One link between Chartism and the Continent had always existed in the family connections of Feargus O'Connor. His uncle, Arthur O'Connor, a priest-hating aristocrat, who had taken a leading part among the United Irishmen, had done his best to induce Lazare Hoche to effect the liberation of Ireland by bringing a Jacobin army across the Channel. On his release from prison in 1803, Arthur O'Connor had settled down in the land of Revolution, had been made a general by Napoleon, had become a French citizen, and had married a daughter of the philosopher Condorcet. He was still living in a country house that had once belonged to Mirabeau, and, though over eighty years of age, remained active enough to send home furious attacks on O'Connell and his clerical following. Thus the French Revolutionary tradition had almost as much to do in moulding O'Connor's policy as had his Irish nationalist antecedents. Lesser apostles of Chartism had drunk deeply in the French Revolutionary spring. James O'Brien had glorified the Jacobinism of Robespierre and the Communism of Babeuf in writings which had been widely read in Chartist circles. If O'Brien were now virtually lost to the party, Harney's Jacobinical sentiments, MacDouall's exile in France, and Ernest Jones's German upbringing and relations with German revolutionaries, had all multiplied the dealings between the Chartist leaders and the Continent. There was now in England a considerable band of foreign exiles, chief among whom was Giuseppe Mazzini. Thus it was that the revolutionary movements on the Continent were closely followed in Chartist circles, while Continental rebels repaid the compliment by studying the methods of Chartism in England. The Chartist outlook was no longer merely local.
In 1845 Feargus O'Connor made a tour in Belgium and came home full of a desire to emulate the Flemish methods of small intensive farming, which he held up for admiration to those who wished to participate in his Land Scheme. Were England cultivated like Flanders and Brabant, it would, he declared, be able to maintain a population of three hundred millions.[1] But O'Connor did not simply go to Belgium to study its agriculture. At Brussels he had treaty with a band of German democratic communists then in exile in the Belgian capital. This body welcomed him with a congratulatory address, signed among others by Karl Marx and Friedrich
- ↑ Northern Star, September 20, 1845. With characteristic incoherence O'Connor wrote in the Star of September 27 that the Belgian peasants were in terrible tribulation through a failure of the harvest.
