At Newport the harsh prison treatment of Vincent, a Chartist advocate, convicted for what was held to be a political offence, brought a crowd of 10,000 men, led by Frost, William, and Jones, to demand his release. The insurgents had a few rifles and pikes, but were generally unarmed, and the fire of the military soon overpowered them. But lives were lost on both sides, and Frost and his two lieutenants were sentenced to death, though the sentence was at once reduced to transportation for life, and some years later to simple banishment from British dominions. Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and all the chief speakers of the movement were brought to trial for seditious utterance in 1840, and in most cases sent to prison either for twelve months or two years. With these imprisonments and the general election of 1841 came the first serious disintegration of the Chartist movement.[135] O’Brien and O’Connor differed vigorously on the question of election policy, and before they were released from prison were expressing their opinions in the _Northern Star_. O’Connor, full of wrath at the repressive treatment meted out to Chartists by the Whig Government, was for attacking the Whigs at the election, and O’Brien objected to this as a pro-Tory policy.[136] The decision to run independent Chartist candidates for parliament in certain constituencies, and the failure of these candidates to get returned on the limited franchise of 1832, increased disunion in the Chartist ranks and brought demoralisation. To make matters worse for the movement, several prominent Chartists left prison with fresh notions and ideas of reform, which had come to them in their long hours of solitude and reflection. Lovett, imprisoned in connection with the Birmingham riot, though he was entirely innocent of giving any encouragement to violence, on his release was full of vast plans for national education, convinced that education must precede political democracy. Vincent had become a strong temperance advocate, and henceforth must give himself to the work of a teetotal lecturer. Other men were for bringing in religion by “Chartist Churches.”[137] Antagonism to the anti-corn law league of Cobden and Bright, and later his own “National Land Company” experiments, withdrew Feargus O’Connor from actual Chartist propaganda. The movement languished. But in spite of government repression, the indifference of parliament, the hostility of the wealthier classes, and its own jarring elements of discord, Chartism was not dead.[138] The misery of the English people kept it from death. With one in every eleven of the industrial population a pauper in 1842, general satisfaction with the state of government was impossible for men of strong social sympathies. Some exerted themselves, like Sadler and Oastler, in following Lord Shaftesbury’s entirely disinterested and successful crusade against the horrors of factory oppression. Others supported the Free Trade agitation.