Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/238

Thus in most of the delegates excitement and a new-found popularity amongst unreasoning followers produced exaggerated expectations and unbounded self-esteem; experience brought disillusionment and shifty shufflings which robbed the Convention of its following long before it dissolved. Abandoning their leaders, the more desperate followers embarked upon projects of futile violence, ending in the imprisonment, transportation, and death of nearly 500 men.^[1]

1. Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 238: 443 persons were in prison alone for political offences in 1837–40. According to Rosenblatt's useful tables in his Social and Economic Aspects of the Chartist Movement, pp. 205-6 (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. lxxiii. 2, 1916), there were 543 individual convictions between January 1, 1839 and June 1840. The distribution of these, emphasised in Mr. Rosenblatt's table, is interesting.