Chapter IX: Part 9

Of Winstanley’s future, when the days of the digging were over, nothing seems to be known. Only one pamphlet is issued by him after 1650--“The Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored”--an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, February, 1652. With this final manifesto on the land question, and on the whole social question, as he saw it, Gerrard Winstanley disappears from history. In the multitude of prophets and preachers, visionaries and practical reformers of the Commonwealth, Winstanley is little heeded by his contemporaries. The importance of his mission is seen more clearly to-day, when statesmen, politicians, and philanthropists all urge agrarian changes and the excellence of land culture.

As to Winstanley’s claim on behalf of the people to the common lands, the advantage of possession of these lands was realized by the landowners in the eighteenth century, and from 1760 to 1830 more than a thousand acts of parliament were passed for enclosing these lands.[128]

In “The Diggers Song,” (of unknown authorship[129]), the outlook of Winstanley and his followers is expressed in popular form:

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name,
Your digging do disdain; and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.

Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now;
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now;
Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you withhold.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now,
Their self-will is their law, stand up now;
Since tyranny came in, they count it now no sin
To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein.
Stand up now, stand up now.

The Gentry are all round, stand up now, stand up now,
The Gentry are all round, stand up now;
The Gentry are all round, on each side they are found,
Their wisdoms so profound to cheat us of our ground.
Stand up now, stand up now.

The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, stand up now,
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now;
To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise,
The devil in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes.
Stand up now, stand up now.

The Clergy they come in, stand up now, stand up now,
The Clergy they come in, stand up now;
The Clergy they come in, and say it is a sin
That we should now begin our freedom for to win.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

The tithes they yet will have, stand up now, stand up now,
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now;
The tithes they yet will have, and Lawyers their fees crave,
And this they say is brave, to make the poor their slave.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now, stand up now,
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now;
For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath,
To grant us they are loath, free meat, and drink and cloth.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now,
The club is all their law, stand up now;
The club is all their law, to keep poor men in awe,
But they no vision saw, to maintain such a law.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now, stand up now,
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now;
The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose
By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

To conquer them by love, come in now, come in now,
To conquer them by love, come in now;
To conquer them by love, as it does you behove,
For He is King above, no Power is like to Love.
Glory here, Diggers all.

Major Cartwright

“The Father of Reform”

1775–1824

AUTHORITIES: _Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright_, edited by his Niece, 1826; _A Memoir of John Cartwright the Reformer_, 1831; _The Times_, September 25th, 1824; Graham Wallas--_Francis Place_.

(_From a Contemporary Drawing._)]

MAJOR CARTWRIGHT “THE FATHER OF REFORM”

1775–1824.

The substance of Major Cartwright’s life is told on the pedestal beneath his statue in the dingy garden of Burton Crescent, to the south of Euston Road, in London.

JOHN CARTWRIGHT,

Born 28th September, 1740. Died 23rd September, 1824.

The Firm, Consistent and Persevering Advocate of _Universal
Suffrage_, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot and Annual
Parliaments.

He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the
Independence of the United States of America, and although his
distinguished merits as a Naval Officer in 1776 presented the
most flattering Prospects of Professional Advancement, yet he
nobly refused to draw his Sword against the Rising Liberties of
an oppressed and struggling People.

In Grateful Commemoration of his inflexible integrity, exalted
Patriotism, “profound Constitutional Knowledge,” and in sincere
admiration of the unblemished Virtues of his Private Life,

THIS STATUE

was erected by Public Subscription near the spot where he
closed his useful and meritorious career.

There is nothing false or exaggerated in this epitaph. Fox, in the House of Commons, testified to Cartwright’s “profound constitutional knowledge.” Hazlitt, who never met Cartwright, classed him with the men of one idea (and lingered over the subject), but the charge is ill-founded. It is true that for nearly fifty years, in season and out of season, Cartwright, a pupil of Locke in politics, contended publicly for annual parliaments and manhood suffrage, claiming personality and not property as the ground for enfranchisement, and insisting that while the right of the rich and the poor to the vote was equal, the need of the latter was far greater. But this agitation was by no means the limit either of his ideas or his activities.

Entering the navy at eighteen, John Cartwright, who came of an old Nottingham family, devised improvements in the gun service, and, made a lieutenant, was marked for high promotion. The revolt of the American colonies cut short his professional career. An innate love of liberty compelled the young naval officer to side with the colonists, and he writes in 1776 that it is a mistaken notion that the planting of colonies and the extending of empire are necessarily the same things. Self-governing colonies, he declares, bound to England only by “the ties of blood and mutual interests, by sincere love and friendship, which abhors dependence, and by every other cementing principle which hath power to take hold of the human heart,” are to be desired.

Lord Howe put Cartwright’s principles to the test by inviting him to join the expedition against the Americans, and Cartwright, who was “passionately attached to the navy,” and had an immense admiration for Howe, could only answer that he was unable to take part in a war he thought unjust. With this refusal his naval services were ended, in spite of Howe’s quiet and dignified reply that “opinions in politics are to be treated like opinions in religion.” (No word of reproach came from Howe, no taunt of want of courage or lack of patriotism.)

Cartwright never condemned all war. He urged in a letter to a nephew in the army that the answer to the question of the justice or injustice of a war decided whether justifiable homicide or wilful murder was committed by those engaged in battle. He hated standing armies and barracks and barrack life, and all the pomp and glory of militarism, as heartily as he hated the attempt to coerce the colonists. But no sooner was he out of the navy than, with a major’s commission, he at once set to work to train the Nottinghamshire militia, only retiring from this post in 1791 when the government cancelled his appointment for attending a meeting called to celebrate the fall of the Bastille.

The militia in Cartwright’s view was strictly a citizen army for home defence. “The militia,” he wrote, “by its institution is not intended to spread the dominion or to vindicate in war the honour of the crown, but it is to preserve our laws and liberties, and therein to secure the existence of the State.” Thirteen years before the fall of the Bastille Major Cartwright had the cap of liberty displayed on the banners and engraved on the buttons of the Nottinghamshire Militia. A greater service than providing symbols of liberty was rendered to the army by Cartwright in the matter of better clothing for the men. The misery endured by ill-clad sentries aroused his compassion and indignation, and Cartwright worried the government until it provided great-coats for all private soldiers.

The humaner courage is as conspicuous in John Cartwright’s long life as his political enthusiasm.

Four times he risked his life to save others from drowning, rescuing two men from the Trent, a naval officer at sea, and, in late middle-life, a small boy who had fallen into the New River, near London. In the year 1800, hearing of a riot planned at Sheffield, Cartwright made his way alone to the barn where the conspirators were assembled, and stayed all night, reasoning with them against their project. In the morning the confederates, dissuaded from violence, quietly dispersed, and the riot was prevented.

An untiring advocacy of democratic politics earned for Cartwright, justly, the title of “The Father of Reform.” He was the real founder of that movement for political reform, which in the nineteenth century swept away rotten boroughs, gave representation to all towns of importance, and extended the franchise to the great bulk of male householders in town and country; which to-day presses towards a general suffrage for men and women.

Major Cartwright began his speeches and pamphlets on behalf of political reform in 1776, just after his retirement from the navy, and his acceptance of the commission in the militia.

The ideas of the French Encyclopædists, the writings of Rousseau, and the revolt of the American colonists, had aroused a belief in social equality, and the “natural” rights of man, and this belief Cartwright championed till his death. His early pamphlets, beginning with “Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated,” (1777) are heavy reading to-day, but in them Cartwright argued for all the famous “six points” of the People’s Charter of fifty years later--Universal Manhood Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification for Parliamentary Candidates, Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. He even uses the modern phrase in urging “one man one vote.”

Unlike Thomas Paine, and many of the “Radical Reformers,” Cartwright pleads for political democracy as the natural outcome of the Christian faith, maintaining that “No man can have a right sense and belief of Christianity who denies the equality of all conditions of men.” Incidentally, challenged on the point of why not Votes for Women? Cartwright could only fall back on certain passages in the Bible to justify his objection to Women’s Enfranchisement. Nothing was more abhorrent to his mind than the notion that government was a matter for “experts,” an exclusive affair for persons with specially trained intelligences. “Of all the errors to which mankind have ever submitted their understandings,” he wrote, “there is no one to be more lamented than that of conceiving the business of civil government to be above the comprehension of ordinary capacities.”

The poor, because of their very poverty, had a need for the vote and for parliamentary representation which the man of property could not experience. This Cartwright emphasised in a petition he presented to the House of Commons as late as 1820:

And when your Honourable House shall further consider that the
humblest mortal on earth is equally a co-heir of an immortality
with the most exalted who now wears stars, or coronets, or
crowns, your petitioner hopes that your Honourable House
will rise superior to the mean thoughts and vulgar prejudices
of the uncharitable among the wealthy, the ignorant, the
interested, the vain, and the proud; and will acknowledge
that, in reference to the respective claims of legislative
representation by the poor and the rich, the poor have equal
right but far more need.

Enthusiasm and an entirely disinterested zeal for democracy kept the spirit of youth in Cartwright, and carried him at the age of 80 over a trial for sedition undisturbed. His zeal was not to be quenched. “Moderation in practice may be commendable,” he declared, “but moderation in principle is detestable. Can we trust a man who is moderately honest, or esteem a woman who is moderately virtuous?”

This very allegiance to principle had its drawbacks in the world of practical politics, of corruption and compromise. Three times Major Cartwright stood for parliament: for the county of Nottingham in 1780, for Boston in 1806 and 1807; and on each occasion he was at the bottom of the poll. His nominations for Westminster in 1818 and 1819 received no serious support at all. The old major was no more distressed by any feeling of personal disappointment at these defeats than he was cast down at seeing no signs of the triumph of political democracy in his lifetime. At eighty-four we find him writing cheerfully, “To despair in a good cause is to approach towards atheism.”

Cartwright did not live to see the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832. Wilkes’ motion for reform in 1776 had been negatived in the House of Commons without a division. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond’s motion in the House of Lords for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments was mocked by the outbreak of the Gordon (“No Popery”) Riots in London on the very day the motion was made. Pitt’s third and last effort for parliamentary reform was rejected in 1785. The French Revolution turned men’s minds in Great Britain towards democracy, but reaction followed hard on the Terror in Paris, and for a time a government terror crushed every expression in favour of political liberty in England. Sir Francis Burdett became the parliamentary leader of the “radical reformers” early in the nineteenth century, and in 1809 found fifteen supporters in the House of Commons. Ten years later the government, in the face of a strong working-class movement for political reform, brought out the military against the people at a peaceful meeting held at Peterloo, near Manchester, and followed this up by six repressive acts of parliament, and a general prosecution of the leaders of the reform agitation.

Cartwright was eighty when, with several friends, he was charged “with being a malicious, seditious, evil-minded person, and with unlawfully and maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent in the minds of his majesty’s subjects.”

All England knew that Major Cartwright was a single-minded and high-principled man, in whose heart was neither guile nor malice, a man who had proved his loyalty and patriotism over and over again, and was no more seditious than he was evil-minded or disaffected. Apart from his advocacy of political reform and his services to the militia, Cartwright had done much for farming and agriculture, he had helped Clarkson and Wilberforce in their anti-slavery work, and he had called the attention of the government, as loudly as he could, to the defenceless state of the east coast against foreign invasion. Yet in 1820 a British jury, obedient to the orders of a political judge, found John Cartwright guilty of “maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent,” and a fine of £100 was inflicted.

Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross, in whose shop the later Chartists and Reformers were to be found, gives his impression of Major Cartwright as he knew him in old age:

“When he was in town he used frequently to sup with me, eating some raisins he brought in his pocket, and drinking weak gin and water. He was cheerful, agreeable, and full of curious anecdote. He was, however, in political matters exceedingly troublesome and sometimes as exceedingly absurd. He had read but little, or to little purpose, and knew nothing of general principles. He entertained a vague and absurd notion of the political arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons, and sincerely believed that these semi-barbarians were not only a political people, but that their ‘twofold polity,’ arms-bearing and representation, were universal and perfect.”[130]

To Place, chief political wire-puller of his age, industrious and persistent in getting things done, with a typical cockney politician’s scorn of disinterested enthusiasm, Major Cartwright appeared “troublesome” and “absurd”--Francis Place had quite an honest liking for the “old gentleman,” as he called him, all the same. By the government Cartwright stood convicted as a “seditious, evil-minded person.” Posterity is content to know John Cartwright by the title his contemporaries conferred upon him--the Father of Reform--and to rank him as the foremost man in England in the eighteenth century to raise the standard of Political Democracy.

Ernest Jones and Chartism

1838–1854

AUTHORITIES: R. G. Gamage--_History of the Chartist Movement_; Thos. Frost--_Forty Years’ Recollections_; Ernest Charles Jones--_Songs of Democracy_; Graham Wallas--_Life of Francis Place_; J. A. Hobson--_Ernest Jones_, in _Dictionary of National Biography_; _The Times_, Jan. 27, 29; Mar. 31, 1869.

ERNEST JONES AND CHARTISM

1838–1854.

The Chartist agitation was at once the largest, the most revolutionary, and the least successful of all the serious political movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. For ten years, with varying fortune, it threatened the authority of parliament, and then slowly expired--destroyed by its own internal weakness and the quarrels of its leaders rather than by the repression of the government.

The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought the Chartist movement to life,[131] and roused the politically minded leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that would place political power in the hands of the whole people.

The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme of Major Cartwright and, in substance, the earlier demands of John Lilburne and the Levellers. Universal manhood suffrage, the ballot, payment of members of parliament, equal electoral districts, abolition of property qualification for members, and annual parliaments, these were the “six points” of the Charter, the platform of its advocates, and for ten years the hope of multitudes of earnest and devoted men and women.

Francis Place and the Working-Men’s Association which gave Chartism its name and programme never had any considerable voice in its direction.[132]

Feargus O’Connor, who had sat in parliament from 1832 to 1835 for an Irish constituency, was from the first the real leader of the movement. His personality and his rhetorical powers roused the manufacturing districts in the North and the Midlands to form political unions for the Charter in 1838, and his presence dominated the first Convention, held in London, with Lovett for its secretary. Later, O’Connor’s obvious weaknesses, his vanity and egotism, his want of self-control and that “one fatal disqualification for a leader of revolt--the fear of the police”[133]--left leadership in his hands, but left him a leader without followers.

Next to O’Connor stood another Irish orator, James Bronterre O’Brien, a man of finer character, and clearer head, but smaller gifts of command.

South Wales, the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and towns like Birmingham, Leicester, and Northampton, were the strongholds of Chartism, and “in the dark days of the late thirties and early forties it was a real and dangerous power.”[134] Feargus O’Connor never advocated an armed rising, and advised the abandonment of the huge torchlight processions; but pikes were being fashioned and men were being drilled in preparation for a revolution that was to end the Whig rule, and give the working classes the reins of government. The circulation of the _Northern Star_, O’Connor’s weekly paper, stood at 50,000 in those days.

Riots at Newport (Monmouth) and Birmingham in 1839, followed by several arrests and imprisonments of the Chartist leaders the following year, ended for the time all notions of a successful revolution. Lord John Russell declared strongly against manhood suffrage when the question was raised in the House of Commons, and on a division in the House the petition for the Charter was rejected by 237 to 48 votes.

The outbreak at Birmingham, provoked, in the first place, by the interference of a body of London police with an orderly meeting in the Bull Ring, was put down in two days by the soldiers; but not till many houses had been attacked and a considerable amount of property destroyed. No robberies or petty thefts accompanied the riot.

At Newport the harsh prison treatment of Vincent, a Chartist advocate, convicted for what was held to be a political offence, brought a crowd of 10,000 men, led by Frost, William, and Jones, to demand his release. The insurgents had a few rifles and pikes, but were generally unarmed, and the fire of the military soon overpowered them. But lives were lost on both sides, and Frost and his two lieutenants were sentenced to death, though the sentence was at once reduced to transportation for life, and some years later to simple banishment from British dominions.

Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and all the chief speakers of the movement were brought to trial for seditious utterance in 1840, and in most cases sent to prison either for twelve months or two years.

With these imprisonments and the general election of 1841 came the first serious disintegration of the Chartist movement.[135] O’Brien and O’Connor differed vigorously on the question of election policy, and before they were released from prison were expressing their opinions in the _Northern Star_. O’Connor, full of wrath at the repressive treatment meted out to Chartists by the Whig Government, was for attacking the Whigs at the election, and O’Brien objected to this as a pro-Tory policy.[136]

The decision to run independent Chartist candidates for parliament in certain constituencies, and the failure of these candidates to get returned on the limited franchise of 1832, increased disunion in the Chartist ranks and brought demoralisation.

To make matters worse for the movement, several prominent Chartists left prison with fresh notions and ideas of reform, which had come to them in their long hours of solitude and reflection. Lovett, imprisoned in connection with the Birmingham riot, though he was entirely innocent of giving any encouragement to violence, on his release was full of vast plans for national education, convinced that education must precede political democracy. Vincent had become a strong temperance advocate, and henceforth must give himself to the work of a teetotal lecturer. Other men were for bringing in religion by “Chartist Churches.”[137] Antagonism to the anti-corn law league of Cobden and Bright, and later his own “National Land Company” experiments, withdrew Feargus O’Connor from actual Chartist propaganda.

The movement languished. But in spite of government repression, the indifference of parliament, the hostility of the wealthier classes, and its own jarring elements of discord, Chartism was not dead.[138]

The misery of the English people kept it from death. With one in every eleven of the industrial population a pauper in 1842, general satisfaction with the state of government was impossible for men of strong social sympathies. Some exerted themselves, like Sadler and Oastler, in following Lord Shaftesbury’s entirely disinterested and successful crusade against the horrors of factory oppression. Others supported the Free Trade agitation.

To one man, Ernest Jones, it seemed, in 1845, that before all else must come political enfranchisement, that the social miseries and discontents of England were not to be cured save by the people of England. The evils might be mitigated by ameliorative legislation, but it was not enough that the decencies of life--then very far beyond the reach of the mass of town and country labourers--should be secured for people; the main thing was that people should have freedom to work out their own industrial salvation.

So in 1846, Ernest Jones plunged boldly into Chartism. He quickly became a leader, and his reputation has endured: for Ernest Jones was the most respected, single-minded, and steadfast of the many who sat in Chartist conventions. Chartism for him was the cry of the uncared-for, because voteless, multitudes, and Ernest Jones was ready to give his life that the cry should move the rulers of the nation.

It was a bad time for England in 1846, that was plain,[139] and Ernest Jones, believing with the average Englishman that in politics lay the key to necessary change, was henceforth a Chartist advocate and till his death the faithful preacher of democracy. Without becoming a socialist, Ernest Jones, in his “Songs of Democracy” and in his speeches and newspaper writings, is clear that political enfranchisement was but the high road to social and economic reform, that the Charter was to bring a better distribution of wealth as the consequence of a better distribution of political power.[140]

Ernest Jones was twenty-seven when he joined the Chartist movement. The son of an army officer--who had been equerry to the Duke of Cumberland--and educated on the continent, Ernest Jones came to England when he was nineteen, and was duly presented to Queen Victoria (as Robert Owen had been) by Lord Melbourne in 1841. He married a Miss Atherley, of Cumberland, and settled down in London, writing novels, verses, and newspaper articles. In 1844 he was called to the Bar, and two years later took the step which separated him from the friends and acquaintances of his social order, and placed him on the hard and strenuous road of the political agitator.

Averse from faction, realising the fatal folly of internal jealousies and strife, and alive to the importance of discipline in the army of revolt, Ernest Jones did his best to work with O’Connor--and was naturally charged with cowardice by the Chartists who hated O’Connor’s supremacy. In 1847 he began writing in the _Northern Star_, and was joint editor with O’Connor of _The Labourer_. His “Songs of Democracy” were to the Chartists what Ebenezer Elliott’s “Corn-Law Rhymes” were to the Free Traders, and his “Song of the Lower Classes” has retained a place in the song-books of social democrats to our own day.

At the general election of 1847, when, to everybody’s astonishment, Feargus O’Connor was elected member for Nottingham, Ernest Jones stood for Halifax, but though immensely popular at the hustings, he only polled 280 votes.

1848, the memorable year of revolutions abroad, saw Chartism once more a formidable movement in England. An enormous petition was again prepared for parliament, and the Chartists decided to carry the petition to the House of Commons after a mass meeting on Kennington Common on April 10th. Lord John Russell and his Whig government became thoroughly alarmed. The Duke of Wellington, as commander-in-chief, undertook to guard the safety of London, and garrisoned the city with troops, and protected the bridges, while 70,000 special constables (of whom Prince Louis Napoleon was one) were quickly enrolled. But on the government prohibition of any procession to Westminster, Feargus O’Connor at once decided against any collision between the people and the authorities. The mass meeting was held, some 50,000 persons were present, and O’Connor and Ernest Jones made speeches. Then the petition was sent off in a cab to parliament, and all was over.

O’Connor had boasted that the monster petition contained 5,000,000 signatures, but on investigation it was found that the signatures only amounted to 1,975,496, and many of these were duplicates and forgeries. Anti-Chartists had signed in several places, using ridiculous names, like “Pugnose,” “Punch,” and “Fubbs,” or boldly signing as “Queen Victoria” and “Duke of Wellington.”[141] Parliament gladly took advantage of O’Connor’s characteristic exaggeration to discredit the whole movement. At the same time the government hastily prepared a bill to suppress the renewed agitation, and the “Treason Felony” bill was passed, making “open and advised speaking with seditious intent” a crime. This clause in the act only remained on the statute book for two years, but it was sufficient for securing the conviction of all prominent Chartist speakers.

Ernest Jones, unlike Feargus O’Connor, believed that the people should arm, and that a display of force was necessary for carrying the Charter. The failure of April 10th strengthened this belief, and for the next two months he was busy speaking in England and Scotland, urging the necessity for enrolling a national guard and forming a provisional government.

But in spite of great public meetings the movement was already breaking up. The Chartist Convention, which met in London on May 1st, dissolved on May 13th in hopeless disagreement, and Ernest Jones, who had attended as a member of the executive committee, exclaimed that “amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee had been trampled out, and the elements of their energy were scattered to the winds of heaven.” Still he tried to rally the broken ranks, and the government decided that the time had come to put the movement down by means of the new “Treason Felony” Act. Feargus O’Connor, now a member, was no longer dangerous to the authorities. His attendance in the House kept him from the agitation in the country, and Ernest Jones was the man to be struck at.

On May 29th and 30th Ernest Jones addressed great, but quite orderly, meetings in London, on Clerkenwell Green and Bishop Bonner’s Fields, and then proceeded to Manchester. Here he was arrested and put on trial with five other Chartists--Fussell, Sharpe, Williams, Vernon, and Looney. The judge had little patience for the prisoners, and Ernest Jones was frequently interrupted in his defence. In the end, he and his fellows were all found guilty of seditious speech, and Ernest Jones was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, to find sureties, himself in £200 and two persons in £150, and to keep the peace for five years.

A number of police spies procured many more arrests and convictions by gaining admission to Chartist meetings, joining Chartist unions and inciting the members to violent speech and an armed conspiracy. By these means at the end of the year 1848 the government had succeeded in getting the prominent Chartists into prison, as it had done in 1840. That Ernest Jones exhorted his followers to learn to bear arms is indisputable; that the success of the revolutionary movements on the continent encouraged the belief amongst a certain number of Chartists that an armed rising was desirable and could be successful in England is equally true. But as no serious attempt was made in 1848 by the “physical force” Chartists to organize such a rising, no rising took place, and “the conspiracy,” as it was called, was chiefly the work of the government’s police spies.

The riots at Newport and Birmingham gave some excuse to the government for repression in 1839–40; in 1848 no outbreaks were even threatened to justify the sentences on Ernest Jones and other Chartist speakers. The government’s chief concern was to end the agitation, even if this could only be accomplished by means of a special act of parliament, and the unsavoury methods of _agents provocateurs_. Lord John Russell and his Whig colleagues were not the men to be kept from their purpose by any nice discrimination in the choice of weapons. It was not the time, when crowns were falling on the continent, to hesitate about crushing a movement which seemed to menace public safety in England. That the strength of Chartism was in the sober, law-abiding character of most of its adherents the government knew no more than they knew that the movement was already doomed for want of cohesion.

The bitter hostility of the government pursued Ernest Jones in prison, and left him to be treated as a common felon. Ordered to pick oakum he refused, and was put on a diet of bread and water. The struggle between the prisoner and his gaolers was at last brought before the House of Commons,[142] and in the end Ernest Jones was allowed to purchase exemption from the allotted prison tasks by a small payment of money.

On his release from prison the Chartist movement was flickering out. It was impossible to work with O’Connor, who, now looking favourably on household suffrage, was already failing in health and showing signs of the insanity which possessed him two years later. The trade-union movement and the co-operative store were attracting the attention of intelligent workmen, to whom for the time political enfranchisement seemed a lost cause. Contesting Halifax in 1852, Ernest Jones only polled 52 votes, and the _People’s Paper_, which he started in that year and edited, never had the success of the _Northern Star_.

Feargus O’Connor was led away from the House of Commons hopelessly insane, to die in 1855, and Chartism utterly disintegrated could not be revived by Ernest Jones. In 1854 the movement was extinct, and from that time till his death Ernest Jones gave his political support to the advanced Radicals. He contested Nottingham in 1853 and 1857, but without success, returned to his old practice at the Bar, and wrote novels and poems. In 1868, the year of household suffrage in the towns, he was adopted by the Radicals as parliamentary candidate for Manchester, and then on January 26, 1869, came a sudden failure of the heart, and death ended all earthly hopes and plans for Ernest Jones. He was just fifty when he died, and though Chartism had passed away, Ernest Jones had not outlived his usefulness or his popularity with all those who believed in the ultimate triumph of democracy, and he had gained the respect of many earlier foes.

The People’s Charter remains unfulfilled, but two of its points have long been granted--the ballot, and the abolition of a property qualification for members of parliament. Annual parliaments are no longer desired by any section of political reformers, the extension of the franchise to the agricultural labourer in 1884 brought manhood suffrage appreciably nearer, equal electoral districts were never more than a plan of quite reasonable political theorists, and the demand for payment of members, never altogether dropped by Radicals, is once more heard in the land.

The great contention of Ernest Jones and the Chartists that political liberty should precede the granting of reforms by parliament, that the people should have the power to control and direct the deliberations of parliaments still has its advocates; but government is passing--almost unnoticed--once more into the hands of an executive, for that “eternal vigilance” which is the price of political liberty is oftentimes relaxed.

Conclusion

CONCLUSION

Two political movements may be noted to-day in Great Britain by all who are interested in such things: the Labour movement and the Women’s movement for political enfranchisement.

The efforts of the past twenty-five years to establish a separate socialist party in parliament have not been directly successful, but the Labour Party has managed to return a group of some thirty workmen to the House of Commons, and these men are the responsible and trusted leaders of the trade-unions and the Independent Labour Party. Without requiring any formal acknowledgment of socialist belief, the Labour Party is largely inspired by socialist teaching, and its goal is the conquest of government by the labouring people, and a more even distribution of wealth by the gradual expropriation of the landlord and the capitalist. While adhering strictly to constitutional methods of agitation, giving full respect to the procedure of parliament and the legal conduct of elections, the leaders of the Labour Party, in their speeches at public meetings, use much of the old revolutionary talk of John Ball and Robert Ket, and the arguments of Winstanley for the popular ownership of the land. To the Labour Party as to the Chartists democratic politics are but a stepping-stone to social reform, and as in the days of the Chartists the strength of the Labour Party is in the industrial districts of the North of England, and in South Wales.

The Women’s movement, on the other hand, while demanding nothing but the right to the franchise, and claiming this right to a voice in the affairs of the State on the old constitutional ground of Pym and Hampden--that those who pay direct taxation to the government must have some political control of the expenditure--boldly avows in the face of government refusal the necessity for revolutionary methods to acquire the franchise. More than 600 women have gone to prison in the last four years in the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and the methods adopted have startled the public, created an enthusiasm, and generally aroused the attention of a formerly indifferent parliament to the claim of women to political enfranchisement.

Mary Wollstonecraft, in her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_, published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary energy and activity of this union and the daring and resource of its members have made the women’s demand for the vote a vital question in politics.

Both these movements--the agitation of the Labour Party for a fuller and more abundant life for wage-earners, and the agitation of the women for political enfranchisement are proceeding in our midst--a guarantee that the centuries of struggle for freedom are not fruitless.

“The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour, so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in strife with them--this is a great part of a man’s life.”

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless, defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right, and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

“Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern of absolutism.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. I.

[2] No Archbishop of Canterbury has received the pallium since Cranmer, but the sign of it remains in the archiepiscopal arms of Canterbury.

[3] “No one in those days imagined Christianity without Christendom, and Christendom without a Pope: and all these bishops understood exactly as Anselm did the favourite papal text, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.’ Nobody in those days doubted the divine authority of the Pope.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[4] “The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence.”--J. R. Green.

[5] “When in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the ‘King’s Court,’ it is only a phrase for the king’s despotism.”--Sir F. Palgrave, _History of Normandy and England_.

[6] “The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre of spiritual law in the West.... It was looked upon as the guide and regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the oracles of right and discipline, the judgment seat to which an appeal was open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and the mightiest.... If ever there was a time when the popes honestly endeavoured to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which reigned in the world around.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

“Under the rule of William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in appealing from him to the apostolic throne Anselm might deem he was appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that was still left on earth.”--Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, Vol. V.

[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice rampant, men spoiled of what was their own--justice, decency, honour trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress. The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality. Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression, corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned, though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to law in England; its time had not yet come.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or wherever safety might be found.”--Eadmer.

[9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.”--Acton, _History of Freedom in Christianity_.

[10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.

[11] “With regard to Thomas’ dealings with the Church, if one thing is clear it is this--that he was not in the least a man who pushed his Order at the expense of his loyalty. More than once he refused to listen to an ecclesiastical claim against the king, even when his old friend Theobald was behind it: he was perfectly impartial: he taxed churchmen as he taxed laymen, and in fact, so loyal and reasonable was he that Henry, when he made him archbishop, seems to have thought that he was wholly on his side. There were innumerable questions to be decided between Church and State. Again and again small points came up as to the appointment of this man or the other, as to the infliction or remission of a fine; and again and again Thomas decided the cause and advised the king on the merits of the case.... He was as zealous now for the State as he was for the Church afterwards. There he stood Chancellor of England; his business was to administer the laws, and he knew and did his business.”--R. H. Benson, _St. Thomas of Canterbury_.

[12] “The only instance which has occurred of the chancellorship being voluntarily resigned either by layman or ecclesiastic.”--Campbell, _Lives of the Chancellors_.

[13] “It must be held in mind that the archbisholp had on his side the Church or _Canon Law_, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil-doers.”--F. York Powell.

“We have to take ourselves back to a state of society in which a judicial trial was a tournament, and the ordeal an approved substitute for evidence, to realise what civilization owes to the Canon Law and the canonists, with their elaborate system of written law, their judicial evidence, and their written procedure.”--Rashdall, _Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages_.

[14] W. H. Hutton.

[15] This conversation is reported by Roger of Pontigny, who ministered to St. Thomas when the latter was in exile at that place.

[16] Garnier was a poet, and he protests passionately against this law, maintaining that God has called us all to His service. Much more worth is the villein’s son who is honourable than a nobleman’s son who is false.

[17] W. FitzStephen.

[18] W. FitzStephen.

[19] Dean Stanley.

[20] Freeman, _Historical Essays_. First series.

[21] “Hubert was very gracious in the eyes of all the host that lay before Acre, and in warlike things so magnificent that he was admired even by King Richard. He was in stature tall, in council prudent, and though not having the gift of eloquence, he was an able and shrewd wit. His mind was more on human than divine things, and he knew all the laws of the realm.”--Gervase.

[22] It is notable that in our day only peerages and knighthoods are sold, and these by political leaders to their partisans. Government offices, the judicial bench and bishoprics are still fortunately not in the market, though frequently allotted for partisan reasons.

[23] “Owing to the craft of the richer citizens the main part of the burden fell on the poor.”--Matthew Paris.

[24] Some writers say 50,000.

[25] William of Newburgh.

[26] “Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a shrewd financier, and an honourable, conscientious statesman; but as a prelate he is noted chiefly for his quarrels with his chapter.”--W. H. Hutton, _Social England_.

[27] Matthew Paris.

[28] “If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting, and fighting successfully, against the pope and the Church for the past six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but--from John’s point of view--only if the friendship could be made something much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation between the pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it.... To outward personal humiliation of any kind John was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the crown or the nation might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances. His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking, whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies or his people, and he would break it with equal facility when sworn to the supreme pontiff.... There seems, in short, to be good reason for believing that John’s homage to the pope was offered without any pressure from Rome and on grounds of deliberate policy.”--K. Norgate, _John Lackland_.

[29] K. Norgate, _John Lackland_.

[30] “By the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with several of his bishops and some barons, a sort of peace (_quasi pax_) was made between the king and the barons.”--Ralph of Coggeshall.

[31] Matthew Paris, _Greater Chronicle_, quoted by K. Norgate.

[32] “The Charter was a treaty between two powers neither of which trusted, or even pretended to trust, the other.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. II.

[33] Luard. Preface to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. Rolls’ Series. 1861.

[34] A well-known passage in Matthew Paris, vol. v, gives the monk’s point of view of Grosseteste, the reformer:--“At this time the Bishop of Lincoln made a visitation of the religious houses in the diocese. If one were to tell all the acts of tyranny he committed therein, the bishop would seem not merely unfeeling but inhuman in his severity. For amongst other things when he came to Ramsey he went round the whole place, examined each one of the monks’ beds in the dormitory, scrutinized everything, and if he found anything locked up destroyed it. He broke open the monks’ coffers as a thief would, and if he found any cups wrought with decoration and with feet to stand on he broke them to pieces, though it would have been wiser to have demanded them unbroken for the poor. He also heaped the terrible curses of Moses on the heads of those who disobeyed his injunctions and the blessings of Moses on those who should observe the same.... And it is believed all this he hath done to restrain from sin those over whom he hath authority, and for whose souls he must give account.” This was written in 1251, when Grosseteste had been sixteen years at Lincoln.

[35] Wright, _Political Songs_. Camden Society, 1839.

[36] Grosseteste had been unable to get his way with the barons on the question of legitimacy of children before legal wedlock. By the old church law marriage made such children legitimate, and at the council of Merton, in 1236, Grosseteste, with the bishops, tried to bring the common law into union with the church view on this matter. He was defeated, and to this day these children are illegitimate. “It would indeed have been better if the independence exhibited by the majority who opposed the prelates at Merton had been reserved for another occasion; for it cannot be deemed that the perpetuation of a law contrary to that which prevails on the subject in almost every European country, and which still differentiates Scotland from England by abroad, though unintelligible line of demarcation, has been open to grave objection on grounds of public convenience, apart from any inherent merits or demerits it may possess.”--F. S. Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste_.

[37] “Grosseteste, then, may be regarded in a threefold aspect; first, as a reformer who sought to reform the Church from within and not from without, by the removal of existing abuses, by the encouragement he gave to the great religious revival of the early part of the 13th century, and by the example of unflinching fearlessness and rectitude which he set in his performance of the episcopal office; secondly, as the teacher who guided the rising fortunes of the University of Oxford; and thirdly, as the statesman who, applying to new conditions the policy associated with the name of Stephen Langton, endeavoured to combine into one effort the struggle of the clergy for the liberties of the Church with the struggle of the laity for the liberties of the nation, imbued Simon de Montfort with principles of ‘truth and justice’ which went far beyond the mere maintenance of the privileges of his own order, and at the same time, by his effort to reconcile him with his sovereign, and by the whole tenour of his actions, showed that had he lived a few years longer, his influence would have been directed to the task of achieving by peaceful means the constitutional advance brought about by those who, taking the sword, perished by the sword.”--Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln_.

[38] See recent article on “Grosseteste” in _Catholic Encyclopædia_.

[39] Yet out of this letter and out of his great knowledge and love of the Scriptures a notion has been current that Grosseteste was a forerunner of Protestantism, and “a harbinger of the Reformation.” “If this implies that he had any tendency towards the doctrinal changes brought about in the Church at the Reformation, or that he evidenced any idea of a separation of the Church of England from that of Rome, a more utterly mistaken statement has never been made.”--Luard, Preface to _Grosseteste’s Letters_. (Rolls Series.)

As for Grosseteste’s Scriptural knowledge, “The thorough familiarity with the Old Testament is, perhaps, only what we might expect; but the use which is made of the actions of all the characters of Scripture, and the forced and sometimes outrageous way in which they are introduced to illustrate his argument, show how thoroughly ‘biblical’ the age was, and how completely the Old Testament history was regarded rather as the guide of men’s conduct in Christian times, than as a mere historical record of past events.”--_Ibid._

[40] “The king acted as if he had sent him abroad simply to ruin his fortunes and wreck his reputation.”--Stubbs.

[41] Matthew Paris.