[238] _Crisis_, October 19, 1833. [239] _Crisis_, October 12, 1833. The history of the General Trades Unions from 1832 to 1834 is mainly to be gathered from the files of the Owenite press, the _Crisis_, the _Pioneer_, and the _Herald of the Rights of Industry_, with frequent ambiguous references in the Home Office Papers for these years. The _Poor Man’s Guardian_ and the _Man_ also contain occasional references. The _Official Gazette_, issued by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union itself in June 1834, has unfortunately not been preserved. We have also been unable to discover any copy of the Glasgow Owenite journals, the _Tradesman_, _Trades Advocate_, _Liberator_, etc., mostly edited or written by Owen’s disciple, Alexander Campbell, the secretary of the local joiners’ Trade Union. [240] It is interesting to notice how closely this organisation resembles, in its Trade Union features, the well-known “Knights of Labour” of the United States, established in 1869, and for some years one of the most powerful labour organisations in the world (“Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labour,” by Carroll D. Wright, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, January, 1887). Its place was taken by the American Federation of Labour, with exclusively Trade Union objects. [241] _Glasgow Argus_, quoted in _People’s Conservative_, December 28, 1833. [242] May 5, 1834. [243] _Times_, January 23 and 30, 1834. [244] _Kerr’s Exposition of Legislative Tyranny and Defence of the Trades Union_ (Belfast, 1834), vol. 1611 of the Halliday Tracts in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; see _The Irish Labour Movement_, by W. P. Ryan, 1919. [245] _Poor Man’s Guardian_, July 26, 1834. [246] _Times_, April 19, 1834. [247] The only record of this organisation known to us is a copy of the Rules in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, which we print in the Appendix. A “Memorial from the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland to the Producers and Non-Producers of Wealth and Knowledge” is printed in the _Crisis_, May 17, 1834; another, “to the Shopmen, Clerks, Porters and other industrious non-producers,” in the issue for April 26, 1834. [248] See the London newspapers for March 1834; a good summary is given in the _Companion to the Newspaper_ for that month (p. 71). [249] September 26, 1831: _Lord Melbourne’s Papers_ (1889), ch. v. p. 130. The note he left on leaving the Home Office was as follows: “I take the liberty of recommending the whole of this correspondence _re_ the Union to the immediate and serious consideration of my successor at the Home Department” (Home Office Papers, 40--27). See also the statements in the House of Lords debate, _Times_, April 29, 1834; and the comments in _Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders_, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.