Chartism
So the working class in despair of help from the Government, decided to get the franchise for themselves, and for twelve years, 1838-1850, Chartism was the great popular movement. The Five Points of the People’s Charter were proclaimed in 1838: (1) Universal Suffrage; (2) Vote by Ballot; (3) Annual Parliaments; (4) Abolition of Property Qualification for Members of Parliament; (5) Payment of Members. A Sixth Point—Equal Electoral Districts—was left out in the National Petition.
Although the Chartist demands were political, it was the social misery of the time that drove men and women into the Chartist movement. The wretchedness of their lot—its hopeless outlook, and the horrible housing conditions in the big towns—these things seemed intolerable to the more intelligent of the working people, and thousands flocked to the monster Chartist demonstrations, and found comfort in the orations of Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and Ernest Jones.
The Charter promised political enfranchisement to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. So it seemed in the ‘Forties—when one in every eleven of the industrial population was a pauper.
Stephens, a “hot-headed” Chartist preacher, put the case as he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in 1839: “The principle of the People’s Charter is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. The question of universal suffrage is, after all, a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty.”79
The lot of the labourer and the artisan was found to be worse than it was in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, before the great Reform Act had been passed.80 And while the Anti-Corn Law League, the Socialist propaganda of Robert Owen, and the agitation for factory legislation, all promised help and attracted large numbers of workmen, the Chartist movement was by far the strongest and most revolutionary of all the post-reform popular agitations. Chartism went to pieces because the leaders could not work together, and were, in fact, greatly divided as to the methods and objects of the movement. By 1848 Bronterre O’Brien had retired from the Chartist ranks, Feargus O’Connor was M.P. for Nottingham—to be led away from the House of Commons hopelessly insane, to die in 1855—and Ernest Jones could only say when the Chartist Convention broke up in hopeless disagreement, “amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee has been trampled out, and elements of our energy are scattered to the winds of heaven.”
In spite of its failure, Chartism kept alive for many years the desire for political enfranchisement in the labouring classes. That desire never died out. Although Palmerston, the “Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet”—so Disraeli accurately enough described him—was Prime Minister from 1855 to 1865 (with one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-class enfranchisement. Palmerston’s very inactivity drove Liberals and the younger Conservatives to look to the working classes for support for the measures that were planned. The middle class was satisfied that the artisans could be admitted to the franchise without danger to the Constitution. Palmerston’s death in 1865 left the Liberal Party to Earl Russell’s premiership, with Gladstone as its leader in the Commons. Reform was now inevitable.
The Bill as first introduced in 1866 was a moderate measure, making a £7 rental the qualification for a vote in the boroughs. It was too moderate to provoke any enthusiasm, and it was hateful to the old Palmerstonian Whigs and most of the Conservatives, who objected to any enfranchisement of the working class. By a combination of these opponents the Bill was defeated, the Liberals retired from office, and a Conservative ministry under Lord Derby, with Disraeli leading the House of Commons, was formed.