wrongs. Yet, making all allowances, Chartism as an organisation was ineffective, just as Chartism as a creed possessed no body of coherent doctrine.
In tracing the influence of Chartism on later ideals we must look to the individual rather than the system, to the spirit rather than the letter. But it would be unjust to deny the variety and the strength of the stimulus which the Chartist impulse gave towards the furtherance of the more wholesome spirit which makes even the imperfect Britain of to-day a much better place for the ordinary man to live in than was the Britain of the early years of Victoria. The part played by the Chartists in this amelioration is not the less important because, as with their political programme, the changes to which they gave an impetus were effected by other hands than theirs. At first their efforts were mainly operative by way of protest. They were seldom listened to with understanding, even by those who sincerely gave them their sympathy. As early as 1839 Thomas Carlyle's Chartism had shown his appreciation of the social unrest and burning sense of wrong that underlay the movement, but Carlyle understood the mind of Chartism as little as he understood the spirit of the French Revolution. His remedy of the strong saviour of society was as repulsive to the Chartist as was the sham feudalism of Disraeli's Sybil. It was a time when the mere attempt to describe social unrest was looked upon with disfavour by the respectable, when a book so conservative in general outlook as Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) could be denounced for maligning the manufacturers, and when the chaotic fervour of Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850) could be interpreted as the upholding of revolutionary principles. But the setting forth by men of letters of the social evils, first denounced by Chartists, spread knowledge and sympathy, and at last some efforts at improvement. The complacent optimism of a Macaulay, the easy indifference of a Palmerston to all social evil in the best of all possible Englands became tolerable only to the blind and the callous. Men of the younger generation, too young to take active part in the Chartists' work, gratefully recognised in after years the potency of the Chartist impulse in the formation of their views.[1]
The Chartists first compelled attention to the hardness of the workmen's lot, and forced thoughtful minds to appreciate
- ↑ See, for instance, the pleasant story of the "conversion" of Anthony John Mundella, then a boy of fifteen, by Cooper's earnestness at a Leicester meeting (Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 170).
