A few days ago, a case was heard before the Court of Queen’s 
Bench,*'* 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.*'? 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 Bright’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.