The “Derby turn-out” was widely advertised by the newspapers, and brought much odium on the Grand National. But the denunciation of “the Trades Union” greatly increased when part of London was laid in darkness by a strike of the gas-stokers. The men employed by the different gas companies in the metropolis had been quietly organising during the winter, with the intention of simultaneously withdrawing from work if their demands were not acceded to. The plot was discovered, and the companies succeeded in replacing their Union workmen by others. But weeks elapsed before the new hands were able completely to perform their work,[248] and early in March 1834 Westminster was for some days in partial darkness. Amid the storm of obloquy caused by these disputes the Grand National suddenly found itself in conflict with the law. The conviction of six Dorchester labourers in March 1834 for the mere act of administering an oath, and their sentence to seven years’ transportation, came like a thunderbolt on the Trade Union world. To understand such a barbarous sentence we must picture to ourselves the effect on the minds of the Government and the propertied classes of the menacing ideal of “the Trades Union,” brought home by the aggressive policy of the Unions during the last four years. Already in 1830 the formation of national and General Unions had excited the attention of the Government. “When we first came into office in November last,” writes Lord Melbourne, the Whig Home Secretary, to Sir Herbert Taylor, “the Unions of trades in the North of England and in other parts of the country for the purpose of raising wages, etc., and the General Union for the same purpose, were pointed out to me by Sir Robert Peel [the outgoing Tory Home Secretary] in a conversation I had with him upon the then state of the country, as the most formidable difficulty and danger with which we had to contend; and it struck me as well as the rest of His Majesty’s servants in the same light.”[249]