During the administration of Sir Robert Peel there was another agitation
which at one time threatened serious consequences, but as it came to
nothing it has not the historical importance of the Anti-Corn-Law
League. It was a fanatical uprising of the lower classes to obtain still
greater political privileges, led by extreme radicals, of whom Mr.
Feargus O'Connor was the most prominent leader, and Mr. Henry Vincent
was the most popular speaker. The centre of this movement was not
Manchester, but Birmingham. The operatives of Manchester wanted cheaper
bread; those of Birmingham wanted an extension of the franchise: and as
Lord John Russell had opposed the re-opening of the reform question, the
radicals were both disappointed and infuriated. The original leaders of
parliamentary reform had no sympathy with such a rabble as now clamored
for extended reform. They demanded universal suffrage, annual
Parliaments, vote by ballot, abolition of property qualifications,
payment of members of Parliament, and the division of the country into
equal electoral districts. These were the six points of the people's
charter,--not absurd to the eyes of Americans, but utterly out of the
question in such an aristocratic country as England, and advocated only
by the working-classes and their incendiary leaders. Discontent and
misery were the chief causes of the movement, which was managed without
ability. The agitation began in 1836 and continued to 1848. At first the
government allowed it, so far as it was confined to meetings, speeches,
and the circulation of tracts,--knowing full well that, as it made no
appeal to the influential and intelligent classes, it would soon expend
itself. I was lecturing at the time in Birmingham, and the movement
excited contempt rather than alarm among the people I met. I heard
Vincent two or three times in his chapel,--for I believe he was educated
as a dissenting minister of some sort,--but his eloquence made no
impression upon me; it was clever and fluent enough, but shallow and
frothy. At last he was foolishly arrested by the government, who had