Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century | Page 6

Parliament shall be paid a salary
for their services.
(6) We demand the Division of the Country into Equal Electoral

Districts--by which was meant an equality of population, as against
mere territorial extent.
To the reader of to-day it must appear a matter of astonishment that the
representatives of the working classes of Great Britain should have
been called upon, at a time within the memory of men still living, to
advance and advocate political principles so self-evident and
common-sense as those declared in the Charter, and his wonder must
be raised to amazement when he is told that the whole governing power
of Great Britain, the King, the Ministry, the House of Lords, the House
of Commons, the Tories as a party, the Whigs as a party, and--all party
divisions aside--the great Middle Class of Englishmen set themselves
in horrified antagonism to the Charter and its advocates, as though the
former were the most incendiary document in the world and the latter a
rabble of radicals gathered from the purlieus of the French Revolution.
The reason for the outbreak of the Chartist reform was the fact that the
Reform Bill of 1832 had proved a signal failure. For six years the
English Middle Classes had sought by the agency of that act to gain
their rights, but they had sought in vain. The people now began to
follow popular leaders, who always arise under such conditions. One of
these, by the name of Thorn, a bankrupt brewer and half madman, who
called himself Sir William Courtenay, appeared in Canterbury. He said
that he was a Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem--this when he was
only a knight of malt and a king of shreds and patches. Delusion broke
out on every hand. One great leader was Feargus O'Connor. Another
was Thomas Cooper, a poet, and a third was the orator Henry Vincent,
afterward well known in America.
The agitation for reform spread far and wide. The people seemed to be
about to rise en masse. The powers of British society were shaken and
alarmed. The authorities put out their hands and the Chartist meetings
in many places were broken up. The leading spirits were seized and
thrown into prison for nothing. Three of the agitators were sent to the
penal colonies, for no other offence than the delivery of democratic
speeches. For several years the movement was in abeyance, but in 1848,
in the month of April, the agitation broke out afresh and rose to a
formidable climax. A great meeting was appointed for the Kensington
common, and there, on the tenth of the month just named, a monster
demonstration was held. A petition had meanwhile been drawn up,

praying for reform, and was signed by nearly two million Englishmen!
After this the Chartist agitation ebbed away. The movement was said to
be a failure; but it failed, not because of the political principles on
which it was founded, but because those principles had in the meantime
been acknowledged and applied. At least three of the six articles of the
Chartist charter were soon adopted by Parliament. The principle of
Manhood Suffrage is virtually a part of the English Constitution. The
right of voting by Secret Ballot, deposited in a ballot-box, has also been
acknowledged as a part of the modus operandi of all British elections.
In like manner the Property Qualification formerly imposed on
candidates for Parliament, against which the Chartists so vehemently
and justly declaimed, has long since been abolished.
THE ABOLITION OF HUMAN BONDAGE.
Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by
mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible
relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world,
but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal
blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and
made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the
outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but it
is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things, the
sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will hardly light
the hovel of a single slave!
The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed.
There was perhaps at the middle of the eighteenth century not a single
non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe! All were alike brutalized
by the influences and traditions of the ancient system. All were familiar
with it--aye, they were nursed by it; for it has been one of the strange
aspects of human life that the children of the free have been nursed by
the mothers of the enslaved. All races, we repeat, were alike poisoned
with the venom of the serpent. Thus poisoned were France and
Germany. Thus poisoned was