growing supremacy of the “Physical Force” section of the Chartists, and to the insurrectionism of 1839-42. The political developments of these years are outside the scope of this work. The Chartist Movement plays the most important part in working-class annals from 1837 to 1842, and does not quit the stage until 1848. Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism in the rank and file, it was disgraced by the fustian of many of its orators and the political and economic quackery of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler elements, finally brought it to nought. An adequate history of it would be of extreme value to our young Democracy.[301] Here it is only necessary to say that whilst the Chartist Movement commanded the support of the vast majority of the manual-working wage-earners, outside the ranks of those who were deeply religious, there is no reason to believe that the Trade Unions at any time became part and parcel of the Movement, as they had, during 1833-4, of the Owenite agitation, though some of their members furnished the most ardent supporters of the Charter. Individual trades, such as the shoemakers, seem to have been thoroughly permeated with Chartism, and were always attempting to rally other trade societies to the cause. The angry strikes of 1842 in Lancashire and the Midlands, fostered, as some said, by the Anti-Corn Law League, were “captured” by the Chartists, and almost converted into political rebellions. The delegate meeting of the Lancashire and Yorkshire trade clubs, which was conducting the “general strike” then in progress “for the wages of 1840,” resolved in August 1842 to recommend all wage-earners “to cease work until the Charter becomes the law of the land.”[302] For a few weeks, indeed, it looked as if the Trade Union Movement, such as it was, would become merged in the political current. But the manifest absurdity of persuading starving men to remain on strike until the whole political machinery of the country had been altered, must have quickly become apparent to the shrewder Trade Unionists. When Chartist meetings at Sheffield were calling for a “general strike” to obtain the Charter, the secretaries of seven local Unions wrote to the newspapers explaining that their trades had nothing to do with the meetings or the resolutions.[303] It must be remembered in this connection that the number of Trade Unionists was, in these years, relatively small--probably not so great as a hundred thousand in the whole kingdom--so that they could not have formed any appreciable proportion of the two, three or four million adherents that the Chartist leaders were in the habit of claiming. And it may be doubted whether in any case a Trade Union itself, as distinguished from particular members who happened to be delegates, made any formal profession of adherence to Chartism. In the contemporary Trade Union records that