“When he was in town he used frequently to sup with me, eating some raisins he brought in his pocket, and drinking weak gin and water. He was cheerful, agreeable, and full of curious anecdote. He was, however, in political matters exceedingly troublesome and sometimes as exceedingly absurd. He had read but little, or to little purpose, and knew nothing of general principles. He entertained a vague and absurd notion of the political arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons, and sincerely believed that these semi-barbarians were not only a political people, but that their ‘twofold polity,’ arms-bearing and representation, were universal and perfect.”[130]
To Place, chief political wire-puller of his age, industrious and persistent in getting things done, with a typical cockney politician’s scorn of disinterested enthusiasm, Major Cartwright appeared “troublesome” and “absurd”—Francis Place had quite an honest liking for the “old gentleman,” as he called him, all the same. By the government Cartwright stood convicted as a “seditious, evil-minded person.” Posterity is content to know John Cartwright by the title his contemporaries conferred upon him—the Father of Reform—and to rank him as the foremost man in England in the eighteenth century to raise the standard of Political Democracy.
Ernest Jones and Chartism
1838–1854
Authorities: R. G. Gamage—History of the Chartist Movement; Thos. Frost—Forty Years’ Recollections; Ernest Charles Jones—Songs of Democracy; Graham Wallas—Life of Francis Place; J. A. Hobson—Ernest Jones, in Dictionary of National Biography; The Times, Jan. 27, 29; Mar. 31, 1869.
ERNEST JONES AND
CHARTISM 1838–1854.
The Chartist agitation was at once the largest, the most revolutionary, and the least successful of all the serious political movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. For ten years, with varying fortune, it threatened the authority of parliament, and then slowly expired—destroyed by its own internal weakness and the quarrels of its leaders rather than by the repression of the government.
The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought the Chartist movement to life,[131] and roused the politically minded leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that would place political power in the hands of the whole people.
The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme of Major Cartwright and, in substance, the earlier demands of John Lilburne and the Levellers. Universal manhood suffrage, the ballot, payment of members of parliament, equal electoral districts, abolition of property qualification for members, and annual parliaments, these were the “six points” of the Charter, the platform of its advocates, and for ten years the hope of multitudes of earnest and devoted men and women.