66 appointment which he felt the more because of his high aspirations. Taught by the gospel of Utopia to despise specific, regulative and immediate remedies, and to strive for one which would apply to all social evils and to all iniquities, he acquired an aggressive and haughty attitude towards the "unproductive" classes, provoking reciprocal hatred and stringent opposition from the latter. The capitalists were naturally not loth to remove the "Day of Judgment" to as remote a future as they possibly could, and they saw to it that the new industrial organization, the "New Moral World", should not come suddenly upon society like a thief in the night". In fact, their watch was so alert that the strongest trades unions came to grief as soon as they attempted to realize their humblest plans. The aggressive policy of the laborers encountered a still more determined opposition not only on the part of the employers but also of the government. In this case the latter enjoyed the fruit of the wisdom of Nassau Senior, who, as commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of combinations and strikes, recorded his conviction, which was based exclusively on statements and hearsay gossip of employers, that "the general evils and general dangers of combinations cannot easily be exaggerated ", that "if a few agitators can command and enforce a strike which first paralyzes the industry of the peculiar class of workpeople over whom they tyrannize, and then extends itself in an increasing circle over the many thousands and tens of thousands to whose labor the assistance of that peculiar class of workpeople is essential . . . that if this state of things is to continue, we shall not retain the industry, the skill, or the capital, on which our manufacturing superiority, and, with that superiority, our power and almost our existence as a nation, depends ".1 1 Nassau W. Senior, Historical and Philosophical Essays, London, 1865, vol. ii, p. 171. The employers stopped short of nothing until they had succeeded in defeating and crushing the labor organizations. Even the most popular Grand National Consolidated Trades Union which was started, through the agitation of Robert Owen, in 1834, and which enrolled within a few weeks at least half a million members, men and women of various trades, was exterminated by the combination of employers who resorted to lock-outs in order to force the laborers to abandon the union. The conviction of many strikers and the barbarous sentences brought against them by the courts were enough to chill the most ardent followers of the new order.1 Notice was served that a bill would be introduced to make combinations of trades impossible. Many a trades unionist began to suspect that the new moral world could not be ushered in without a hard struggle in the teeth of a hostile government, subservient commissioners and corrupt courts. Conspiracies, intimidation and violence on the part of workingmen began to show signs of something more dangerous than the talk of some future Day of Judgment. The capitalists, however, blinded by their easy victories, were unable to read the handwriting on the wall. Union after union was disbanded and crushed by the newly-formed Chamber of Commerce, thus driving multitudes of people into the very pit of revolution. "Back to politics!" became the slogan of the bulk of laborers. Politics again became the emblem of something which could give everything and deprive of everything; Parliament began to be regarded with awe as a new Almighty in whose word lay life and death. And it was quite natural. The workingmen lost their battle on the industrial field, and they lost it because the machinery of government was turned against them. The important point of stratagem appeared to lie in the 1 1 See George Loveless, The Victims of Whiggery, London, 1837. capture of that machinery and its use against the capitalists. The New Poor Law, the hostility and treachery of the government and the crushing defeat of labor organizations brought, to use Cobbett's words on an earlier occasion, the issue of the working class "to be a question of actual starvation or fighting for food; and when it comes to that point, I know that Englishmen will never lie down and die by hundreds by the wayside." 1 The apotheosis of political power brought again the issue of universal suffrage to the foreground. The foremost radical writers renewed their fight for "freedom". Bronterre started his National Reformer on the 7th of January, 1837, with the declaration that the "money monster" must be fought with his own weapons: Government, Law, Property, Religion, and Morals, these five words embrace everything that affects our happiness as social beings, and consequently all that a reformer can have to deal with. I place Government at the head, because upon that do all the rest really depend. It is the Government that makes the law. The law determines the property—and on the state of property depend the religion and morals, and (as a consequence) the well-being and happiness of every people in the world. . . . The parent cause (of the wretched condition of the people) being bad government, we must necessarily begin with that—and if the government be bad, because, as I contend, it is wrongly constituted, our first attempt must be to have it constituted rightly. Here, then, I am at once conducted to my old ground, universal suffrage. A government which does not represent the interests of all who are called upon to obey its laws, is necessarily a wrongly constituted government. In his article on "Social Occupations" in the same issue 1 See the Political Register, October 20, 1815. he dwells at some length on the same question and upbraids the masses for their want of sufficient interest in universal suffrage. Says he: I know but one way of salvation for us-but one way of felling the monster without being buried underneath his ruins; it is to smite him with the authority of the law, having first got the law on the people's side. It is only by having first got the law on his side, that he has been able to prostrate us. Why should not we be able to do the same by him when we have got the law on ours? . . . What right has he to exclude you more than you to exclude him? . . . I am, therefore, obliged, -reluctantly, but unavoidably obliged-to conclude that your exclusion is the work of your own ignorant and craven submission. You have made no bold efforts as a body-no grand. demonstrations to obtain the franchise; you have occasionally petitioned, it is true, but your petitions were "few and far between", they were also weak and desultory, seldom bold and commanding - never simultaneous and absorbing. You talked in them about your paying taxes, and being liable to serve in the militia, and all that sort of unconsequential rubbish, but you never put forward your claims resolutely, as men who had an equal, and even a superior stake in the question, to that of your oppressors-namely, your very lives, which are hourly threatened with destruction by the murderous moneymonster. Much less did you meet simultaneously, and in millions, to demonstrate the absorbing interest you took in the question. On the contrary, you were satisfied, even in your best days, to abandon your case to the care of a few demagogues, who, however honest and brave, could do nothing for you without some grand national movement on your own part. The reproach of Bronterre came at a time when the seeds of discontent had already begun to sprout to the surface. The "grand national movement" was on its way. It was but a short time after those lines had been penned that from |