ABSTRACT
In perusing the account of the assassination of Mr. Horsfall the reader will doubtless be impressed by the singular daring and the disregard of the commonest precautions which characterised throughout the proceedings of the four murderers. That the foal deed should be discussed in the open shop might be deemed sufficiently dangerous even if all the men had been sworn members of the brotherhood, but it is well known that some of those who were present when the hot-blooded Mellor avowed his determination to shoot Horsfall had not joined the Luddites, though there is no doubt they sympathised strongly with the movement. When George Mellor come into the room where Benjamin Walker was working, and after bluntly avowing his murderous intention, asked him to accompany them, Walkers father was present, and yet, strange to say, he does not appear to have offered a single word of objection to the proposal that his son should participate in the murder. Doubtless the knowledge they all possessed of the desperate character of the Luddite leaders would make Walker and the others afraid of calling down upon their heads the swift vengeance they were well aware would await the traitor who should obstruct the movement, but even this is scarcely 148sufficient to account for the strange silence on the part of Walker. One would have thought that, seeing he was afraid to imperil his own safety by joining the lawless band, he would have felt sufficient solicitude respecting his son’s welfare to have taken advantage of the time when the latter was absent from the workshop at his “drinking” to warn him of the tremendous danger which must attend the execution of the foul plot laid before him by Mellor. The father does not, however, appear to have given a word of warning to his son, and though he was present afterwards when the latter consented to take the heavily loaded pistol from the impetuous leader’s hands, he is not reported to have offered a single word of remonstrance. The fact seems to be that the chief characteristic of the elder Walker was great cowardice, whioh was also indeed, as we have already stated, the leading point in his son’s oharaoter. They were both quite capable of doing villainous deeds, but were afraid to put themselves into positions of danger. We have shown how this craven fear for the safety of his own neck was overpowered in the case of the younger Walker by a dread of the vengeance of the desperate villain, Mellor, in the plantation from which the deadly shot was fired, but if the strangely callous father had only risked consequences and advised his son to reject the foul proposal, Mellor, disgusted with his want of spirit, might have passed him by contemptuously, aa he did William Hall.
