The permanent officials of the Ironfounders and the London Bricklayers were men of less originality than Allan or Applegarth. Guile was a man of attractive personality and winning manner, gifted with a certain rugged eloquence. Coulson is described by an opponent as being “stolid and obstinate,” and again as “bricky and stodgy”; but the expansion, under his influence, of the little London Society of Bricklayers into a powerful Union of national scope, proves him to have possessed administrative ability of no mean order. The special distinction of all four alike was their business capacity, shown by the persistency and success with which they pursued, each in his own trade, the policy originated by Newton and Allan, of basing Trade Union organisation upon an insurance company of national extent. George Odger brought to the Junta quite other qualities than the cautious industry of Allan or the lawyer-like capacity of Applegarth. Of the five men we have mentioned he was the only one who continued to work at his trade, and who retained to the last the full flavour of a working-class leader. An orator of remarkable power, he swayed popular meetings at his will, and was the idol of Metropolitan Radicalism. But he was no mere demagogue. Beneath his brilliant rhetoric and emotional fervour there lay a large measure of political shrewdness, and he shared with his colleagues the capacity for deliberately concerted action and personal subordination. His dilatory and unbusinesslike habits made him incapable of building up a great organisation. Had he stood alone, he would have added little to the strength of Trade Unionism; as the loyal adherent of the great officials and their popular mouth-piece to the working-class world, Unionist and non-Unionist alike, he gave the movement a wider basis, and attracted into its ranks every ardent reformer belonging to the artisan class.[376]