Preface

economical doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848 , were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid ‘People’s Charter’ actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. ‘The Abolition of the Property Qualification’ and ‘Vote by Ballot’ are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to ‘universal suffrage,’ at least such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates ‘equal electoral districts’⁠—on the whole not more unequal than those of Germany; ‘payment of members,’ and shorter, if not actually ‘annual Parliaments,’ are visibly looming in the distance⁠—and yet there are people who say that Chartism is dead. > > “The Revolution of 1848 , not less than many of its predecessors, has had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People’s Charter. > > “For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a degree unheard