70	ENGLISHSAGA
Celtic orators, and forests of oak saplings were brandished by
grimy sons of toil. Stories were whispered about the country
of how the master workmen of Birmingham— the savage bishops
of heathen Midland tradition— were manufacturing pikes which,
•smuggled out in the aprons of Staffordshire chain and nail
makers, were being sold to honest revolutionaries at 1/8 a piece
or 2/6 polished. Men spoke of kidnapping the wives and children
of the aristocracy and carrying them into the northern towns as
hostages, of the secret manufacture of shells and hand grenades
and caltrops for strewing in the path of the hated yeomanry.
Newcastle was to be reduced to ashes: "if the magistrates
Peterloo us," the cry went round, "we will Moscow England."
In 1839 the principal town of Monmouthshire was attacked by
miners with muskets and pitchforks. Here and in riots at
Birmingham many lost their lives.
The ruling class ignored the movement The violence of
its spokesmen^1 rendered it ridiculous in the eyes of responsible
persons. The. House of Commons, with its hatred of
exaggeration, refused to receive its petitions. During the debate
on one, purporting to bear the signatures of millions of
operatives, the House was half empty: though a Tory b?A .
bencher, who one day as Prime Minister was to take more*^2f
one step towards the fulfilment of the People's Charter, cop£ended
that the rights of labour were as sacred as those e£"property.
Those within the movement who advocated violence were corre-
spondingly strengthened. For it seemed that the rulers of England
had no interest in the sufferings of its disinherited people.
The climax came in 1842, the year which saw the publication
of the Report on the employment of children in the coal mines.
One of those prolonged and periodic depressions that attended
industrialisation had culminated in almost unbearable hardship
in the midlands and north: factories were closing and the families
of the operatives starving. Through the previous winter stories
O'Connor, the Chartist 'leader, who daimed to be descended from the
Irish Kings, thus addressed his followers in Palace Yard, Westminster. "It was said the
working classes were dirty fellows, and that among them they could not get six hundred
and fifty-eight who were fit to sit in the House or Commons. Indeed I He would soon
alter that He would pick out that number from the present meeting, and the first he
chose he would take down to Mr. Hawes's soap factory; then he would take them
where they should reform their tailors' bills; he would next take them to the hairdresser
and perfumer, where they should be anointed with the fashionable stink; and having
done that by way of preparation, he would quickly take them into the House of Com-
mons, when they would be the best six hundred and fifty-eight that ever sat within its
walls.^11