Part 19

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.