Now, the agitation of these two questions found me in a mental state much altered by three years' reflection. From the advocacy of physical force-induced by painful acquaintance with the deep daily suffering the squalid want and raggedness-the woe and agony of starvation-experienced by what are called "the manufacturing masses," in 1842;from being the man of whom Sir Frederick Pollock, the Attorney-General, truly declared in Parliament, that he who was then on his trial for the alleged crime of stirring up the people to sedition and riot, in the Staffordshire Potteries, had avowed in the Manchester Convention that-" he was for fighting;" I say, from such advocacy, and from being such a man, I had come, by serious reflection during more than three years-two-thirds of that time passed in a prison—I had come, at the period in which these two questions began to be simultaneously agitated, to the conclusion-the clear and conscientious conclusion-that all wars and fightings were wrong : that all taking of human life was wrong-even the taking of human life in self-defence. For a considerable part of my period of change my views were, of course, very unfixed and uncertain it is so with all of us, when our opinions are in a state of transition. At length, after surveying the whole question of war, aggressive and defensive, to the utmost extent of which I was able, I found no firm ground for consistent advocacy but the denial of the propriety of blood-shedding war altogether the absolute negation of the right of lifespilling, even in self-defence. I shall not apologise for having held opinions in favour of a resort to violence, much as I lament having ever held such opinions. When the most numerous and most toilful class suffer unto agony and despair, under the ill regulations of society, and when governments uphold the laws whereby these faulty regulations are continued, bad governments must take the chief blame of the violent opinions, ay, or violent courses of action, into which the suffering classes, and they whose sympathies are naturally bound up with them, may fall. And as I cannot, under such convictions, be so mean as to apologise for old opinions, neither shall I, from a weak fear of losing a reputation for consistency, apologise for exchanging these old opinions for new ones. Every man who thinks must change his opinions: it is impossible that a thinking man can remain stagnant in opinion. And nothing ought to render us more suspicious of a private man's good sense than his assertion that he had held precisely the same opinions, on all subjects, through life; nor ought anything, I judge, render us more jealous of a public man's honesty than a boast that his opinions had never changed on any of the great subjects of public morals or economy. My friends, every man's lifewalk will be found to be, more or less, zig-zag in its direction, when closely and honestly traced: he who dares to assert that he has marched from the cradle to maturity by an invariable right line, is an impostor. : : Well these two questions, of the militia, and of the recal of Frost and his brother exiles, being anxiously discussed among my own party, I felt myself in this predicament:When the recal of Frost was pleaded, I listened with alternate gratification and pain to the speeches made by some of my brethren gratification at the true-heartedness with which they pleaded for putting an end to the degradation and suffering of the banished ones,—but pain at the irksomeness which it was evident they felt in dealing with the question of physical force. Fain would they have avoided all mention of it that was manifest. But the consciousness that physical force, and the question of its propriety, must be uppermost in the minds of many in a mixed audience,-many who were accustomed to speak of the poor exiles by no other name than that of the Newport rioters,' utterly forbade what would certainly be termed 'shirking the question of physical force,'and so every speaker alluded to it, more or less directly, and yet could not avoid a tendency to mystify the doctrine, and even to mystify the very facts of the outbreak in which John Frost participated. Not a shade of dishonest nature prompted : this course the mind was ill at ease, in each speaker: it was a struggle to get through the task of dealing with what the middle classes have always affirmed to be the great stain upon Chartism-our advocacy of physical force. Some way was sought to explain facts, so as, if possible, to lessen the reprobation under which it was felt they would lie, in the minds of a mixed audience; but as that way could not be successfully found, the irksomeness of each speaker's self-allotted task became manifest. I listened, until I said within myself, "This is a course as unwise as it is full of needless difficulty. People know that an insurrection took place at Newport: they know that Frost took part in it. It is the sheerest folly to deny any part of this, or to suggest endless mystic doubts as to what Frost's motives were. Our only consistent part is to proclaim that we believe John Frost to have been moved by a patriotic and philanthropic zeal, kindred to that which has impelled men, esteemed the noblest in past times, to end the oppression of the oppressed: that if John Frost erred, he, to compare small things with great, did but err as the Barons erred on Runnymede, or as Hampden erred on Chalgrove Field; but that we ourselves were become sufficiently enlightened to renounce war and fighting altogether." If I had maintained no more than this, my brother Chartists, I believe, would not have complained of me. As long as you talk in generals of a doctrine or proposition, men will go with you in crowds; but it is not the case when you so specify your opinions as to make the edge of them come home to every man's nearest interests. I proceeded to propose amendments on the general motion against war at the anti-militia meetings, and what I conceived to be amended petitions for Frost, Williams, and Jones; and in all these I broadly affirmed my own present opinion, that it was wrong to take human life, even in self-defence. This procedure was disapproved by many of my Chartist brethren; but all treated me tolerantly, courteously, as I treated them,— all save one—and that one, I have unspeakable gratification in saying, is not of my order, not a working man. Mr. Feargus O'Connor styles my doctrine-the doctrine I have espoused from careful and anxious reflection, from deeply sincere conviction-the doctrine that it is wrong to take human life even in self-defence, "beastly, slavish, unmanly, cowardly, debasing, un-christian, and un-chartist," and he defines my insertion of this doctrine in a petition for the recal of Frost, Williams and Jones, as "absolutely childish, if not idiotic." I make no other answer to these selections from the vocabulary of abuse, than that since Mr. Feargus O'Connor is a gentleman by birth and education, I trust he will, on reflection, see cause to retract these terms. To you, however, my brothers of the toiling class I purpose after this long but necessary introduction, to address myself in explication of the doctrine I have espoused, trusting, that, in the course of two short discourses, although I may fail in convincing you fully of the strict truth and rationality of my opinions, I may, nevertheless, so far impress you with a belief in their weight and importance, as to induce you to give them the deepest and calmest consideration. I. On some branches of this great moral inquiry, I shall not dwell at length, for the pertinent reason that you will expect me to deal with them summarily. Such is the case with the question of Aggressive or Offensive War. The convictions which so widely pervade the minds of our order, my brethren, leave nothing for you and me to debate on this point. Indeed, for me to take up your time on this occasion, with a lengthened philippic against offensive war, would be an act of unseemly supererogation-seeing that I speak from the platform where this particular branch of our question has lately been treated with such consummate ability by the most polished English speaker of the age-one ever amongst the foremost in the cause of philanthropy and of right—our own glorious Norwich Weaver Boy,'-in himself a proof that the great working-class is fast hastening to assume its grand destination, that of becoming the triumphant regenerative agency that shall bring about the world's true and universal civilization. I shall not stay, then, to deal with this part of our general question; but pass on as if it did not require debate. I shall presume you all grant me this part of the argument: you all agree that the wantonness and wickedness of shedding human blood in aggressive warfare, is utterly indefensible, that human life is too sacred to be recklessly destroyed for the sake of conquest or of 'glory'-for the advantage of national plunder or of enlargement of territory. You know well that we who have had to pass life in the toil for bread have never had anything to fight for; that the toiling classes in other nations, being in a similarly degraded condition, never wished to fight, since they had no quarrel with the poor of other lands; that the war-spirit was kindled by the evil masters of the poor, solely for their own evil purposes; that offensive wars have invariably been begun by knaves or tyrants, and have invariably ended in strengthening knavery and tyranny at home as well as abroad; that taxes and public debts are increased by aggressive wars until industry is paralysed in every direction, and the accumulated difficulties of national embarrassment set fast the wits of financiers, drive statesmen to despair or suicide, merchantmen to bankruptcy, working-men to beggary, pauperism, or crime, and entail a succession and renewal of these evils on following generations; that the utter resignation of moral agency by the great mass of an armed force the fact of an army becoming a mere engine, moved by the nod of command, and subordinated to the strictest living mechanism, is itself slavery, gross, unmitigated slavery, and therefore to be regarded with abhorrence. I repeat, you are so thoroughly convinced, by having again and again reasoned on the question of aggressive war, while bending at your daily toil,—or by having heard the question reasoned upon by acute minds and eloquent tongues of your own class, that I have no question to answer you-no difficulty to solve you on this point of the inquiry. We are agreed, to a man, that offensive war is |