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acter was not understood by those who assailed it, and perhaps not fully by those who defended it. All would admit this: the old constitution had an intelligible principle, which the present one had not. The former invested a small portion of the nation with political rights. Those rights were entrusted to that small class on certain conditions—that they should guard the civil rights of the great multitude. It was not even left to them as a matter of honour; society was so constituted that they were entrusted with duties which they were obliged to fulfil. They had transferred a great part of that political power to a new class whom they had not invested with those great public duties. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class, which had been invested with political station, had not been bound up with the great mass of the people by the exercise of social duties." Disraeli's insight was not at fault. There is no doubt that the Chartist Movement does reflect a certain decline or change in social sympathies which the economic revolutions of the two generations previous had brought about. To this extent Disraeli was right in declaring that the Chartist Movement arose neither out of purely economic causes nor out of political causes, but out of something between the two, that is, to a lack of the lively interest taken by each class in the welfare of others, which Disraeli supposed to be the peculiar merit of pre-1832 society. As a matter of fact, that clever orator might have been embarrassed to declare at what exact period his ideal society had existed, for the aristocracy had taken its full share in breaking down the old social bonds. "The real cause," said Disraeli, "of this, as of all real popular movements, not stimulated by the aristocracy … was an apprehension on the part of the people that their civil rights were invaded. Civil rights partook in some degree of an economical and in some degree certainly of a political character. They conduced to the comfort, the security, and the happiness of the subject, and at the same time were invested with a degree of sentiment which mere economical considerations did not involve." To Disraeli, therefore, civil rights consisted in the claims of the less fortunate upon the more fortunate classes of society. These claims had been ignored, for instance, by the introduction of the New Poor Law, which, though not the cause of, was yet closely connected with, the Chartist Movement. In the passing of that measure both sides of the House were culpable: they had "outraged the whole social duties of the State, the mainstay,