CHAPTER IV
THE LONDON WORKING MEN'S ASSOCIATION AND THE PEOPLE'S CHARTER (1836–1839)
The London Working Men's Association was the last of a series of similar organisations, extending as far back as 1829, and including the First London Co-operative Trading Association, the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge, and the National Union of the Working Classes and Others, which covered the period from 1829 to 1833. The character of these bodies has already been described. They present a gradual evolution from "voluntary communism to social democracy,"[1] that is, from non-political Owenism to a belief that democracy is the necessary preliminary to social equity and justice. This evolution was modified by two events which had a very disturbing influence upon the minds of thinking working men. The Reform Bill of 1832 was a profound disappointment to them, and the sudden attack by the new middle-class Parliament upon the Trade Unions, ending in the barbarous sentence on the Dorchester Labourers in 1834, was a still greater blow. The ideas of the working classes took on a sharper edge. The Reform Bill and the Dorchester Labourers' case were regarded as cause and effect; the middle class were using their newly acquired political supremacy to further their economic interests. Hence the idea of class war, which made the possession of political power more essential than ever to the working classes. Without the franchise the working men would be absolutely at the mercy of the middle class.
The National Union faded away during 1833–34 on the rise of militant Owenism in the shape of the Grand National Con-
- ↑ Wallas, Life of Francis Place, p. 269.
