at which Scotch and Irish representatives were present.[234] The aggressive activity and rapid growth of the Builders’ Union during 1832-33 had been only a part of a general upheaval in labour organisation. The Cotton-spinners had recovered from the failure of the Ashton strike (1830-31) by the autumn of 1833, when we find Doherty prosecuting with his usual vigour the agitation for an eight hours day which had been set on foot by his Society for National Regeneration. “The plan is,” writes J. Fielden (M.P. for Oldham) to William Cobbett, “that about the 1st March next, the day the said Bill (now Act) limits the time of work for children under eleven years of age to eight hours a day, those above that age, both grown persons and adults, should insist on eight hours a day being the maximum of time for them to labour; and their present weekly wages for sixty-nine hours a week to be the minimum weekly wages for forty-eight hours a week after that time”; and he proceeds to explain that the Cotton-spinners had adopted this idea of securing shorter hours by a strike rather than by legislation on Lord Althorpe’s suggestion that they should “make a short-time bill for themselves.”[235] Fielden and Robert Owen served, with Doherty, on the committee of this society, which included a few employers. The Lancashire textile trades followed the lead of the Cotton-spinners, and prepared for a “universal” strike. Meanwhile their Yorkshire brethren were already engaged in an embittered struggle with their employers. The Leeds Clothiers’ Union, established about 1831, and apparently one of the constituent societies of the National Association for the Protection of Labour, bore a striking resemblance to the Builders’ Union, not only in ceremonial and constitution, but also in its policy and history.[236] In the spring of 1833 it made a series of attacks on particular establishments with the double aim of forcing all the workers to join the Union and of obtaining a uniform scale of prices. These demands were met with the usual weapon. The employers entered into what was called “the Manufacturers’ Bond,” by which they bound themselves under penalty to refuse employment to all members of the Union. The men indignantly refused to abandon the society; and a lock-out ensued which lasted some months, and was the occasion of repeated leading articles in the _Times_.[237] The Potters’ Union (also established by Doherty in 1830) numbered, in the autumn of 1833, eight thousand members, of whom six thousand belonged to Staffordshire and the remainder to the lodges at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Derby, Bristol, and Swinton[238]--another instance of the extraordinary growth of Trade Unions during these years.