branches in London, Paris, and Brussels, it became a powerful body.
London, as the chief haven of refuge for the exiled revolutionary, furnished more abundant opportunities than even Brussels for fraternal relations between the Chartists and their foreign allies. Thus Harney and Jones attended, on July 14, 1846, the celebration of the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille by a Democratic Society of French exiles. At this gathering Jones made a terrific speech on behalf of the fraternity of nations, while Harney drove home his moral by urging the French to forget Fontenoy and the English to forget Waterloo.[1] Moreover Harney and Jones were both members of an international society of German origin called the Deutsche Bildungsgesellschaft für Arbeiter. Jones was an active member of a committee for the regeneration of Poland, and Harney energetically got up meetings in favour of the Poles.[2]
There was a danger lest absorption in international schemes of revolution might not limit the directness of the Chartist appeal to the British proletariat. In the early months of 1848 the conflict between the older and newer Chartist ideals was already making itself felt. There was the natural impulse to profit by the recrudescence of interest in the movement to carry on an agitation on the good old lines that had so often been tried and found wanting. A new National Petition had already been arranged for, and it was another proof of the ascendency of O'Connor that his aristocratic dislike of the ballot was allowed to prevail over the sacred traditions of the Six Points, consecrated by ten years of agitation. The Petition asked for the Charter, but henceforth the Charter was a Charter of Five Points. The Sixth Point, the Ballot, was quietly dropped. Yet it must have been a real stimulus to men, who had long lived in a backwater, conscious, despite their own assertions to the contrary, that the general public was little heedful of their doings, to learn that crowds were flocking on every side to sign the Petition, and that there was every prospect of making a braver show than even in the glorious days that preceded the collapse of the Petition of 1842. With February came the news of the ignominious flight of Louis Philippe and the supersession of the citizen king by a Radical Republic with socialistic leanings. The Northern Star rejoiced in the triumph of the "Paris proletarians," and declared that "as France had secured for herself her beloved
