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See if in Louis Philippe's time France was not in many respects more advanced than England is now, property better divided, hereditary privilege abolished! Are we to blow with the trumpet because we respect the ruts while everywhere else they are mending the roads? I do not comprehend. As to the Chartists, it is only a pity in my mind that you have not more of them. That's their fault.
With £28 a pathetic beginning was made that has led to the immensely rich coöperative movement of to-day. Furthermore, the Chartists were leading a vast political movement of the workers. In support of the suffrage and of parliamentary representation for workingmen, a wonderful group of orators and organizers carried on in the thirties and forties an immense agitation.
And since self-acting mules have been introduced into a very large number of spinning-mills, the spinners' work is wholly performed by the machine. There lies before me a book from the pen of James Leach, one of the recognised leaders of the Chartists in Manchester.
The "knife and fork question" of the preacher Stephens was a truth for a part of the Chartists only, in 1838, it is a truth for all of them in 1845.
"Here in England, too, the Spirit of the Revolution was abroad with her flaming torch. The Chartists had come together, and every day we expected to hear that the monarchy had been overthrown and a Social Republic established. Of course, we knew that Chartism was a 'bread and butter question' at the bottom, and that the Chartists' cause was ours.
The "Six Points" which for the Radical bourgeois are the beginning and end of the matter, which are meant, at the utmost, to call forth certain further reforms of the Constitution, are for the proletarian a mere means to further ends. "Political power our means, social happiness our end," is now the clearly formulated war- cry of the Chartists.
I should then have it in my power to say to the Chartists of Edinburgh, "When your petition was before the House I was on your side: I was for giving you a full hearing." I should at the same time be able to assure my Conservative constituents that I never had supported and never would support the Charter.
The unexpected termination of the events of May, 1839, in the re-establishment in power of a party confessedly too weak to carry on the parliamentary government of the country, was viewed however by the chartists in a very different spirit to that with which they had witnessed the outbreak of these transactions.
The strike, which first brought to light the whole cruelty of the owners, has established the opposition of the workers here, forever, and made at least two-thirds of them Chartists; and the acquisition of thirty thousand such determined, experienced men is certainly of great value to the Chartists.
I think I know every line which was ever published under the signature Parson Lot; and I take it upon myself to say, that there is in all that "burning language" nothing more revolutionary than the extracts given above from his letters to the Chartists.
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