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And thus the question arises, who was right, the angry intellectual or the apathetic man in the street? The man in the street undoubtedly, for reasons which will presently appear.

Let our readers in the first place pay attention to the incredible meekness of the Chartist crowds. It is all very well to sing the praises of General Napier for having, in the summer months of 1839, so gently handled the Chartist rising in the North. But would things have gone as smoothly as they did if he had dealt with an Irish instead of an English mob? or again, with French insurgents instead of English starving working men? The Chartist displays of physical force, so gigantic and so harmless, were a perfect riddle for French contemporary observers.

'Les Chartistes,' wrote Louis Blanc, the founder of French Social Democracy, 'ont formé l'avant-garde de la démocratie de l'Angleterre. Dans leurs meetings ils affectaient jusqu'aux formes extérieures de la démocratie française. .. Mais c'était pour le gros de la nation plutôt un spectacle qu'un symbole; on venait écouter les orateurs pour passer le temps, et la circulation des voitures n'était pas même interrompue sur les places où ils se tenaient.' †

Henri Heine, the Franco-German man of letters, the philosophical communist and intimate friend of young Karl Marx, confessed that he felt sorely perplexed ('saisi d'un singulier doute') when he saw 'qu'une poignée d'hommes est suffisante pour disperser un bruyant meeting de cent mille Anglais.'‡ Or again, let us listen to Elias Regnault, already once quoted abovea bitter Anglophobe, as is to be expected from a French democrat of those days, who over-emphasises the brutality of an English mob, but who, when once this mistake is allowed for, must be admitted to have been a very keensighted critic of Chartism.

'Tant que l'autorité reste inactive, c'est un torrent qui semble défier la digue; mais qu'il se présente cinquante

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* 'Chartism,' chap. I. † 'Revue du Progrès,' vol. II, p. 249 (1839). 'Lutèce,' xv, 29 juillet 1840.

baïonnettes, ces bandes furieuses ne laissent d'autres traces de leur passage que les ruines qu'elles ont faites. Le Français marche à l'insurrection calme et silencieux. S'il pousse quelques cris, c'est en face du canon; il tient en échec des régiments entiers; et trois cents hommes disputent Paris à toute une armée. Ce contraste s'explique aisément; on affronte le mort pour une conviction politique même erronée; on ne se fait pas tuer pour un besoin matériel, même très puissant, parce que le besoin de la vie est encore plus puissant que le besoin de la faim. Aussi l'insurrection des chartistes est-elle destinée à finir comme les révoltes de la Jacquerie, tandis que le démocratie française gagne tous les jours du terrain, et déjà commande à l'avenir.'

Such is the first and perfectly legitimate ground for the coolness of English middle-class opinion while the first Chartist uprising was reaching its culminating point. But there is still more to be considered, and we believe it may be explained why Chartism, take it all in all, had a positively reassuring effect upon the mind of the English gentry and bourgeoisie.

We do not sufficiently realise nowadays what a living thing the fear of a renewal of the French Revolution was in those days. The years of Jacobinism and the Terror had not faded away into the distant past. The times of Napoleon and Pitt and Robespierre were not farther off from an Englishman of 1840 than are from us the times of Bismarck, Gladstone, and Gambetta; and many of the leading statesmen, the Austrian Chancellor, the English Foreign Minister, the King of the French, had taken an active part in the events of the Great War, in, and even before, the time when Napoleon was Emperor. After France had been forced back within its pre-revolutionary boundaries and under its legitimate King, it was a problem how long the French people could be kept from again shaking off the very artificial regime of the Restoration. And why

should a new French revolution not spread to the whole of Europe, England included? It was useless to explain that England was not an over-centralised country such as France, and that it was not in the power of a revolutionary mob in the capital to get hold of the seat of government and, in the course of a few hours, change the political institutions of the nation. The fact

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remained that there were in London revolutionary leaders and a discontented populace, and that the financial and industrial fabric of England was in many ways more shaky than was that of France. What if a revolution after the Jacobin model was to occur in London, and overturn the Constitution?

That was the fear which in 1819 frightened the ruling class into reaction; and that was the fear which in 1832 frightened them into concession. At the latter date the situation appeared to be more perilous than it ever had been before. A revolution had actually occurred in Paris, and from France the agitation passed into England. Wellington fell; and the new Whig ministry was carried along on a huge flood of pseudo-French revolutionary feeling. Orators in London meetings wore caps of liberty, with tricolour flags unfurled above their heads. The King was insulted in the streets; Apsley House was badly damaged by the mob; and bishops had to flee for their lives. Around the metropolis a 'rural war' was raging, with all the agricultural labourers of the Home Counties in touch with the London Radicals, arrayed against the parson and the squire. The passing of the Reform Bill did not apparently allay the feeling of discontent. Revolutionary

clubs went on exerting 'pressure from without' upon the reformed House of Commons. The rural war, after a few months of suspense, began again in the winter of 1834, while the workmen for the first time conceived the scheme of a universal strike. Parliament, seriously alarmed, abolished at one blow the whole of the house duty in order to placate the metropolitan Radicals; while it hastily passed a Poor-Law Amendment Bill in order to solve the problem of rural unrest in the Southern Counties. In all the big towns, and more particularly in London, the fight was no more between Whig and Tory, Reformer and Conservative, but between Whig and Radical.

Everything had altered by 1840. At the general election of 1837, for the first time since 1832, the Radicals positively lost ground; and Chartism, coming upon the heels of the general election, proved at all events that London was no more a revolutionary centre. When, after having held big meetings in Lancashire, Yorkshire,

and the Midlands, the Chartists tried to take London by storm, they failed badly; and the thinly attended meeting which was held in Palace Yard in September 1838 was a ridiculous affair. When, later, the delegates to the Chartist Convention came to London, they soon felt themselves ill at ease in an uncongenial atmosphere, and eventually transferred themselves to Birmingham, as being a more suitable centre of propaganda and action. Observe that the day on which, having reached Birmingham, they issued their manifesto to the English people, was the very day on which Barbès and Blanqui, with a handful of insurgents behind them, seized several public buildings in Paris, and for a few hours held the police and army at bay. The coup de main of Barbès and Blanqui was a failure of course; both men were thrown into prison, not to be released for years. But it was a caricature of what had succeeded in 1830 and was to succeed again in 1848. Nothing of the kind happened, or could happen in England.

There were riots, Chartist riots, in the course of 1839; but they occurred first in Birmingham, and then, still further away from the capital, in the distant Welsh town of Newport. So that at last English public opinion realised that London was safe from the peril of a Jacobin or pseudo-Jacobin revolution. Chartism was

a thing not of London but of the provinces, not of the South but of the North. As a political movement (and we must never forget that the Chartist programme was emphatically a political programme), Chartism was the ebb of the big Radical upheaval which, having begun in 1817 and 1819, had in 1832 all but broken down the dam. As a social movement it was nothing but one of those fits of unrest which periodically disturbed the industrial North, the last and impotent outburst of what in the earlier part of the century had been called Luddism.

ELIE HALÉVY.

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Art. 5.-TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES.

1. The Voyage of Captain Don Felipe González to Easter Island, in 1770-1. Edited by B. Glanvill Corney, I.S.O. Charts and Plates. (Hakluyt Society.) 1903.

2. A New Account of East India and Persia. By John Fryer, M.D., F.R.S. Edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by William Crooke, B.A. Three vols. 1909-15. 3. The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain, 1772-76. Compiled from original documents, and edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by B. Glanvill Corney, I.S.O. With Charts, Plans, and Plates. Three vols. 1913-18,

4. Cathay and the Way thither. A Collection of Mediæval Notices of China. Translated and edited by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, K.C.S.I., C.B., R.E. New edition, revised throughout by Prof. Henri Cordier, of the Institut de France. Four vols. 1913-16. 5. The Book of Duarte Barbosa : an Account of Countries bordering on the Indian Ocean... about 1518 A.D. Translated from the Portuguese, and edited by M. Longworth Dames, I.C.S. (retired). Vol. I. 1918.

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And other works.

ORAL and written narratives of voyages of discovery have naturally occupied a conspicuous place in the legends and the epics of maritime peoples from the earliest historical times; and travels by land into remote or previously unknown regions have consistently enjoyed a similar measure of renown, with the result, as we see to-day, that explorers who

'Wand'ring from clime to clime, observant stray'd,

Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,'

have been honoured in their lifetimes as public benefactors or national heroes, and have left undying names. The half-legendary fame of Hanno the Carthaginian and Pytheas the Massilian, the navigation of Onesicratus, the Norsemen's sagas of their voyages to Greenland and Labrador, the remarkable songs and traditions of Polynesian migrants and other ocean-rangers, all testify to the enduring public impression made by exploits of

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