Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/237

 The fidelity of the rank and file was at once the strength and weakness of the movement. It was given to good and bad leaders with equal indiscriminateness, and produced an unprecedented amount of self-deception, which later so cruelly avenged itself.

These diversities of aims and outlook made effective co-operation in revolutionary action impossible. They were, in fact, the same fundamental divergencies of policy which had been, as we have seen, reflected in the Convention, which swayed constantly between the two extremes of French revolutionary and English middle-class conceptions of political agitation. One section was for armed insurrection, and looked upon the Convention as a provisional government—a Committee of Public Safety in posse; another conceived it as a great agitating body, like the Anti-Corn Law League conferences; another, of which O'Connor was typical, was content to use the threats of the one and the methods of the other. To Lovett the Convention must have been a great tragedy—a long torture which his imprisonment brought to a welcome end. The futile boastings of would-be Marats and self-styled Robespierres, and the cowardly shufflings of irresolute babblers, who feared imprisonment more than they respected their own principles, must have thoroughly sickened him. It is not to be supposed that the delegates were generally cowards and rogues. The majority were quite sincere men, who in good faith had thoroughly deceived themselves and their followers, but who had not the moral courage to face the real facts, when they were finally undeceived, nor the mental dexterity of O'Brien and O'Connor to withdraw themselves from a false position without loss of prestige. On every material point the would-be insurrectionary leaders were wrong: they underestimated the strength of the Government and the influence of the middle classes, strengthened as these were by the upper strata of working people; they underrated the military forces opposed to them; but most of all, they attributed to English people that thoroughgoing lawlessness which had been inculcated in the French by generations of arbitrary government. For even Stephens thought it wrong to overturn a Government by arms, though it was right to oppose a bad law. According to O'Brien it was right to knock a policeman on the head, but wrong to destroy property.