and the official leaders, like George White, a Northern Star reporter, and John Mason, whose eloquence had helped to convert Cooper at Leicester. The old Birmingham Political Union was of course dead and buried in oblivion. A "Birmingham Association for Promoting the General Welfare," with T. C. Salt for a chairman, was in existence in October 1841, but no more seems to be known about it than the notice recorded by Place.[1] In 1842, however, Birmingham was the centre of a movement which at first bade fair to carry Chartist or Radical principles into regions which O'Connor never knew, a movement in fact which carried no less a person than Herbert Spencer in its train.
This was the Complete Suffrage Movement. It was a kind of middle-class Chartism. There are two distinct aspects to Chartism as generally conceived down to 1840, and as conceived after that date by the National Charter Association. On the one hand, it is an agitation for the traditional Radical Programme; on the other, it is a violent and vehement protest from men, rendered desperate by poverty and brutalised by excessive labour, ignorance, and foul surroundings, against the situation in life in which they found themselves placed. This protesting attitude had been brought, by the teachings of leaders and the prosecutions of authority, to a pitch of bitterness hardly now conceivable. In this second aspect alone was Chartism an exclusively working-class affair, and in this respect alone could there be no middle-class Chartism, for such a thing would be a contradiction in terms. At the same time there was nothing to prevent middle-class people from supporting the principles of the Charter (which had successively been favoured by every social class from the Duke of Richmond to Richard Pilling, cotton operative), or to prevent them from sympathising, in the name of humanity, with the sufferings of the working folk. Such middle-class sympathisers, however, found it difficult, in the year of grace 1842, to give their opinions practical expression. They found the field of political and social reform agitations more than comfortably occupied. On the radical side there were the Anti-Corn Law League and the various Chartist organisations; on the conservative side Factory Legislation and Repeal of the Poor Law of 1834 were still the stand-by of social reformers. For Radicals the claims of the League or of Chartism were naturally paramount, but between the two there was a great
- ↑ Additional MSS. 27,821, p. 315
