Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/264

 agreed that the Corn Laws were an intolerable evil, but they replied that they could not agree to co-operate merely upon the merits of the question. "What," they ask, "is our present relation to you as a section of the middle class? It is one of violent opposition. You are the holders of power, participation in which you refuse us; for demanding which you persecute us with a malignity paralleled only by the ruffian Tories. We are therefore surprised that you should ask us to co-operate with you." They proceed to describe how the middle class press had denounced them as low adventurers, and their schemes as impracticable; how it had ignored their proceedings except to pour contempt and ridicule upon them. The middle class had urged the prosecutions for treason and sedition, had hounded on the police and imprisoned the people's leaders. The people cannot co-operate with them, for their failings will not permit them to do so. Nor will their principles, for Chartism aims at something higher than the repeal of a tax. It aims at the stoppage of tyranny and slavery at their source. So the attitude of the local magistrates, mill-owners, and gentry in the summer of 1839 was resulting in its natural consequences. The "asking-for-troops" face, which Napier so graphically describes, gave place to the prosecution-for-sedition face. The terror of July and August was avenged with a carnival of arrests, trials, and imprisonments which only embittered the relations of Chartists and the higher classes. The whole odium was thrown on to the middle class, and we cannot be surprised if leaders like Williams and Binns, smarting under imprisonment, vented their feelings in bitter denunciations of the whole body which they vaguely felt to be the cause of their failures and misfortunes.

The arguments of James Leach speak for themselves. In a debate with a Free Trader at Manchester he laid down seven propositions. First, that the workers had been duped by the middle class over the Reform Bill, and might therefore be duped over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Second, that the evils of which the workers complained were due not to agricultural protection and the consequent depression in trade, but to machinery. Third, that the increase of trade which the League promised as a result of repeal would not be of any benefit to the labourer, for as the cotton trade had increased the wages of the handloom weavers had decreased. The argument here is, more trade more machinery, more machinery