[313] _Flint Glass Makers’ Magazine_, October 1851. The years 1847-8 had witnessed many strikingly vindictive prosecutions of Trade Unionists. Besides the case of the engineers, to which we shall refer hereafter, twenty-one stonemasons of London were indicted in 1848 for conspiracy, but, after repeated postponements, the prosecuting employer failed to proceed with the case. The Sheffield razor-grinders stood in greater jeopardy. John Drury, and three other members of their society, were tried and sentenced to ten years’ transportation at the instance of the Sheffield Manufacturers’ Protection Association on the random accusations of two dissolute convicts that they had incited them to destroy machinery. This monstrous perversion of justice aroused the greatest indignation. Public meetings were held by the National Association of United Trades. The indictment was quashed on a technical point, but a new one was immediately preferred against the defendants. The local feeling was, however, so great that they were finally, after a year’s suspense, released on their own recognisances (July 12, 1849). A Sheffield Trade Unionist declared that “the tyranny of the employers had been so great,” in perverting the local administration of the law, “that the men laid their grievances before the Government. Sir George Grey ordered an inquiry.... Twenty cases of parties who had been convicted by the magistrates were brought before a Board of Inquiry, seventeen of which were quashed” (_Stonemasons’ Fortnightly Circular_, November 23, 1848). [314] Bill No. 58 of 1844, introduced by William Miles, M.P. (Hansard, vols. 73 and 74.) [315] _Potters’ Examiner_, April 13, 1844. [316] Hansard, vols. 73 and 74. The Bill was lost by 54 to 97 (May 1, 1844); see _Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_, by Friedrich Engels, 1892, pp. 283-4. [317] _The Miners of Northumberland and Durham_, by Richard Fynes, 1873, chap. ix.; _The British Coal Trade_, by H. Stanley Jevons, 1915, pp. 448-51. [318] _Rules and Regulations of the Association of United Trades for the Protection of Industry_ (London, August 2, 1845). There is, as far as we know, only one copy of these rules in existence, but full particulars of its establishment and working are to be found in the _Northern Star_, which it used for a time as its official organ. [319] Thomas Slingsby Duncombe was the aristocratic demagogue of the period. An accomplished man of the world, with the habits of a dandy, he nevertheless devoted himself with remarkable assiduity not only to the Parliamentary business of the Chartists and Trade Unionists, but also to the dry details of the committee work of the association of which he became president. The _Life and Correspondence_ of Duncombe, which his son published in 1868, describes him almost exclusively as a fashionable man of the world and House of Commons politician, and entirely ignores his more solid work for Trade Unionism during the years 1845-8.