generation. The great Chartist following had, we may safely say, no policy at all. It followed its leaders with touching devotion into whatsoever blind alleys they might go. The plain Chartists had nothing to contribute to Chartist doctrine. A moving sense of wrong, a fierce desire to remedy the conditions of their daily life, were the only spurs which drove them into agitation and rioting. Hence the incoherence as well as the sincerity of the whole movement.
It followed from the contradictory tendencies within their ranks that Chartists could agree in little save in negations, whether in their social or in their political activity. Nothing kept Chartists together long, save when they made common cause against some obvious and glaring evils. Thus they united their forces easily enough when they fought manfully against the New Poor Law or for factory legislation and declared in chorus their abhorrence of the Manchester Radicals, like Bright and Cobden, who opposed it in the interest of the manufacturers. When a more positive remedy was sought, the divergent schools parted company. We have seen this when the agrarian proposals of O'Connor were opposed, not only in detail but on principle, within the Chartist ranks. A stolid and prosperous peasant democracy was hateful to Jacobin Chartism, because it would be hostile to all change as change, and would therefore stop any idealistic reconstruction of society.
Whatever else it was not, Chartism certainly was an effort towards democracy and social equality. Nowadays the gulf between classes is bad enough, but it is difficult for the present generation to conceive the deeply cut line of division between the governing classes and the labouring masses in the early days of Victoria. It was the duty of the common man to obey his masters and be contented with his miserable lot. This had been the doctrine of the landed aristocracy of the past; it was equally emphatically the point of view of the capitalist class which was using the Reform Act to establish itself in an equally strong position. Against the autocracy both of the landlord and of the capitalist Chartism was a strong protest. Every Chartist was fiercely independent and eager that the class for which he stood should work out its own salvation. It is this which makes the most reactionary Chartist idealisation of the past differ from the Young Englandism which was expressed most powerfully in Disraeli's Sybil. The Chartists rejected the leadership of the "old nobility,"
