DURING the French Revolution, 174 especially during its earlier stages, there was a corresponding movement in England. This was partly an intellectual matter, led by a few aristocrats—like the Earl of Stanhope—and had no connection with the life of the people; it was rather a piece of aristocratic Bohemianism, a tendency to which has been seen in various times, even our own. But it was partly a popular ferment in sympathy with the general spirit of the French Revolution, was widespread, and was looked upon as dangerous by the Government, who repressed the agitation with a high-handed 175 severity which would seem almost incredible in our times.
The French Revolution naturally brought about a great reaction, not only in absolutist countries, but also in England, the country of Constitutionalism; and this reaction was much furthered and confirmed by the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France, and all the doings and incapacities of the Holy Alliance. We may take as representative names of this reaction the Austrian Prince Metternich on the Continent and Lord Castlereagh in England. The stupid and ferocious repression of the governments acting under this influence, as well as the limitless corruption by which they were supported, were met in England by a corresponding progressive agitation, which was the beginning of Radicalism. Burdett and Cartwright are representatives of the early days of this agitation, and later on Hunt, Carlile, Lovett, and others. William Cobbett must also be mentioned as belonging to this period—a man of great literary capacity of a kind, and with flashes of insight as to 176 social matters far before his time, but clouded by violent irrational prejudices and prodigious egotism; withal a peasant rather than a literary man of cultivation—a powerful disruptive agent, but incapable of association with others.
This period of Radical agitation was marked by a piece of violent repression in the shape of the so-called Peterloo Massacre (1819), where an unarmed crowd at a strictly political meeting was charged and cut down by the yeomanry, and eleven people killed outright.141
At last, when the country was on the verge of civil war, the Reform Act of 1832 secured the practically complete political emancipation of the new middle class, which then at once quietly settled down and deserted the proletariat, although the latter had given both its numbers and its blood to aid it in its struggle for political freedom.
Consequently this agitation, which was partly middle-class and partly popular, 177 was succeeded by the further demands of the proletariat for freedom, in the Chartist movement, which was almost exclusively supported by the people, though some of the leaders—as Feargus O'Connor and Ernest Jones—belonged to the middle class. Chartism, on the face of it, was nearly as much a political movement as the earlier Radical one; its programme was largely directed towards parliamentary reform; but, as we have said, it was a popular movement, and its first motive power was the special temporary suffering of the people, due to the disturbance of labour caused by the growth of the machine industry. The electoral and parliamentary reforms of its programme were put forward because it was supposed that if they were carried ultimately, they would affect the material condition of the working classes: at the same time, however, there is no doubt that the pressure of hunger and misery gave rise to other hopes besides the above-mentioned delusion as to reform, and ideas of Socialism were current among the Chartists, though they were not openly put forward 178 on their programme.142 Accordingly the class-instinct of the bourgeoisie saw the social danger that lurked under the apparently political claims of the charter, and so far from its receiving any of the middle-class sympathy which had been accorded to the Radical agitation, Chartism was looked upon as the enemy, and the bourgeois progressive movement was sedulously held aloof from it. It is worthy of note that Chartism was mainly a growth of the Midland and Northern Counties—that is, of the great manufacturing districts newly created—and that it never really flourished in London. In Birmingham the movement had the greatest force, and serious riots took place there while a Chartist conference was sitting in the town. The movement gave birth to a good deal of popular literature, especially considering that the press was very strictly controlled by the Government.
The Chartist movement went on vigorously enough in the Northern and Midland 179 Counties; but, as stated, it never took much hold on London and the South, where there was opposition between the skilled and unskilled workmen, the former belonging to the trades mostly carried on by handicraft. In the North the industrial revolution which had produced the factory had mainly done away with this distinction. The insufficiency of its aims, and of knowledge how to effect them, at last found out the weak places in Chartism. The Chartists were mostly, and necessarily so, quite ignorant of the meaning and scope of Socialism; and the economical development was not enough advanced to show the real and permanent cause of the industrial distress. With the first amelioration of that distress therefore the Chartist party fell to pieces. But the immediate external cause of its wreck was the unfortunate schism that arose between the supporters of moral force and physical force in the body itself. For the rest it seems clear enough to us that they had little chance of succeeding on constitutional lines, considering the immense amount of resistance (not all constitutional) 180 with which their demands were met. The historical function of the movement was to express the intense discontent of the working classes with the then state of things; and to pass on the tradition to our own days.
It may here be mentioned that the trump-card which the Chartists were always thinking of playing was the organisation of an universal strike, under the picturesque title of the Sacred Month. In considering the enormous difficulties, or rather impossibilities of this enterprise, we should remember that its supporters understood that the beginnings of it would be at once repressed forcibly, and that it would lead directly to civil war.
From 1842, when the above schism came to a head, Chartism began to die: out. Its decay, however, was far more due to the change that was coming over the economical state of affairs than even to its incomplete development of principle and ill-considered tactics. Things were settling down from the dislocation caused by the rise of the great industries. Apart from the fact that the Chartists were gradually worn out by 181 the long struggle, the working people shared in the added wealth brought about by the enormous expansion of trade, however small that share was; and in consequence became more contented. The trades unions began to recover from the disasters of 1834, and improved the prospects of the skilled workmen. So-called co-operation began to flourish: it was really an improved form of joint-stockery, which could be engaged in by the workmen, but was and is fondly thought by some to be, if not a shoeing-horn to Socialism, at least a substitute for it; indeed Chartism itself in the end became involved in a kind of half co-operative, half peasant-proprietorship land scheme, which of course proved utterly abortive.
As the improvement in the condition of the working classes weakened that part of the life of Chartism that depended on mere hunger desperation, so the growing political power of the s middle classes and the collapse of the Tory reaction swallowed up the political side of its life.
Chartism, therefore, flickered out in 182 the years that followed 1842, but its last act was the celebrated abortive threat at revolt which took place in April 1848. And it must be said that there was something appropriate in such a last act. For this demonstration was distinctly caused by sympathy with the attacks on absolutism then taking place on the Continent, and Chartism was always on one side of it a phase of the movement which was going on all over Europe, a movement directed against the reaction which followed on the French Revolution, as represented by the “Holy Alliance” of the absolutist sovereigns against both bourgeoisie and people.
On the fall of Chartism, the Liberal party—which as an engine of progress was a party without principles or definition, but has been used as a thoroughly adequate expression of English middle-class hypocrisy, cowardice, and short-sightedness—engrossed the whole of the political progressive movement in England, and dragged the working classes along with it, blind as they were to their own interests and the 183 solidarity of labour. This party has shown little or no sympathy for the progressive movement on the Continent, unless when it deemed 1t connected with current anti-Catholic prejudice. It saw no danger in the Cæsarism which took the place of the corrupt Constitutionalism of Louis Philippe as the head of the police and stock-jobbing regime that dominated France in the interests of the bourgeoisie, and it hailed Louis Napoleon with delight as the champion of law and order.
Any one, even a thoughtful person, might have been excused for thinking in the years that followed on 1848 that the party of the people was at last extinguished in England, and that the class struggle had died out and given place to the peaceable rule of the middle classes, scarcely disturbed by occasional bickerings carried on in a lawful manner between Capital and Labour. But, under all this, Socialism was making great strides and developing a new and scientific phase, which at last resulted 1n the establishment of the International Association, whose aim was to unite the 184 workers of the world in an organisation which should consciously oppose itself to the domination of capitalism.
The International was inaugurated in England in 1864, at a meeting held in St. Martin’s Hall, London, at which Professor Beesly took the chair. It made considerable progress among the Trades Unions, and produced a great impression (beyond indeed what its genuine strength warranted) on the arbitrary Governments of Europe. It culminated as to the Socialistic influence it had, in the Commune of Paris, of which we shall treat in a separate chapter. The International did not long outlive the Commune, and once more for several years all proletarian influence was dormant in England, except for what activity was possible among the foreign refugees living there, with whom some few of the English working men had relations. In the year 1881,143 an attempt was made to federate the various Radical clubs of London under the name of the 185 Democratic Federation. Part of the heterogeneous elements, mainly the mere political radicals, of which this was composed, withdrew from it in 1883; but other elements, connected with the literary and intellectual side of Socialism, joined it, and soon after the body declared for unqualified Socialism, and took the name of the Social Democratic Federation. This was the first appearance of modern or scientific Socialism in England, and on these grounds excited considerable public attention, though the movement, being then almost wholly intellectual and literary, had not at that time reached the masses.
Differences of opinion, chiefly on points of temporary tactics, caused a schism in the body, and a rival, the Socialist League, was formed, both Societies carrying on an active socialist propaganda, and in process of time often acting in concert. The West-end riots on Monday 8th February 1886, and the consequent trial of four members of the Social Democratic Federation, brought the two organisations much together. A good many branches both of the Federation 186 and the League were founded and carried on with various fortunes. But in the year 1890 dissensions in the League, caused by a considerable anarchistic element, broke it up. In the meantime the Fabian Society, which took form as a Socialist body about the same time as the League, has been actively engaged in propaganda, directing its efforts chiefly to forcing existing political parties to take notice of social questions; and largely also to educating middle-class persons in Socialism. There are other bodies more or less independent, scattered up and down the country, amongst whom may be mentioned the Bristol Socialists, Societies in Aberdeen and Glasgow, and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, the latter being an offshoot of the Socialist League. It must not, however, be supposed that the spread of Socialistic doctrine 1s, in any way, confined to the areas surrounding these local centres of propaganda; on the other hand, its influence will be clearly discernible throughout every industrial community. In spite of mishaps and disputes the movement has 187 taken root in England, and Socialism is beginning to be understood by the working classes at large, the Socialistic instinct being now obvious in all strikes and trade disputes, and having caused the growth of a new unionism based on a frank recognition of the class struggle. And, moreover, the governing classes have been forced to turn their attention to the condition of the workers, so that Parliament, however unwillingly, can no longer ignore their demands as a class, and all existing parties are bidding for their favour and votes. In fact, what has happened to the Socialist agitation is that which happens in all movements beginning with insignificant minorities. If it has lost somewhat for the present in intention, it has gained enormously in extension, and only awaits increased education and the force of inevitable economic events for it to become general as an opinion; the result of which will be a corporate action, destined to carry the evolution of modern life into the next great stage—the realisation of a new society with new politics, ethics, and economics, in short, the transformation of Civilisation into Socialism.
141. The improvement in our political position since the end of the eighteenth century is sufficiently shown by such examples as those of John Frost, Winterbotham, William Cobbett, and others, who were fined heavily and imprisoned for the simple expression of opinions that carried with them not the least intention of incitement to revolt.Back
142. The term Socialists was at this time used to indicate the Utopian Co-operationists, who were blindly opposed to all political movement. There was far more Socialism in our sense of the word amongst the ranks of the Chartists.Back
143. Since the history of this part of the movement is so recent that it cannot at present be written in any detail, the authors think it advisable not to mention personal names.Back