passing away. There was no prospect of such sweeping changes as those which, after 1789, rudely destroyed the mediaeval survivals in government and in society which had been much more noticeable in eighteenth-century France than in nineteenth-century England. There was the less need for political revolution in England since her political institutions, unlike those of France, were still sufficiently sound to be capable of legal adaptation to their new social environment. It was necessary then that the first reforms should be political, and that both these, and such social ameliorations as were immediately possible, should be rather the removal of restrictions than the establishment of positive principles. The first business of every reformer was to clear away evil survivals that could no longer justify themselves. Thus it was that within twenty years it was practicable to abolish the excessive cruelties of the criminal code, to initiate the first timid attempts to mitigate the brutalities of the factory system, to remove the more glaring disabilities imposed on Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, to repeal the anti-combination laws, which had made the healthy development of Trades Unionism impossible, and to cut away unworkable and harmful restrictions on freedom of trade between the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. It was thus that the Benthamites, the only reformers who acted upon principle, could erect the very practical test of utility into a philosophical doctrine, and preach the unrestrained freedom of the individual as the panacea for all the evils of society.
Chartism then was the union of men who agreed in a negative policy of protest against restrictions which were the source of infinite misery and unrest, but whose positive policy was narrowed down to a sensible but limited political programme which, when realised, left the root of social evils hardly touched. That this should be so was unavoidable, since Chartists were profoundly disagreed as to what use should be made by the proletariat of the political power which they claimed for it. Every conceivable wave of doctrine flowed from some portion or another of the Chartist sea. Ideas the most contradictory, dreams the most opposite, were strongly and passionately expressed from one section or other of the Chartist ranks. Many Chartists were, like O'Brien and Harney, frank revolutionaries, who wished a complete breach with a rotten and obsolete past and desired a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the social order. But even these
