Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/156

 The Attwoodites were intoxicated with the unexpectedly large success of their schemes and contemplated with satisfaction their future progress towards a sure and certain victory. But the Birmingham Union died in giving birth to the Chartist Movement.

For a time all went well. The election of delegates was carried out in all parts of the country during September and the following months. Nevertheless from this time forward the Birmingham Union lost hold upon the Movement, and when the Convention met leadership was already gone from their delegates. The Union itself began to collapse and it was the Convention which dealt the final blow.

This downfall was due to a combination of forces working both within and without the Union. In the first place the Birmingham Political Union was an anachronism, a resurrection from the days before militant Owenism had inculcated the idea of a class war. It was a body whose rank and file were working people and whose leaders were middle-class men. As such it was opposed to the prevailing tendency amongst working people. The London Working Men's Association was founded with the idea of excluding any but bona fide artisans, and though it in practice was prepared to co-operate with middle-class people, it made no concealment of the fact that it held such co-operation to imply no subordination. The London working men would accept no terms but equal alliance. They had drunk deep of the liquor of O'Brienism and, in the somewhat limited social philosophy at their disposal, identified the middle class with the capitalist employing class, whose elimination was one of the principal articles of their creed. The working men of the North, who had suffered more personally from the evils they denounced, held the same views, but in a cruder and more violent form than did the skilled artisans of London. Neither section, however, believed that the interests of middle class and working class could possibly be identical, or that a middle-class leader was to be trusted. The mere fact that a middle-class leader was zealous for a particular object was a guarantee that that object was not one for which working men should strive.

There are early hints that the London Working Men's Association was not inclined to allow the Birmingham leaders or their programme to take first place in the national