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Unionists. If the English working men were innocent, why should they object to such an impartial inquiry? Because, answered a group of revolutionists, an inquiry conducted by a corrupt and undemocratic House of Commons could not be impartial. Feargus O'Connor, an Irish demagogue who had a feud with O'Connell, and had started a few months before in Leeds a weekly Radical paper called the Northern Star,' made an alliance with the enemies of William Lovett, and became the leader of the Northern Chartists with methods of his own, which were to have nothing in common with Lovett's bourgeois line of action.

Then began the big open-air meetings of the North, under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor, with the help of the local Trades. These orderly processions of thousands of workmen were marshalled by the Trade Unions; these bands of music, these unfurled banners, were the bands and banners of the Trade Unions. Chartism never approximated to the modern Labour Party more than it did in the summer months of 1838; it was a political organisation founded upon Trade Unionism. But a Labour Party is not necessarily a Socialist Party. The Trade Unionists who led the movement wanted a more democratic House of Commons in order that they might be protected against an eventual undoing of the Combination Act of 1824; they were, as a rule, well-paid wage-earners, the aristocracy of the world of labour, and did not trouble about such bold problems as the abolition of private property, or even of the wage system.

Things now changed once more. We enter, as the year 1838 nears its end, the third phase of the History of Chartism. These huge meetings were too big a thing for the Trade Unionism of the time. They became, as months wore on, more crowded and more rowdy. In November the torchlight meetings began, and well might the English bourgeoisie wonder what the torchbearing was meant for; was there going to be industrial incendiarism in the North, after the model of the rural incendiarism of 1830, but on a larger scale and with more destructive consequences? In fact, the movement had got out of the hands of organised labour; it had become a movement of the unorganised mob.

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Oastler and Stephens, the Tory mob-orators, had first set their faces against Chartism, seeing in it nothing but a political trick of O'Connell and his confederates; but now O'Connell in his turn had become an enemy of Chartism, and Oastler and Stephens attended the Chartist meetings. Not that they believed more than formerly in political democracy; but they found Chartist platforms, where they occasionally faced more than a hundred thousand hearers, convenient for the purpose of inveighing against factory servitude and workhouse imprisonment. Thus had O'Connell been hoist with his own. petard. He had conceived that the Charter of the People might be used to kill the Anti-Poor-Law agitation; and, after a year had gone by, Chartism was nothing but the old Anti-Poor-Law agitation under a new name, more dangerous than it had ever been.

It is a pity that none of the recent students of Chartism should have bestowed their labour upon this special problem of analysing Chartism into a series of successive phases. They could have shown, more in detail than we are able to do here, how Chartism came to be dropped, first by O'Connell and the parliamentary Radicals, then by the Trade Unions. Let anybody compare the Chartist meetings of 1839 with those of 1838; the tone has altered, the discipline is no more there; it is apparent that the Trade Unions have recoiled from the movement. Let anybody again inquire why the Chartist plan of a national strike broke down; it was, by the testimony of the Chartists themselves, because the well-to-do members of the Trade Unions did not choose to answer the appeal of their "more distressed brethren.' And it is also a pity that none of our writers should have attempted to draw a map-a geographical and sociological map-of Chartism, as it stood in 1839. We believe the result of their study would have been the following: Wherever the working class was in a state of disorganisation, whether because it was decadent, and the time of organisation had passed for it, as was the case with the hand-loom weavers, or because it was in its infancy,

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* Resolution of the General Council of the Convention, Aug. 6, 1839 : Gammage, 'History of the Chartist Movement,' p. 155.

and had not yet reached the stage of organisation, as was the case with the colliers, there, and only there, Chartism prevailed.

Being revolutionary in temper, were the discontented working men of 1839 Socialists? They were-if it is enough, in order to be called a Socialist, that you should ask for higher wages and shorter hours, a national bankruptcy, and a wholesale distribution of State alms. But there was no elaborate doctrine, no carefully prepared programme of action behind the Chartist uprising; or rather, there was one, and it was the strictly political one, of a democratic Reform of Parliament. The Chartists were hungry; and Chartist meetings were a kind of theatrical display of their hunger. In August 1838, the price of wheat began to rise, and Chartism increased. Some months later, the price of wheat fell, and Chartism subsided. Elias Regnault, a French Republican, in a preface which he wrote in 1839 for a translation of Bentham's 'Catechism of Electoral Reform,' very aptly defined the difference between the spirit of the Parisian and that of the English mob:

'Il y a loin, bien loin, de ces insurrections à tout ce qu'on pourrait leur comparer chez nous. .. La révolte à Birmingham, c'est le cri de l'estomac; à Paris, c'est une excitation du cerveau.'

There was one among the Chartist leaders who may be said to have been in the proper sense of the word, a conscious Social Democrat. Bronterre O'Brien, a disciple of Robert Owen and an enthusiastic student of the French Revolution, expressly meant to weld into one common block the socialism of Robert Owen with the Jacobinism of Robespierre. But how many followers had this very frenchified Englishman? He was only the head of a very small group in London, where William Lovett's moderate party always succeeded in retaining the majority within the Chartist body; and, on the other hand, he never got any influence in the North, where Feargus O'Connor made the law. Mr Graham Wallas makes capital' of a very misleading sentence of his. 'If I mistake not,' writes Bronterre in the 'Northern Star,' June 23; 1838, all the more intelligent Socialists are becoming Radicals, and all the more

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intelligent Radicals are becoming Socialists.' But quotation is a difficult art; and should this particular sentence have been singled out of the whole article?

'Why,' exclaims Bronterre in the course of the same article, 'have not these parties [the Radicals and the Socialists] a better mutual understanding? Why do they not make Common Cause, since their interests are one and the same? Or, if they cannot agree to think so, why do they not practise mutual forbearance?'

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Then comes the sentence quoted by Mr. Wallas; the real question being how many intelligent Radicals and intelligent Socialists there were according to Bronterre's calculation. Time and good example,' he goes on, will no doubt remedy the evil.' Did they? The leader of the Socialists, Robert Owen, started in 1839, throughout the Midlands and the North, a big campaign of propaganda which was mainly directed against Radicalism and Chartism. The chief and king and hero of the Chartists was, and to the end remained, Feargus O'Connor, a revolutionist and an enemy of the Factory and Workhouse system, but a genuine individualist of the Irish type, whose aim was to bring the English wage-earners back to the land as small and independent landholders.

We have briefly told the tale of the first Chartist uprising, which took place in 1838 and 1839. The further history of Chartism is nothing, as Mr P. W. Slosson says, but the history of the decline of Chartism. After the first National Petition in favour of Universal Suffrage had been presented and rejected in 1839, there was another National Petition in 1842, which failed also, and was followed by an uncoordinated and aimless general strike all through the industrial districts of England; but nobody would have denied in 1842 that Chartism was on the wane, while the Anti-Corn-Law-League was winning new members every day. In 1848 a third and last National Petition was signed by the English workmen; but it was a mere aftermath of the French Révolution de Février'; and if there happened on April 10 a kind of one-day panic in London, I dare say everybody on the evening of that uneventful afternoon, when there had been neither an armed insurrection nor

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even the promised peaceful procession of Chartists, felt rather ashamed of having been so frightened in the morning. The only outburst of Chartism which it is worth while to consider is the outburst of 1839.

Real and important as it may have been, did it seriously alarm the gentry and middle class of England? Some fears may have been aroused in the end of 1838 when the torchlight meetings began; but, even then, the alarmists were in the minority. The Government did not lose its head; it took only the necessary military measures, made practically no preventive arrests, and did not attempt to curb the liberty of the press and of public meeting. And, though some Tory members of Parliament, for obvious tactical reasons, complained of what they thought a dangerous display of Whig nonchalance, the Ministers were manifestly backed by public opinion, which could not bring itself to believe in a Chartist peril. A French Fourierist who just then travelled through England, inquiring about the future of Democracy and Socialism, was bound reluctantly to acknowledge 'la parfaite sécurité que professent de ce côté-là les classes supérieures et moyennes de ce pays'; and adds, a few lines lower, this most characteristic sentence:

'Les Anglais pensent si peu comme moi à cet égard que, quand je prononçais devant l'un d'eux le mot de Chartistes : "Chartistes?" me répondait-on, qui est-ce qui s'occupe de Chartistes en Angleterre? On ne parle de chartistes qu'en France.'

Just in the same way Thomas Carlyle, who took Chartism in deadly earnest, believing quite mistakenly that it meant the speedy downfall of middle-class liberalism and the advent of some kind of social feudalism or monarchy, observed indignantly the apathy of public opinion.

'Read Hansard's Debates, or the morning papers, if you have nothing to do! The old grand question, whether A is to be in office or B, with the innumerable subsidiary questions growing out of that... Canada Question, Irish Appropriation Question, West-India Question, Queen's Bedchamber

*La Phalange,' 15 août 1839: 'Sur l'avenir révolutionnaire de l'Angleterre.'

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