should collect arms and march in their thousands on Buckingham Palace. "If the Queen refuses our just demands, we shall know what to do with our weapons."[1] But nothing came of this or any other similar manifestations of Chartist statesmanship. It looked as if the leaders could no longer carry on an effective agitation.
The outbreak of a widespread strike in August added a real element of seriousness to the situation in the North. Here again Lancashire was the storm-centre, but the strike movement broke out simultaneously in other districts, ranging from Glasgow and Tyneside to the Midlands, where the colliers in the Potteries and in the South Staffordshire coal-field went out. It is very doubtful whether the strike had much directly to do with Chartism. Its immediate cause was a threatened reduction of wages, which was answered by the workmen in the Lancashire mills drawing the plugs so as to make work impossible.[2] For this reason the operatives' resistance to the employers' action was called in Lancashire the Plug Plot.
Whatever the origin of the strike, the Chartist leaders eagerly made capital out of it. They attributed the proposed reduction to the malice of the Anti-Corn Law manufacturers, anxious to drive the people to desperation, and thus foment disturbances that would paralyse the action of the Protectionist Government.[3] In a few days the country was ablaze from the Ribble to the confines of Birmingham. At a great meeting of the Lancashire and Cheshire strikers on Mottram Moor on August 7 it was resolved that "all labour should cease until the People's Charter became the law of the land." A similar resolution was passed at Manchester[4] and in nearly
- ↑ Annual Register, lxxxiv. ii. 102.
- ↑ The Life of Thomas Cooper, pp. 190-91. Compare T. E. Ashworth, The Plug Plot at Todmorden, p. 16. "The 'turn-outs' visited every mill in the Todmorden valley first raking out the fires from beneath the boilers and then knocking the boiler-plugs out."
- ↑ This is Cooper's view, Life, pp. 190-91. That it was widely spread is clear from the Manchester Courier, August 13, 1842, and still more from The League Threshed and Winnowed, League Hypocrisy, The Treachery of the League, and other contemporary pamphlets, collected in Manchester Free Reference Library (P. 2507). A foolish speech of Cobden in the House of Commons on July 8, threatening outbreaks, is often quoted as a proof. Dolléans' Chartisme, ii. 210-25, elaborately discusses the origin of the strike and inclines towards connecting both Chartists and Anti-Corn Law League with it. But it would be safer to assume that the League, like the Chartists, made what capital it could out of the situation. The Machiavellian policy attributed to it is hardly credible. But none of these interrelated movements worked independently of the other. Their isolation only exists in the narratives of their historians. It is remarkable, however, how both the political and the free trade writers ignore the very existence of Chartism. Even Morley's Life of Cobden is not exempt from this reproach.
- ↑ Manchester Guardian, August 13, 1842, gives its terms.
