people, Cooper lacked that balance of judgment which comes largely by contact with other minds, and he was apt to act hastily upon half-truths. He also had no little opinion of himself, as a glance at his autobiography will show. A brilliant but impulsive intellect, Cooper flared up suddenly in the Chartist world, and as suddenly disappeared. But in the years 1841–42 there was no leader so successful as he.
Whilst acting as reporter for a Leicester paper, Cooper was requested near the beginning of 1841 to report a Chartist meeting in the town. It was to be addressed by John Mason, a shoemaker of Birmingham. It is remarkable how many shoemakers failed to stick to their lasts in those days; Collins, Benbow, Cooper, Mason, Cardo are all cases in point. Cooper found some twenty ragged men in the room when he arrived, but the place quickly filled up with men and women, all equally poor and ragged. The speeches were sensible and temperate, and they told Cooper nothing new. On leaving the meeting, however, his attention was drawn to the clatter of the knitting-frames—and that at an hour approaching midnight. Inquiries revealed to him the fearful poverty which drove starving men and women to toil at such a time for such wages—less than a penny an hour. The crying injustice of the frame-rent system completed his conversion.[1] From that day he was a Chartist, and his Chartism grew more vehement daily. In our days revelations of this sort would at once produce an agitation for the reform of the frame-rent system, and it is very significant of the passionate and unpractical temper of those times that Cooper seems never to have thought of any such thing. The opposition which such a campaign would have to meet, and the poverty and recklessness of the poor employees themselves would have rendered its successful conduct all but hopeless. To men so situated as these stockingers (who had proved their own helplessness in many a futile strike) the Charter had become a kind of charm or fetish, through which every evil would be exorcised, and every social wrong be avenged. In the year 1841 every poor man with a real grievance tended to become a Chartist. Chartism was the grand, all-containing Cave of Adullam for men who were too poor to build up their own barriers against economic oppression.
So Cooper became a Chartist. His conversion was quickly followed by the loss of his situation, and he thenceforward
- ↑ The Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 179.
