amounted to less than £2700.[1] It seemed then that, however much O'Connor might flog the twin steeds of the Charter and the Land, their pace remained terribly slow, and even at that pace they could not keep step with each other.
The real sincerity of Chartism had always been its cry of want, its expression of deep-felt but inarticulate economic and social distress. Chartism was the creed of hard times, and it was unlucky for O'Connor and his plans that between 1842 and 1845 there was a wave of comparative prosperity that made those who profited by it forget the distress that had been so widespread between 1836 and 1842. It was only in Ireland that misery still grew apace until its culmination in the potato famine, and in Ireland there never had been any Chartism to speak of. But in England and Scotland it was becoming clear that better times were at hand. The harvests were good, though bread remained dear; there was a great impetus in railway construction; the textile trades, notably the cotton industry, were rapidly increasing. The Chartists themselves recognised the improved outlook, and they were hardly convincing when they warned their following that prosperity would not last long without the Charter.[2] The gross fact remained that the return of economic progress was cutting away the very foundations of the Chartist movement.
The ebb and flow of prosperity and misery largely depend on causes deeper seated than the operations of Governments. Yet the unheroic but effective administration of Sir Robert Peel had already begun to teach the ordinary man that substantial benefits might accrue even from an upper-class Ministry, kept in power by a middle-class House of Commons. This was notably the case with their factory legislation, their successive readjustments of the national finances, and their legal and administrative mitigations of the doctrinaire harshness of the New Poor Law, as carried out by convinced Benthamites. The result was that men, who, a few years earlier, had been ready converts to Chartism, found more immediate and practical ways of working out their salvation. Unemployment was becoming less common; wages were tending towards the up grade; many of the worst scandals of the factory system were being grappled with. A moderately prosperous artisan discovered a new outlet for his energies in aiding in the great development of trades unionism that was now beginning.
