1833-40] Marriage of the Queen. — Chartism 681

governed England for eleven years. They had spent their force, and Feel was ready to take their place.

The accession of the Conservatives to power was facilitated by the fact that the Queen was no longer without an adviser. Early in 1840 she was married to Prince Albert, second son of the Duke of SaxeCoburg-Gotha. The people were anxious that she should marry; but her choice was not universally approved. It was said that the Prince was too young; and certain Tories whispered that he was a Papist or an infidel as well as a Radical. Nor were the necessary arrangements concluded without friction. The Queen's wish to make him King Consort was refused, and an income of £30,000 was substituted by Parliament for the £50,000 suggested by Melbourne. A third rebuff occurred when a clause giving him precedence after the Queen was shipwrecked by the opposition of the Duke of Cumberland; and a fourth when Melbourne declined to allow the Prince to choose his own private secretary. The Prince Consort immediately became the chief political adviser of the Queen. When the fall of the Whigs was imminent, the Prince, with the full cognisance of Melbourne, informed Peel that the three principal Whig ladies would resign on a change of Government if Peel expressed such a wish to the Queen. Peel replied that it would be better if the ladies resigned of their own accord; and the problem of 1839 was thus amicably settled.

While the party struggle raged at Westminster, the working-classes, throughout the country and especially in the north, had been passing through a time of exceptional suffering. The good harvests and the general hopefulness that filled the air immediately after the Reform Bill soon gave place to a series of lean years and to a conviction among the working-classes that far-reaching political changes were needed to lift them out of their slough of distress. Several independent currents of discontent combined to form a very threatening movement.

Chartism, in its narrower sense, was an outburst of Radicalism consequent upon the discovery by the people that they had only exchanged the domination of the upper classes for that of the middle ; but in its broader meaning it was also the expression of their discontent with their economic condition—a new name, as Carlyle remarked, for a thing which had had many names. The growth of manufactures, which added to the wealth of the manufacturers and the country, seemed to increase the degradation of the workers. The survey of Dr Gaskell in 1833, the speeches of Ashley Fielden, and Oastler, and the evidence of the Parliamentary Committees, amply confirm the terrible and familiar pictures of Sybil and Mary Barton. Chadwick had not yet begun his great reforms in sanitation ; fever was endemic in the noisome alleys and cellars ; and men worked long hours for a pittance, or sat idle at home, ousted by the competition of their own children. At this time of social despair Owen's ideas began to permeate the working

682 Agitation against the neiv Poor Law [1829-37

classes. Factory legislation was at most a palliative; but the antagonism of interest between masters and men could be overcome by the workers themselves controlling the productive processes of the country. The Owenite propaganda began seriously in 1834, and was welcomed by the worker as a revelation.

Owen's teaching found the readiest acceptance in the Trade Unions. Since 1829 the idea of a unanimous and irresistible organisation had flitted through the minds of working-men. In 1833 Owen and Fielden declared for the plan, the latter urging a general strike for an eight hours' day; and in 1834 was launched the Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union, which counted before long half a million members. Before any joint action had been taken, many masters dismissed all their employees who belonged to the Union. The rapid growth of the organisation and its extension to agricultural districts thoroughly scared the ruling classes ; and an obsolete Act, passed in 1797 to cope with the Mutiny of the Nore, was revived against six Dorsetshire labourers for administering oaths on the admission of members. Though no outrage or intimidation was alleged, the men were condemned to seven years' transportation. The sentence was hotly attacked in Parliament by the Radicals; petitions poured in ; and a monster procession, organised by the Trades' Union and estimated by the Times at 30,000, marched to Whitehall, where Melbourne refused to see them. The labourers were allowed to return after two years; but the federation was paralysed by the blow, and rapidly fell to pieces. The ultimate cause of the Chartist movement was the misery of the working-classes; its proximate cause was the Poor Law of 1834. The choice now lay between starvation and the workhouse. Horrible tales, like that of Oliver Twist, were circulated of the wanton cruelty to which inmates of workhouses were subjected, and the formation of each new union in the north was hotly resisted. The feature of the new system whicharoused the most passionate resentment was the separation of the sexes; and huge audiences were lashed to madness by stories of the agonised parting of aged couples on the threshold of the worker's prison. The crusade was led by Stephens, who thrilled vast crowds by his passionate oratory, and exhorted them to demand by force the repeal of the hated law, which was only passed for five years. The good harvests of 1835-6 prevented the full effects of the new law being immediately felt; but the rise in the price of corn which began in 1837 turned dissatisfaction into uproar, and made an explosion inevitable.

Owen, Oastler, and Stephens did not believe in political remedies; but the crowds that they addressed soon passed beyond their instructors. In 1836 a Working Man's Association was founded in London by James Robert Black, an American friend of Place and an enthusiast for popular education. The secretary was Lovett; and Hetherington, Cleave, Watson, and Vincent were amongst the members. The society quickly

1837-9] The Six Points of the Charter 683

passed out of its purely educational stage, and drew up articles declaring its independence of Whigs and Tories, and urging working-men to combine for securing equal political rights. The Association grew rapidly, and in February, 1837, held a meeting at the Crown and Anchor, to organise a petition to Parliament for universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, equal electoral districts, removal of property qualification, the ballot, and payment of members. These were the famous Six Points; and a further meeting was held in June to form an association to secure them. The demands of the Charter, as O'Connell named it, had been the commonplaces of reformers for two generations; and several of them were supported by the " Philosophical Radicals " in Parliament. Branches of the Association were founded in the provinces ; lectures were given by Vincent and Cleave ; and manifestos were issued by Lovett. The movement received a notable impetus from Russell's declaration in the autumn of 1837 that the Government regarded the Reform Bill as final. A few days later Fergus O'Connor began to publish the Northern Star, the great Chartist organ, at Leeds.

The Charter was published in May, 1838. The standard was raised, but a leader was lacking. Lovett and Hetherington had not sufficient prestige to head a national movement; and Fergus O'Connor was hardly known in the south. Attwood, the founder of the Birmingham Political Union, was hardly a Chartist at all; but his failure to convert Parliament to his currency proposals led him to support plans of further reform. He therefore revived the Birmingham Union, and suggested a national convention, a national petition, and a national strike if the petition were refused. O'Connor, who had founded an organisation in the north to work for universal franchise in order to repeal the Poor Law, promised to follow Attwood. Stephens, though caring nothing for the Charter, threw in his lot with the movement, but was arrested at the end of 1838. The National Convention met in London in February, 1839. The Working Man's Association had given the name and programme; but the movement soon passed out of its control. When violent methods were suggested, the Birmingham delegates, who mostly belonged to the middle class, retired in protest; and the movement became dominated by the so-called " physical force party." The Convention felt itself in danger in London, and moved to Birmingham, where a disturbance was caused by the unwise interference of the police ; and Lovett and other leaders were imprisoned. A week later the House debated and refused the national petition, which had been introduced by Attwood. The action of Parliament led thousands in despair to join the physical force party, and a few bold spirits determined to rise, in the belief that a single victory would again rally the masses to the cause. It was arranged that the town of Newport, where Frost, a Chartist leader, resided, should be seized one day in November ; but the plot was betrayed, the converging parties failed to meet, and an attack

684 Reasons for the failure of Chartism [1839

on a hotel commanding the road was beaten off with loss. The rebels dispersed; Frost and his colleagues were convicted of treason; the National Convention was dissolved; and the first chapter of the Chartist movement came to an end.

The complete failure of Chartism was primarily due to disunion and lack of definiteness. In the absence of a controlling mind, its leaders were not agreed as to whether it should be a strictly constitutional movement or whether it should rely on force. Nor was there any clear notion what should be done after the Charter had been yielded, except to repeal the new Poor Law and to establish a Ten Hours' day. It was widely imagined that Chartism was a Socialist movement; and many were convinced that it stood for an attack on property and the repudiation of the National Debt. Such a belief was entirely erroneous. Though thousands of Chartists had at one time or other been under the influence of Owen, Owenism and Chartism were radically different. Owen was no democrat, and he believed that his reforms could be obtained without any serious political changes. In the next place, though there were doubtless advocates of violent expropriation and repudiation in the Chartist ranks, such proposals found no support with the leaders. The error arose chiefly through a misconception of the views of Bronterre O'Brien, the thinker or, as O'Connor called him, the schoolmaster of the movement. O'Brien believed that most of the evils of the workers arose from the private ownership of land, and adopted the principle of nationalisation from the followers of Thomas Spence, but he was in favour of a fair and peaceable transfer. Again, he proposed, not the repudiation of the National Debt, but the repayment of the capital. Moreover, these views formed no part of the official programme; and nationalisation was expressly condemned by O'Connor, who favoured a rival scheme of small tenancies. The final cause of the downfall of Chartism was the attitude of its leaders towards the Corn Laws. Their abolition had been demanded as frequently and almost as violently at the mass meetings as that of the Poor Law; but, when the League began its work, the Chartists held aloof. They suspected it as a middle-class movement, all the more since its leaders had supported the Poor Law and were the avowed opponents of factory legislation. They believed too that the success of the League would serve to increase the power of the employers and capitalists, and strengthen industry at the expense of agriculture. But, though the attitude of the Chartist leaders is intelligible, it was fatal to the continuance and extension of their influence. Progress follows the line of least resistance; and it was a true instinct that led men to support the demand for cheap food rather than to await the uncertain bounties of a completely democratised State.

CHAPTER XXI
CANADA

The peace of Paris (1763) did not strike that decisive blow at the maritime and commercial position of France which Pitt desired, but it brought to an end in favour of England the long struggle for the possession of North America. The settlements on the St Lawrence, the trading-stations amongst the lakes and streams of the interior, Acadia and the islands of Cape Breton and St John, almost all the laborious results of a century and a half of colony-building and empire-planning on the part of France, were now transferred, or guaranteed afresh, to the Crown of Great Britain. So far as their trade was concerned, these acquisitions were of little value. But the interests of the American Colonies in the removal of the French power from their neighbourhood, and the future advantages likely to be derived by England from an almost undisputed authority over the whole continent, provided sufficiently strong grounds for their retention.

To introduce into the British Empire a French people, forming a compact society and remembering a great history, was a problem new in our colonial experience. At the moment, however, Ministers saw in Canada onty a part of a British America, of small importance in itself, but destined soon to be occupied by British immigrants. They therefore thought the wisest policy would be to assimilate its character, laws, and institutions, as quickly as possible to those of the remainder of the empire; and they announced their intentions in the Proclamation of 1763. By this the old French Colony was dismembered. Labrador and Anticosti were placed under the Government of Newfoundland; Cape Breton and St John under that of Nova Scotia. The province of Quebec was created, with boundaries, on the east at the St John's river, and on the west at a line connecting Lakes Nipissing and St Francis, the inland regions being provisionally reserved for the Indians and the fur-trade. Military administration gave way to a Governor with a nominated Council, and with power to summon an assembly when circumstances permitted. The introduction of English law was ordered; and English merchants and settlers were invited to enter the country.