THE UPSTANDING CROP 29 



where chimneys were far apart and organisation not only 

 difficult but expensive. No politician troubled about 

 Hodge, who had no vote to give. The politician visited 

 the vicar, the squire and the farmer, but left the labourer 

 severely alone. 



The newly enfranchised (1867) town workman and the 

 trade unionist (1871) of the growing industrial areas who 

 had wrung concessions of legal protection from an unwilling 

 Liberal Ministry had, it appeared, taken little notice of 

 farm workers until they, driven by want and long hours of 

 toil, began to take concerted action in a form the townsmen 

 understood. 



The first note of the new movement was sounded in Feb- 

 ruary, 1872, by a few labourers of West erton-under- Weather- 

 ley, a village near Leamington, who stated their miserable 

 condition in a letter written to a local newspaper. This 

 letter was read by other labourers in Charlecote, near Willes- 

 bourne, and they decided to form a club. Then this club of 

 eleven labourers sent a deputation to Barford to wait upon 

 Joseph Arch, a well-known hedge-cutter, who had trained 

 himself to speak with considerable force as a Primitive 

 Methodist preacher. 



Now Arch was forty-six years of age, and had apparently 

 no political or trade union designs of any national signifi- 

 cance, until this group of his fellow-labourers asked him 

 to come and help them to deliver themselves out of their 

 conditions of chronic poverty. He, like them, knew nothing 

 about trade union organisation. They wanted to be able 

 to buy more food for themselves and their families, and they 

 wanted to shorten their long hours of labour. They were 

 voteless and uneducated. They had only one weapon to 

 use ; that weapon was the right to say, " We shall not work, 

 we will starve outright rather than submit to our present 

 condition of semi-starvation." But it was useless for one or 

 two to say this. It must be one mighty shout coming from 

 the lungs of a long-suffering race. The one weapon forged 

 in the fire of their breasts was the Strike. 



Mr. George Edwards, who was a member of Arch's 

 Union, tells us that Arch hesitated, as he was not sure of his 



