A period of general apathy in the Trade Union world ensued. The “London Dorchester Committee” continued with indomitable perseverance to collect subscriptions and present petitions for the return of the six exiled labourers; but “the Trades Union,” together with the ideal from which it sprang, vanished in discredit. The hundreds of thousands of recruits from the new industries or unskilled occupations rapidly reverted to a state of disorganisation. The national “orders” of Tailors and Shoemakers, the extended organisations of Cotton-spinners and Woollen-workers, split up into fragmentary societies. Throughout the country the organised constituents of the Grand National fell back upon their local trade clubs. The records of the rise and fall of the “New Unionism” of 1830-4 leave us conscious of a vast enlargement in the ideas of the workers, without any corresponding alteration in their tactics in the field. In council they are idealists, dreaming of a new heaven and a new earth; humanitarians, educationalists, socialists, moralists: in battle they are still the struggling, half-emancipated serfs of 1825, armed only with the rude weapons of the strike and boycott; sometimes feared and hated by the propertied classes; sometimes merely despised; always oppressed, and miserably poor. We find, too, that they are actually less successful with the old weapons now that they wield them with new and wider ideas. They get beaten in a rising market instead of, as hitherto, only in a falling one. And we shall soon see that they did not recover their lost advantage until they again concentrated their efforts on narrower and more manageable aims. But we have first to inquire how they came by the new ideas.