We are not altogether without information as to the genesis of the idea. The first attempt at a General Trades Union of which we have any record is that of the “Philanthropic Society” or “Philanthropic Hercules” of 1818. This we hear of almost simultaneously in Manchester, the Potteries and London, though it seems to have originated in first-named town. A meeting of workmen of various trades, held at Manchester in August 1818, convinced of the impotence of isolated Trade Clubs, sought to establish a society on a federal basis, each constituent trade raising its own funds and separately moving for advances or resisting reductions; but pledged first to consult the committee and the other trades, and promised the support of all, both in approved trade movements and in case of legal prosecution or oppression. A committee of eleven was to be chosen by ballot, one-third retiring monthly by rotation; and was to be assisted by a similar local organisation in each town.[208] How far the “General Union,” as the “Philanthropic Society” seems also to have been called, got under way in Lancashire or Staffordshire remains uncertain; but in London the idea was taken up by one of the ablest Trade Unionists of the time--the shipwright John Gast, whom we have already mentioned as an ally of Francis Place, who became president and called upon “the general body of mechanics” to subscribe a penny per week to a central fund for the defence of their common interests.[209] Whether anything came of the attempts at a General Union in 1818-19 we have not discovered, but in all probability the project immediately failed. Seven years later a similar effort met with no greater success. “In 1826,” as we incidentally learn from a subsequent Labour journal,[210] “a Trades Union was formed in Manchester, which extended slightly to some of the surrounding districts, and embraced several trades in each; but it expired before it was so much as known a large majority of the operatives in the neighbourhood.” What was aimed at is clear enough. It was being recommended to the workmen by some of their intellectual advisers. An able pamphlet of 1827 tells them that “Against the competition of the underpaid of surrounding trades, the ready remedy is a central union of all the general unions of all the trades of the country. The remuneration of all the different branches of artisans and mechanics in the country might then be fixed at those rates which would leave such an equalised remuneration to all as would take away any temptation from those in one branch to transfer their skill in order to undersell the labour of the well-remunerated in another branch: the Central Union fund being always ready to assist the unemployed in any particular branch, when their own local and general funds were exhausted; provided always their claims to support were by the Central Union deemed to be just.”[211]