79. K. Marx. On Ernest Jones ( from the " Political Review" of Das Volk)
A few days ago, a case was heard before the Court of Queen's Bench,[318] which we must recount in detail. Ernest Jones, who was condemned to two years solitary confinement in 1848 for his revolutionary activities and, having served his sentence, reorgan-ised the Chartist Party with as much self-sacrifice as talent, as is known, conceived a plan in the autumn of 1857 to establish an alliance of the proletariat with the middle class. In order to put this idea into practice, he invited representatives of the bourgeoisie and of the workers to a joint conference, which took place nominally at the beginning of last year in St. Martin's Hall.(1) But only nominally. From the Chartists no man of weight turned up, and as "representatives of the bourgeoisie", instead of Messrs. Cobden, Bright, and so on, who had scornfully refused, a couple of ambiguous characters attended, like Mr. Coningham, the communist-Urquhartist Palmerstonian, and a certain Mr. Ingram, who has since been convinced of common fraud. The so-called conference drew up a "Programme of Alliance" and preached a proletarian and bourgeois crusade against the aristocrats. In vain. The proletariat protested, the bourgeois realised that there was nothing to be won, and Ernest Jones soon saw himself abandoned by his friends, old and new. The readership of The People's Paper and The London News, the two Chartist papers which he published, dwindled from day to day, and finally Jones decided to sell these newspapers to Mr. Baxter Langley, manager of Blight's Star*—at best a case of excessive haste, which was all the less excusable since The People's Paper was at the time the only official organ of the Chartist Party. As was to be expected, this step aroused great indignation among some of the Chartists. Ernest Jones was violently attacked, and Reynolds's Newspaper, among others, carried a series of articles in which he was said to have sold himself to the Manchester School, to have exploited the workers politically and financially, to be a corrupt traitor, and so on and so forth. Thereupon Jones brought a defamation suit against Mr. Reynolds. Owing to various circumstances the lawsuit was drawn out and did not come up for hearing before the Queen's Bench until last Saturday. The plaintiff demonstrated most convincingly that by fighting for the Chartist principles he had ruined himself from the bourgeoisie's point of view, that he had never received money for himself from the Chartists and that he had not been bribed by the bourgeoisie, but on the contrary had been cheated by them in respect of the selling price of The People's Paper. Mr. Reynolds, who could furnish no proofs, solemnly retracted the accusations and was fined forty shillings for form's sake, but at the same time — and this is no trifling matter — was ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings, which amounted to several hundred pounds sterling.
Ernest Jones has saved his personal honour, but he has not had his political honour restored to him by the verdict of the Queen's Bench. He has already paid dearly for his ill-advised attempt at mediation, but the proletariat can never forgive mistakes.
Endnotes
[318] The Court of Queen's Bench is one of the high courts in England nineteenth century (up to 1873) it was an independent supreme court for bodies.