Chartism

“ Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England. It is a new name for a thing which has had many names, which will yet have many. The matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-rooted, far-extending ”

“ If by a Chartist you mean one who fancies that a change in mere political circumstances will bring about a millennium, I am no longer one. That dream is gone—with others. But if to be a Chartist is to love my brothers with every faculty of my soul—to wish to live and die struggling for their rights, endeavouring to make them, not electors merely, but fit to be electors, senators, kings, and priests to God and to His Christ—if that be the Chartism of the future, then am I sevenfold a Chartist, and ready to confess it before men, though I were thrust forth from every door in England. ”

“ Yet even here Chartism may claim to have initiated many movements which are still with us, both in Britain and on the Continent. Accordingly we shall take a much truer view of the place of Chartism in history, if we disregard the superficial judgments of despairing agitators and contemptuous enemies, and look rather at the wider ways in which Chartism has made its influence felt upon succeeding generations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nevertheless the efforts of Vincent, O'Neill, Collins, and the like, who leavened the mass of Chartist doctrine with some moral ideals, ought not to be neglected by the student of the movement. It is the tragedy of Chartism that it came to be controlled by one whose influence was fatal to ideals. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beyond this, however, the Chartist consensus hardly went. It was impossible for them to focus a united body of opinion in favour of a single definite social ideal. The true failure of Chartism lay in its inability to perform this task. Political Chartism was a real though limited thing; social Chartism was a protest against what existed, not a reasoned policy to set up anything concrete in its place. Apart from machinery, Chartism was largely a passionate negation.
The Chartists need not be severely reproached for their lack of a positive policy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Delirious Chartism will not have raged entirely to no purpose, as indeed no earthly thing does so, if it have forced all thinking men of the community to think of this vital matter, too apt to be overlooked otherwise. Is the condition of the English working people wrong; so wrong that rational working men cannot, will not, and even should not rest quiet under it? A most grave case, complex beyond all others in the world; a case wherein Botany Bay, constabulary rural police, and such like, will avail but little. Or is the discontent itself mad, like the shape it took? ”

“ To us, looking at these matters somewhat in the same light, Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippes. Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexplicable. Where the great mass of men is tolerably right, all is right; where they are not right, all is wrong. ”

“ Chartism then was the union of men who agreed in a negative policy of protest against restrictions which were the source of infinite misery and unrest, but whose positive policy was narrowed down to a sensible but limited political programme which, when realised, left the root of social evils hardly touched. That this should be so was unavoidable, since Chartists were profoundly disagreed as to what use should be made by the proletariat of the political power which they claimed for it. Every conceivable wave of doctrine flowed from some portion or another of the Chartist sea. ”

“ Up to this point Chartism has presented itself to us mainly as a particularly British manifestation of specifically British grievances. But the problem of misery and its remedies had its universal as well as its insular aspect, and from the early days of the Working Men's Association, from which Chartism sprang, the cosmopolitan side of the common cause had not been lost sight of. The Chartist pioneer, Lovett, made it the pride of the Working Men's Association that, as early as 1836, it had introduced to Europe the mode of international addresses between working men of different countries. ”

“ This Address was circulated throughout the Chartist world. It set forth the objects of the National Association, as already described in Chartism, and it was accompanied by a dissertation in the true Lovett style.
In addressing you as fellow-labourers in the great cause of human liberty, we would wish to rivet this great truth upon your mind: you must become your own social and political regenerators or you will never enjoy freedom. ”

“ Radicalism was a force in reform before Chartism began. The Radical more or less evolves his creed by observation of the condition of things surrounding him; the Chartist had his creed ready made for him. ”

“ Much has been written about the various schools of Chartism. There have been many superficial attempts to divide Chartists, both in their own time and later, into the partisans of moral and physical force. But the dispute between O'Connor and the physical force men was a mere difference as to method; it did not touch the fundamental problem of the Chartist ideal; it corresponded to what is found in one shape or another in the history of every revolution. Moreover, there was little sincerity in the physical force party. ”

“ We have Chartism preached by one 122not a Chartist—by one who has no more his five points of Radicalism than his five points of Calvinistic divinity—who has no trust in democracy, who swears by no theory of representative government—who will never believe that a multitude of men, foolish and selfish, will elect the disinterested and the wise. ”

“ For Chartism was in these manufacturing areas a cry of distress, the shout of men, women, and children drowning in deep waters, rather than the reasoned logical creed of Lovett, or the fanatical money-mongering theories of Attwood. Impatience, engendered by fireless grates and breakfastless tables, was the driving force of much northern Chartism.
The Manchester demonstration was one of a series arranged to elect the delegates to the Convention. These delegates had to be elected by public meeting and not by definite organisations. ”

“ One of its own crude and forceful orators said on Kersall Moor to 200,000 turbulent workingmen of Manchester: "Chartism, my friends, is no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question. ”

“ In finding no place for the independence of the worker the Young England scheme of salvation parted company from all Chartism.
There was the same conflict in the Chartist social outlook as in their ideals of reconstruction. To some Chartists the war of classes was the necessary condition of social progress, and their characteristic attitude was the refusal of all co-operation between working men and those who did not gain their bread by manual labour. ”

“ Thus the great movement got once more under weigh. With new men and new methods, Chartism made great progress during 1840 and 1841. The new organisation tended towards much greater efficiency. It separated the wheat from the chaff, those who applauded at meetings from those who worked and subscribed for the cause. One sign of this greater efficiency is the fact that a petition on behalf of Frost, handed in in May 1841, received over two million signatures, far more than the National Petition of 1839. Lecturers were hard at work. ”

“ A wider survey suggests that in the long run Chartism by no means failed. On its immediate political side the principles of the Charter have gradually become parts of the British constitution. If on its broader social aspects there was no such complete and obvious vindication of the Chartist point of view, this is due partly to the fact that the Chartists had no social policy in the sense that they had a political platform, and partly to the obvious truth that it is harder to reconstitute society than it is to reform the political machinery of a progressive community. ”

“ We may begin with political Chartism, for though Chartism was in essence a social movement, yet, for the greater part of its active existence, it limited its immediate purpose to the carrying out of a purely political programme. Here the consummation of its policy was only deferred for a season. Its restricted platform of political reform, though denounced as revolutionary at the time, was afterwards substantially adopted by the British State without any conscious revolutionary purpose or perceptible revolutionary effect. ”

“ While Chartism stood in revolt against the middle-class ascendancy, established by the Reform Bill, the French Revolution of 1848 marked the triumph of the opposition to the similar principles of bourgeois ascendancy which had come in with the citizen king of the French. Thus the Continental democratic leaders hoped for assistance from the Chartist pioneers of proletarian revolt, while the Chartists themselves rejoiced to find brethren and allies among the workers beyond seas.
One link between Chartism and the Continent had always existed in the family connections of Feargus O'Connor. ”

“ We have seen this when the agrarian proposals of O'Connor were opposed, not only in detail but on principle, within the Chartist ranks. A stolid and prosperous peasant democracy was hateful to Jacobin Chartism, because it would be hostile to all change as change, and would therefore stop any idealistic reconstruction of society. ”

“ England has become a democracy, as the Chartists wished, and the domination of the middle class, prepared for by the Act of 1832, is at least as much a matter of ancient history as the power of the landed aristocracy.
In the light of the adoption by the State of the whole of its positive programme it is hard to reproach Chartism with failure. But let us not overstress its success. Against it we must set the fact that not a single article of Chartist policy had the remotest chance of becoming law until the movement had expired. ”

“ It helped to break down the iron walls of class separation, and showed that the terrible working man was not very different from the governing classes when the time came for him to exercise direct power.
Nor was the Chartist message for Britain only. The crude experiments of Chartism were watched at the time with keen interest by reformers from other lands, and have been studied in later days with much more curiosity in Germany, France, and America than in the island of its birth. It was the first genuinely democratic movement for social reform in modern history. ”

“ Even more superficial than the division between the champions of moral and physical arms is the attempt to split up Chartism into schools, arising from the miserable personal rivalries that did so much to wreck the movement as a force in practical politics. ”

“ When times improved, and trade started to prosper, Chartism lost ground; the Trade Unions began to detach themselves from schemes of social revolution, and to make their immediate objective the improvement of the conditions of the workers in regard to wages and employment. Chartism continued as a political movement, with varying fortunes, up to the year 1849. What it achieved up to 1855 is thus summarized by Mr. Beer in Vol. II of his History of British Socialism, p. 190:
“After a desperate contest of thirty years’ duration, Chartism had come to an end. ”

“ The pace only became quick when, after 1867, Parliament, with each extension of the franchise, grew more susceptible to working-class pressure. But the Chartist programme was only the first step towards the consummation of the Chartist ideal. The most optimistic of Chartist enthusiasts could hardly have believed that a new heaven and a new earth would be brought about by mere improvements in political machinery. Behind the restricted limits of avowed Chartist policy lay the vision of social regeneration that alone could remove the terrible evils against which Chartism had revolted. ”

“ The Scottish and the Manchester reorganisations were by no means the only result of the Chartist revival, but they were the two most important. Nothing is, in fact, more surprising than the variety of enterprises which sprang up during this phase of the movement, and nothing illustrates more clearly the great moral revival which Chartism engendered than the remarkable character of some of these movements. It is worth while to consider those which are associated with the names of Arthur O'Neill of Scotland and Birmingham, William Lovett of London, and Thomas Cooper of Leicester. ”