Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 1 [of 3]

by J. Ewing Ritchie

In London and in all our large cities were men who felt deeply their misery and poverty, and were labouring earnestly for the removal of their wrongs and the attaining of their rights. But there were professional agitators as well, paid agents of agitation, many of them mercenary wretches, who fattened on this state of things—men who preferred to talk rather than earn an honest living. They made the best of their opportunity. Many of them were sots, and had a fine time of it in public-houses; few of their characters would bear a very close inspection. They travelled down into the country, and sowed seed, which fell upon prepared ground. It was truly sad to see the decent, sober workman, living at his best on starvation wages, keeping his wife and family, not by work, but by pawning every bit of household furniture, every superfluous article of apparel, dressing himself in rags.

‘Sunday come again, and nothing to eat,’ said one, while the poor babe sought its mother’s breast in vain.

‘Ah,’ said another, with a frenzied air, and with language too vehemently blasphemous to be repeated, ‘I wish they would hang me. I have lived upon cold potatoes that were given me these two days, and this morning I have eaten a raw potato from sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread or a cup of coffee, or I shall drop.’

There were riots, of course, for men in that state had little to fear. Now and then a parson’s house was burnt down, or a magistrate had to fly for his life, or the agent of some great landlord or millowner was in danger. The orators worked up the passions of the people to fever heat. Now and then appeared on the scene a stray Irishman, with a tremendous tongue, or a wandering Pole, with the latest device for blowing up houses, setting fire to mills, or destroying the attack of a hostile force. There was much talk of a chemical composition by which London was to be fired in five places, and which would burn stone itself. These schemers and dabblers assumed to speak in the name of the Chartists, and the Chartists assumed to represent the people of England. Never was a greater sham than the agitation for the Charter. It was all wind and fury, and utterly brainless; the concoction of journeymen printers, patriotic tailors, heaven-taught stonemasons, and one or two Methodist preachers and obscure journalists, eaten up by vanity, and urged on by the belief that a revolution in England was impending, and that they were to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. How they raved—like the madmen that they were—of the terror that would give wings to British capital to fly to other climes; of the middle-class population of our country, broken down by bankruptcy and insolvency; of the destruction of our commerce; of the awful doom of farmers, manufacturers, and landlords! We hear now of the bitter cry of outcast London; that is nothing to the cry that came from all parts of the country then.

It happened that just at this time there was to be a grand Chartist demonstration in Sloville. At any rate, so it seemed good to the editor of the Trumpet of Freedom, who found the sale of his paper falling off, and subscriptions for the national testimonial to be presented to himself not coming in so abundantly as he could wish. At any rate, the demonstration would serve to keep his name before the public, and that was something. Accordingly, the proper machinery was put in motion, and he got himself invited down, coming in a post-chaise—there were few railways then—with his secretary, as hungry a looker-out for power and pelf as himself. They put up at the best hotel in the town, and took good care not to starve either in the matter of eating or drinking.

The excitement in the place was intense. There was a lean and hungry mob all day long opposite the hotel, to cheer the great man whenever he came to the door or put out his head at the window. The local leaders seemed as busy as if the nation’s welfare depended on them. Angry posters glared on you from every wall, which the police in vain tried to pull down. The great London newspapers sent down reporters; and not a little was the indignation aroused when a myrmidon of the law managed to serve the editor with a writ for debt, which was explained to be a political dodge on the part of the Government to muzzle the great man himself, whose invective on the subject it did all the people good to hear.

The Whigs were denounced as base, bloody, and brutal; the Tories were the devils in hell. The time had come for tyrants and oppressors to tremble. Sloville was to be the first to raise the standard, to strike off its fetters, to emancipate the country from the grasp of a hireling soldiery, a tithe-fed clergy, and a bloated aristocracy.

There was a good deal of brandy-and-water in the posters, and there was a good deal of the same refreshing beverage in the speeches of the orators. A Chartist tailor took the chair—a man who had at one time done well, but who, since he had taken to politics and drink, had lost all his business, and who naturally cast an envious eye on his more successful fellow-tradesmen. He hinted at a plan for the equal division of property, which was received with immense applause, and which he assured his intelligent hearers would be realized as soon as the Charter was the law of the land.

A Chartist shoemaker followed. At home he was a terrible tyrant, dreaded by his much-suffering wife and his much-to-be-pitied children: but that was no reason why he should not denounce the tyranny of Government, which he did at some length, and with much physical exaggeration and emphasis, to his own delight and that of his hearers.

You could easily detect the Chartists in the town. They were not the best workmen, but they were the best supporters of the publicans, who at that time had not ventured to raise the cry of Beer and the Bible. However, on the night of the meeting—which was in the open air—all the workmen in the place, good or bad, Chartist or not, assembled in considerable numbers. The British operative is wonderfully influenced by the gift of the gab. It always fetches him, as Artemus Ward would say. He is not, as a rule, much of an orator himself, and fluent and fervid declamation sooner makes a fool of him than it does of the rest of the community.