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 A new Executive had to be chosen for the Association. Up to now O'Connor had proudly stood aloof from it, preferring to control the machine from the outside. He was now so anxious to get everything under his own direct control that he condescended to accept office. He announced his acquiescence in characteristically grandiose terms:

I am now about to enter into a reacknowledgement of a Solemn League and Covenant with the working classes during that period for which they have imposed upon me duties and a responsibility which nothing but their own good conduct would have induced me to undertake.

Humbly accepting the patronage of the descendant of Irish kings, his meek followers promptly elected O'Connor as their Treasurer, hoping, no doubt, that the rents of his mythical Irish estates and the more certain profits of the Northern Star would fill up the emptiness of their coffers. As Secretary of the Executive the defaulting John Campbell was replaced by T. M. Wheeler, a member of the staff of the Northern Star, and a dependent of O'Connor. The effect was to put the Executive in the hollow of the autocrat's hands. O'Connor, in fact, was responsible for the whole scheme; he had set it forth in the Northern Star so far back as the previous April. It involved much more than mere changes of personnel, for the crowning new proposal now was to establish the headquarters of the organisation in London.

The change was easily agreed upon, but its motives and results deserve some consideration. There were obvious motives of convenience in favour of establishing the Chartist machine in the political centre. London had in the days of the Working Men's Association been the birthplace of the movement, and it was only gradually that its centre of gravity had shifted towards the industrial North. Meanwhile the current of London Radicalism had begun to drift into very different channels, and there were few representative leaders in the South save those with whom O'Connor had quarrelled. Harney voiced the higher argument for the change when he declared that transference to London was necessary to "regenerate" the capital. But for O'Connor himself the chief motive was that he himself now lived in London and his simple wish was to exercise control with a minimum of trouble to himself. Perhaps one object was to get away from the