him, whilst to O'Connor the intellectual and moral purposes of Lovett were foreign and unintelligible. All these things were against any hearty co-operation from the very beginning. Lovett detested the personal ascendancy of O'Connor; it was against his principles. He also suspected O'Connor's sincerity in the people's cause. O'Connor no doubt returned these feelings with interest. He took no further notice of Lovett and Collins when they were incarcerated, and their appeals for better treatment in prison were totally ignored by the Northern Star,[1] which found space for many columns of O'Connor's whinings. Lovett fell into an intense detestation of the great Northern demagogue, and from the moment of his release nothing could induce him to bury his resentment and co-operate with the National Charter Association. Lovett carried with him many sincere and able men, but they were officers without companies. The rank and file marched with the Irishman, whose controversial methods may be gauged from the following.
Even before Lovett's new Association had been launched these incompatibilities were threatening Chartism with a new schism. Lovett was designing his National Association to supplement rather than to supersede the National Charter Association. But as the latter fell more and more under O'Connor's control, Lovett's refusal to work with it had the inevitable consequence of suggesting that he was dividing the Chartist forces at a moment when unity was especially necessary. O'Connor took full advantage of his enemy's mistake and attacked him and his friends with unrestrained violence. The onslaught began with an article, written by O'Connor, in July 1840, denouncing the refusal of the London Radicals; to take part in the Manchester delegate meeting, a refusal, dictated partly by lack of funds, which was afterwards rescinded. The worst enemies of the suffering multitudes, says O'Connor, are the better-paid members of their own order. "Of all parts of the kingdom the masses have least to expect from the leaders of popular opinion in the Metropolis. The fustian jackets, the unshorn chins, and the blistered hands are as good there as here, but the mouthpieces which undertake to represent them appertain, generally speaking, to an altogether different class."[2] A week later O'Connor tersely declared that "London is rotten."
