a local but a national paper; news came later to Leeds than to London; O'Connor's residence in London interposed constant difficulties in the way of publication in Leeds; London was the centre of Government and faction, and the Star must be there in order to fight the enemy on the spot.[1] But if the step had been undertaken in the hope of reviving its sales, the result finally was the completion of its ruin. The Star, which first came forth from its London office on November 30, 1844, was something very different from the old Yorkshire newspaper. It was now called the Northern Star and the National Trades Journal, and a desperate effort was made to win new readers by appeals to the Trades Union element which in earlier days had seemed of little account. Before long it almost ceased to be a Chartist paper at all. The methods and spirit of the old Star had been nurtured in the fierce and democratic atmosphere of the West Riding and Lancashire, and the transplanted organ retained enough of its traditions to fail in making a strong appeal to the south-country readers on whose support it was henceforth mainly dependent. And it was a bad day for O'Connor's influence upon the most blindly devoted of his adherents when he removed from their midst their favourite organ. Even eighty years ago north-country opinion was inclined to resent the dictation of "metropolitan" journalism.
We must now return to the Birmingham Convention of 1843. There the crowning triumph of O'Connor was the somewhat reluctant acceptance by its obsequious members of the grandiose schemes of land reform which were now taking a superficially definite shape in the brain of the agitator, and to which he Was to devote his main energies for all that remained of his tempestuous life. How these plans originated in his mind will demand an even further retrospect.
Despite incoherencies and insincerities O'Connor remained possessed by certain fundamental principles or prejudices during the whole of his public life. His hatreds were as sincere as they were fierce, and chief among them was his deep-rooted hostility to modern industrialism and all its works. His abhorrence of machinery, the factory system, the smoke and squalor of the factory town, the close-fisted and selfish employers with their eagerness for cheap labour, sprang not only from his real sympathy with the down-trodden weavers and colliers
- ↑ Northern Star, October 19, 1844, the date of the public announcement of the impending change. The last number published at Leeds was issued on November 23.
