During the administration of Sir Robert Peel there was another agitation which at one time threatened serious consequences, but as it came to nothing it has not the historical importance of the Anti-Corn-Law League.  It was a fanatical uprising of the lower classes to obtain still greater political privileges, led by extreme radicals, of whom Mr. Feargus O’Connor was the most prominent leader, and Mr. Henry Vincent was the most popular speaker.  The centre of this movement was not Manchester, but Birmingham.  The operatives of Manchester wanted cheaper bread; those of Birmingham wanted an extension of the franchise:  and as Lord John Russell had opposed the re-opening of the reform question, the radicals were both disappointed and infuriated.  The original leaders of parliamentary reform had no sympathy with such a rabble as now clamored for extended reform.  They demanded universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, abolition of property qualifications, payment of members of Parliament, and the division of the country into equal electoral districts.  These were the six points of the people’s charter,—­not absurd to the eyes of Americans, but utterly out of the question in such an aristocratic country as England, and advocated only by the working-classes and their incendiary leaders.  Discontent and misery were the chief causes of the movement, which was managed without ability.  The agitation began in 1836 and continued to 1848.  At first the government allowed it, so far as it was confined to meetings, speeches, and the circulation of tracts,—­knowing full well that, as it made no appeal to the influential and intelligent classes, it would soon expend itself.  I was lecturing at the time in Birmingham, and the movement excited contempt rather than alarm among the people I met.  I heard Vincent two or three times in his chapel,—­for I believe he was educated as a dissenting minister of some sort,—­but his eloquence made no impression upon me; it was clever and fluent enough, but shallow and frothy.  At last he was foolishly arrested by the government, who had really nothing to fear from him, and imprisoned at Newport in Wales.

In England reforms have been effected only by appeals to reason and intelligence, and not by violence.  Infuriated mobs, successful in France in overturning governments and thrones, have been easily repressed in England with comparatively little bloodshed; for power has ever been lodged in the hands of the upper and middle classes, intolerant of threatened violence.  In England, since the time of Cromwell, revolutions have been bloodless; and reforms have been gradual,—­to meet pressing necessities, or to remove glaring injustice and wrongs, never to introduce an impractical equality or to realize visionary theories.  And they have ever been effected through Parliament.  All popular agitations have failed unless they have appealed to reason and right.