mouth, Bolton, and Sheffield. At Huddersfield O'Connor was the chief attraction, but the magistrates there said the affair was poor compared with the previous demonstrations. At Manchester, on May 25, a crowd, whose number varies from twenty thousand, according to the Times, to half a million, according to the Chartist papers, marched to Kersal Moor to hear O'Connor, Dr. Fletcher, Dr. Taylor, and some local orators. The meeting was wholly peaceable.
Napier was apparently very much afraid of an outbreak in Manchester and took very peculiar precautions. He heard that the Chartists had five brass cannon, and purposed desperate things under the lead of Taylor, who had come down from Glasgow. He thereupon gave a private artillery exhibition to a few Chartist leaders with whom he was acquainted.[1] He also sent a message to the responsible persons to tell them "how impossible it would be to feed and move 300,000 men; that, armed, starving, and interspersed with villains, they must commit horrid excesses; that I would never allow them to charge me with their pikes, or even march ten miles, without mauling them with cannon and musketry and charging them with cavalry, when they dispersed to seek food; finally, that the country would rise on them and they would be destroyed in three days."[2]
These measures doubtless damped much of the warlike ardour of the Chartist leaders. Napier and Wemyss went in person to the Kersal Moor demonstration. His troops had been strengthened by the 10th Regiment from Liverpool, and he had promised the magistrates to arrest any one who preached treason after the meeting had dispersed. Napier's estimate that the meeting was thirty or thirty-five thousand strong, we may take to be fairly correct, but he says that not five hundred of this crowd were seriously bent on mischief.
Wemyss addressed a few of the people in high Tory oratory and argued with a drunken old pensioner, fiercely radical and devilish sharp: in ten minutes one-eighth of the whole crowd collected round Wemyss and cheered him.[3]
The speeches, delivered by the official Chartist orators at this meeting, consisted largely of eulogies of Henry Hunt and the Peterloo martyrs. Resolutions condemning the delegates who resigned from the Convention were passed, as well as resolutions approving the programme of "ulterior measures."
