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 programme was only the first step towards the consummation of the Chartist ideal. The most optimistic of Chartist enthusiasts could hardly have believed that a new heaven and a new earth would be brought about by mere improvements in political machinery. Behind the restricted limits of avowed Chartist policy lay the vision of social regeneration that alone could remove the terrible evils against which Chartism had revolted. The latest phases of Chartism after 1848 fully recognised this fact, but the machine, which had failed at the moment to work out its political programme, could not be reconstructed by its discredited makers for the discharge of still more difficult tasks. Accordingly the social ideals of Chartism attained even a scantier degree of realisation through direct and immediate Chartist action than did its political programme.

In estimating the measure of success won, when the time was ripe, for the Chartist social programme we must apply the same tests that we have used in studying the execution of its political reforms. We must determine the extent to which its social and economic ideals have been taken up, and made practical, in the sixty years that have elapsed since the extinction of the movement. The real difficulty before us is, however, to discover what were the broader visions of the Chartists. They were well agreed in the diagnosis of the obvious social diseases of their time; they could unite in clamouring for the political reforms which were to give the mass of the people the means of saving themselves from their miseries. Beyond this, however, the Chartist consensus hardly went. It was impossible for them to focus a united body of opinion in favour of a single definite social ideal. The true failure of Chartism lay in its inability to perform this task. Political Chartism was a real though limited thing; social Chartism was a protest against what existed, not a reasoned policy to set up anything concrete in its place. Apart from machinery, Chartism was largely a passionate negation.

The Chartists need not be severely reproached for their lack of a positive policy. It was a fault which they shared with the chief English parties of the time. It was a limitation which was inevitable in the existing circumstances. The new Britain, in which we still live, had been slowly arising out of the old England which had preceded the Industrial Revolution. The forms and trappings of the old system still cumbered the ground, though the reasons for their existence were rapidly