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most revolting were repealed.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
'universal suffrage,' at least such as it now exists in Germany; the
Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates 'equal electoral
districts'--on the whole not more unequal than those of Germany;
'payment of members,' and shorter, if not actually 'annual
Parliaments,' are visibly looming in the distance--and yet there are
people who say that Chartism is dead.

"The Revolution of 1848, not less than many of its predecessors, has
had strange bedfellows and successors. The very people who put it
down have become, as Karl Marx used to say, its testamentary
executors. Louis Napoleon had to create an independent and united
Italy, Bismarck had to revolutionise Germany and to restore Hungarian
independence, and the English manufacturers had to enact the People's
Charter.

"For England, the effects of this domination of the manufacturing
capitalists were at first startling. Trade revived and extended to a
degree unheard of even in this cradle of modern industry; the previous
astounding creations of steam and machinery dwindled into nothing
compared with the immense mass of productions of the twenty years from
1850 to 1870, with the overwhelming figures of exports and imports, of
wealth accumulated in the hands of capitalists and of human working
power concentrated in the