Here at last we have substance given to the formidable idea of “the Trades Union.” It was soon worked up by the newspapers to a pitch at which it alarmed the employers, dismally excited the imaginations of the middle class, and compelled the attention of the Government. But there was no cause for apprehension. Lack of funds made the Association little more than a name. Practically no trade action is reported in such numbers of its organ as are still extant. The business of the Manchester Committee seems to have been confined to the promotion of the “Short Time Bill.” On April 23, 1831, at the general meeting of the Association, then designated the Lancashire Trades Unions, it was resolved to prepare petitions in favour of extending this measure to all trades and all classes of workers. Active support was given in the meantime to Mr. Sadler’s Factory Bill. Towards the end of the year we suddenly lose all trace of the National Association for the Protection of Labour, as far as Manchester is concerned. “After it had extended about a hundred miles round this town,” writes a working-class newspaper of 1832, “a fatality came upon it that almost threatened its extinction.... But though it declined in Manchester it spread and flourished in other places; and we rejoice to say that the resolute example set by Yorkshire and other places is likely once more to revive the drooping energies of those trades who had the honour of originating and establishing the Association.”[224] What the fatality was that extinguished the Association in Manchester is not stated; but Doherty, to whose organising ability its initial success had been due, evidently quarrelled with the executive committee, and the _Voice of the People_ ceased to appear. In its place we find Doherty issuing, from January 1832, the _Poor Man’s Advocate_, and vainly striving, in face of the “spirit” of “jealousy and faction,” to build up the Yorkshire branches of the Association into a national organisation, with its headquarters in London. After the middle of 1832 we hear no more, either of the Association itself or of Doherty’s more ambitious projects concerning it.[225] The place of the National Association was soon filled by other contemporary general trade societies, of which the first and most important was the Builders’ Union, or the General Trades Union, as it was sometimes termed. It consisted of the separate organisations of the seven building trades, viz. joiners, masons, bricklayers, plasterers, plumbers, painters, and builders’ labourers, and is, so far as we know, the solitary example, prior to the present century, in the history of those trades of a federal union embracing all classes of building operatives, and purporting to extend over the whole country.[226]