interest as the basis of human society. Without this, changes in the form of government are futile.
At the same time the enfranchisement of the people under a truly democratic system would be a step towards bringing about this substitution. Thus Lovett in a conversation with Place in 1837: "People would contend for a better state if they had political power." Place: "No, if they had intelligence."[1] Lovett undoubtedly agreed with Place. All his life Lovett believed that education was the indispensable preliminary to social regeneration. It was not so much intellectual conviction as a passionate sense of the injustice of things as they were that drove him into political agitation.[2]
On a later occasion Lovett expressed himself at greater length upon the evils of individual accumulation of capital. The primary evil is the trafficking in human labour.
This he conceived to be a pernicious principle in society. We admitted an individual to avail himself of the small savings of his own industry, or it may be of the assistance of his friends, and with these means thus to traffick in human labour, to buy it cheap and sell it dear, and as his means increased, to purchase machinery or other productive powers, and thus to supersede human labour. The fruits thus accumulated we allow him to transmit to his children: they, becoming rich, intermarry and mix with the aristocracy, and thus by this principle we are building up exclusion and corruption on the one hand faster than we can reform evils on the other.[3]
Lovett was a tall, thin man with a delicate frame and an ardent spirit. A description by an admirer runs thus:
Mr. Lovett is a tall, gentlemanly-looking man with a high and ample forehead, a pale, contemplative cast of countenance, dark-brown hair, and possessing altogether a very prepossessing exterior, in manner quiet, modest and unassuming, speaking seldom, but when he does so, always with the best effect. His voice is good though not powerful, his figure commanding, and the slow, clear and distinct enunciation of his thoughts at once arrests the attention and sympathy of his audience.[4]
Place's description is more critical:
Lovett was a journeyman cabinet-maker, a man of melancholy temperament, soured with the perplexities of the world. He was
- ↑ Additional MSS. 27,819, p. 263.
- ↑ W. J. Linton, Memories, p. 40: "Lovett was the gentlest of agitators, a mild, peace-loving man, whom nothing but a deep sense of sympathy with and duty towards the wronged could have dragged into public life."
- ↑ The Charter, February 17, 1839, p. 51.
- ↑ Brief Sketches of the Birmingham Conference, 1842.
