Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/320

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272
THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT

tives rather than for one of landlords. The workmen themselves must unite and by subscribing small sums allow some happy members of their order to make a start. Three or four acres are enough. Cultivated by the spade, and producing crops of potatoes, roots, and cabbages, these little plots will yield such profits, over and above the farmers' support, that they will form a fund which will enable other comrades to forsake the mill and the mine for the invigorating labours of the field.[1] The result will be that the greedy mill-owners and colliery proprietors will find their looms and mills deprived of labour. Then their only way to carry on their trade will be to bribe their hands not to remove to the land by wages so ample that town and country alike will enjoy the blessings of opulence. The security for all this to the poor man will of course be the People's Charter. When the Charter is won, his vote will secure him the permanent possession of his prosperity.[2] Even before the Charter is secured, and that will not be a long time, the champions of the good cause can organise the resources which will enable a beginning to be made in this most beneficent social revolution.

We now see what O'Connor meant by declaring at Birmingham that something practical must be adopted to save the declining Chartist cause, and how in his megalomania he built up his new Tammany Hall in London, where as chief boss he could pull the wires that were to win the Charter, restore the golden age, make unnecessary the new Poor Law, and turn the artisan classes from their misguided faith in Bright, Cobden, and Free Trade. On the incoherencies of the system, as O'Connor expounded it, it is needless to dwell. They are written large in every detail of the scheme. But there is no need to doubt the sincerity of the strange mind which could convince itself and others of the practicability of such a plan. After all there were sound elements in O'Connor's principles which have appealed, and will continue to appeal, to social reformers of many types and ages. But the fantastic details were as vivid to the agitator as was the honest repugnance to the black sides of industrialism on which his weird calculations

  1. See, for instance, O'Connor's extraordinary argument in Northern Star, May 15, 1843, that a man with four acres under potatoes, cabbages, and turnips could clear £100 a year at a moderate estimate by spade cultivation. O'Connor's figures worked out to £305, and he allowed only £100 surplus to show his moderation. The Leeds Mercury replied that at this rate all landlords would raise their rents twentyfold.
  2. See O'Connor's answer to the Leeds Mercury in Northern Star, June 3, 1843. It is simply that the Mercury leaves the magic effects of the Charter out of the question.