against the movement, must not be pressed too far. Nearly all of them beguiled their old age by setting down in writing the reminiscences of their youth, or in treating in some more or less general fashion of the history of the Chartist movement. Their memoirs share fully in the necessary limitations of the literary type to which they belong. There are failures of memory, over-eagerness to apologise or explain, strong bias, necessary limitation of vision which dwells excessively on trivial detail and cannot perceive the general tendencies of the work in which the writers had taken their part. But, however imperfect they may be as set histories of Chartism, we find in most of them that same note of simplicity and sincerity that had marked their authors' careers. If these records make it patent why Chartism failed, they give a shrewder insight than any merely external narrative can afford of the reasons why the movement spread so deeply and kept so long alive. They enable us to understand how, despite apparent failure. Chartism had a part of its own in the growth of modern democracy and industrialism.
(5) The Place of Chartism in History
Contemporaries, whether friendly or hostile to Chartism, had no hesitation in declaring the movement fruitless. The initial failure to gain a hearing for the National Petition was complicated by unending faction among the Chartists, and culminated in the great fiasco on Kennington Common. Then, after a few frenzied efforts had been made to keep the cause alive, it slowly perished of mere inanition. The judgment of its own age has been accepted by many later historians, and there has been a general agreement in placing Chartism among the lost causes of history.
That there is some measure of truth in the adverse judgment can hardly be gainsaid. The Chartist organisation failed; the individual Chartists were conscious of the wreck of their hopes. But how many of the greatest movements in history began in failure, and how often has a later generation reaped with little effort abundant crops from fields which refused to yield fruit to their first cultivators? A wider survey suggests that in the long run Chartism by no means failed. On its immediate political side the principles of the Charter have gradually become parts of the British constitution. If on its broader social aspects there was no such complete and obvious
