of the police prevented any outbreak, but on July 14 there was a collision at Ashton-under-Lyne between a mob, armed with pikes, and the special constables, supported by a small military force. In the course of it the mob did to death a policeman, who was wrongly identified with a constable who had given evidence against MacDouall, who had long plied his trade as an unqualified medical practitioner at Ashton, and was something of a local hero.[1] In London several secret deposits of arms and weapons were discovered by the police in August.[2]
These circumstances gave some justification to the numerous arrests and trials which vindicated the dignity of the law. Ernest Jones was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for his share in the troubles at Clerkenwell Green and Bonner's Fields. In August MacDouall received a similar punishment, while in September William Cuffey and others were condemned to transportation for life.[3] The most chilling circumstance for the last victims of Chartism was the profound indifference shown to their threats and sufferings. But their foolish schemes of impracticable rebellions no less than the eagerness with which they incriminated each other might well have disgusted a public less attuned to anti-Revolutionary panic than the disillusioned men of 1848.
(4) The Last Stages or Chartism (1849–1858)
After the Chartist collapse of 1848 there remains nothing; save to write the epilogue. But ten more weary years elapsed before the final end came, for moribund Chartism showed a strange vitality, however feeble the life which now lingered in it. But the Chartist tradition was already a venerable memory, and its devotees were more conservative than they thought when they clung hopelessly to its doctrine. It is some measure of the sentimental force of Chartism that it took such an unconscionably long time in dying.
O'Connor had survived with difficulty the double catastrophe of the National Petition and the Land Scheme. But he still remained member for Nottingham, and, though his parlia-
- ↑ Annual Register, p. 103.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 104.
- ↑ Cuffey, a notorious London Chartist, is perhaps the Chartist leader most often mentioned in Punch, whose attitude to the men of 1848 was much less sympathetic than it had been to the heroes of 1842. Cuffey, for instance, is never spoken of without ridicule. But the change of tone in this widely read paper reflects the change of sentiment in its middle-class readers with regard to the Chartist movement.
