appropriate in such a last act. For this demonstration was distinctly caused by sympathy with the attacks on absolutism then taking place on the Continent, and Chartism was always on one side of it a phase of the movement which was going on all over Europe, a movement directed against the reaction which followed on the French Revolution, as represented by the “Holy Alliance” of the absolutist sovereigns against both bourgeoisie and people.
On the fall of Chartism, the Liberal party—which as an engine of progress was a party without principles or definition, but has been used as a thoroughly adequate expression of English middle-class hypocrisy, cowardice, and short-sightedness—engrossed the whole of the political progressive movement in England, and dragged the working classes along with it, blind as they were to their own interests and the 183 solidarity of labour. This party has shown little or no sympathy for the progressive movement on the Continent, unless when it deemed 1t connected with current anti-Catholic prejudice. It saw no danger in the Cæsarism which took the place of the corrupt Constitutionalism of Louis Philippe as the head of the police and stock-jobbing regime that dominated France in the interests of the bourgeoisie, and it hailed Louis Napoleon with delight as the champion of law and order.
Any one, even a thoughtful person, might have been excused for thinking in the years that followed on 1848 that the party of the people was at last extinguished in England, and that the class struggle had died out and given place to the peaceable rule of the middle classes, scarcely disturbed by occasional bickerings carried on in a lawful manner between Capital and Labour. But, under all this, Socialism was making great strides and developing a new and scientific phase, which at last resulted 1n the establishment of the International Association, whose aim was to unite the 184 workers of the world in an organisation which should consciously oppose itself to the domination of capitalism.