The Chartist working-men, on the contrary, espoused with redoubled zeal all the struggles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.  Free competition has caused the workers suffering enough to be hated by them; its apostles, the bourgeoisie, are their declared enemies.  The working-man has only disadvantages to await from the complete freedom of competition.  The demands hitherto made by him, the Ten Hours’ Bill, protection of the workers against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new Poor Law, all of the things which belong to Chartism quite as essentially as the “Six Points,” are directly opposed to free competition and Free Trade.  No wonder, then, that the working-men will not hear of Free Trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws (a fact incomprehensible to the whole English bourgeoisie), and while at least wholly indifferent to the Corn Law question, are most deeply embittered against its advocates.  This question is precisely the point at which the proletariat separates from the bourgeoisie, Chartism from Radicalism; and the bourgeois understanding cannot comprehend this, because it cannot comprehend the proletariat.

Therein lies the difference between Chartist democracy and all previous political bourgeois democracy.  Chartism is of an essentially social nature, a class movement.  The “Six Points” which for the Radical bourgeois are the beginning and end of the matter, which are meant, at the utmost, to call forth certain further reforms of the Constitution, are for the proletarian a mere means to further ends.  “Political power our means, social happiness our end,” is now the clearly formulated war-cry of the Chartists.  The “knife and fork question” of the preacher Stephens was a truth for a part of the Chartists only, in 1838, it is a truth for all of them in 1845.  There is no longer a mere politician among the Chartists, and even though their Socialism is very little developed, though their chief remedy for poverty has hitherto consisted in the land-allotment system, which was superseded {235} by the introduction of manufacture, though their chief practical propositions are apparently of a reactionary nature, yet these very measures involve the alternative that they must either succumb to the power of competition once more and restore the old state of things, or they must themselves entirely overcome competition and abolish it.  On the other hand, the present indefinite state of Chartism, the separation from the purely political party, involves that precisely the characteristic feature, its social aspect, will have to be further developed.  The approach to Socialism cannot fail, especially when the next crisis directs the working-men by force of sheer want to social instead of political remedies.  And a crisis must follow the present active state of industry and commerce in 1847 at the latest, and probably in 1846; one, too, which will far exceed in extent and violence all former crises.  The working-men will carry their Charter, naturally; but meanwhile they will learn to see clearly with regard to many points which they can make by means of it and of which they now know very little.