with Continental revolutionists, but it must not be forgotten that Mr. Urquhart suffered from a monomania, which took the odd form that everybody who differed from him was a Russian spy.[93] The political position of the Chartists was rather curious. The Tories were the only Party who showed them any sympathy, for they shared their antagonism to the Reform settlement of 1832, which was essentially a Whig settlement. Then the Chartists were always suspicious of the Free Trade movement as a capitalists’ agitation, the real object of which was not to give the people cheap bread, but to get them to work for low wages on the strength of reducing the price of food. Mr. Cobden’s friends often complained that the Anti-Corn-Law League meetings were broken up by Chartist roughs, who were incited to violence by Tory Protectionists. After the collapse of the conspiracy at Newport, the Chartists formed a purely political organisation, whose objects were admirably described in the able and moderate speech in which Mr. Sharman Crawford, in 1842, attempted, without success, to pledge the House of Commons to take the People’s Charter into consideration. The motion was contemptuously rejected by 226 to 67. The Chartists were then divided into two parties--the London Convention, representing the “physical force” Chartists, and the smaller Birmingham Convention, identified with Mr. Joseph Sturge. He aimed at reconstructing the alliance between the working and middle classes, that had carried Parliamentary Reform in 1832, and at starting an agitation for an extension of the Franchise, and for triennial Parliaments. Both factions joined in bringing the pressure of agitation on Parliament in 1848, an agitation which it now seems was quite peaceful in its intent, though the revolutionary excitement in France naturally induced the well-to-do classes to see in it an anarchical conspiracy. The first check the Chartists received was the intimation that their meeting and their procession would be prohibited because both were likely to lead to disturbances.