are Turkish in race,' should be returned to Turkey. This is very different language from the arrogant claims of the Khalifat Committee. The Moderates have formed the National Liberal Association and have offered a vigorous opposition to Non-Co-operation. Their proposals in the new Councils have been reasonable, and all who wish for the success of the Reforms hope that they will consolidate their political power.

Itinerant agitators have been concerned in the agrarian disturbances, accompanied by some damage to the crops and property, and by some loss of life, which broke out at the end of the year 1920 in the Oudh districts of Rai Bareli and Sultanpur against the taluqdars or landlords, The cultivators had been told that the downfall of the British Raj was near, and that a 'golden age' of cheapness and plenty under Mr Gandhi's beneficent rule was coming. The disturbed districts are now quiet, and it is proposed to redress the cultivators' only genuine grievance by granting them greater fixity of tenure, and preventing the landlords from imposing arbitrary cesses on their tenants. Similar disturbances have since broken out in the Fyzabad district in Oudh, and in the Mozufferpore district in Behar. These disturbances, with the exhibitions of racial hatred culminating in the murder of Mr Willoughby in August last and the frequent strikes, show that the Reforms have been only too successful in disturbing what their framers called the placid, pathetic contentment of the masses' with British rule. As Mr Montagu and Lord Chelmsford have sown, so have they reaped. Lord Chelmsford has defended his policy in a recent speech made at the Calcutta Club dinner on Feb. 23. Speaking of Non-Co-operation, he said:

'The outstanding fact remains that the Councils have been established, are composed of admirable materials, and are doing their work. Non-Co-operation was attempted in the Hijrat movement into Afghanistan. The trial of death and suffering imposed by that exodus upon the unfortunate misguided people who took part in it has, I believe, killed any attempt to revive any such exodus from India. NonCo-operation succeeded temporarily in inducing emotional boys to leave their schools and colleges, but here again, as soon as the emotional ebullition had passed, the students

returned in large numbers to their class-rooms. We have then every reason to take heart with regard to the success of the policy we have adopted.

'But a moment may come when our policy may fail, and when the two alternatives of order on the one hand or anarchy on the other alone may face us. In such an event there can be only one course for the Government to pursue and that is to uphold the cause of order. We shall then ask all responsible men to range themselves on the side of order, and here I am confident the Reformed Councils will play their part. We as a Government will place all the facts before them, and all our cards on the table, and I am confident that when we prove to them that the alternative is between order and anarchy, there will be only one response made, and that is that we will support you in any action that you may consider necessary to maintain order in the country.'

Such a speech would be more appropriate for an incoming than an outgoing Viceroy. Lord Chelmsford is entitled to all the satisfaction he can gather from the circumstances he alludes to, but it is strange that he did not consider that the moment when his policy failed, had come last year, when the Non-Co-operators were preaching sedition, persecuting those who disagreed with them in politics, even to the extent of refusing them burial in Mahomedan graveyards, emptying the colleges and schools, and stirring up strikes everywhere. Even when, in his estimation, the moment for action has come, Lord Chelmsford will take no action till assured of the support of the popular representatives. Surely this is to invert the proper functions of government. Any Government, worthy of name, would take action in defence of law and order first, and then invite the popular representatives to criticise its action, if they think fit. Sir Verney Lovett* criticises the official policy thus: 'It has profoundly puzzled many among those millions, who consider that no Government deserves respect or obedience, which does not promptly combat the operations of its open enemies.' This he calls a 'root idea,' and says that it will remain in 'spite of the implications of the coming parliamentary system.' In saying this he has, we think, given expression to the general verdict.

'History of Indian Nationalism,' third edition, 1921, p. 278.

Art. 4.-CHARTISM.

1. The Life of Francis Place, 1771-1854. By Graham Wallas. Revised edition. Allen and Unwin, 1918.

2. Le Chartisme, 1830-48. Par E. Dolléans. Two vols. Paris Floury, 1912-13.

3. Geschichte des Sozialismus in England. Von M. Beer. Stuttgart: Dietz, 1913. English translation: A History of British Socialism. With an introduction by R. H. Tawney. Two vols. Bell, 1919-20.

4. The Chartist Movement in its Social and Economic Aspects. By Frank Rosenblatt. New York: Columbia University, 1916.

5. The Decline of the Chartist Movement. By Preston William Slosson. New York: Columbia University, 1916. 6. The Chartist Movement. By the late Mark Hovell. Edited and completed, with a memoir, by Professor T. F. Tout. Longmans, 1918.

7. A History of the Chartist Movement. By Julius West. With introductory memoir by J. C. Squire. Constable, 1920.

8. Life and Struggles of William Lovett. With an introduction by R. H. Tawney. Two vols. Bell, 1920. THERE comes a time when a period of history is ripe for scientific study; that time has come for Chartism. Mr Graham Wallas was the pioneer, when, being the first to study the Place Papers in the British Museum, he stumbled upon twenty-eight volumes of materials for a history of Chartism. Then came a Frenchman, M. Dolléans, whose history of Chartism may be called 'massive' or 'diffuse,' or said to be not always strictly accurate, but who certainly has given us a very full and living account of the revolutionary leaders and groups, and of the movement as a whole. A German, Mr M. Beer, followed close upon the heels of the Frenchman, with his well-known, very painstaking, and very narrowminded 'History of Socialism in England.' What we mean when we say that Mr Beer's mind is narrow will appear from the fact that, in his History, Ruskin's teaching and influence are absolutely left out of account; doubtless because there is not enough of the Marxist atmosphere in Ruskin's philosophy. As for Mr Beer's

scholarly qualities, they nowhere come out better than in his nine admirable chapters on Chartism. Three Americans published works on Chartism in the course of 1916, when we Europeans had no time to spare upon such subjects of ancient history. Not that English scholars had neglected the study of Chartism; two Englishmen were busy working at it when war broke out. And at last their books have been published as the incomplete and posthumous works of their authors; for both Mark Hovell and Julius West were very young, and both died in the war.

Now, valuable as all the books which we have mentioned may be-and we think that they are very valuable indeed-we are afraid that they labour under what we might aptly call the defect of the family biography and of the monograph study. They have, if not always, at all events in many cases, been written by those who, being Socialists, considered themselves as the spiritual grandchildren of the Chartist leaders, and who have in consequence piously emphasised-over-emphasised, as we conceive-the socialistic aspect of Chartism. On the other hand, the writers, immersed as they were in the particular subject of their study, have often lost sight of its historical surroundings, and given Chartism more importance than it deserved in the history of the times. Sir Spencer Walpole, a liberal and broad-minded author, gives on the whole a more faithful account, brief as it is, of Chartism, than do most of these more recent and more laborious writers, because he wrote a general history of England, and because he wrote at a time when Socialism was not yet rampant. It was not, after all, sheer accident that England, in the early forties, fell under the influence of the ideas of Richard Cobden, not under the dictatorship of Feargus O'Connor. Let us never forget that Chartism was not the beginning of a thing that succeeded; it was quite decidedly a thing that failed.

How did Chartism begin? The best account of its beginnings is given us by Francis Place, as quoted by Mr Julius West (op. cit., pp. 79, 89):

'Three or four years ago (he writes) there were a number of weekly newspapers. the purpose of which was to excite

insurrections against property which, under the name of capital, they denounced as the principal cause of low wages and the depression of the people, and the poor law as the production of the higher and middle classes, the "plundering" classes, for the purpose of robbing and keeping in ignorance the productive class, who alone were entitled to all the produce and all the commodities in the country. . . . There was foolish Owenism, too, operating to some extent, and great mischief was done. As, however, the doctrines of each of these men differed in some particulars, so the people were formed into many different squads, but all believing or hoping that a change in their favour was about to take place. But some among the Working Men's Association were displeased with this state of things, and persuaded that it would be much better that a plan should be adopted in which all might concur, and by concurring call the people off from these absurdities, and they proposed Annual Parliaments, Voting by Ballot, Universal Suffrage, etc.'

The original plan, therefore, according to one of its authors, was not to promote Socialism, but to bring back the deluded workmen from Socialism to Radicalism.

The six members of Parliament who were appointed together with six workmen, members of the London Working Men's Association, to draw the Universal Suffrage Scheme, were Benthamites, headed by O'Connell. A story was current, half a century ago, that O'Connell invented the name which was eventually given to the scheme-The People's Charter; and, though the report has since been deemed, by universal consent, untrustworthy (not one of the authors of the books before us, except Mr Rosenblatt, accepts it; most of them do not even think it worth a denial), we do not believe that it should be dismissed as being absolutely without a foundation. If not literally true, it is at all events one of those legends which in a sense are truer than history; it links up, and rightly links up, the early youth of Chartism with the name of O'Connell. He had unsuccesfully, in the course of the preceding years, tried to rouse the spirit of the people against the House of Lords. He observed the Anti-Poor-Law agitation, led by such Tories as Stephens and Oastler, becoming noisier day by day, and opening a kind of chasm between the Liberal Party and the masses. Being a professional agitator, he knew