The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  O’Connor’s basic idea was to enfranchise more and more Chartists by making them men of property and thus eligible to vote. The scheme would begin by raising £5,000 to buy an estate that would provide the livelihood for fifty men and give them the necessary property qualification. A mortgage on the existing real estate would then be raised with which a second estate would be purchased and then, by this process of piggy-backing, a third and a fourth, and so on.26 Yet O’Connor also had moral aims with his Land Plan. He argued that it would mitigate poverty, lead to self-reliance and moral regeneration, and give the cultivator pride and self-respect. It would also enable the working man to become the master of machines rather than vice versa, to make technology ‘man’s holiday instead of man’s curse’.27 The years of the Land Plan were also the years of the Great Famine in Ireland, in which a million people died of starvation, and O’Connor sometimes claimed that his plan was his personal refutation of Malthusianism. Hard-hearted Benthamite ‘market theorists’ claimed that the famine in Ireland was not due to the incompetence of the British government or the poverty of its economic theory, but simply an appalling demonstration of the essential truth of Malthus’s famous thesis: that in all societies the means of subsistence increases by arithmetical progress but the population by geometric progression. No less an authority than John Stuart Mill, for one, thought that O’Connor’s Land Plan was feasible, and a possible way to avoid famine and make the country independent of foreign food supplies.28 O’Connor originally intended to make his plan an integral part of the NCA, but when the NCA was refused legal registration as a friendly society (on the grounds that it was an obviously political one), O’Connor detached the plan from any association with the NCA. Despite the jeremiahs, at first everything went well. The Land Plan proved more popular than the NCA itself, with over 70,000 shareholders at its peak and more than 600 local branches. O’Connor had hit a nerve and struck the right note for the 1840s, when the idea of moral regeneration through agriculture and smallholdings was highly popular. Even some of the ‘deviant’ sects such as ‘Teetotal Chartism’ – previously denounced vociferously by the bibulous O’Connor for its petit-bourgeois and chapel ‘temperancing’ – embraced the Land Plan, seeing in it a potent weapon against drunkenness.29

  Nothing infuriated O’Connor more than the accusation that his Land Plan was a feeble copy of ideas already put into practice by Robert Owen (1771–1858). Of all the nineteenth-century utopian socialists (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Weitling, et al.) Owen was possibly the most interesting, since he was no mere dreamer and visionary but a factory owner with sustained and direct contact with working-class life for many years before he set down his theories. From 1800, as manager and co-owner of a large textile works at New Lanark, he carried out educational and social experiments designed to lift the working classes out of squalor and misery. These included the refusal to employ children younger than ten years of age, working hours set at ten and a half hours’ a day maximum, free primary education and relatively hygienic working conditions. He aimed to eliminate theft and drunkenness by persuasion, not punishment, and amazed contemporaries by achieving higher productivity than the slave drivers in the satanic mills.30 His great achievement was to secure (in 1819) a Factory Act, which for the first time outlawed child labour in the textile industry. Always courageous, he attacked the Anglican Church for its cynical and craven ‘opium of the people’ collusion with the ruling elite. The first great organiser of the British proletariat in its economic struggles, he promoted trade union and cooperative movements and spread his ideas abroad, principally in the United States.31 Owen’s great weakness was that he was a utilitarian and, as it were, paid-up member of the Benthamite brotherhood. He had a simple formula: the source of all social evils is ignorance, and this can be remedied by education. Mankind, he thought, had hitherto lived in a cloud of ignorance, but education would soon dispel that and reveal the obvious truth of socialism. As he grew older Owen became more radical.32 In his New View of Society he argued for a modified capitalism and posited that the existing organisation of capitalist economy was self-defeating, since poverty and low wages led to overproduction. In his later years he opted for communistic settlements as the nucleus of a future society and preached socialism as a heaven-sent discovery – the key to future liberation and a doctrine so obviously true that humanity would embrace it as soon as it was proclaimed. Marx famously criticised Owenite socialism as seriously intellectually defective. Marx was convinced that his studies in Hegelian philosophy gave him, a priori, a greater insight into socialism than Owen, who was essentially a practical man. For Marx the key to human misery was not poverty but alienation. It was not enough to daydream like the utopian socialists, and contrast what was with what ought to be. One had to probe deeply the issues of class consciousness and class struggle. What would happen if the ruling classes refused to see the ‘self-evident’ truth of socialism? What was Owen’s advice then?33

  O’Connor always tried to distance himself from Owen and Owenism and resented any comparison. As far as he was concerned, his ideas had come to him during his imprisonment in York Castle in 1840–1. In 1843 he had published The Management of Small Farms – a down-to-earth guide to the mundane problems of planting potatoes and cabbages, in no way concerned with irrelevant abstract theory.34 To accuse Owen of abstract theorising was of course a travesty – clearly O’Connor had never read the work of Marx and Engels, though it is true that Owen did have general things to say about human nature and the fundamentals of human society; for instance, he often declared his belief in the perfectibility of man, implicit in his view of the transformative possibilities of education. O’Connor never even went that far; it would be impossible to talk about him in terms of the Enlightenment or Benthamite ideology. Moreover, with his Land Plan, O’Connor was determined to press home the point that Chartism was no longer radical but gradualist. Cooperation, he stressed, did not mean communalism; land ownership under his scheme would be individual not common.35 His plan was no threat either to private property or to any other established institution. He declared that he was no communist, no radical and not even a republican: he claimed he was for ‘the altar, the throne and the cottage’.36 He made it clear that he bitterly opposed Owen’s deism and enmity to organised religion. Where Owen thought the nuclear family was the enemy of human happiness, O’Connor praised it and went out of his way to eulogise family values. There was considerable irony in the spectacle of a man who had fathered eight children in thirty-two years of stable marriage excoriating the family, while O’Connor, a womanising bachelor, extolled the family as the ideal social unit.37 All of O’Connor’s pronouncements were hostile to socialism: ‘My Plan has no more to do with socialism than it has with the comet’ was one of his sayings.38 How far from socialism he was can be appreciated from his pro-bourgeois argument for smallholdings – that a small proprietary class would form the backbone of a citizen militia.39 He pointed up the motivations of the skilled workers who took the opportunity to become agriculturalists: they disliked town life, they had increased security as the owners of property, and they were ideally suited to the new way of life since the craftsman and artisan was already used to the combination of agriculture and domestic industry that would be needed on the O’Connor estates. Above all, O’Connor stressed that he was a gentle utopian, as opposed to the frothing socialists on the continent: ‘If those with money to lend would lend it, I would change the whole face of society in twelve months from this day. I would make a paradise of England in less than five years.’40

  At first the Land Plan seemed to be working well. Ultimately 70,000 subscribers contributed £100,000 to the scheme. In March 1846 the Chartist Co-operative Land Society purchased its first estate of 103 acres in O’Connor’s name, since the society was denied official registration. Lots were drawn to decide who would farm the lots of two, three and four acres, depending on shareholding. The grandiloquently named O’Connorville was made available for public inspection
in August 1846 and officially opened in May 1847.41 Eventually six agricultural colonies were founded with 250 tenants on 1,700 acres. O’Connor took an obsessive and even pedantic interest in his pet project, to the point of writing a homily on the correct relations between employers and employees in the form of a dialogue.42 From the very start O’Connor’s colonies were controversial. His plan was assailed both in a frenzied newspaper campaign by pro-Establishment organs and (in the early stages) by paid agents of the ACLL, all of them asserting much the same thing – that the Land Plan was a mere stalking horse for the eventual nationalisation and expropriation of all property.43 Such hostility could have been expected, but much more alarming was the virulent criticism from within the Chartist movement. Bronterre O’Brien claimed that the plan would at best introduce landlordism and at worst would produce an elite who could be detached from the main body of Chartists. O’Brien could be discredited on the grounds that he was now an isolated, marginal figure sniping from the sidelines, but more serious was the critique mounted from within the core of Chartism by the ex-editor of the Northern Star, Joshua Hobson (whom O’Connor had sacked), accusing O’Connor of peculation and defalcation.44 In this context O’Brien welcomed the sudden appearance of a new radical figure, Ernest Jones, who hailed the Land Plan in ecstatic terms as the dawn of a golden age.45 Jones (1819–69), who became a major figure in the movement from 1846, was yet another of the gentleman radicals the nineteenth century produced in such profusion. Born in Berlin, the son of a British army major who was equerry to the Duke of Cumberland, Jones came to England in 1839, had his first novel published two years later and was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1844, before seeing the light and throwing in his lot with the Chartists. Some say his conversion was rather like that of Tom Paine, in that he came to radicalism after bankruptcy and personal misfortune.46 The author of the poems Chartist Songs (1846), he quickly displaced Thomas Cooper as the poet laureate of the movement; Cooper fell foul of O’Connor by, so to speak, letting the cat out of the bag and declaring that Chartists would never use violence, even in self-defence.47 A skilful orator, Jones lacked O’Connor’s magnetism and charisma and could never have been the leader of the movement. Though a failure as gentleman demagogue, he was always very popular and was at first hailed by O’Connor as his heir apparent. Needless to say, the honeymoon did not last, and O’Connor quarrelled with Jones, as he had previously with O’Connell, Stephens, Lovett, Sturge, Hobson, Harney and a host of others. O’Connor was one of those individuals – one can think of analogies among great actors – who cannot bear even the second or third lead to shine, albeit in a subsidiary role. In Jones’s case the parting of the ways came with international socialism. Increasingly friendly with Marx, Engels and the European socialists, Jones was publicly disowned by O’Connor in July 1847 when he declared emphatically against liaisons with European socialists in a famous, ripsnorting and xenophobic article in the Northern Star.48

  The Land Plan was meant to revive Chartism through increasing its parliamentary representation under the existing electoral system, once the successful proprietors of the allotments became men of property. Yet, despite its promising start, the plan soon encountered massive problems, which made O’Brien charge that O’Connor had abandoned real political action for pointless tinkering, which was a bagatelle by comparison. In the first place, O’Connor was no businessman. He set up a Land and Labour Bank to finance the project at the end of 1846, but by August of the following year legal complications obliged him to separate the bank from the company, with O’Brien as sole proprietor of the bank. A glaring weakness of the bank was that the only security for depositors was the land owned by the company, but this was already mortgaged to the shareholders. The Land and Labour Bank was in the precarious position of having O’Connor’s personal money as its only real security and O’Connor’s shaky reputation as its only collateral.49 The project of leapfrogging from estate to estate with successive mortgages meant that there was always a wild, speculative element about the scheme. The fact that O’Connor was the sole proprietor of the bank left him wide open to charges of peculation and financial dishonesty. These were later clearly proven to be false but, as has been well said: ‘the Land Plan’s directors faced a recurrent problem in preventing critics from drawing lurid conclusions from the fact that purchases of estates were made in O’Connor’s name’.50 Although O’Connor was personally honest, he encouraged his critics and gave hostages to fortune by keeping no proper accounts, employing no orthodox methods of bookkeeping and no minutes of directors’ meetings. The confusion over rents was almost total and never solved: should all the allottees pay the same? How should the rents be collected? How much credit should be extended, etc? It was never even clear whether the holders of allotments were freeholders or tenants of the company.51 There were too many applicants for the available lots, and this caused resentment and discontent. When the fortunate colonists arrived on their plots, all too often they found that the soil was barren and unproductive. The colonists themselves proved incompetent in agricultural technique. The small plots of 2–4 acres were insufficient to feed a family, given that a surplus was needed to pay the ground rent.52 Worst of all, from the viewpoint of social amelioration, there was that perennial barrier to socialism or any form of the ‘new man’: human nature. The lucky 250 chosen ones took advantage of the chaos. Some simply did not pay their rents; others sublet their lots at a profit against the entire spirit of the enterprise, or went in for profiteering from the sale of shares.53 From the public-relations viewpoint, the way O’Connor used his plan as part of his cult of personality led to disillusionment: ‘he cast Chartism in a supporting role in the drama of Feargus O’Connor’.54 By 1849 investors had had enough. Neither subscriptions nor investment from the bank were arriving in sufficient quantities to buy further estates; the fifth and final colony was set up in 1849. In a final acknowledgement of the ‘original sin’ component of human nature, evictions were started for non-payment of rent; 68 such orders were issued in 1850.55

  Even while the Land Company was foundering, the government was waging a sustained war of legal attrition against it. Four separate stages may be discerned. When O’Connor discovered that the NCA itself could not be registered as a friendly society, he detached the Land Company from the NCA and tried to register it as such, but John Tidd Pratt, the registrar-general, with the backing of the attorney-general, made it clear that this was not acceptable because the Land Company had clear political aims. O’Connor next tried a change of nomenclature and set up the National Cooperative Land Society, using lottery money. Tidd declared that this too was illegal, even though a large number of building societies and friendly societies used lotteries. It soon became clear that, whatever device O’Connor used to achieve registration, Pratt would veto it, and that this was a pan-Establishment plot, with Pratt backed by the attorney-general and he in turn by the prime minister.56 Accordingly, O’Connor tried a third tack: an attempt at registration under the Joint Stock Companies Act. After a ten-month delay, the Board of Trade ruled that this would not be allowed, unless the new legal entity paid stamp duty – which it had been O’Connor’s purpose from the very beginning to avoid. The government was ingenious in finding legal obstacles to thwart O’Connor, but it must be conceded that even within Chartism there were doubts about the legal status of such a body, and uncertainty about payment to managers and their accountability. It is not surprising that O’Connor was frequently ill in these years.57 He hit back with an eighteen-month legal campaign to overthrow the Board of Trade’s decision, but the courts decided against him on the grounds that no profit from shareholders to the new entity could be foreseen, and therefore it had no bona fide status as a joint-stock company. Finally the dauntless O’Connor tried to enrol his plan under an act of Parliament and moved a first reading of this in the House of Commons. Unable to stymie him this time by the legal system, the government hit back by appointing a Select Committee. Sixteen MPs – not all of them
inherently hostile to O’Connor – sat twice weekly for two months, starting work on 23 May 1848 and completing their 390-page report on 1 August (a work rate that puts to shame today’s interminable committees and tribunals).58 They found that there had been no personal dishonesty on O’Connor’s part – indeed he had put in £3,000–4,000 of his own money – but that there was sloppy record and account keeping and no proper capitalisation of the bank, which was personally owned by O’Connor. Trying to establish who exactly had contributed and in what numbers was almost impossible, and it was clear that most rents had not been paid. The overall conclusion was that the plan did not remotely meet the criteria for a viable friendly society, that it was an illegal scheme which did not satisfy the legitimate expectations of shareholders and which did not make the directors accountable to them. A government actuary estimated that it would take 150 years to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the shareholders and that the entire scheme thus came close to being fraudulent. That was a death sentence. As one student of the scheme has said: ‘The Land Company petered out rather than burst like the speculative bubble which many of its critics declared it to be.’59 A parliamentary petition to wind up the scheme was presented in 1850 and in August 1851 the company was formally dissolved but, as a result of litigation reminiscent of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, the entire ramshackle structure was not finally wound up until 1857. The moral most observers drew from the fiasco was that it was hubris followed by nemesis, that O’Connor had overreached himself in his Promethean ambitions and that he would have done better to set up a string of small building societies.60