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 have made a very effective striking body, but they were precisely the people who preferred armed insurrection. In fact, those Chartist leaders who advocated insurrection had at least logic and consistency on their side. Their policy was likely to be at least as successful as a strike, and they did make preparations for it. In fact, it is hard to escape the impression that the apparent indifference, displayed towards the doings of the Convention about this time by certain of the former advocates of insurrection, was due to the fact that they were busy organising a revolt, and that the appeal of the Convention was only to a middle party amongst their followers, which had neither the wisdom to be moderate nor the courage to be rebel.

The same procedure was now adopted as in the previous instance, when the Convention shirked a decision upon Ulterior Measures. It published an address in which it congratulated itself that it had discovered the error of proposing a general strike, announced nevertheless that the project was not abandoned, and then adjourned for a month to give the delegates time and opportunity to direct the movement and complete the preparations. There was no further meeting till the end of August.

In this interval the great movement died away. The local authorities, backed up by Government, made wholesale arrests of Chartists for illegal possession of arms, for attending unlawful meetings, for sedition, and for many other offences, reaching, in the case of three who were arrested at Birmingham for participation in the fight with the Metropolitan Police, to high treason, for which they were condemned to death, the sentence being commuted to transportation. No less than a score of members of the Convention were arrested during the summer months of 1839, and a vast number of the rank and file. Among these were Benbow, the fiery old advocate of the National Holiday; Timothy Higgins of Ashton-under-Lyne, who had a regular arsenal in his cottage; and the whole of the leaders of the Manchester Political Union and the Northern Political Union of Newcastle. There were several abortive attempts, especially in Lancashire, to put into force the National Holiday in spite of the official abandonment of that measure, and they led to more arrests. Wholesale trials followed. At Liverpool some seventy or eighty Chartists were brought up together; at