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 deriving their importance from sources which were not within themselves.

Sufficient, it is hoped, has been said in the course of the narrative as to the causes which brought the first phase of Chartism from so promising a beginning to so futile an end. In spite of the appearance of unity which the movement exhibited at the beginning of the year 1839, Chartism was then far less of a homogeneous thing than at any time in its career. It never again included such heterogeneous elements. The movement in 1839 was a tumultuous upheaval of a composite and wholly unorganised mass. It was a disease of the body politic rather than the growth of a new member of it. The various sections of Chartism had been brought together upon the common but negative basis of protest against things as they were, but the positive fundamentals of unity were lacking. The protest against the Poor Law Amendment Act, the protest against the existing currency theory, and the vaguer but much more violent protest against poverty and economic oppression, had all been swallowed up in the general but doctrinaire protest against political exclusion and monopoly, and it was under the last standard that the Chartist legions marched. But the fundamental differences of outlook remained. One section, and that the largest, had been brought up on a strong diet of unreasoning sentimentalism by Stephens and Oastler, and hungry and starving men had long been inured to insurrectionary suggestion by Vincent, O'Connor, O'Brien, and other demagogues. The rude, half-barbarian ignorance of the miners and colliers in the North of England and in South Wales, and the famishing desperation of the poor weavers and stockingers, made these men very susceptible to such inflammatory teaching. They fell nominally under the leadership of intellectuals like Lovett and his friends, and of impractical fanatics like Attwood. Both Lovett and Attwood had come forward to build up organised parties, but Lovett had a permanent and Attwood only a temporary purpose. Both ideals came to grief through the dog-like attachment of the great mass of their nominal followers to their own local leaders—Harney, Bussey, Frost, Fletcher, MacDouall, O'Connor, and the rest. This destroyed all real organisation, for the organisation was concentrated in the persons of the leaders. This was the "leadership" which Lovett so strongly condemned.