Accordingly the class-instinct of the bourgeoisie saw the social danger that lurked under the apparently political claims of the charter, and so far from its receiving any of the middle-class sympathy which had been accorded to the Radical agitation, Chartism was looked upon as the enemy, and the bourgeois progressive movement was sedulously held aloof from it. It is worthy of note that Chartism was mainly a growth of the Midland and Northern Counties—that is, of the great manufacturing districts newly created—and that it never really flourished in London. In Birmingham the movement had the greatest force, and serious riots took place there while a Chartist conference was sitting in the town. The movement gave birth to a good deal of popular literature, especially considering that the press was very strictly controlled by the Government.
The Chartist movement went on vigorously enough in the Northern and Midland 179 Counties; but, as stated, it never took much hold on London and the South, where there was opposition between the skilled and unskilled workmen, the former belonging to the trades mostly carried on by handicraft. In the North the industrial revolution which had produced the factory had mainly done away with this distinction. The insufficiency of its aims, and of knowledge how to effect them, at last found out the weak places in Chartism. The Chartists were mostly, and necessarily so, quite ignorant of the meaning and scope of Socialism; and the economical development was not enough advanced to show the real and permanent cause of the industrial distress. With the first amelioration of that distress therefore the Chartist party fell to pieces. But the immediate external cause of its wreck was the unfortunate schism that arose between the supporters of moral force and physical force in the body itself. For the rest it seems clear enough to us that they had little chance of succeeding on constitutional lines, considering the immense amount of resistance (not all constitutional) 180 with which their demands were met. The historical function of the movement was to express the intense discontent of the working classes with the then state of things; and to pass on the tradition to our own days.