it has attained such complete domination that the upper classes are merely adjuncts to it and servants of it. In fact, these also are now of the bourgeoisie, as they are all engaged in commerce in one way or other thus the higher nobility are all either house-agents, spirit merchants, coal-factors, or company-promoters, and would be of no importance without their "businesses." Moreover, striving ever to extend itself downwards as well as upwards, the middle class has absorbed so much in that direction, especially within the last thirty years, that it has now nothing left below it except the mere propertiless proletariat. These last are wholly dependent upon it, utterly powerless before it, until the break up of the system that has created it (the signs of whose beginning we have just noted), shall force them into a revolt against it. In the course of that revolt this great middle class will in its turn be absorbed into the proletariat, which will form a new society in which classes shall have ceased to exist. This is the next Revolution, as inevitable, as inexorable, as the rising of to-morrow's sun.

CHAPTER XIV

POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN

ENGLAND

DURING the French Revolution, especially during its earlier stages, there was a corresponding movement in England. This was partly an intellectual matter, led by a few aristocrats-like the Earl of Stanhope-and had no connection with the life of the people; it was rather a piece of aristocratic Bohemianism, a tendency to which has been seen in various times, even our own. But it was partly a popular ferment in sympathy with the general spirit of the French Revolution, was widespread, and was looked upon as dangerous by the Government, who repressed the agitation with a high

handed severity which would seem almost incredible in our times.

The French Revolution naturally brought about a great reaction, not only in absolutist countries, but also in England, the country of Constitutionalism; and this reaction was much furthered and confirmed by the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France, and all the doings and incapacities of the Holy Alliance. We may take as representative names of this reaction the Austrian Prince Metternich on the Continent and Lord Castlereagh in England. The stupid and ferocious repression of the governments acting under this influence, as well as the limitless corruption by which they were supported, were met in England by a corresponding progressive agitation, which was the beginning of Radicalism. Burdett and Cartwright are representatives of the early days of this agitation, and later on Hunt, Carlile, Lovett, and others. William Cobbett must also be mentioned as belonging to this perioda man of great literary capacity of a kind, and with flashes of insight as to

social matters far before his time, but clouded by violent irrational prejudices and prodigious egotism; withal a peasant rather than a literary man of cultivation -a powerful disruptive agent, but incapable of association with others.

This period of Radical agitation was marked by a piece of violent repression in the shape of the so-called Peterloo Massacre (1819), where an unarmed crowd at a strictly political meeting was charged and cut down by the yeomanry, and eleven people killed outright.'

At last, when the country was on the verge of civil war, the Reform Act of 1832 secured the practically complete political emancipation of the new middle class, which then at once quietly settled down and deserted the proletariat, although the latter had given both its numbers and its blood to aid it in its struggle for political freedom.

Consequently this agitation, which was

1 The improvement in our political position since the end of the eighteenth century is sufficiently shown by such examples as those of John Frost, Winterbotham, William Cobbett, and others, who were fined heavily and imprisoned for the simple expression of opinions that carried with them not the least intention of incitement to revolt.

partly middle-class and partly popular, was succeeded by the further demands of the proletariat for freedom, in the Chartist movement, which was almost exclusively supported by the people, though some of the leaders-as Feargus O'Connor and Ernest Jones-belonged to the middle class. Chartism, on the face of it, was nearly as much a political movement as the earlier Radical one; its programme was largely directed towards parliamentary reform; but, as we have said, it was a popular movement, and its first motive power was the special temporary suffering of the people, due to the disturbance of labour caused by the growth of the machine industry. The electoral and parliamentary reforms of its programme were put forward because it was supposed that if they were carried ultimately, they would affect the material condition of the working classes at the same time, however, there is no doubt that the pressure of hunger and misery gave rise to other hopes besides the above-mentioned delusion as to reform, and ideas of Socialism were current among the Chartists, though they were not openly put for

N