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Untitled Article
Dorchester has acted as a promulgation , and the word has gone forth throughout the country to discontinue the oaths . The only rational object of the sentence has been attained \ yet the cry of the people for a remission of the sentence is unheeded ,
Lord Howick argues that though the labourers may not have known of the particular statute , or of the penalty , they knew that they were doing wrong ; else why did they take an oath of secrecy ? If it is upon such logic as this that unoffending peasants have been torn from their homes , and doomed to the
punishment and to the fellowship of the refuse of gaols , those who sent them richly deserve to take their place . Is Lord Howick so ignorant of the rudiments of the subject on which he presumes to talk , as not to know that , although the Trades ' Unions were never before brought under one general organization , the Unions themselves existed , and their regulations were
adopted , at a time when the very fact of belonging to a Union , or being concerned in a strike , wa 3 an offence by statute ? Need we ask a member of the British Legislature if laws are always abrogated the moment the reason for them has ceased ? Yet , a man who could not make this obvious reflection , sets up a shallow conceit of his own against the general belief of the whole country that the members of Trades' Unions did not know , did not believe
the oaths to be illegal . Illegal or not , that they believed them to be wrong , a person ' s mind must be in a curious state who can surmise : arid even if they did , are you to pounce upon men unawares with leg al penalties , on the assumption that they know they are doing wrong ? Then all ex post facto penal laws are justified ; for no one dared ever propose such a law , unless he thought , or affected to think , that the nature of the offence itself was a sufficient warning of its criminality .
We cannot quit the subject without adverting to a flagrant misrepresentation in the 'Times , * respecting the strike now taking place at Derby ; on which there has been some controvers y between that paper and Mr . Robert Owen . It is generally known to those who have attended to the subject , though not perhaps to the public , that , in the present instance , the suspension of work was not the act of the workmen , but of the manufacturers ;
a numerous body of whom , on learning that a Trades' Union had been established , agreed to refuse employment to all who were members of it . The ' Times / however , in direct contradiction to the fact , represents the strike as having originated with the men . 4 considerable body / says that journal , ( 14 th April , ) ' of the
workmen of Derb y struck for wages which their masters could not grant . They were accordingly discharged , as belon ging to the hostile Union , and other persons were found willing to occupy their places at the wages which they refused to take . * Tnis being denied by Mr . Owen , the ' Times' reiterated the assertion , * nd affirmed that , on inquiry , he would find that before the
Untitled Article
Government hy Brute Jfatte . ' * W
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 367, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/55/
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