Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/360

 Nor was the Chartist message for Britain only. The crude experiments of Chartism were watched at the time with keen interest by reformers from other lands, and have been studied in later days with much more curiosity in Germany, France, and America than in the island of its birth. It was the first genuinely democratic movement for social reform in modern history. It was the first stage of the many-tongued movement which transferred the bourgeois demand for liberty, equality, and fraternity from the purely political and legal to the social sphere, and was thus the unconscious parent of Continental social democracy. Hence its anticipation of the cry for a universal proletarian brotherhood which was to cut across national lines of division by organising the laborious classes of all lands in a great Confederation of all workers. The first efforts towards international brotherhood came from the Chartist leaders, and their methods were studied by the revolutionaries of the Continent and adapted to the conditions of their own lands. Thus a movement, which was only to a limited extent socialistic at home, became an important factor in the development of abstract socialism abroad. It is strange that in the evolution of Continental socialism the Chartists should have played a more direct part than did Robert Owen and the whole-hearted pioneers of the British socialist movement. It was from the Chartists and their forerunners that Marx and Lassalle learned much of the doctrine which was only to come back to these islands when its British origin had been forgotten. Europe is still full of "the war of classes" of the "international" and other disturbing tendencies that can in their beginnings be fathered on the Chartists. There is no need to discuss here the value of these points of view. However they may be judged, their importance cannot be gainsaid. As a result of such tendencies our own generation has seen a much nearer approach to the realisation of Chartist ideals than the age of our fathers. It need not be afraid to recognise that, with all their limitations, the Chartists have a real place in the development of modern English politics and society. In stumbling fashion they showed to the democracies of the West the path which in our own times they have first striven seriously to follow. Many of the problems which still vex the reformer were first attacked by the Chartist pioneers.