Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/268

 CHAPTER XIV

O'CONNORISM

(1841–1842)

August 30, 1841, Feargus O'Connor was released from York Gaol, six weeks before the period of his imprisonment was complete. With this event the Chartist Movement commences another phase. It is the period of the development of the absolute personal supremacy of O'Connor. It is interesting to see how this supremacy was attained. There are several factors in the process, the personal gifts of O'Connor himself, the Northern Star, which ruthlessly manufactured and exploited opinion, the ignorance of his followers, and the fact that leaders inclined to independence of opinion were at work in separate organisations, and so left the National Charter Association at the mercy of O'Connor.

Of O'Connor's personality something has already been said. A jovial, tactful, obliging person, to whom no exertions were wasted which procured one more adherent, a boon-companion of a highly entertaining character, suiting his conduct exactly to the standards of his company, a racy and not too intellectual speaker, a master-hand at flattery and unction, a poseur of talent and resource, O'Connor was well equipped to gain the affections of uneducated men to whom sympathy with their hard lot was more than dissertations upon democratic freedom and exhortations to self-culture. Social antipathy, not political bondage, was at the bottom of Chartism, and the immense exertions of O'Connor, a member of the favoured classes, in the cause of the poor, vain, futile, and self-glorifying as those exertions were, were nevertheless a passport to the fidelity and affection of many thousands of followers.

There is a repulsive aspect to this relationship in the manner 220