Thus the People’s Charter movement, beginning about 1838, was a signal failure, because from the practical side it involved no great principles of political economy, nothing that enriches a nation; and from the side of popular rights it was premature, crude, and represented no intelligent desire on the part of the people.  It was a movement nursed in discontent, and carried on with bitterness and illegal violence.  It was wild, visionary, and bitter from the start, and arose at a period when the English people were in economic distress, and when all Europe was convulsed with insurrectionary uprisings, and revolutionary principles were mixed up with socialism and anarchy.  The Chartist agitation continued with meetings and riots and national conventions until 1848, when the Revolution in France gave a great impulse to it.

At last some danger was apprehended from the monster meetings and inflammatory speeches of the Chartists, and government resolved to suppress the whole movement by the strong arm.  The police force throughout the kingdom was strengthened, and one hundred and seventy thousand special constables were sworn in, while extensive military preparations were intrusted to the Duke of Wellington.  The Chartists, overrating their strength, held a great meeting on Kensington Common, and sent a petition of more than five millions of names to the House of Commons; but instead of half a million who were expected to assemble on the Common with guns and pikes, only a few thousand dared to meet, and the petition itself was discovered to be forged, chiefly with fictitious names.  It was a battle on the part of the agitators without ball cartridges, in which nothing was to be seen but smoke.  Ridicule and contempt overwhelmed the leaders, and the movement collapsed.

Although the charter failed to become law, the enfranchisement of the people has been gradually enlarged by Parliament in true deliberate English fashion, as we shall see in future lectures.  Perhaps the Chartist movement may have ripped up the old sod and prepared the soil for the later peaceful growth; but in itself it accomplished nothing for which it was undertaken.

The repeal of the corn laws in 1846 was followed, as was the Reform Bill of 1832, by a series of other reforms of a similar kind,—­all in the direction of free-trade, which from that time has continued to be the established principle of English legislation on all the great necessities of life.  Scarcely had Lord John Russell in 1846 taken the helm of state, when the duties on sugar were abolished, no discrimination being shown between sugar raised in the British colony of Jamaica and that which was raised in Cuba and other parts of the world.  The navigation laws, which prohibited the importation of goods except in British ships, or ships which belonged to the country where the goods were produced, were repealed or greatly modified.  The whole colonial system was also revised, especially in Canada; and sanitary measures were taken to prevent disease in all the large towns of the country.