1

One more attack was made on the functions of the Peers in May of the same session, when Mr. Duncombe proposed the abolition of the Lords' privilege of voting by proxy. The resolution was thus worded: "That the practice of any deliberative assembly deciding by proxy upon the rejection or adoption of legislative enactments, is so incompatible with every principle of justice and reason, that its continuance is daily becoming a source of serious and well-founded complaint among all classes of His Majesty's subjects." It was shown that when the practice of voting by proxy began, in the time of Edward I., the proxies were men of lower rank, sent as messengers by the nobles who could not attend in person; and that it was not till the reign of Henry VIII. that the abuse crept in of allowing one peer to represent others. When, in the time of Charles I., the Duke of Buckingham held fourteen proxies, the evil was so evident as to cause an order to be passed that no Peer should henceforth hold more than two proxies. In modern days, when legislation has become immediately interesting and important to the great mass of the people, the practice of proxy-voting has become more indefensible than ever; and yet the safeguard was withdrawn of the King's license being a condition of a Peer's absence. Lord Stanley and Sir R. Peel met the argument by likening proxy-voting to the custom of pairing in the Commons. The analogy was shown not to be a true one; and, if it had been, the obvious reply would have been, “Then abolish the custom of pairing, except on individual occasions." The majority of 48 against the motion was formed by the official Whigs and their dependents, so that the state of the question appeared by no means desperate. But, again, events were occurring which deferred the controversy to a future time.

Such was the course of the mildest of the three "revolutionary" movements of the period, that in which the sober and educated classes of the community reflected the far more serious agitation which was going forward on either hand.

Chartism.

It was at this period that men who went among the workingclasses of the great towns first began to speak of Chartism, Chartists, and the Charter. Some in higher ranks now and then asked what the words meant; but too many in every station especially, too many in the ranks of government did not look closely into it, but dismissed the matter as a thing low and disagreeable, and sure to come to nothing from its extreme foolishness. It is the year 1838 before we find the word "Chartism" in the "Annual Register;" yet, long before that, Chartism had become the chief object in life to a not inconsiderable portion of the English nation. And when it came to

1 Hansard, xxxviii. p. 760.

be a word in the index of the "Annual Register," government and their friends regarded it as a "topic of the day." When the great national petition, bound with iron hoops, was carried, like a coffin, by four men from its wagon into the House of Commons, ministers and their friends looked upon the show as upon an incident of that vulgar excitement which poor Radicals like or need, as the tippler likes or needs his dram. Reckoning on the fickleness of the multitude, they pronounced that Chartism would soon be extinct; and then, that it was extinct. Their Attorney-general, Sir John Campbell, in a sort of declaratory ministerial speech at a public breakfast at Edinburgh, declared Chartism to be "extinct," shortly before the Monmouth rebellion. The chief law-officer of the government gloried in the supremacy of loyalty, law, and order, immediately before the breaking out of a long-planned rebellion, of which every possible warning had been given, in the form of preceding riots! The newspapers agreed with the government, and government took its information from the newspapers; and thus, from year to year, was Chartism declared to be extinct, while we, in the present day, have the amplest evidence that it is as much alive as ever. And, as it is living so long after the announcement that it was dead, so was it living long before it was declared to be born. When government and London were at last obliged to take heed to it, they found that their tares were ready for harvest, and that long ago the enemy had been sowing them while they slept: -while they slept, literally as well as metaphorically; for the gatherings and speechifyings had been by torchlight on the northern moors and the Welsh hillsides. There were stirrings certainly as early as the date before us, the years 1835–36.

And what were these stirrings? What was it all about? The difficulty of understanding and telling the story is from its comprehending so vast a variety of things and persons. Those who have not looked into Chartism think that it means one thing, a revolution. Some who talk as if they assumed to understand it, explain that Chartism is of two kinds, — physical-force Chartism and moral-force Chartism, as if this were not merely an intimation of two ways of pursuing an object yet undescribed! Those who look deeper, who go out upon the moors by torchlight, who talk with a suffering brother under the hedge or beside the loom; who listen to the groups outside the union workhouse, or in the public-house among the Durham coal-pits, will long feel bewildered as to what Chartism is; and will conclude at last that it is another name for popular discontent, comprehensive general term under which are included all protests against social suffering. And thus it was at the date before us, whether or not it be so now.

a

There were men among the working-classes, sound-headed and sound-hearted, wanting nothing but a wider social Radical knowledge and experience to make them fit and safe

66

Chartists.

guides of their order, some few of them not deficient even in these, who saw that the Reform Bill was, if not a failure in itself, a failure in regard to the popular expectation from it. If it was all that its framers meant it to be, they must give a supplement. A vast proportion of the people, the very part of the nation whose representation was most important to the welfare of the State, were not represented at all. As a sage expressed the matter for them not long afterwards:1 "A reformed Parliament, one would think, should inquire into popular discontents before they get the length of pikes and torches! For what end at all are men, honorable members and reform members, sent to St. Stephen's, with clamor and effort; kept talking, struggling, motioning, and counter-motioning? The condition of the great body of people in a country is the condition of the country itself. This, you would say, is a truism in all times, a truism rather pressing to get recognized as a truth now, and be acted upon, in these times. Yet 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, courting paragraphs and suffrages for a blessed solution of that, Canada question, Irish-appropriation question, West-India question, Queen's - bedchamber question ; game-laws, usury-laws; African blacks, hill coolies, Smithfield cattle, and dog-carts, all manner of questions and subjects, except simply this, the alpha and omega of all! Surely honorable members ought to speak of the condition-of-England question too, Radical members, above all; friends of the people; chosen with effort, by the people, to interpret and articulate the dumb, deep want of the people! To a remote observer they seem oblivious of their duty. Are they not there, by trade, mission, and express appointment of themselves and others, to speak for the good of the British nation? Whatsoever great British interest can the least speak for itself, for that beyond all they are called to speak. They are either speakers for that great dumb toiling class which cannot speak, or they are nothing that one can well specify. Alas, the remote observer knows not the nature of Parliaments; how Parliaments, extant there for the British nation's sake, find that they are extant withal for their own sake; how Parliaments travel so naturally in their deep-rutted routine, commonplace worn into ruts axle-deep, from which only strength, insight, and courageous generous exertion can lift any Parliament or vehicle; how in Parliament, reformed or unreformed, there

1 Carlyle's Chartism, p. 4.

.

may chance to be a strong man, an original, clear-sighted, greathearted, patient, and valiant man, or to be none such." The men we have spoken of soon confounded in the group of Chartist leaders - felt and knew such things as Carlyle has here set down for them; felt that Parliament had not done what was needed, that the people's story had not been told there, - that the "strong man" had not yet appeared there; and their conclusion was, that they might try and get the duty of Parliament better done. They might possibly expect too much from the means they proposed, extension of the suffrage, shortening of Parliaments, protected voting, and establishing a control over representatives, and opening a wider field of choice of such, by paying the expenses of their function: they might possibly expect too much from these aims; but it is a libel upon the best class of Chartist leaders to say that they expected from these aims all that they wanted. These men were the heartiest and truest advocates in the country of universal education. They saw more clearly than anybody else, and lamented more deeply, the miseries arising from popular ignorance. They mourned over the murders and vitriol-throwing of the operatives who were enslaved by mercenary delegates; they mourned over the fate of the followers of "Messiah Thom;" they mourned over the nightly drillings on the heath, with pike and bludgeon; they mourned over the nature of the opposition to the new poor-law, when crowds of thousands of men, who could never be called together again to be disabused, were assured by orators, whom they took for educated men, that under the new poor-law every poor man's fourth child was strangled, and that none but the rich were henceforth to have more than three children. They did more than mourn: they spent their hard earnings, their spare hours, their sleeping hours, their health, their repose, to promote the education which the State did not give. By wonderful efforts, they established schools, institutes, lecture and reading rooms, and circulated knowledge among their class in every way they could think of. Such were some of the body soon to be called Chartists, as soon as their political ideas had resolved themselves into the form of a charter which the people might demand. These men were all Radical Reformers. They saw little to choose between the Tories and the Whigs. As we again find their ideas expressed for them: "Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform Ministry? Let the Tories be Ministry, if they will; let at least some living reality be Ministry! A rearing horse that will only run backward, he is not the horse one would choose to travel on; yet of all conceivable horses the worst is the dead horse. Mounted on a rearing horse, you may back him, spur him, check him, make a little way even backwards; but, seated

astride of your dead horse, what chance is there for you in the chapter of possibilities?" These men wanted a strong, steadygoing progression; and they would have therefore neither the pomp and prancings of Toryism, nor the incapacity of Whiggism. They were Radical Reformers.

Another set were Tories, Tory agitators who went about to raise the people against the new poor-law, and divert Tory them from the aim of repealing the corn-laws. These Chartists. men-guilty or stupid, according as they were or were not really the reverends and esquires that the mob believed them to be were the orators on the moors by torchlight. These were the men who taught in those thronged meetings that the poor-law was a system of wholesale murder, and that no one could blame a poor man who carried a knife in his bosom for the workhouse official who should attempt to part him from his wife. These were the men who represented the whole class of manufacturers as devils who caused children to be tortured in factories for their own amusement; and too often the declamation ended with a hint that the hearers evidently knew how to get torches, and that factories would burn. These were the men who warned their hearers against a repeal of the corn-laws, because these laws were the last restraint on the power of the mill-owners. These rabid and ranting Tories were another class of Chartists.

There were thousands who knew little about themselves, except that they were very hungry and miserable. A Hungering landed proprietor now and then, here and there, said Chartists. in the House pretty things about the sun of Christ's natal-day gilding the humble thatch of the laborer at the same moment with the spire of the church and the windows of the mansion, intending to convey that the joyousness of Christmas was shared by all ranks: while, the very next Christmas, in the very county, the very parish of these orators, the laborers were shivering without fire, cowering under a corner of the decaying thatch, which let in snow and rain upon their straw litters, and hungering over the scantiest morsels of dry bread; one neighbor in four or eight, perhaps, having a slice of bacon, and a fire whereon to cook it. Such parishes as these furnished a contingent to the Chartist force, haggard wretches, ready to be called by any political name which might serve as a ticket to better cheer in life than they had found.

Chartists.

Largest of all was the number of those who ought not to have felt themselves under any immediate pressure of wrong Factious at all. There were many thousands of factory operatives, of Welsh, Durham, and Cumberland colliers, and others, who were far from poor, if only they had been wise enough to

1 Carlyle's Chartism, p. 93.