only maintained in Manchester by military force.[1] It was to this stormy ocean that Attwood and his friends proposed to entrust their frail currency bark. An early shipwreck awaited it.
The Birmingham Union now entered upon a dazzling phase of activity. Its leaders fancied themselves as victorious generals, once more leading the legions of industrious patriots into the legislative citadel, as they fondly supposed had been the case in 1831–32. They would set up their standard in the Midlands and call all working men into it. They anticipated that their massed battalions would overawe Melbourne as easily as Wellington or Lyndhurst. They were moral force men, but they fancied that moral force meant only a display of the potentialities of physical force. Edmonds spoke darkly about the substantial thing behind moral force which produced the impression upon rulers.[2] Attwood, carried away by excitement and disappointment, on December 19, 1837, denounced the Radicals in the House for their unspeakable dulness in remaining unconvinced by his Currency eloquence, and voted them a dogged, stupid, obstinate set of fellows from whom the people had really nothing good to expect. He was for extreme measures and substituted Universal Suffrage for Household Suffrage in his political creed. He would get two million followers—a force to which Government must bow.[3]
This speech and its programme provided the raw material for the National Petition, as it came to be called. The meeting of June 19 had decided upon a petition in favour of Radical reform, and the document itself was drawn up by R. K. Douglas. The Petition in its final shape demanded Repeal of Peel's Act of 1819 and of the Corn Laws; and the amended political reforms mentioned by Attwood in December.
Agitation began in the immediate neighbourhood of Birmingham and was pursued for some three months. In March 1838, a great step forward was taken, and it was decided to send a missionary to Glasgow.[4] That town, in common with most of the other industrial centres, was labouring under severe depression. In the immediate neighbourhood there were thousands of handloom weavers whose distress was chronic during normal times and acute during the depression.
