Fate, with that playfulness which some take too seriously or quite
amiss, set her queer stage as long ago as 1838 for the comedy of
certain lives, and rang up the curtain one dark evening on no fitter
scene than the high road from Gateshead to Durham. It was raining
hard, and a fresh breeze from the south-east swept a salt rime from
the North Sea across a tract of land as bare and bleak as the waters
of that grim ocean. A hard, cold land this, where the iron that has
filled men's purses has also entered their souls.

There had been a great meeting at Chester-le-Street of those who
were at this time beginning to be known as Chartists, and, the Act
having been lately passed that torchlight meetings were illegal,
this assembly had gathered by the light of a waning moon long since
hidden by the clouds. Amid the storm of wind and rain, orators had
expounded views as wild as the night itself, to which the hard-
visaged sons of Northumbria had listened with grunts of approval or
muttered words of discontent. A dangerous game to play--this
stirring up of the people's heart, and one that may at any moment
turn to the deepest earnest.

Few thought at this time that the movement awakening in the working
centres of the North and Midlands was destined to spread with the
strange rapidity of popular passion--to spread and live for a
decade. Few of the Chartists expected to see the fulfilment of half
of their desires. Yet, to-day, a moiety of the People's Charter has
been granted. These voices crying in the night demanded an extended
suffrage, vote by ballot, and freedom for rich and poor alike to sit
in Parliament. Within the scope of one reign these demands have
been granted.