On that awful day, nobody was reported as found looking into a shop window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge in a menacing manner.
I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the "Iron Duke."
My advice to them, published at the time, was to "Beware of the police," and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers, crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green, had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had "saved Society," by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in Paris.
As I had been personally associated with all the chief Chartists, in prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with some knowledge of them on that day.
On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts, and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row of constables was drawn up. I found a coarse, plethoric alderman, going from man to man, saying only three words: "Strike hard to-day."