514 
Jones — Chartism. 
" knobsticks, ” as workmen who took the place of strikers were 
called. Arrangements were made for preventing the use of 
machinery and persecuting employers in numerous ways. 1 But 
all this was hardly more than mere ruffianism though the causes 
of it were serious enough. 
The economic distress of the time stirred up the lower elements 
of society to revolt. The direction which their first definite 
movement took was determined by the prevailing ideas of the 
time. Political reform was in the wind and they threw them¬ 
selves in line with it. The first stage of Chartism was involved 
in the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. The discussion of 
this question occupied the arena of public thought when suffer¬ 
ing drove the factory and farm hands of England to take up 
their own cause. To draw these ignorant classes into their 
campaign was an easy matter for the Whig defenders of the 
Reform Bill. In this way they severed Chartism from the is¬ 
sues we should have expected it to represent and made out of it 
a sort of tail-piece to the Whig reforms of the early thirties. 
The Whigs were frequently accused of filling their political sails 
with the rising storm of popular impatience and, when later it 
passed out of their control, they were roundly denounced by the 
conservatives for having, as they thought, conjured it up. 
The puzzle of Chartism lies in the fact that though the griev¬ 
ances of the average Chartist sympathizers were economic, the 
movement they supported was persistently devoted to the ex¬ 
tension of the suffrage. The causal connection between eco¬ 
nomic injustice and the indifference and aristocracy of government 
was not doubted by Chartists. They expected through govern¬ 
ment to set economic matters right. We have evidence here 
how little serious influence laissez-faire ever existed with the 
English workmen. The politics of the Chartists were, as Adolf 
Held said, purely a “ magenfrage. ” 2 Rev. Stevens, one of the 
Chartist leaders, when addressing a vast crowd of men at Ker- 
sall Moor, near Manchester, said: “Chartism, my friends, is 
no political movement, where the main point is your getting 
1 Chas. Read©, Put Yourself in His Place. 
2 Sozialismus und Sozialdemokratie , p. 87. 
