strike they obtained permission to hold a meeting at Newcastle; and the wealthy citizens who made their fortunes out of the coal trade trembled before the invasion of black barbarians.  But the meeting passed off in rain and peace.  Thirty thousand miners marched in procession, ‘for near a mile flags in breeze, men walking in perfect order’; and as they marched, they sang, as only miners sing, songs and hymns and topical ditties: 

    ’Stand fast to your Union
      Brave sons of the mine,
    And we’ll conquer the tyrants
      Of Tees, Wear, and Tyne!’

Up and down the Durham coalfields tramped a misguided agitator (in after life the veteran servant of the Durham Miners’ Association), by name Tommy Ramsey.  With bills under his arm and crake in hand, he went from house-row to house-row calling the miners out.  He had only one message: 

    ’Lads, unite and better your condition. 
    When eggs are scarce, eggs are dear;
    When men are scarce, men are dear.’[48]

Such blasphemy appalled the Government’s Commissioners.  But the miners had a zest for religion as well as for strikes.  During the strike of 1844, ’frequent meetings were held in their chapels (in general those of the Primitive Methodists or Ranters as they are commonly called in that part of the country), where prayers were publicly offered up for the successful result of the strike.’  They attended their prayer meeting ’to get their faith strengthened’.[49]

Such ignorance could only be cured by education.  Some worthy members of society had already recognized the fact.  In 1830 a Cardiff ’Society for the improvement of the working population in the county of Glamorgan’ issued improving pamphlets: 

No. 9.  Population, or Patty’s Marriage.

No. 10.  The Poor’s Rate, or the Treacherous Friend.

No. 11.  Foreign Trade, or the Wedding Gown.[50]

But the northern miners were perverse people.  In Scotland, according to one Wesleyan minister,[51] the miners read Adam Smith.  In Northumberland, with still greater perversity, they preferred Plato.  ’A translation of Plato’s Ideal Republic is much read among those classes, principally for the socialism and unionism it contains; in pure ignorance, of course, that Plato himself subsequently modified his principles and that Aristotle showed their fallacy.’[52]

3.  The Royal Commission of 1842 on the Employment and Condition of Children and Young Persons in Mines disclosed facts which made Cobdenite England gasp.  The worst evidence came from Lancashire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, East Scotland, and South Wales.  In these districts juvenile labour was cheap and plentiful; and this was an irresistible argument for its employment, though the miners themselves disliked it.  The meddlesome restrictions on the factories were a contributory cause.  Parents, it was said in Lancashire, were pushing their children into colliery employment at an earlier age because of the legal restrictions upon sending them to the neighbouring factories.