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.