great object with that strong common sense and that contempt for
traditional principles which has ever distinguished them from their
more narrow-minded compeers on the Continent. Chartism was dying out.
The revival of commercial prosperity, natural after the revulsion of
1847 had spent itself, was put down altogether to the credit of Free
Trade. Both these circumstances had turned the English working-class,
politically, into the tail of the 'great Liberal party,' the party led
by the manufacturers. This advantage, once gained, had to be
perpetuated. And the manufacturing capitalists, from the Chartist
opposition, not to Free Trade, but to the transformation of Free Trade
into the one vital national question, had learnt, and were learning
more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and
political power over the nation except by the help of the
working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between
both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all
manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their
expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated.
Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself,
were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions,
and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst
the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious
up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very
useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their
own time. Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower
level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the
most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid 'People's
Charter' actually became the political programme of the very
manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. 'The Abolition of the
Property Qualification' and 'Vote by Ballot' are now the law of the
land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to