and that "Russell…now conducts all their plans". His role as a United Irish recruiter was commemorated in the well-known ballad "The man from God-knows-where". In October 1793 he had founded the Society in Enniskillen with William Henry Hamilton. In January 1794 he married Russell's niece, Mary Ann Russell (c.1775–c.1840), who herself had radical political views, and he was to remain a close confidante and collaborator. Social radical In 1796, Russell published a Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present State of the Country—the fullest exposition of his democratic and increasingly millenarian outlook. He castigated the aristocracy for stalling progress towards reform in the 1780s, their moral corruption, their unworthiness to govern, and their useless, parasitic existence and insisted that all men have not only the right, but the duty, to concern themselves with government and politics. Only if legislation seeks to serve "the whole family of mankind", rather than just self-interested minorities, can there be some hope that it will reflect the natural justice ordained by God. Russell looked to a simpler, purer form of government in which the will of a benevolent deity could operate untrammelled by greed and corruption and man could realise those rights accorded him by nature. These, he believed, required radical changes to distribution and prerogatives of property. He decried the cruelties of mill work and the poverty induced by the exactions and indifference of the aristocracy and the government. As an acting magistrate in Dungannon Russell had taken the side of local linen weavers in their disputes with their employers. While some radicals took a hostile view of tradesmen's combinations, seeing them as an obstacle to the self-regulating harmony of the market, Russell looked upon them with approval. Clashing with Samuel Nielson in the Northern Star, he recommended combination—unions—not for only tradesmen but also for labourers and cottiers. In advance of Tone's oft-quoted declaration in 1796, Russell was "among the first of the United Irishmen to conclude that they would have to depend on 'the men of no property'". In July 1793, he argued:... from what I can see, the men of property, whether landed or commercial, are decidedly against a struggle, which might risqué that and will do nothing. The people are begin[n]ing to see this and in time when they will feel their strength and injurys they will do it themselves and adieu to property! While Tone feared that the