[233]It was eventually finished by the landlord, and still exists as a metal warehouse in Shadwell Street.
[234]In May 1834 an informer offered to supply the Home Secretary With full particulars of its organisation, leading members and their activities, for two sums of £50 each (Home Office Papers, 40—32).
[235]Letters to Cobbett’s Weekly Register, reprinted in the Pioneer, December 21, 1833. See also Home Office Papers, 40—32; and the Crisis for November and December 1833. The Voice of the West Riding, an unstamped weekly, June and July 1833, was devoted to this agitation in the Yorkshire textile industry (see Home Office Papers, 40—31).
[236]For an unfavourable account of this Union, see the extremely biassed statement given in the pamphlet Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834). The employers seem to have regarded all the demands of the men as equally unreasonable, even the request for a list of piecework prices. See Times, October 2, 1833. A printed address To the Flax and Hemp Trade of Great Britain, issued by the flaxworkers of Leeds, November 30, 1832, refers with admiration to the effectiveness of this Union (Home Office Papers, 40—31; see also 41—11).
[237]Times, October 28, 1833.
[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.