gulf fixed. However much they sympathised with Chartism, middle-class leaders could scarcely hope to find any great following amongst their own class for the Chartist programme. Preoccupation with Free Trade, the class-war teachings of some Chartists, and the futile excuses of others, prevented that. Nor could middle-class leaders find a place within the National Charter Association. The predominance of O'Connor prevented that, except they were prepared to occupy a very subordinate position.
The Complete Suffrage Movement was a well-meant, ill-conceived, but not wholly unsuccessful attempt to solve this difficulty. Its author was Joseph Sturge (1793–1859), a Quaker corn-miller and alderman of Birmingham, a zealous and prominent anti-slavery advocate, and now an adherent of the Free Trade Movement. Sturge was a typical Quaker, honest, upright, and benevolent. Prosperity in business had not blinded his eyes to the distress and poverty of thousands of his fellow-citizens, and it was this which moved him along the path of political agitation.[1] Sturge was hardly a deep-thinking man and, being a little pig-headed and hasty-tempered, had few special gifts for dealing with men more addicted than he to disputations and contentions. Rectitude and sympathy were his qualifications for leadership, and though they carried him far, it was not far enough.
Sturge, like many other Quakers and Radicals, had taken a part in the work of the Anti-Corn Law League, but he had apparently come to the conclusion that the Repeal of the Corn Laws could never be attained, "except by first securing to the people, a full, fair, and free representation in the British House of Commons."[2] He had also, as a true Quaker, been much disturbed by the growing alienation between the middle and the working classes, which he traced, like the Chartists, to the evils of class legislation. During 1841 he published in the Nonconformist, which periodical became the organ of the Complete Suffrage Movement, a series of articles afterwards reissued under the title "Reconciliation between the Middle and Working Classes." This reconciliation was to be accomplished by a combined agitation for "full, fair, and free" representation of the people in Parliament. In recommending the "Reconciliation" to his readers Sturge writes: "The
- ↑ Sturge visited the West Indies and America in the cause of Abolition (Brief Sketches of the Birmingham Conference, published by Cleave, 1842).
- ↑ Letter to Chairman of A.C.L. Conference, Sun, July 28, 1842.
