Who would have thought that if you scratched a Chartist you would find a Tory agent under his skin? Yet so it proved with many of them. George Julian Harney was a Republican. In early Chartist days he wore on Winlaton platforms a Red Cap of Liberty, after the manner of Marat, and called himself "L'Ami du Peuple," after Marat's famous "Journal of Blood." Yet he was not the Friend of the People, in the sense we all thought. He went to America with the reputation of a fiery patriot. It procured for him a welcome from the Liberals of Boston, and he was given a clerkship in the State House soon after his arrival. He might have grown grey in England before a place would have been given him in any Government department here.* To my astonishment Harney soon began to write home disparagements of the American people and their Government, such as we were familiar with from aristocratic pens. When the Bulgarian massacres were stirring the indignation of English Liberals, he sent me a pamphlet he had written, in the spirit of Disraeli's "Coffee House Babble" speech. I wrote to him, saying "it read like the production of a full-blown Tory." He resented the imputation--when all the time it was true. He had cast off his Liberal garments, and was naked, and ashamed. Afterwards he cast off the shame. When I was in Boston, in 1879, American Liberals expressed to me their disappointment that Mr. Harney neither associated with them nor lent them any assistance in their societies, such as they had expected when they welcomed him to their shores. Yet to the end of his days I remained his personal friend, in consideration of services in agitations in which we had worked together. I had helped him when he issued _The Republic_ and had written words in honour of his first wife, a Mauchline beauty of the Amazon type, whose heroism was notable. In times of danger she would say to her husband, "Do what you think to be your duty, and never mind me." * Sam Bamford, who wrote the "Pass of Death," when Canning died, was old before we accorded him a seat in a cellar in Somerset House, copying papers at a few shillings a week. It was all his Parliamentary friends could procure for him. I first knew Harney at the time of the Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839. He was "wanted" by the authorities. I alone knew where he lodged. He knew he was safe in my hands, and we never ceased to trust each other. I never change my friendship for a colleague because he changes his opinions; but I never carry my friendship so far as to change my convictions for his. Happily it is now thought a scandal to say that Chartist politicians took money from Tories to break up Liberal meetings. This shows there is a feeling against it. But they did take it Thomas Cooper, as well as Ernest Jones, the two poets of Chartism, were themselves in this disastrous business.