1 Reprinted in Heterodox London by the Rev. Davies, C. M.. p. 225.Google Scholar

2 Letters to Kugelmann by Karl, Marx. English Edition. Lawrence and Wishart. 1936 p. 107.Google Scholar

3 3) Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 4. Marx to Engels. 30th Oct. 1869.

4 The Republican. 1st Sept. 1870.

5 History of the First International: Stekioff, G. M. (1928). p. 141.Google Scholar

6 The names Osborne and Johnson appear on the Provisional Council of the I.W.M.A. But this was 3. Osborne, a plasterer.

7 The National Reformer. 19th and 26th Sept. and 3rd and 10th Oct. 1869.

8 Gladstone and the Irish Question: Hammond, J. L.. p. 93.Google Scholar

9 Howell Collection: Bishops Gate Institute: L.T.R.A. 333/4.

10 The National Reformer spells his name ‘Reed’, and refers to him as Secretary of the Land Transfer Association.

11 National Reformer: 24th Oct. 1869.

12 Reynolds News: 17th Oct. 1869.

13 Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe Vol. 4. Marx to Engels, 18th Nov. 1869.

14 National Reformer, 7th Nov. 1869. (Osborne, Lucraft, Dahlmann, Hales, Le Lubez, Johnson, Mottershead and Jung.)

15 See Appendix. Heterodox London, Vol. 2, Rev. Davies, C. M.. p. 216–221. (The Address was “slightly abridge by Davies.)Google Scholar

16 So much so that Bradlaugh refused to join it on these grounds, and Odger was soon disowning his membership of it.

17 Reynolds News: 17th Oct. 1869.

18 M. J. Boon, in one of the first publications of the League, referred to the workers as “nothing but white wage slaves to the same classes who have always been licensed by the Land Robbers to rob and plunder their forefathers from the time of the Norman Conquest…” A Protest Against the Present Emigrationists: M. J. Boon. 1869.

19 National Reformer 9th April 1871. An early tract issued by the League was entitled, ‘The Bank of England and the Greenback Banks of Issue’. The Basle Congress may have given some impetus to this ‘deviation’. A. C. Cameron was the delegate from the American National Labour Union at this Congress, he was a Currency reformer and his fare to Europe was paid out of funds advanced by the leader of that School in the States, Horace Day. As early as 1870, F. A. Sorge was reporting to Marx that “the National Labor Union which had such brilliant prospects in the beginning of its career, was poisoned by Greenbackism and is slowly but surely dying”. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: P. S. Foner International Publishers 1947.

20 Howell Collection: Howell to Beales, E., 10th 03 1869.Google Scholar

21 Bee-Hive, 29th July 1871.

22 Bee-Hive, 19th February 1870.

23 Frazer's Magazine: “English Republicanism” by “A Working Man”, June 1871.

24 Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe: Engels to Marx, 1st Nov. 1869.

25 For the Emigrationists see C. A. Bodelson: ‘Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism’.

26 “We are told,” continued Boon, “by the advocates of emigration, that our wants arise from too great a number of people. This is a monstrous untruth. Our wants do not—they cannot arise from too great a number of people for many years to come. They arise from the fact of one third part of the people living in idleness, luxury and splendour, while the mass of the people are compelled to live upon less than one fourth part of the produce of their own labour. Therefore, let the useful classes say emphatically, ‘No! We will not emigrate!’ If emigration is needed, let those who have never done anything to add to the happiness of the ’human race, go and begin in a fresh land … Some tell us that it is the law of nature that causes the present distress: that population tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence. No! not the cause is—and the only cause Is—the law—and not, as Mr. Malthus and his mistaken disciples say, the Law of Nature.”Boon appended to this tract a draft of a Bill which Gladstone was called upon to introduce. It specified that “on and after the first day of March, 1870, all Forests and untilled lands throughout the United Kingdom be used for National Purpose, the same to be held as National Property, and under no circumstances to be sold to private individuals; the future rents of such lands to be used to defray the legitimate expenses of the Country”. The whole project which aimed at relieving unemployed by organising small Co-operative farms, was to be financed by borrowing “a sum of National Notes free from all interest, such notes to be legal tender for all taxes and purposes of trade …”

27 The Times: 10th March and 12th and 16th April 1870. “Anything more deplorable than the nonsense uttered from the steps of Nelson's Column on Friday last it is impossible to conceive … We must needs charge them with the grossest ignorance ever exhibited by popular pretenders to knowledge.” (The Times, 18th April 1870.) Even more monstrous, in the eyes of the Times, than the notion that the price of bread could be reduced by reclaiming waste lands, was the contention that it was being kept artificially high by the landlords.

28 Chairman and Secretary's reports to the Land and Labour League. The Republicn, 1st Sept. 1870.

29 Public Records Office.

30 The war was treated as a dynastic one by every section of labour opinion. (See the Manifestos dated 25th July and 7th September 1870, of L.R.L.)

31 The Republican. 1st Sept. and 1st Oct. 1870. See the Bee-Hive, Eastern Post etc. before and after the School Board elections at the end of 1870.

32 Report of the Land Labour League. The Republican. 1st Jan. 1870.

33 Third Half Yearly Report of the Land and Labour League. The Republican. 1st Sept. 1871.

34 Programme for carrying out the principle No. 9 of the Land and Labour League, to be submitted to the branches and to the public meetings. The Republican. May 1871.

35 The Republican. Nov. 1870. (The Positivist lealer R. Congreve presided over this Committee.)

36 The Eastern Post. 14th Jan. 1871, and the National Reformer, 15th Jan. 1871. The Duke of Cambridge was the Commander in Chief appointed by the Queen, whose cousin he was. Although the Queen had been deprived of her prerogative of appointing this officer, the Duke was not removed.

37 At the time of its foundation there was much discussion in the London Workers' Clubs as to whether the greatest need was for a Land or a Republican agitation. The League employed the symbols of the Republic well in advance of the general Republican movement. At the Trafaigar Square demonstration, League members wore broad scarlet sashes, “not over the shoulder, but round the waist, in the exact pattern current amongst the leaders of sans culottes of the first French Revolution, and, in a further imitation of that class, poles were borne aloft with the emblematical caps of liberty”. (The Times, 16th April 1870.)

38 Third Half Yearly Report of the Land and Labour League. The Republican. 1st Sept. 1871.

39 The League was still in existence in 1877. In the Goldsmith Library of Senate House there is a handbill headed Resolutions of the Land and Labour League, which refers to “the late George Odger”. However, it has been catalogued as 1873.

40 See a telling attack by Lloyd Jones on ‘unscientific lumping’ in the programme of a political alliance which League members and others attempted to promote (Bee-Hive, 17th August 1872).

41 The New York World, quoted in the Eastern Post. 21st 1871.

42 National Reformer, 8th Jan. 1871.

43 The Republican, 1st August 1871.

44 The Republican, 1st August 1871.

45 The Contemporary Review, August 1871. “The Land Question” by G. Odger.

46 The Republican, 1st Nov. 1871.

47 The Republican, 15th May 1871.

48 The Irish Vindicator, 30th Sept. 1871.

49 The Currency Reformers had much space in the ‘Republican’. They attacked the unionists as “the worst of monopolists”; (Nov. 1870) unions were “deadlier than any capitalist's possible weapon”; (1st August 1870). Attacks on Odger and other trade union leaders brought protests from Weston and from branches of the Land and Labour League. More support was lost through needless revivals of old Chartist quarrels. (The Editor claimed the friendship of O'Brien and J. G. Harney.) The last issue of the paper carried an attack on the atheists who were compared unfavourable to the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey and the Pope of Rome. (1st February 1872.)

50 Manuscript in the Howell Collection 333/4.

51 Programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association. “Explanation” added by J. S. Mill.

52 Report of the Public Meeting in the Freemason's Hall, 15th May 1871.

53 National Reformer, 23rd March 1873.

54 Resolutions of the Land and Labour League. Goldsmith's Library.

55 The Standard. Editorial of 20th March 1873. The confusion in the press between the principles and personalities of the two organisations, reached such a point that even the Bee-Hive, in its obituary notice on J. S. Mill, twice refers to “his colleagues of the Land and Labour League”. (Bee-Hive, 17th May 1873).

56 Reprinted by Rev. C. M. Davies. Heterodox London Vol. 2. (1874).

57 The Bee-Hive, 16th March 1872.

58 How to Construct Free-State Railways by Boon, M. J., 1884. (Autobiographical note added.)Google Scholar

59 The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Lands: p. 260. By Curtler, W. H. R.. 1920.Google Scholar

60 The Annals of Toll, Part 4. By Morrison Davidson, 1899.

61 See before, p. 174.