It may here be mentioned that the trump-card which the Chartists were always thinking of playing was the organisation of an universal strike, under the picturesque title of the Sacred Month. In considering the enormous difficulties, or rather impossibilities of this enterprise, we should remember that its supporters understood that the beginnings of it would be at once repressed forcibly, and that it would lead directly to civil war.
From 1842, when the above schism came to a head, Chartism began to die: out. Its decay, however, was far more due to the change that was coming over the economical state of affairs than even to its incomplete development of principle and ill-considered tactics. Things were settling down from the dislocation caused by the rise of the great industries. Apart from the fact that the Chartists were gradually worn out by 181 the long struggle, the working people shared in the added wealth brought about by the enormous expansion of trade, however small that share was; and in consequence became more contented. The trades unions began to recover from the disasters of 1834, and improved the prospects of the skilled workmen. So-called co-operation began to flourish: it was really an improved form of joint-stockery, which could be engaged in by the workmen, but was and is fondly thought by some to be, if not a shoeing-horn to Socialism, at least a substitute for it; indeed Chartism itself in the end became involved in a kind of half co-operative, half peasant-proprietorship land scheme, which of course proved utterly abortive.
As the improvement in the condition of the working classes weakened that part of the life of Chartism that depended on mere hunger desperation, so the growing political power of the s middle classes and the collapse of the Tory reaction swallowed up the political side of its life.
Chartism, therefore, flickered out in 182 the years that followed 1842, but its last act was the celebrated abortive threat at revolt which took place in April 1848. And it must be said that there was something