Mark Hovell

“ By their means Civilisation divides mankind into Rich and Poor, and gives the former power to oppress the latter. Riches is a power directed to oppression. No despotism is worse than that of Capital. Capital is the means whereby the Rich rob the Poor of the larger part of their produce. It is not Nature, as Malthus declares, who condemns the Poor to poverty, starvation, and death, but Capital. Capital is given in the form of wages and material to the labourer that he may produce more goods, but even the goods given as capital were originally taken from the labourer. ”

“ To organise such a scheme would have taxed the resources of a modern state to the uttermost, and to control hundreds of thousands of harassed and oppressed workers, brimming with renewed hopes, burning with zeal and fired with indignation against their old enemy, Capital, was a task from which the boldest modern Labour leader would shrink. But the serene optimism of Owen saw only the promised land, the perils of the way being ignored. ”

“ We admitted an individual to avail himself of the small savings of his own industry, or it may be of the assistance of his friends, and with these means thus to traffick in human labour, to buy it cheap and sell it dear, and as his means increased, to purchase machinery or other productive powers, and thus to supersede human labour. The fruits thus accumulated we allow him to transmit to his children: they, becoming rich, intermarry and mix with the aristocracy, and thus by this principle we are building up exclusion and corruption on the one hand faster than we can reform evils on the other. ”

“ Tracing most of our social grievances to class legislation, we have proposed a political reform upon the principles of the People's Charter. ... Believing it to have truth for its basis and the happiness of all for its end, we conceive that it needs not the violence of passion, the bitterness of party spirit, nor the arms of aggressive warfare for its support: its principles need only to be unfolded to be appreciated and being appreciated by the majority will be established in peace. ”

“ Watson and Lovett, perhaps Hetherington too, represent an interesting revolutionary type. They are intellectual men whom modern education might have lifted into quite other spheres of life, where their abilities would have found that expression which political agitation alone seemed to offer in their own day. They were men driven into revolutionary thought by the appalling misery which they saw around them and which tinged their whole mental outlook with a melancholy which sought refuge in political agitation. ”

“ The Charter Suffrage would not rob any man while it would protect and enrich all: while Complete Suffrage would merely tantalise you with the possession of a thing you could not use, and would entirely prostrate labour to capital and speculation. The Charter Suffrage would, firstly, more than treble our production now locked up, restricted, and narrowed, while it would cause a more equitable distribution of the increased production. Complete Suffrage would not increase the production while it would monopolise all that was produced. ”

“ Yet there was a better type of Chartist leader, and the touch of complacent self-satisfaction, the doctrinaire impracticability, and the limited outlook of a Lovett or a Cooper must not blind us to their steady honesty of purpose, to their power of learning through experience to govern themselves and others, to their burning hatred of injustice and to their passion for the righting of wrongs. Yet, making all allowances, Chartism as an organisation was ineffective, just as Chartism as a creed possessed no body of coherent doctrine. ”

“ How could the town-bred artisan cultivate his little holding without knowledge, capital, equipment, or direction? Could such tiny plots, unskilfully tilled by amateur farmers, be made capable of supporting even the most industrious and capable of the new owners? How could such ill-equipped amateurs compete successfully against the capitalist farmer, skilled in his trade and provided with all the machinery and tools required for modern farming? If this were impossible, how was the Company to get back its "rent" without which it could not extend its operations? ”

“ London was then probably the only English city in which there was a considerable body of highly skilled artisans, for there alone was there a large wealthy and leisured class whose wants could find employment for skilled handicraft. The manufacturers of the north, even when wealthy, did not always adopt a style of living commensurate with their earnings, for they often lacked the tastes which accompany hereditary riches. But London was alike the centre of society, fashion, politics, affairs, law, medicine and letters. ”

“ From this moment the excitement began to rise to fever heat. At scores of meetings the Petition and Charter were adopted with immense enthusiasm. This was especially the case in the North. Everybody was carried away by the fire and fervour of the movement. The speeches became more and more inflammable and exulting. It is from this period that the gems of Stephens and O'Connor are derived. Attwood was in the seventh heaven, and even the less enthusiastic leaders of the London Working Men's Association began to imagine that the day of redemption was at last about to dawn. ”

“ His thorough knowledge of the subject, his clear and incisive style, together with a charming personality, held the attention of the class. His realistic description of the condition of the people, especially of the working classes, during the early part of the nineteenth century—the homes they lived in and the lives they lived—showed us at once a man with a large heart, one who sympathised with the sorrows and the sufferings of the people. His great desire was to serve his fellows by educating, and so exalting the manhood of the nation. ”

“ Christianity should prevail in everyday life, commerce should be conducted on Christian principles and not on those of Mammon, and every other institution ought to be based on the doctrines of Christianity. Hence the Chartist Church felt it their duty to go out and move amongst the masses of the people to guide and direct them by the principles of Christianity. They felt it incumbent upon them to go out into the world, to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. The true Christian Church could not remain aloof but must enter into the struggles of the people and guide them. ”

“ The opposition between Lovett and O'Connor was the opposition of two completely different personalities. Lovett was a thin, delicate, nervous, retiring, serious, and ascetic man to whom life was a tragedy, made bearable only by self-abnegation and devotion to the welfare of others. O'Connor was a great, burly, bouncing, hail-fellow-well-met, to whom the essence of life was political agitation, involving crowds, excitement, applause, and authority, the end and purpose of the agitation being but secondary. ”

“ Nowhere was there fiercer opposition to the Land Scheme than from the malcontents whom the dictator had drummed out of the Chartist army. O'Brien bitterly denounced the Land Scheme from the point of view of doctrinaire Jacobinism. If the Land Scheme succeeded, he declared, it would set up a stolidly conservative mass of peasant holders who would make all radical change impossible. "Every man," said the National Reformer, "who joins these land societies is practically enlisting himself on the side of the Government against his own order." ”

“ For true liberty cannot be conferred by Acts of Parliament or by decrees of princes, but must spring up from the knowledge, morality, and public virtue of our population. ... If therefore you would escape your present social and political bondage and benefit your race, you must bestir yourselves and make every sacrifice to build up the sacred temple of your own liberties. ”

“ Acquisition of wealth, which opened up to many the prospects of social advancement, destroyed the old feeling of contented acceptance of that station of life in which they were born. Hence came the increasing specialisation in agriculture and industry, the enclosures which alone made possible the improvement of agricultural methods, and the machinery which superseded men. Employers employed no longer men but hands, no longer human beings but labour, and the relation between the two gradually developed into the payment of cash which was held to cover all the obligations of the one to the other. ”

“ It was to this stormy ocean that Attwood and his friends proposed to entrust their frail currency bark. An early shipwreck awaited it.
The Birmingham Union now entered upon a dazzling phase of activity. Its leaders fancied themselves as victorious generals, once more leading the legions of industrious patriots into the legislative citadel, as they fondly supposed had been the case in 1831–32. They would set up their standard in the Midlands and call all working men into it. They anticipated that their massed battalions would overawe Melbourne as easily as Wellington or Lyndhurst. ”

“ It was the duty of the common man to obey his masters and be contented with his miserable lot. This had been the doctrine of the landed aristocracy of the past; it was equally emphatically the point of view of the capitalist class which was using the Reform Act to establish itself in an equally strong position. Against the autocracy both of the landlord and of the capitalist Chartism was a strong protest. Every Chartist was fiercely independent and eager that the class for which he stood should work out its own salvation. ”

“ The new Unionism derived its economics from Hodgskin, and its inspiration from Robert Owen. Owen's chief merit was that he filled the working classes with renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics. The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men and women. ”

“ The bane of the industrial system was the encouragement it gave to the rise of a brood of small capitalists but little removed in culture and education from the working people themselves, slender of resources, precarious in position, and therefore unable to abate one jot of the advantage which their position gave them over their workmen, often unscrupulous and fraudulent, and generally hated by those who came under their sway. ”

“ It would be idle to suppose that O'Connor in no wise deserved this fidelity; men do not gain such homage without cause or merit. But O'Connor's character was such that no man of independence, talents, and integrity could long co-operate with him. O'Brien, Cooper, William Hill, Gammage, Harney, Jones, and a crowd of others served him with zeal and quitted him with contumely. Yet there was something gained by the supremacy of O'Connor. The disunion which had been so disastrous in 1839 was avoided, and the National Charter Association stood as a very enthusiastic and very hopeful compact body. ”

“ If this system is good for Ireland, it is equally good for Britain. Within twenty years of its general adoption twenty million landholding peasants, entrenched on the soil and living in contentment and comfort, tempered only by the idyllic simplicity of happy village life, will be an army which will save Ireland and Britain from the domination of cotton-spinners and iron-masters, and give the land and the gentry their true place in controlling the destinies of a free nation. ”

“ The Chartists first compelled attention to the hardness of the workmen's lot, and forced thoughtful minds to appreciate the deep gulf between the two "nations" which lived side by side without knowledge of or care for each other. Though remedy came slowly and imperfectly, and was seldom directly from Chartist hands, there was always the Chartist impulse behind the first timid steps towards social and economic betterment. The cry of the Chartists did much to force public opinion to adopt the policy of factory legislation in the teeth of the opposition of the manufacturing interests. ”

“ The London Working Men's Association was founded with the idea of excluding any but bona fide artisans, and though it in practice was prepared to co-operate with middle-class people, it made no concealment of the fact that it held such co-operation to imply no subordination. The London working men would accept no terms but equal alliance. They had drunk deep of the liquor of O'Brienism and, in the somewhat limited social philosophy at their disposal, identified the middle class with the capitalist employing class, whose elimination was one of the principal articles of their creed. ”

“ It was a speech which the Chartists themselves repudiated. It was a middle-class Birmingham Union speech, not a Chartist speech.
Fielden briefly seconded the motion. Both he and Attwood were guilty of confusing the issues. Both had enlarged rather upon the necessity of relieving misery than upon the question of granting civil and political rights. Each offered his own panacea for the prevalent distress, and so turned the discussion on to side issues. Apart from the manifest absurdity of expecting to cure the many-rooted evils of society by a single remedy, this was a bad error in tactics. ”

“ These prosecutions had a very depressing effect upon the Chartist cause, and the reputation of the Convention sank lower and lower. It had scarcely accomplished anything, and the great expectations with which it had commenced had come to nothing. The arrest and imprisonment of so many leaders produced a feeling of helplessness which damped all enthusiasm. From all parts of the country came reports of hopelessness, disappointment, and dissension, and when the Convention met for its last sittings at the end of August, it met merely to dissolve in ignominy. ”

“ To the timid folk who trembled at Chartism without even trying to understand it, Chartism meant irreligion even more than it meant revolution. And it is clear that to most Chartists organised middle-class religion was anathema. "More pigs and fewer parsons" was a famous cry of Chartism on its most material side. Chartist leaders, like Hetherington and Cleave, handed on to Lovett and Holyoake the uncompromising free-thought of revolutionary France, until, under the latter's auspices, it crystallised into the working-class "secularism" of the later nineteenth century. ”

“ In tracing the influence of Chartism on later ideals we must look to the individual rather than the system, to the spirit rather than the letter. But it would be unjust to deny the variety and the strength of the stimulus which the Chartist impulse gave towards the furtherance of the more wholesome spirit which makes even the imperfect Britain of to-day a much better place for the ordinary man to live in than was the Britain of the early years of Victoria. ”

“ The Leeds Times thought there were a quarter of a million people present, which is scarcely credible. There was an immense array of speakers, representing all parts of the Chartist world. The dominant note was struck by Stephens, who declared that the Charter was not a political question but a knife and fork question: not a matter of ballot-boxes but of bread and butter. This tone sounded throughout all the subsequent babble about arming or not arming, about natural rights and legal rights, which filled up the debates of the Convention. ”