Chapter 47 PART II RESULTS CHAPTER XI THE WORKING POOR 5

5 However, when we look back at this period, we can see: there is a clear and huge gap between the power of the working poor that the rich fear, the "specter of communism" that hangs over them, and their actual organized power, not to mention The strength of the newly emerging industrial proletariat.The way they protest publicly is literally a "movement" rather than an organization.Even in the case of the most popular and comprehensive political movement—Chart (1838-1848)—the working poor were united only by a few traditional radical slogans, a few powerful orators and journalists who, like O'Connor, became advocates for the poor, and several newspapers like the Northern Star.Against the rich and the great was their common lot, and of this the old warriors recalled:

We have a dog named Rodney.My grandfather didn't like the name because she was kind of quirky and reminded of Admiral Rodney.After he was made a nobleman, he became hostile to the people.An older lady also took care to explain to me that Corbett and Cobden were two different people--Corbett a hero and Cobden a mere middle-class champion.One of the paintings I remember longest—next to the samples and engravings not far from the Washington statue—is a portrait of John Frost (the Chartist leader of the failed Newport uprising in 1839).A line at the top of the painting states that it belongs to a series of works in the "Portrait Gallery of Friends of the People".At the top of the picture is a crown of laurels, and at the bottom, Mr. Frost, in the image of a miserable homeless man in rags, calls for justice. . . . the most common of our visitors was a lame shoemaker . . . (who) carried with him every Sunday morning a copy of the Northern Star, fresh off the press, like a clock. Exactly there to hear our family read "The Segus Letters" to him and others.Newspapers are first dried before the fire, and then carefully and neatly cut so as not to mar every line of the almost sacred product.When everything was ready, Larry smoked a short pipe calmly, occasionally put the pipe into the fireplace, and listened intently to the great Fergus like a believer in a church.

Situations of leading or cooperating are fairly rare. The "General Trade Unions" of 1834-35, an ambitious attempt to transform the movement into an organisation, failed miserably and swiftly.The best-case scenario—in Britain and on the Continent—is the spontaneous solidarity of local labor groups, the laboring poor, like the silk workers of Lyon, willing to fight to the death to survive.Hunger, misery, hatred and hope are the forces that hold the labor movement together, and it is the lack and maturity of organization that bring it down.The hunger and despair of many poor people was enough to make them rise up, but the lack of organization and maturity reduced their uprising to a temporary crisis of social order.As was the case with Chartism in England, so was the Revolution of 1848 on the Continent.Before 1848 the movement of the working poor had not yet developed an equivalent to the revolutionary middle-class Jacobinism of 1789-1794.