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 remark which, if it meant anything at all, meant that from the currency scheme alone was salvation to be expected. It was a speech which the Chartists themselves repudiated. It was a middle-class Birmingham Union speech, not a Chartist speech.

Fielden briefly seconded the motion. Both he and Attwood were guilty of confusing the issues. Both had enlarged rather upon the necessity of relieving misery than upon the question of granting civil and political rights. Each offered his own panacea for the prevalent distress, and so turned the discussion on to side issues. Apart from the manifest absurdity of expecting to cure the many-rooted evils of society by a single remedy, this was a bad error in tactics. The Government spokesman was Lord John Russell, and he seized the advantage thus offered. He attacked not the Petition and not even Attwood's speech, but the views which Attwood was known to hold. It was an unfair attack in a way, for Attwood had scarcely mentioned his favourite theme, and his speech does not contain the word "currency" at all. Russell spoke as one who was enjoying the opportunity of suppressing a bore, which Attwood undoubtedly was. He turned Attwood's theories upside down—a feat which required little skill—and finally produced, to give the unfortunate man his quietus, the recently published manifesto of the Convention on the Banking and Paper Money Systems. Attwood saw in the expansion of the Paper Currency a remedy for all social ills. Not so the Convention, which, led by O'Brien, pronounced that "amongst the number of measures by which you have been enslaved, there is not one more oppressive than the corrupting influence of paper money." Lord John proceeded to demonstrate the impossibility of improving the lot of the labouring classes by legislation, and consequently by universal suffrage. He hinted that the granting of the rights demanded by the Petition would bring about the demolition of the Monarchy, of the House of Lords, and of the institutions of the country in general.

Benjamin Disraeli followed. His speech was the most interesting contribution to the debate. It was an attack upon the reformed constitution, not in the Chartist sense but in the sense of an idealised Toryism. "The origin of this movement in favour of the Charter dated from about the same time that they had passed their Reform Bill. He was not going to entrap the House into any discussion on the merits of the constitution they had destroyed and that which had replaced it. He had always said that he believed its