Life and struggles of William Lovett in his pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom, with some short account of the different associations he belonged to and of the opinions he entertained

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Introduction

The Life and Struggles of William Lovett which, is now reprinted from the first edition of 1876, is more than the mere autobiography which its title might suggest. Lovett was a Cornishman, born in 1800 at Newlyn, who migrated to London in 1821. From about 1825 onwards he was actively engaged in public work, and from 1836 to 1839 he was the spokesman of the political labour move¬ ment which started with the formation of the London Working Men’s Association, and which developed into Chartism. Place, whom he knew intimately, and whom Lovett esteemed as a “ clear-headed and warm-hearted old gentleman,” described him as a “ man of melancholy temperament soured with the perplexities of the world, ^ but “ possessed of great courage and persevering in his conduct,” and remarked, “ his is a spirit misplaced. 1 Though without either the cool adroitness of Place, or the gifts of the mob-orator which made and ruined O’Connor, he was enough of a personality to be the leader of working class politics in London, at a time when London was more truly the political capital than it is to-day, and was evi¬ dently one of those who are born to be given office by any organisation with which they are connected. . .

Lovett’s career — thrown out of work by the competition of a new trade, excluded at first by the union from what afterwards became his profession because he had not served an apprenticeship, craftsman, coffee-house keeper, agitator, prisoner, journalist and schoolmaster — is an epitome ox the social confusion in which the working classes were

i Additional MSS., 27, 791, pp. 67, 241, quoted Hovell, The Chartist Movement, pp. 55-6.

vi plunged during the passage of industry from the old order to the new. As a member and afterwards president of the Cabinet-makers’ Society, 1 store-keeper to the first London Co-operative Trading Association, secretary of the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge, a member of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union which blazed up for a few months in 1834, founder and secretary of the London Working Men’s Association, secretary of the Chartist Convention of 1839, secretary of the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, and a delegate to Sturge’s Complete Suffrage Conference in 1842, he saw from the inside almost every popular movement of the thirties and forties.2 He attended the London Mechanics Institute, where he heard Birkbeck, and possibly Hodgskin, lecture ; was a colleague of Cleave, Hetherington and Watson in their agitation for a free Press ;3 had his furniture sold because he refused to serve in the militia '“on the ground of not being represented in Parliament” ; 4 knew reformers and prophets of the old generation and the new, Cobbett, Hunt, Carlile, Cobden and Owen, whose principles he absorbed, while resenting his autocratic methods ; denounced, to the annoyance of Place, who was working for unity,” the Whig Reform Bill ” ; 6 petitioned Parliament for temperance reform and the opening of museums on Sundays ; reasoned with Melbourne as to the legality of public meetings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, while “ a posse of the new police were posted in the next room ” to protect the minister against the deputation of desperadoes,6 and fought the battle of the trade unions when they were threatened with a revival of the Combination Acts in 1837. 7 Above all he was the secretary of the London

1 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 33.

2 Life and Struggles, pp. 42-3 (Co-operation), 88-9 (Grand National Consolidated Trades Union), 93-9 (London Working Men’s Associa¬ tion), 205-19 (Convention), 250-5 (National Association), 279-91 (Complete Suffrage Movement).

vii

Working Men's Association, and drafted the document which was afterwards published as the People’s Charter.1 He was careful to preserve the manifestos and addresses, many of them written by himself, in which the various organizations with which he was connected, in particular the London Working Men’s Association, expounded their views to the working-class public of Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Belgium and France. A con¬ siderable number of them, together with the famous Charter, are printed in the following pages.

Lovett Tad certain limitations both of experience and of character which make his account of the Chartist Move¬ ment, if taken by itself, liable to mislead the reader. His adult life was spent in London, and he was perhaps a little inclined to see the rest of England under the optical illusion which residence in London is apt to create. Birmingham was his ultima Thule, and, a fact which had disastrous effects on the leadership and fortunes of Chartism, he did not know or understand the north. Like most thoughtful work¬ men of the time he loathed the new industrialism children forced to compete with their parents, wives with their husbands, and the whole society morally and physically degraded to support the aristocracies of wealth and title. But he was not himself of it. A skilled craftsman and member of an ancient' and exclusive trade union, he had no first-hand knowledge of industrial England, with its turbulent population of miners and cotton operatives, swept together, without traditions or organization, m towns which were little better than mining camps. To that as yet undisciplined force, which, led by 0 Connor, snatched - the Chartist movement after 1839 out of the hands of London, and carried it forward on a wave of misery and violence to its ignominious collapse, Lovett, by tempera¬ ment a student and a teacher, made little appeal. Like Sir Charles Napier,2 the most discerning and most chivalrous of enemies, who as general in charge of the northern com¬ mand averted a collision compared with which Peterloo

1 Life and Struggles, pp. 116-241, App. A and B.

2 W. F. P. Napier, Life and Opinions of Sir G. J.N apier, Voi. li.

via would have been child’s play, he regarded the “ physical force men ” as the worst enemies of his cause. But, unlike Napier, he does not seem to have understood the tempest of despair and indignation which responded to the denuncia¬ tions of Bull and Stephen and Benbow, which prompted the midnight drillings on the moois, raised barricades in Staffordshire, and at Ashton-under-Lyne burst into the cry “ 0 ye tyrants, think you that your mills will stand V’1 Hence, though his detestation of the egomania of the great charlatan O’Connor is intelligible enough, he perhaps exaggerates the mischief for which O’Connor was personally responsible, because he had not grasped the conditions which made him a power.

Apart from these limitations there are several gaps in Lovett’s story. His account of the first Chartist Convention is disappointingly meagre. Circumstances prevented him from having continuous and direct knowledge of the move¬ ment after 1839. From August of that year to July, 1840, he was, much to his credit, in prison. His description of Frost’s rebellion in Wales, a mysterious episode which gave rise to the wildest theories and to endless recrimination, is, therefore, unreliable. When he returned to London, in 1840, he was marked down for destruction by O’Connor, into whose hands the leadership of the movement had passed, and who, though not himself a very valiant warrior, would allow no compromise with the “ moral force humbugs.” He founded a new organization, “ the National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Social and Political Improvement of the People,” to carry on the agitation for the Charter, and attended on behalf of it the abortive Complete Suffrage Conference which was sum¬ moned by Sturge in 1842 in the hope of uniting reformers both of the working and of the middle classes. But the main organ of the Chartist movement, such as it now was, was the National Charter Association, of which he had refused to become a member, and that Association was controlled by O’Connor. Lovett continued to be prolific of organiza¬ tions and an indefatigable pamphleteer. After his release 1 Quoted Hovell, op. cit.f p. 158.

IX from prison lie helped to found not only the National Association, hut societies called the “ Democratic Friends of all Nations,”1 and “the People’s League,”2 and pro¬ jected a “ General Association of Progress.”3 Addresses and manifestos poured from him. His last petition to Parliament, proposing to establish “ a Higher Intellectual and Moral Standard for Members of Parliament,”4 was inspired, appropriately enough, by the blunders of the Crimean campaign, and suggests that even in old age he retained the faith which can move mountains. Apart from this he took no part in politics after 1850. His old colleagues drifted off into other spheres of activity, Vincent into temperance reform, Cooper into preaching. Lovett, as his book shows, had always been an enthusiast for educa¬ tion, and deserves the name of “the Chartist Schoolmaster far more than Bronterre O’Brien, to whom 0 Connor applied it. From 1850 to 1877 education was his main interest, and his principal activity was in connection with the school established by the National Association.

While Lovett’s book contains only a fragmentary account of the later years of the Chartist movement, the picture which it gives of its genesis and earlier development is invaluable. During the creative period, when doctrine was being formulated and methods thought out, the London Working Men’s Association was the centre of Chartism, and Lovett was the centre of the Association. From the first there was a double strand in Chartism. On the surface it was a continuation of the demand for the reform of Parliament as a step towards political democracy, which had been advanced by Wilkes and Cartwright in the seventies of the previous century, which had been regarded with indulgence by some of the Whigs in the days of calm before the deluge, which had been reduced to a rational and systematic theory by the Utilitarians, and had been at once met and disappointed by the Reform Act of 1832. Like the fathers of the movement fifty years before, the Chartists demanded manhood — Lovett himself believed in

X adult-suffrage and annual parliaments : their additions were the four other points, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, payment of members and abolition of a proper qualification.1 It was characteristically English that what afterwards became a semi-revolutionary movement on the part of the working classes, of whom none had a vote and almost all appeared to most members of Parlia¬ ment a band of ragged ruffians, should pour its grievances into the parliamentary mould. Unfortunately it was hardly less characteristic that of the powers of this world hardly one had the wit to thank Heaven for the inveterate constitutionalism of his fellow-countrymen.

Though the Charter was political, Chartism was largely economic. It was, as Marx pointed out, the entry in politics, not merely of a new party, but of a new class. The English counterpart of the continental revolutions of 1848, it was at once the last movement which drew its concep¬ tions and phraseology from the inexhaustible armoury of the French Revolution, and the first political attack upon the social order which had emerged from the growth of capitalist industry. The declaration that “ all men are bom equally free, and have certain natural and inalienable rights,” marched hand in hand with the doctrine that “ Labour is the source of all wealth.”2 Capitalism upon a large scale and in a highly concentrated form was still sufficiently novel in the thirties to seem not only repugnant but unstable. Among the hand-loom weavers who were starving then, there were men who could remember a period in their youth when they had been something of the village aristocracy described by Bamford,3 and who were the more ready on that account to become the victims of O’Connor’s fantastic land scheme. It was the revolt against capitalism which made the magic of Chartism to thousands of men Avho were too wretched to be willing to subordinate the passion for economic change to the single issue of political reform. Behind it lay two generations of social misery

1 But Cartwright had advocated two of these, viz. payment of members and vote by ballot. 2 Life and Struggles, p. 74.

3 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical.

XI and thirty years of economic discussion, which had per¬ colated into the mind of the working classes partly through popular papers, such as the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Co-Operative Magazine, partly through the teaching of the early English socialists, Thompson, Hodgskin, Gray, and above all, Robert Owen. The essence of Chartism was. in fact, an attempt to make possible a social revolution by the overthrow of the political oligarchy.

These two objects were not incompatible. But in an age when the mass of the working classes were without either organisation or political experience, they were not easily pursued together. The struggle between the con¬ flicting interests of economic reform and political democracy, corresponding as it did to a difference in outlook between north and south, and to the rival policies of revolution and persuasion, ultimately broke up the movement. The achievement of Lovett and of the organization which he founded was to create an Independent Labour Party which aimed at both, but which aimed first at political democracy. It was, as Place said, “ the first time that the desire for reform has been moved by the working people, and carried upwards.” 1 The London Working Men’s Association was established in June, 1836, as the result of two great disillusionments, the Reform Act of 1832 and the collapse of the syndicalist movement led by Owen in 1834. The first had taught it to be independent of middle-class leaders. “ The masses, in their political organizations,” writes Lovett, “ were taught to look up to great men (or to men professing greatness) rather than to great principles. We wished, therefore, to establish a political school of self-instruction among them, in which they should accustom themselves to examine great social and political principles, and by their publicity and free discussion help to form a sound and healthful public opinion throughout the country .” 2 The failure of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union had at once left an opening for a political movement, and emphasized the necessity of making the basis political

1 Wallas, Life of Francis Place, p. 368.

2 Life and Struggles, p. 94.

xii LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF

reforms upon which the working classes agreed rather than social theories upon which they differed. Lovett himself, though in later life he repudiated the ambiguous name of socialist, was in his youth a disciple of Owen, and believed “ that the gradual accumulation of capital by these means (i.e. co-operation) would enable the working classes to form themselves into joint-stock associations of labour, by which (with industry, skill and knowledge) they might ultimately have the trade, manufactures and commerce of the country in their own hands.” 1 But, on the principle of first things first, he was resolute that the London Working Men’s Association should concentrate its energy upon securing political reform. It was not to be “ led away by promises of repealing the detested Poor Law, or any of the other infamous laws which Whig and Tory have united to enact, and to laud their excellence, unless the promise be accompanied by the pledge of universal suffrage, and all the other great essentials of self-govern¬ ment.” 2 “ They had read and admired,” wrote Lovett of of a group which met in 1831 and later supplied the London Working Men’s Association with some of its members, “ the writings of Robert Owen, Peter (sic) Thompson, Morgan, Gray and others, and resolved to be instrumental to the extent of their means and abilities in spreading a knowledge of these works throughout the country. They intended, however, to avoid the course taken by Robert Owen. He had all along, though in his mild manner, condemned the radical reformers, believing, as he did, that reform was to be effected solely on his plan. The radical reformers of the working classes, believing that his plan could only be carried out when the reforms they sought had been accomplished . . . resolved to take up such part of his system as they believed would be appreciated by the working classes, and be the means of uniting them for specific purposes.” 3

The London Working Men’s Association was, even at its zenith, an extremely small body. The total number of

3 Wallas, Life of Francis Place, pp. 269-70

Xlll members admitted between June, 1836, and 1839, was only 279. 1 Its objects, which are set out by Lovett on pp. 94-95 of his Life and Struggles,- were to agitate for parliamentary reform, for the freedom of the Press, and for the creation of a national system of education, and to collect and publish information upon social and industrial questions. Its method was education and propaganda. At a later stage in its career the character and policy of the movement started by the Association were transformed by the very success of its earlier efforts. From the early months of 1837 onwards it employed “missionaries,” who, by the end of the year, had founded over one hundred daughter associations in different parts of the country. The publica¬ tion of the People’s Charter in June, 1837, enormously increased its prestige and multiplied its adherents. Chartism was taken up by veteran agitators like Benbow, who could look back to the days of the Hampden Clubs and Peterloo, and politicians in search of a platform like Beaumont and O’Connor. The agitations against factory slavery and the detested new Poor Law swelled the main movement and cast their own sombre colour upon it. But for the first three years of its existence the policy pursued by the London Working Men’s Association had nothing in common with the orgy of mob oratory in which Chartism finally collapsed. Its appeal was to public opinion : its instrument argument and persuasion — “ to publish their views and sentiments in such form and manner as shall best serve to create a moral, reflecting, yet energetic public opinion ; so as eventually to lead to a gradual improvement in the condition of the working classes, without violence or commotion.” 2 Lovett’s policy of working for gradual reform through the pressure of public opinion was, of course, no novehy. But it was in striking contrast both with Owen’s apocalypse of a new moral world, which was to descend upon mankind “ like a thief in the night,” and with the whirlwind campaign of sterile denunciation and fantastic promises, which fed the vanity of O’Connor. Neither economic circumstances nor the attitude of the ruling classes made Lovett’s course 1 Hovell, op. cit., p. 62. 2 Life and Struggles, p. 95.

XIV easy. At a time when whole districts lived on the edge of starvation, and when the Government seized every oppor¬ tunity to crush peaceful attempts at organization, the restraint and foresight needed to concentrate on slowly won political changes, which, in turn, could only very slowly bring social amelioration, were qualities not easily to be maintained. Revolt seemed a more direct route than persuasion. “ Propose to any working man,” wrote Place, a veteran in popular movements, in 1835, the year before the foundation of the London Working Men’s Associa¬ tion, “ any great measure affecting the whole body, and he immediately asks himself the question, What am I to get by it ? meaning, What at the moment am I to have in my hand or in my pocket ? ... He has not the heart to do anything even for his own advantage, if that advantage be remote, and he has no desire to stir himself for the advantage of other persons.” 1

Lovett had no illusions as to the character and policy of the Government. He had been dogged by its spies, had seen the savage onslaught upon trade unions from Dorset¬ shire to Glasgow, and knew that it at once hated and feared any symptom of independent political activity, even of independent thought, among the working classes. In view of the preparations for rebellion made by influential men of the middle classes in 1832, he was justified in regarding with some impatience their sanctimonious denunciation of rebels impelled by far graver causes in 1839. In language reminiscent of the Whig doctrine that a breach of the original contract absolves men from the duties of obedience, he argued that “ when an attempt is made to destroy representative rights, the only existing bond of allegiance, the only power through which laws can be justly enforced, is broken, and the time has arrived when society is resolved into its original elements.”2 Tireless in preaching modera¬ tion and patience, he was prepared to consider in the last resort what came to be called “ ulterior measures.” It was he who drafted the manifesto of 1839, submitting to the decision of public meetings the question whether Chartists 1 Wallas, op. cit., pp. 370-1. 2 Life and Struggles, p. 111.

XV should support “ the sacred month,” and whether “ accord¬ ing to their old constitutional right . . . they have prepared themselves with the arms of freemen to defend the laws and constitutional privileges their ancestors bequeathed to them.”1 But he regarded violence as the last weapon of defence, not as part of his political offensive. For the hare-brained rhetoric which made violence certain of occurrence and futile when it occurred, for the policy of coquetting with revolution while appealing, at the same time, to the spirit of the constitution, and of coming, to quote a characteristic specimen of O’Connor’s oratory, “ morally into collision ” with the Government, he had all the contempt of the genuine craftsmen for the antics of the charlatan. Down to the end he believed that one principal cause of the defeat of Chartism was that the advocates of physical force had driven all waverers on to the side of reaction. “ Whatever is gained in England by force, by force must be sustained ; but whatever springs from knowledge and justice will sustain itself.”2 It was necessary to choose whether to appeal to goodwill and reason, or to organize an insurrection, the fate of which it did not need the military experience of Napier to foretell. He chose the former.

The methods of the London Working Men’s Association were determined by his choice. “ Such Associations,” said Place, to whom Lovett owed much, and who attended the Sunday meetings of the Association in 1837, “ can only succeed by long-continued, steady, patient, liberal conduct, accepting and using every kind of assistance which may at any time and in every way be available, making no absurd pretensions to anything, and especially not to superior wisdom and honesty, but acting with becoming modesty, but with indomitable perseverance.”3 During the first three years of its existence, the Association carried out Place’s programme. Secrecy was to be eschewed. There was to be no talk of violence. Middle-class support, when¬ ever possible, was to be enlisted. Such use as possible was

1 Life and Struggles, pp. 218-19. 2 Ibid., p. 197.

3 Wallas, op. cit., p. 370.

XVI made of the not very reliable group of radical members of Parliament. The committee appointed to draft tbe Bill embodying the Charter included, with six members of the Association, O’Connor, Roebuck, Leader, Handley, Thomp¬ son and Crawford.1 The presentation of the Petition of 1839 was entrusted to Attwood. The choice was un¬ fortunate. Every war and every period of social crisis seems to produce strange doctrine as to currency. Attwood was the leading prophet of the particular heresy which flourished in the thirties. For the sake of it he had laboured in Birmingham for the Reform Bill of 1832. Por the sake of it he was prepared to swallow the Charter. He regarded universal suffrage as a milestone on the stony way to the shining goal of universal paper. And he introduced the Petition to the House of Commons in a speech which, if any hope of reasonable consideration being given it by the House had existed, was calculated to extinguish it for ever.2

In the meantime the Association laboured to influence public opinion by a stream of reports, addresses and manifestos setting out the working class point of view as to contemporary political and social questions. Of the petitions and addresses which are printed in the following pages some seventeen were issued by the London Working Men’s Association and appeared in the three years between June, 1836, and August, 1839. The majority of the remainder emanated from the National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, which was founded by Lovett in 1840, soon after his release from prison. The range of subjects covered by them is remarkable. They give a broad and generous interpretation to the political aspira¬ tions of labour, and are singularly free from the exclusive preoccupation with immediate economic issues of which popular movements are often accused. In addition to the agitation for the reform of the franchise, which was its main work, and the case for which it set out in the pamphlet,

1 Life and Struggles, pp. 114-17.

2 But he tried to keep paper out of it, see Hovell, op, cit,, pp. 160-1.

XVII the Totten House of Commons,”1 it produced reports on the condition of the silk weavers of Spitalfields and on education.2 It issued a manifesto defining the attitude of the Chartists to the agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws, in which, without imputing the motives afterwards ascribed by some Chartists to the manufacturing and commercial interests behind the free trade agitation, it combated the suggestion that an alteration of the tariff was more important than the enfranchisement of the work’ ing classes.3 In 1837, when the disorder accompanying a strike of cotton spinners in Glasgow led to the outrageous sentence of seven years transportation being passed on certain members of the union, and to the appointment by the Government of a Select Committee to inquire into the whole subject of trade unionism, the Association undertook much the same part as had been played by Place and Hume in 1824 and 1825. It appointed a Trade Combina¬ tion Committee, arranged with societies to send witneses, issued an “ Address to the working classes in reply to the attacks made on trade unions,” and generally attempted, in 1837 a somewhat forlorn hope, to secure that the unions had fair play.4

From the beginning the Association claimed the right of the working classes to be heard on international and colonial affairs. It addressed a manifesto to the working classes of Belgium on the occasion of the imprisonment of Jacob Katz,5 petitioned Parliament on behalf of Canada against the policy of coercion adopted by Russell,6 sent an address of sympathy to the Canadian people, 7 and pub¬ lished manifestos to the working classes of Europe,8 to the Precursor Society of Ireland, and to the Irish people.9 The National Association of the United Kingdom, which after 1840 did the work formerly done by the London Working Men’s Association, was almost equally prolific. It not

1 Life and Struggles, pp. 102-4 2 Ibid., pp. 138-50.

b xviii LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF

only produced a number of manifestos on its special subject of Parliamentary Reform, but continued the international tradition of the older organization. It denounced the reception of the Czar, on the occasion of his visit to England in 1 844, 1 issued in the same year an “ address to the working classes of France on the subject of War,”2 and in 1846, when feeling ran high on the question of the Oregon boundary, published “ an address to the working classes of America on the war spirit sought to be created between the two countries.”3 In 1848, when the French Revolution had revived for a moment the golden dreams of 1789, it sent a congratulatory address to the French, urging them to prepare themselves “ intellectually and morally for the coming age of freedom, peace, and brotherhood.”4

These manifestos, the majority of which were by Lovett, contain in epitome the philosophy of Chartism. Their fundamental ideas are four.

(1) Social evils are the consequence of social institutions, and can be removed by altering them. “ When we investi¬ gate the origin of pauperism, ignorance, misery and crime we may easily trace the black catalogue to exclusive legisla¬ tion.”5 The speculations of the nineteenth century upon the causes of economic misery had begun with the debate between Malthus and Godwin, and in one guise or another most subsequent thought marches under one or other of those rival banners. The argument that it is the natural tendency of population to press upon the means of sub¬ sistence had pacified uneasy consciences among the middle classes with the assurance that the evils of society were the work of nature, not of man, and after 1850, when economic fatalism had been reinforced by the triumphant gospel of evolution, the mind of labour for a time submitted to that creed. From 1820 to 1850 the leaders of working class thought were in revolt against it. They drew their weapons from the forgotten armoury of pre-Marxian Socialism. Godwin, who explained to young men in 1793 the nature

1 Life and Struggles, pp., 186-94, and pp. 195-203.

XIX of the new force which was overthrowing thrones and castles in France, and whose “Political Justice” was re¬ printed in 1843, at the height of the Chartist movement, and Owen, who had found in Godwin a confirmation of his own doctrine of the all-importance of environment, had taught them that character is formed, not by man, but for man, that in a world where the external order was just and reason allowed full play he would progress swiftly towards perfection, and that there was no force within him, no original sin or intractable remnant of the tiger or ape to drag him down. At the end of the eighteenth century Paine and Spence had turned on the English system of land tenure criticism which Chartists used in the thirties and forties. A host of critics of capitalism, from Charles Hall, whose Effects of Civilisation appeared in 1805, to Hodgskin, who published his Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital in 1825, had pointed the antithesis between increasing wealth and increasing poverty. Colquhoun, the first statistician of modern capitalism, and Ricardo, the Balaam of economic science, whose curious fate it was to supply the corner-stone to doctrines which he detested, by insisting that labour is the source of all wealth had given a new sting to the inevitable question “ Why, then, is the labourer poor ? ” Above all, Owen had supplied reformers with an ideal for which to work, the Co-operative Commonwealth.1