Runcorn and Widnes Examiner. — 1874-08-22 (Runcorn, Cheshire, England)

OLD LANCASHIRE RADICAL LEADER.  Referring to the recent death of an old Manchester I Radical, the Hanchester City _Yews has the following— Mr. J. R. Cooper, who died on Sunday last, aged 64, was for many years somewhat of a notataity in Manchester, and took a prominent part in those prolonged political agitations in which the working classes of Manchester and the district were especially interested. In the days when the political earnestness of the people was characterised by no little pas.don and an almost fierce sincerity, and when the demand for the People's Charter excited considerable alarm in Parliament and elsewhere, Mr. J. R. Cooper was one of the local popular leaders. During the days when Fergus O'Connor was a popular idol, and his Northern Star fulminated the most radical remedies for public grievances, Mr. Cooper was one of the captains of the North, and was held in much esteem in and around Manchester as a speaker and leader. Mr. Cooper had no sympathy with the more daring spirits who seriously counselled the employment of the musket and pike in the conquest of their political rights, and who had a stern satisfaction in the advocacy of downright physical force. Mr. Cooper was always in favour of what is now :tailed "moral suasion." His interest in public affairs dated indeed from the time when a little war was being waged by the Government against untaxed newspapers; at the time when Mr. Alderman Heywood, of Manchester, was engaged in selling "Poor Man's Guardians" in defiance of the Excise and incurring untold pecuniary penalties, for his political and commercial contumacy. In this important warfare Mr. Cooper took a personal part; and being for many years engaged in the news agency and bookselling business, he had opportunities of watching with a clese and special interest the gradual fiscal emancipation of the press. With the now innumerable band of newsagents in and around Manchester—news agency having risen almost to the rank of an industry—Mr. Cooper was always an authority, and may be said, perha s, to have become the father of the trade. Although Mr. Cooper's political life in Manchester began so long ago, when the education of the poor was much of an accident or a scramble, and political zeal was not always allied with political knowledge, he possessed a considerable amount of infer:ration on all the subjects which agitated the popular mind and feeling, and his acquisitions were always at the service, in lectures and speeches, of the somewhat heterogeneous bodies into which working class inquiry has been distributed. When the fiercer fires of political agitation had subsided into the pleasanter after-glow of practical organisation, Mr. Cooper belonged to the National Reform Union, and was a member of its committee. On the occasion of the great working-class meeting held in the Free Trade Hall to support the candidature of Sir Thomas Bezley, when he first solicited the suffrages of the electors of Manchester, Mr. Cooper was the person chosen to move a vote of confidence in the candidate, which was passed by acclamation. The deceased gentleman was the brother of the late Mr. Robert Cooper, well known as a protege of the late Robert Given. and for many years a lecturer on therdoeical and other subjects. Both gentlemen often declared that they were indebted for their zeal in public affairs to their father, who was a resolute disciple of Henry Hunt, William Cabbett. and other dauntless primitive political reformers. The father follewed the humble occupation of a shoemaker—the craft which has given us a Gifford, a Bloomfield, and the author of the "Purgatory of Suicides "—and it was amusing to hear, from their own lips, the story of his sons sitting at the feet of their paternal G imaliel as he read to them the fierce declamation of Cobbett in his "Gridiron," or his "Twopenny Trash," or the scathing diatribes he addressed "To the pretty gentlemen of Whitehall." Mr. Cooper has left the politicel world much quieter than he found it, for—thanks to the Anti-Corn Law League, and the multitude who have borne the heat and burden of the day of Reform— Hunger has ceased to be the teacher of working-class politics, and the day is well nigh past when dinner time came and there was no dinner.