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Updated: June 1, 2025
CHARTISM. Notwithstanding the constitutional changes in England, the distress and discontent of the poorer classes occasioned the riotous "Chartist" movement in 1839, when universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and other radical changes were in vain demanded. Mass meetings were held, and outbreakings of violence were feared; but order was preserved.
The demands hitherto made by him, the Ten Hours' Bill, protection of the workers against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new Poor Law, all of the things which belong to Chartism quite as essentially as the "Six Points," are directly opposed to free competition and Free Trade.
The middle classes in England, having secured their rights, as she expressed it, the laborers were now striving for the franchise. Chartism was rampant. What would it all come to? Was England safe against such innovation? But how about America, if the colored people were given freedom, not of the franchise merely, but in civil rights of property and free activity?
In spite of this single miscarriage of the government, the great object of these proceedings was completely answered; the end of all punishment was attained; the vengeance which the law then took had all the effect which the most condign punishment of these few men could have accomplished; the constitutional maxim of "poena ad paucos, metus ad omnes," has been amply illustrated by these proceedings; Chartism has been suppressed, by the temperate application of the constitutional means which were then resorted to for the correction of its violence, and the prevention of its seditious schemes.
Socialism, Chartism, Ribandism; Spain, Canada, China; freed criminals, and imprisoned poverty; penny wisdom, and pound folly; the universal centralizing system, corrupting all generous individualities: patriotism ridiculed, and questionable loyalty patted on the back; vice in full patronage, and virtue out of countenance; Protestantism discouraged, Popery taken by the hand; Dissent of any kind preferred to sober Orthodoxy; and, fitting climax, all this done under pretences of perfect wisdom, and most exquisite devotion to the crown and the constitution: these things have made me too often sympathize in Colonel Crockett's humour, tiger-like, with a dash of the alligator.
On the following day her Majesty walked in the grounds, while Prince Albert gratified an earnest wish by visiting Birmingham and inspecting its manufactures, undeterred, perhaps rather allured, by the fact that the great town of steel and iron was regarded as one of the centres of Chartism.
Hence the seeds of chartism, already sown, were quickened in 1832; but socialism was not yet a force in politics, and it was still hoped that, under the new electoral system, the sufferings of the poor might be mostly remedied by act of parliament. The effect of the reform act on the balance of the constitution was not, at first, fully appreciated.
He invested many questions of a social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler meaning than they had had before. His French Revolution, his papers on Chartism, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from 1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work.
But, although parliament did not occupy itself with any very important reforms during his tenure of office, Lord Russell had his hands quite full in other respects. Chartism came to a head during this period; and besides this, there were fresh difficulties in Ireland in store for the new premier.
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."
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