it was to be conducted. Of preparations involving funds, food, stores, they would not hear; they would live on the country like an invading army. To them a strike was one thing, a general strike quite another thing. Yet for a general strike of this insurrectionary description they discussed no preparations, though the complicated arrangements of an ordinary strike were simple in comparison with those requisite for such a desperate venture. In fact, one is driven to the conclusion that the Convention delegates decided to recommend a general strike, partly because they had to decide on something and partly because they knew that it was impossible.

After two days' discussion it was resolved by thirteen against six votes (five abstentions) to recommend the commencement of the National Holiday on August 12. Thus the weightiest decision of the Convention was carried by one quarter of its original strength. The next day a Committee was appointed to promulgate the decree. Trade Unions were to be asked to co-operate. Eight delegates, sitting in London, were given a month in which to organise a national stoppage of industry in a land where industry was stopping of its own accord, in a land where only a strike of agricultural labourers could have had much effect, in a land where men, women, and children were begging to be allowed to work even for a pittance. As if to show how topsy-turvy its ideas had become, the Convention adopted an address urging the middle class to co-operate in this measure.

Whilst the Convention was thus engaged, the Chartist cause received irreparable injury through a riot which took place on the 15th of July, again at Birmingham, where the presence of the London police was a source of extreme exasperation, not merely to the Chartists and the numerous enemies of the newly formed Corporation,^[2] but to the majority of the Council itself. In the early evening crowds began to assemble in the vicinity of the Warwick Road in the hope of greeting Lovett and Collins, on their release on bail from Warwick Gaol. The two heroes, however, avoided the ovation, and the disappointed crowd rushed into the Bull Ring, where the police were stationed in the Public Office. The Public Office was attacked, and the police, having apparently learned caution, refused to retaliate without express orders. For more than an hour the rioters were undisturbed. They smashed the street lamps, and tore down the iron railings of the Nelson Monument which stands at the lower end of the Bull Ring. With the weapons so obtained they began to force their way into the shops. A tea-warehouse and an upholsterer's shop were sacked and a bonfire made of their contents; other shops shared the like fate. There was no looting; destruction, not plunder, was the order of the day. At a quarter to ten the London police began to act. Their chief, assuming that the Mayor alone could authorise action, had spent over an hour in bringing him and other magistrates on to the scene of the riot. The police, reinforced by infantry and cavalry in considerable numbers, then succeeded in dispersing the crowd, after which their energies were employed in extinguishing the fires which the rioters had started. The two shops first attacked burned till past midnight. What with their careless haste on July 4 and their stupidity on the 15th, the newly appointed Birmingham magistrates had made a very inauspicious start in their official careers.^[3]

Such ebullitions as these could hardly be viewed with composure by the Convention. To control such reckless forces was a task which a Convention of Napoleons would have attempted with misgivings, and the Chartist Convention was rapidly losing its nerve. For some time it must have been aware of a gradual secession of the moderate party amongst its followers from those who followed counsels of violence, and this schism was widened by the decision to adopt the general strike. Hitherto this secession had been viewed in the light of a beneficial purge, the moderates being regarded (probably with no good reason) as a minority, but gradually the conviction grew that the division which existed was one which was likely to rend the whole Chartist body in pieces. A curious example of this loss of nerve is afforded by a letter dated July 21, addressed by R. J. Richardson to the Convention.^[4] This man, the verbose, pedantic retailer of bad law, the one-time terror of moderates, and the enthusiastic advocate of arming, now regrets that he is no longer a member of the Convention, as there never was a time when prudence and caution were more requisite in its debates. He will offer advice. He considers the decision to hold the National Holiday undigested and ill-timed. The Convention had not even reviewed their resources, but had relied upon false and exaggerated reports. In the South of England there was no following. Even in Manchester, the faithful stronghold, the Chartists could not make an effective strike; the hands were on half-time; many have petitioned to be allowed to work longer. The employers were praying for the Convention to order a strike so as to be relieved of the necessity of locking their workpeople out altogether. Liverpool is still less hopeful. Neither Yorkshire nor Scotland was much better. The National Holiday is hopeless, and would only "bring irretrievable ruin upon thousands of poor people, while the rich would not suffer in comparison." Thus did Richardson find wisdom.

The Convention found wisdom also. On Monday, July 22, the Convention met to hear O'Brien's views upon the National Holiday. He had been absent the previous week, and now moved that the decision then taken be rescinded. In his speech he made the best of a bad job. He had been one of the stalwarts of the physical force revolutionaries. Now he was compelled to recognise that all the assumptions on which his former views rested were false, and it required no little courage on his part to make his confession that both he and the majority of the Convention had been deceivers and deceived. Whilst still retaining a belief in the general strike as the ideal political weapon, O'Brien declared that the Convention was incompetent to wield it. They were not unanimous or at full strength. Their followers in the country were not unanimous, and therefore the strike would be a ghastly failure. The Convention, therefore, ought not to advise so dangerous a proceeding, but leave the matter to the people, "who were the best judges after all, whether they would be able to meet the exigencies of a strike, and he would prefer that the Convention should leave the holiday to the people themselves, and at the same time tell the people that nothing but a general suspension of labour could convince their oppressors of the necessity of conceding to them their rights." Surely a miserable exhibition of leadership! Phrases like "pregnant with such dreadful consequences for which the Convention would be morally, if not legally, responsible" do not sound well in the mouth of one who had long been damning the consequences. Nor was the solicitude for the followers, but for the delegates themselves, to whom prison and Botany Bay were becoming dreadful realities.

On this the Convention proceeded to an orgy of recrimination. One fact was clear: the delegates had grossly exaggerated their following and influence. Now they sought to blame each other for it. Neesom and MacDouall especially came in for abuse. O'Connor spoke both for and against the motion in a speech of which Fletcher said he could not make head or tail. Fletcher said that the Convention would now listen to his advice, to win the middle class to their side. Poor Fletcher had had enough of Chartism. He was an Anti-Poor Law man who had got into troubled waters. Duncan said those who voted for the Holiday ought to carry it through. Skevington and MacDouall protested against the motion as cowardly, but the former voted for it and the latter abstained. Half a dozen delegates alone had the courage to vote against the motion, twelve voted for it, and seven were too perplexed to vote at all. The formal result was the appointment of a Committee to take the sense of the people upon the question of a general strike; the real result was the suicide of the Convention and the temporary collapse of the whole movement.^[5]

The Committee which was thus appointed obtained a number of replies, which are preserved in the letter-book. J. B. Smith writes from Leamington in fierce reproach. If the holiday is begun, will the Convention be ready to control the idle workmen? Will the strikers not assume that they have the Convention's permission to pillage and plunder? Why had the Convention never talked of saving money for Ulterior Measures instead of talking so much about arms and force? From Sheffield came a better report, but not encouraging. Coventry was decidedly against the strike. Colne reported that "the principal obstacle in the way of the holiday arises from those operatives and trades who are receiving remunerating wages for their labour, and whose apathy and indifference arise more from ignorance of their real position than an indisposition to benefit their fellow-men." At Preston, a supposed physical force stronghold, the Chartists could do nothing to further the strike as the trade societies refused to help. Neither Rochdale nor Middleton was decidedly favourable to a strike. The Convention, and especially O'Connor, has forfeited all respect, and the people know not whom to trust, reports James Taylor.^[6] Richards from the Potteries sends no encouragement; Knox from Sunderland none. Hyde, a regular Chartist arsenal, requests Deegan to withdraw his vote for the strike. Some places which favoured a strike wanted others to give the lead. Huddersfield and Bath protested against the abandonment, but these were isolated instances.^[7]

Two communications from the North exhibit the local divergence of views which perhaps existed in nearly every important Chartist locality towards the end of July. On the 21st the Northern Political Union addressed a threatening manifesto to the middle classes, urging them to join the working people against the boroughmongers and aristocracy. If the middle class allow the aristocracy to put down Chartism, the working people "would disperse in a million of incendiaries," and warehouses and homes would be swallowed up in one black ruin! This address, which was probably the work of O'Brien, landed most of its signatories in gaol. On the 20th Robert Knox, the delegate for Durham, published an address to the middle classes in exactly opposite terms, comparing Capital and Labour to the two halves of a bank-note, each useless without the other. Knox said that the possession of political power by the middle class has hitherto tended to obscure this fact of mutual dependence. These addresses were both communicated to the Government by local authorities.^[8] When leaders were so divided, it is no wonder that followers were perplexed.

The failure of the strike policy throws an interesting light upon the status of the Chartist rank and file. It is clear that the trade societies as a whole stood outside the Chartist movement, though many trade unionists were no doubt Chartists too. The societies could not be induced to imperil their funds and existence at the orders of the Chartist Convention, and without the organised bodies of workmen the general strike was bound to be a fiasco. The workmen who could be relied on to participate in the strike were precisely those whose economic weight was least effective—handloom weavers, stockingers, already unemployed workmen of all sorts. The colliers, it is true, labouring under special grievances, might have made a very effective striking body, but they were precisely the people who preferred armed insurrection. In fact, those Chartist leaders who advocated insurrection had at least logic and consistency on their side. Their policy was likely to be at least as successful as a strike, and they did make preparations for it. In fact, it is hard to escape the impression that the apparent indifference, displayed towards the doings of the Convention about this time by certain of the former advocates of insurrection, was due to the fact that they were busy organising a revolt, and that the appeal of the Convention was only to a middle party amongst their followers, which had neither the wisdom to be moderate nor the courage to be rebel.

The same procedure was now adopted as in the previous instance, when the Convention shirked a decision upon Ulterior Measures. It published an address in which it congratulated itself that it had discovered the error of proposing a general strike, announced nevertheless that the project was not abandoned, and then adjourned for a month to give the delegates time and opportunity to direct the movement and complete the preparations. There was no further meeting till the end of August.

In this interval the great movement died away. The local authorities, backed up by Government, made wholesale arrests of Chartists for illegal possession of arms, for attending unlawful meetings, for sedition, and for many other offences, reaching, in the case of three who were arrested at Birmingham for participation in the fight with the Metropolitan Police, to high treason, for which they were condemned to death, the sentence being commuted to transportation. No less than a score of members of the Convention were arrested during the summer months of 1839, and a vast number of the rank and file. Among these were Benbow,^[9] the fiery old advocate of the National Holiday; Timothy Higgins of Ashton-under-Lyne, who had a regular arsenal in his cottage; and the whole of the leaders of the Manchester Political Union^[10] and the Northern Political Union of Newcastle.^[11] There were several abortive attempts, especially in Lancashire, to put into force the National Holiday in spite of the official abandonment of that measure, and they led to more arrests.^[12] Wholesale trials followed. At Liverpool some seventy or eighty Chartists were brought up together; at Lancaster, thirty-five;^[13] at Devizes, twelve. At Welshpool thirty-one Llanidloes rioters were tried, the sentences ranging from fifteen years' transportation to merely binding over to keep the peace.^[14] At Chester Higgins, MacDouall, and Richardson were brought before the Grand Jury, which returned true bills for various charges. Only occasionally did the Chartists make any attempts to put a stop to the course of prosecution. A policeman who was to be a witness against Stephens was half-murdered in Ashton,^[15] whilst the Loughborough magistrates were compelled to release two prominent Chartists because their followers terrorised all likely witnesses.^[16] Generally speaking, the prosecutions went on unhindered. The Convention busied itself with a Defence Fund, and local subscriptions were set on foot for the purpose of procuring legal aid. This appeal met with no great response. The enthusiasts still preferred to devote their savings to the purchase of arms, whilst the others were unwilling to spend theirs on such worthless rogues as, for example, Brown, the Birmingham delegate, who, before his arrest was conspicuous for his absurd violence, and afterwards begged and prayed the Convention "not to let him be sacrificed."^[17]

Two trials at this time provoked more than ordinary interest: those of Stephens at Chester, and Lovett and Collins at Warwick. Stephens defended himself in a speech lasting five hours. It was a very bad defence. In spite of the fact that he had been arrested for attending an exceedingly riotous Chartist meeting, he devoted his speech to a long denunciation of Carlile, Paine, Bentham, and Radicalism generally. He denounced the prosecuting counsel, the Attorney-General, in set terms, and declared that he had been a victim of persecution. Stephens cut a really bad figure, and with his trial and imprisonment he disappeared from the Chartist world, except for one brief reappearance in opposition to his former colleagues, at Nottingham in 1842. He was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in Knutsford Gaol, but was transferred to Chester Castle, where he was handsomely treated.

Very different was Lovett's defence. He was charged with publishing a false, scandalous, and inflammatory libel. Lovett admitted the libel and the publication, but pleaded justification. He made no real defence, but made use of the opportunity to vindicate the principles for which he was willing to suffer imprisonment. He had evidently prepared his speech with great care. It was a very good speech indeed, and drew forth unstinted praise from the prosecuting counsel, who refused to believe that Lovett was a working man. Lovett appealed to a greater tribunal than that before which he was brought to trial. "Public opinion," he said, "is the great tribunal of justice to which the poor and the oppressed appeal when wealth and power have denied them justice, and, my lord, it is for directing public attention to a flagrant and unjust attack upon public liberty that I am brought as a criminal before you."^[18] Collins was defended by Serjeant Goulburn. Both received the same sentence, twelve months' imprisonment. They spent their time partly in agitating against the harshness of the prison rule, in which they achieved some success, and partly in writing their famous pamphlet on Chartism. The spirit in which Lovett endured his imprisonment may be divined from the following passage, written to his wife on October 1, 1839:

In your letter before last you intimated that Mr. Place was still making some exertions on our behalf. Now, my dear girl, while I have no great partiality for being in a prison, I have no inclination to get out of it by anything that can in any way be construed into a compromise of my principles.^[19]

He might have been released on giving a pledge to keep out of politics.

These prosecutions had a very depressing effect upon the Chartist cause, and the reputation of the Convention sank lower and lower. It had scarcely accomplished anything, and the great expectations with which it had commenced had come to nothing. The arrest and imprisonment of so many leaders produced a feeling of helplessness which damped all enthusiasm. From all parts of the country came reports of hopelessness, disappointment, and dissension, and when the Convention met for its last sittings at the end of August, it met merely to dissolve in ignominy.^[20] Dr. Taylor proposed the dissolution of the Convention. He had already denounced many of his colleagues as a pack of cowards, and he now proposed to exclude them all from re-election by a self-denying ordinance. The debate resolved itself into a fierce altercation between Dr. Taylor and Harney on the one side and O'Connor and his "tail" on the other. The recriminations show how deep the local dissensions had gone. Finally the motion to dissolve was carried. The Convention then plunged into a sordid and squalid squabble about money matters. It appears that O'Connor had been using his wealth, derived of course from the enormously increased sales of the Northern Star,^[21] to buy up a following in the Convention, and even to subject the whole body to his influence by offering himself as security for various objects. This policy he pursued until he became the absolute ruler of the Chartist world. The accounts seem to have been kept with gross carelessness, and money voted with great laxity. In this atmosphere of recrimination, squabble,^[22] and intrigue the great Chartist Convention disappeared. It left two Committees, one, of which O'Connor and Pitkeithly were the chief, to dispense the sum of £429, available for the Defence Fund, and another to draw up the valedictory address. The latter produced three addresses: one fiery, dictated by Dr. Taylor; one mild, composed by O'Brien; and one compromising. None of them was published; the Convention was to the last incapable of any decision.

1. Hansard, 3rd ser. xlix. 220-78.
2. In some newly incorporated towns, like Bolton, Manchester, Birmingham, there was a strong conservative faction which had opposed incorporation, and thwarted the new municipal bodies to the utmost of its power. The Chartists received much countenance from this factious body, especially in the matter of opposing the introduction of a police force. These facts help to explain the weakness of the borough councils at times like this.
3. Hansard, 3rd ser. xlix. 447.
4. Additional MSS. 34,245, B, p. 53.
5. London Dispatch, July 28, 1839; Charter, July 28, 1839.
6. O'Connor had written an article in the Northern Star, July 27, dissuading Chartists from the strike policy.
7. Additional MSS. 34,245, B, pp. 38, 110, 119, 123, 125, etc.
8. Home Office, 40 (51) and (46).
9. Northern Liberator, August 17, 1839.
10. Manchester Guardian, August 3.
11. Northern Liberator, August 3, 1839.
12. Manchester Guardian, August 14, 1839.
13. Northern Liberator, November 16, 1839.
14. Charter, July 21, p. 415.
15. Manchester Guardian, July 10, 1839.
16. Home Office, 40 (44), July 25.
17. Additional MSS. 34,245, B, pp. 61-2, 68.
18. Trial, published by Hetherington. (Manchester Free Library, H. 154.)
19. Place Coll., Hendon, vol. lv. p. 72.
20. Lowery on September 5 reported his mission to Ireland, which was a total failure, ascribed to O'Connell's influence.
21. 1838: average sales per week, 10,900; February-May 1839: average, 48,000—a fact which gives colour to belief that O'Connor deliberately prolonged the Convention so as to keep up circulation. O'Connor proposed (Northern Star, September 21, 1839) to pay for another Convention out of his own pocket.
22. A curious feature of these squabbles was that Fletcher, an Anti-Poor Law stalwart, declared that the Charter had been put forward by the supporters of the hated Act to capture the Anti-Poor Law agitation (Northern Star, October 19, 1839). He even hinted at Government agency.