activity forms during the next ten years the central point of Trade Union history. FOOTNOTES: [308] Between 1850 and 1874 there was (except, perhaps, during the American Civil War) no falling off in the value of our export trade comparable to the serious declines of 1826, 1829, 1837, 1842, and 1848. We do not pretend to account for this difference, but may remind the reader of the coincident increase in the production of gold, the influence of Free Trade and railways, and, as the bimetallists would tell us, the currency arrangements which were brought to an end in 1873. [309] This was an elaborate national organisation with 60 branches, grouped under five District Boards. But it enrolled only 4320 members, and broke up in 1847, after numerous local strikes. In June 1849 most of the provincial branches joined in the Typographical Association, from which for some time the strong Manchester and Birmingham societies stood aloof; whilst the London men formed the London Society of Compositors. [310] _The Colliers’ Guide, showing the Necessity of the Colliers Uniting to Protect their Labour from the Iron Hand of Oppression_, etc., by J. B. Thompson (Bishop Wearmouth, 1843); and see many reports in the _Northern Star_, from 1843 to 1848; _The Miners of Northumberland and Durham_, by Richard Fynes, 1873; _A Great Labour Leader_ [Thomas Burt], by Aaron Watson, 1908, pp. 19-23. [311] _Northern Star_ for 1843-4; Fynes’ _Miners of Northumberland and Durham_, 1873, chap. viii.; _Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_, by Friedrich Engels, 1892, pp. 253-9. [312] William Prowting Roberts, the youngest son of the Rev. Thomas Roberts, of Chelmsford, was born in 1806, and became a solicitor at Manchester. He was an enthusiastic Chartist, and friend of Fergus O’Connor, to whose Land Bank he acted as legal adviser. From 1843 onwards his name appears in nearly all the legal business of the Trade Unions. The collapse of 1848 somewhat damaged his reputation, but he continued to be frequently retained for many years. In 1867 he organised the defence of Allen, Larking, and O’Brien, the Irish “Manchester Martyrs,” who were hanged for the rescue of Fenian prisoners and the murder of a policeman. In later years Roberts retired to a country house in the neighbourhood of “O’Connorville,” near Rickmansworth, the scene of one of O’Connor’s colonies, where he died on September 7, 1871. A pamphlet on the Trade Union Bill of 1871 is the only publication of his that we have discovered, but he appears also to have edited a report of the engineers’ trial in 1847, and reports of some other legal proceedings.