Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/286

 and proceeded to Paris to fulfil their mission to the Provisional Government.

At the same time the British Cabinet had grave troubles at home. There was no country in Europe where the revolution in Paris wrought more startling changes than in England. The working classes had been long discontented, and the mass of them organised as Chartists claimed to exceed the population of Scotland. Their discontent, which had been chiefly declamatory, now took the most menacing shape. They had before forbade anti-Corn Law meetings, and occupied churches to the exclusion of the congregation; they now spoke openly of arms and menaced an attack on London. Their wrongs and the redress they sought were set out in a petition, the signatures to which were said to outnumber the male population of London; but some of those signatures proved to be fictitious or burlesque, a discovery which seriously diminished the importance of the document. It was determined to present this huge petition to Parliament, and to escort it to Palace Yard by a muster of the Chartists of London and Middlesex. The Government forbade the procession, and enrolled an army of special constables to co-operate with the police and military in resisting it. Feargus O'Connor advised submission to the authorities, and the effect was like the Clontarf retreat in Ireland five years earlier; the confidence of the Chartists was dissipated, and in a moment their movement lost its strength and terror. The Government, which had been much perturbed, was now jubilant and contemptuous of opposition. It was at this time O'Brien returned from his deputation to Paris, and when he attempted to tell the House of Commons the history and moral of that enterprise he was received with jeers and insults. The young bucks of the army, who are always the most unmannerly of opponents, distinguished