Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/353

 differed among themselves. Some desired the erection of an autocratic and Jacobinical state which would dragoon the individual into progress on socialist lines. Others, even among those who shared the socialist ideal, were as suspicious of state control as the Benthamites or as Robert Owen, and believed that their goal could best be attained by free voluntary association. Another school, headed by Lovett, was brought by the rude teaching of experience to modify its original abstract doctrine in the direction of a practical compromising individualism. Its final faith was that all would be well when positive restraint on freedom was removed, and when the spread of popular education, organised by private associations, untrammelled by state or clerical interference, had been secured. While all these varied types looked to the future, there were many Chartists who gazed back with such longing to a mythical golden age that they were not so much conservative as reactionary. Men like Joseph Stephens of Ashton, the Tory-Protectionist, the ally of Oastler and Sadler, made a much more direct appeal to the industrial North than did Jacobins like O'Brien and Harney. O'Connor himself in his sincerer moments was much more akin to Stephens than to the revolutionary crew which he inspired to battle. Thus Chartism represented not one but many social ideals. Two essentially divergent Chartist types struggled unhappily in a single Chartist organisation.

Much has been written about the various schools of Chartism. There have been many superficial attempts to divide Chartists, both in their own time and later, into the partisans of moral and physical force. But the dispute between O'Connor and the physical force men was a mere difference as to method; it did not touch the fundamental problem of the Chartist ideal; it corresponded to what is found in one shape or another in the history of every revolution. Moreover, there was little sincerity in the physical force party. To a large section of it, notably to the Birmingham Political Union, the appeal to arms was a game of bluff calculated to terrorise the governing classes into submission. To another section it was even less than this; it was simply a blatant device to attract attention. There was little depth then in the physical force cry. Even more superficial than the division between the champions of moral and physical arms is the attempt to split up Chartism into schools, arising from the miserable personal rivalries that did so much to wreck the movement as a force in practical politics. The clearest