to a strike. The Convention, and especially O'Connor, has forfeited all respect, and the people know not whom to trust, reports James Taylor.[1] Richards from the Potteries sends no encouragement; Knox from Sunderland none. Hyde, a regular Chartist arsenal, requests Deegan to withdraw his vote for the strike. Some places which favoured a strike wanted others to give the lead. Huddersfield and Bath protested against the abandonment, but these were isolated instances.[2]
Two communications from the North exhibit the local divergence of views which perhaps existed in nearly every important Chartist locality towards the end of July. On the 21st the Northern Political Union addressed a threatening manifesto to the middle classes, urging them to join the working people against the boroughmongers and aristocracy. If the middle class allow the aristocracy to put down Chartism, the working people "would disperse in a million of incendiaries," and warehouses and homes would be swallowed up in one black ruin! This address, which was probably the work of O'Brien, landed most of its signatories in gaol. On the 20th Robert Knox, the delegate for Durham, published an address to the middle classes in exactly opposite terms, comparing Capital and Labour to the two halves of a bank-note, each useless without the other. Knox said that the possession of political power by the middle class has hitherto tended to obscure this fact of mutual dependence. These addresses were both communicated to the Government by local authorities.[3] When leaders were so divided, it is no wonder that followers were perplexed.
The failure of the strike policy throws an interesting light upon the status of the Chartist rank and file. It is clear that the trade societies as a whole stood outside the Chartist movement, though many trade unionists were no doubt Chartists too. The societies could not be induced to imperil their funds and existence at the orders of the Chartist Convention, and without the organised bodies of workmen the general strike was bound to be a fiasco. The workmen who could be relied on to participate in the strike were precisely those whose economic weight was least effective—handloom weavers, stockingers, already unemployed workmen of all sorts. The colliers, it is true, labouring under special grievances, might
