Of twenty thousand men who held up their hands at Sheffield for the People's Charter, sixteen thousand, at least, were non-electors. Yet the middle classes kept away from the meeting. Why? Because, they say, the non-electors have no property, (which is false), and because (which may be true, and might be proper), they would, if they could, sometimes send to Parliament men who have no property-qualification. Now, this state of things is frightful; it makes thoughtful men, who have aught to lose, tremble. For how can the middle classes expect their property to be protected, if they would prevent you from obtaining the only possible means of protecting yours? They support men whose very existence, as monopolists, is no longer (no, not for an hour) compatible with the commonweal and the public safety - men who make laws to famish their fellow-creatures, that is, to murder them by hundreds of thousands; and yet they talk of property, and property-qualifications, and send men to Parliament who call you "rabble." Rabble! Are you not self-sustained? Every honestly self-sustained man of necessity performs every social duty. But if you are really rabble, how is the Government, for any purpose of good government, to be carried on? Palaced-pauper Chandos! or any of your fellow miscreants! what say you? He answers not, - but thinks that liveried William, and white-stockinged John, ought not to have votes; for the beggarly, bread-tax eating scoundrel knows right well, that his footmen are less dependent than his farmers. They do think, then, sometimes? One can hardly believe it. For while the higher classes assert the principle of public robbery; while Ministers declare in Parliament that it is, and shall be, the principle of their government; and while the middle classes support that principle, and no other, good God! was ever nation so endangered as this nation is, if you, the working men of Britain, also are corrupt? Never! for if you are not fit to be trusted with the management of your own affairs, the whole social mass is plague-stricken, doomed, and lost; and all the property in Britain will be insufficient to feed the riot of the desperate, because unemployed, multitude, which will soon, of necessity, constitute the population of these realms. But it is not true that you are unfit to manage your own affairs. The respectables, and their respectable press, do you the honour to belie you. If you are some of the most industrious men in the world, surely you are also some of the most virtuous; and, (but that you have been badly governed), you would have been equally happy and enlightened; and if so, never will I despair of my country, while you can get honest and remunerating employment. But, alas, if you do not speedily obtain the franchise, you will not be able to get employment at all, for your trade will depart to other countries! You may apply the power-loom to the weaving of woollen cloth, but how will you prevent your rivals from getting the power-loom? You may improve machinery, but will not a single post letter carry to your cheap-food rivals a copy of your improvements? You may find new markets, but if your rivals can undersell you, how will you prevent them from supplying those markets? Remember, that when you have made your ultimate improvements, your rivals will get them for nothing: they will only need to copy perfection, and leave you - to your carrion - banquet of blood and horror! Remember, that in Switzerland - one of the poorest countries on earth, before its people got Universal Suffrage and Free Trade - the purchasing power of a watch-maker's wages is 12s. a day, and in England, 3s. 6d. Remember, that where trade is unrestricted, rising wages signify rising profits; for there Trades' Unions are unnecessary! Remember, that when the continental governments generally make trade free (unless you shall have forestalled them), British capital will depart in masses. And above all things, remember, That the New Poor Law is the right arm of the food monopoly, which robs you of half your wages, and is destroying the market for your productions. IN SIX MONTHS YOUR BREAD WILL BE FIVE SHILLINGS PER STONE ! Will your wages, as your enemies assert, rise in the same proportion? "Ah, no! 'tis never so." Obtain the franchise then, before your trade is destroyed. For your own sakes - for the sake of long-suffering Ireland - for the sake of blood-weeping Canada - put an end to the monopoly of law-making. Let not your children's children be told, that you suffered the murderers of your Canadian fellow subjects to escape the hangman: let not the innocent blood cry in vain for justice! No! Remember, that honest and happy matrimony is made of solid pudding; and let the horrors of hand-loom weaving - let Irish poverty, warring on English labour - let all such horrors find a tremendous voice; let them demand, in thunder, the Universal Franchise! Will you wait, till, like the Irish, you are forced to eat seaweed? Only two days ago, the English and Irish labourers, on the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway, were knocking out each other's brains; while the bread-tax-eating magistracy - ignorant, perhaps, that potatoe-wages will not pay for bayonets - were prating at the head of their famine-guards, and telling the aggressors, in other words, that they ought to suffer their labour to fall, at once, to the Irish-price, the lowest that will support life! Let that happen, and where would they be? Never mind. But would the poor Irishman leave his country, to compete with you, if he had justice done him at home? No. The war of Irish poverty on English labour, is the war of the Aristocracy on English labour, capital and skill - on all labour, all capital, and all skill, English, Irish, Scotch, and Welch (sic).

Obtain the franchise, then, and emancipate both the Irish and yourselves. And don't forget to thank the landowners, and their Poor Law agitators, for opening your eyes to the means of emancipation - Annual Parliaments, the Ballot, paid Members, and Universal Suffrage. In demanding those means, tell them that if their extravagance has kept pace with their rapacity, that is their own affair; that if they have dowered their wives, and fortuned their children, on the supposition that their robber-power would last for ever, that is nothing to you; that if, by means of their food-monopoly, they have mortgaged their estates for twice as much as they are worth, that concerns their plundered mortgagees; but that they shall not obtain their meditated fixed duty of 20s. per quarter on corn - equivalent , (with the other results of their monopoly) to a tax of 80 millions a year on our falling trade! for that trade cannot - and shall not, if it can - pay such a tax to thirty thousand unproductive landed annuitants - who have a right to their property, if the people have not paid for it in the forced price of food - and to their lives, if every criminal executed in the last twenty-three years, has not been murdered. But do not mistake me. Many of them, I believe, are self-deceived; but if the fact is otherwise, I would not hurt a hair of their heads; for I am opposed to the punishment of death in all cases, except treason against the people: when they are betrayed, let the traitors perish; when they are massacred, let the assassins die! I should have said all this at Peep-Green today, had I not been prevented by symptoms of disease, threatening suffocation, which I must not despise, if I would live to finish my task. Hoping, for the sake even of your tyrants, that you may speedily obtain your rights, I remain, your friend and brother,

This very long letter asks "fellow sufferers" to seize the right to vote & urges them to ignore the middle classes who are pleading for calm & inaction. The Chartists had been campaigning hard for suffrage but all that appeared on the statute book was the 1838 Poor Law Act which prevented poor people receiving relief in their own homes & condemned them to the workhouse, often called "the Bastille." Elliott clearly has a dislike of the middle classes since they had failed to attend Sheffield's public meeting on the Charter where he claimed that 20,000 had voted for the charter. (Local newspapers had calculated a much lower figure).

Elliott's letter continues to repeat statements he has made elsewhere: without the franchise, trade will disappear overseas; only universal suffrage & free trade can transform the economy; the price of bread must soar if things remain as they are; we shall all be left on a starvation diet of potatoes. Once again, the bard denounces "Palaced-pauper Chandos - the beggarly, bread-tax-eating scoundrel." (Chandos was a wealthy hedonistic MP, "the farmers' friend," whose speeches sought to preserve the Corn Laws. A natural enemy for the Poet of the Poor). Once again, Elliott shows his fears about his own mortality "if I would live to finish my task" and he also displays his surprising international outlook with references to Switzerland, Ireland & Canada. Something completely new does appear towards the end of the letter: Elliott announces that he is against capital punishment. He then makes an exception for treason against the people (note - not against the monarchy). This reveals how closely he identifies with the cause of ordinary men.