On the 28th, [April] there was a strike of the London journeymen tailors, numbering thirteen thousand. Their masters came to a determination not to employ men belonging to trades unions, and after a few weeks, the journeymen were content to return to their work on those terms. These trades unions and their strikes were becoming an insufferable nuisance; nevertheless, no proper effort was made to put them down. The mischief they created was well known to the Government,[8] their interference with trade, their atrocious oaths, impious ceremonies, desperate tyranny, and secret assassinations, had been brought under their observation; but Ministers could not be stirred to any exhibition of energy for the protection either of the manufacturer, the workman, or the public. Even the following powerful appeal was addressed to them without effect: "Those whose lives and property have been endangered by these illegal associations have a right to call on Government to employ some additional means for their suppression. Those who wish for the prosperity of our trade, and what is of far more importance, the prosperity and happiness of the working-classes, should equally desire their extinction. Those who hate oppression should give their suffrages for the putting down these most capricious and irresponsible of all despotism. They are alike hurtful to the workmen who form them, to the capitalists who are the objects of their hostility, and to the public who more remotely feel their effects. Were we asked to give a definition of a trades union, we should say that it is a society whose constitution is the worst of democracies, whose power is based on outrage, whose practice is tyranny, and whose end is self-destruction." AGITATION FOR REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS (1835). =Source.=--Martineau's _History of the Peace_, Vol. III. pp. 254-5. Bohn's Libraries. G. Bell & Sons. _Speech by Mr. O'Connell at Edinburgh, 1835._