Lord John Manners let the cat out of the bag when he ...

Lord John Manners let the cat out of the bag when he talked, apropos of a Factory Bill, of' putting a curb on the manufacturing interest and making it know its rider'. The political creed of the Chartists was an amplification of the Radical formula, one man one vote, one vote one value.

How they were going to get the vote was not so clear, and what they were going to do with it remained, even to themselves, unknown. Judged by what they did, they might be considered a body of decent, hardly used, and not particularly intelligent men, whose allegiance, given with equal readiness to high-minded leaders like Lovett and Hetherington and to pitiful demagogues like Fergus O'Connor, would probably be at the service of the first Conservative or Liberal who showed that he deserved it.

Judged by what they said, or by what O'Connor, 'false, malignant, and cowardly', said for them, both their objects and their methods seemed to involve a bloody progress from confiscation, through anarchy, to famine and a dictatorship. The Socialism of Billy Owen, the doctrine that industrialism was not an impersonal force to be adored or bewailed, but a way of life to

be controlled by co-operation, had gone

underground.

The young Queen was gracious to him / her for her father's sake, who had been his mate in the days when Napoleon had studied his projects in

Elba, and Castlereagh had laid them

before Congresses. But his mind was failing, and to most people Owenism meant a crazy multiplication of Trade Unions with long names, and the combination of economic heresy with irreligion and sexual depravity.

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