The Parade of 18J+8. 
525 
crowd was thrown into confusion. It was found furthermore 
that the police were in posession of all the city bridges and 
that they were thus shut off from the north side of the river 
and from the Parliament buildings. 1 They cursed their stupidity 
in choosing so unfortunate a location. The leaders being humil- 
ated desired nothing so much as to get out of sight and court 
retirement. The crowd gradually dispersed and sought consola¬ 
tion, for the remainder of the day, in the ale houses. There 
was no procession and after ever thing had settled down, the 
bales of petition were quietly carted to the Parliament Houses. 
On the north side of the river, in the city, all was orderly. No 
soldiers appeared in public. The special police paraded up and 
down all day through nearly deserted streets. The city was 
more than usually quiet. 
The petition was examined by government clerks and found 
to contain 1,975,496 signatures. Many sheets of these were 
utterly worthless, either showing the same handwriting or filled 
with preposterous names. Such signatures as “The Queen,” 
“The Prince of Wales” were found among “Harry the Tar” and 
the names of favorite characters of fiction. The Illustrated Lon¬ 
don News in the first issue after April tenth said: “Mr. Feargus 
O’Connor has shown that quality which was as good as valor in 
Sir John Falstaff and which was still better than valor in him — 
discretion. . . . Three hundred thousand Chartists sum¬ 
moned to Kennington Common have dwindled down to fifteen 
thousand. The mountain has laboured, the mouse has been born. ” 
The ridiculous character of this demonstration killed Chartism 
as an organized power. It did not however alter the main 
movement of reform in which Chartism has a place. The im¬ 
pulses which so long found expression through Chartism ulti¬ 
mately passed into other lines and gave constituency to various 
reforms. The Earl of Shaftesbury wrote in his private diary 
under the entry bearing the date April 13, 1848: “Men are 
talking, they know not why, and they do not reflect how, of this 
slight concession and that; of an ‘enlargement of the franchise,’ 
1 From twelve o’clock noon, until four o’clock in the afternoon no one 
was allowed to cross the bridges from the Surrey side of London. 
