HE at once secretly invites a leading Chartist chief to visit with him the artillery-barrack while the gunners are at work. The battery is drawn up, the command is given to dismount the guns, remount them and come into action. It is done in the usual brilliant and rapid manner, and the Chartist chief goes away from the parade not quite so confident that the five old brass carronades which are hidden away under some backyard rubbish will be equal to meet in action these perfectly served guns.
When civil war is trembling in the balance, when the magistrates and many of the Government officials are calling out for vigorous measures, when Whigs and Tories are jointly agreed that stern repression is to be the rule of politics, we find the real soldier anxious only to avoid spilling the blood of his countrymen.*
Chartist unrest grew with riots, talk of a general strike, and arrests for conspiracy and treason. Another petition of over 5 million signatures was collected and a mass rally planned for Kennington Common in London on April 10th, 1848, but in the event rain dampened the occasion, and the petition was delivered not by marching crowds but by cab. The fractured movement and poisonous rhetoric, and an upturn in economic prosperity fuelled by industrialisation and The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, left the public with as little appetite for bloodshed and revolution as Major-General Napier had.