period—a man of great literary capacity of a kind, and with flashes of insight as to 176 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.141
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 partly middle-class and partly popular, 177 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 forward 178 on their programme.142