utionary courage, and do not shun a rain of bullets. And when an
unarmed multitude, without a precise aim common to them all, are held in
check in a shut-off market-place, whose outlets are guarded by a couple
of policemen and dragoons, as happened in 1842, this by no means proves a
want of courage. On the contrary, the multitude would have stirred quite
as little if the servants of public (_i.e_., of the bourgeois) order had
not been present. Where the working-people have a specific end in view,
they show courage enough; as, for instance, in the attack upon Birley's
mill, which had later to be protected by artillery.

In this connection, a word or two as to the respect for the law in
England. True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own
composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and
protection. He knows that, even if an individual law should injure him,
the whole fabric protects his interests; and more than all, the sanctity
of the law, the sacredness of order as established by the active will of
one part of society, and the passive acceptance of the other, is the
strongest support of his social position. Because the English bourgeois
finds himself reproduced in his law, as he does in his God, the
policeman's truncheon which, in a certain measure, is his own club, has
for him a wonderfully soothing power. But for the working-man quite
otherwise! The working-man knows too well, has learned from too
oft-repeated experience, that the law is a rod which the bourgeois has
prepared for him; and when he is not compelled to do so, he never appeals
to the law. It is ridiculous to assert that the English working-man
fears the police, when every week in Manchester policemen are beaten, and
last year an attempt was made to storm a station-house secured by iron
doors and shutters. The power of the police in the turnout of 1842 lay,
as I have already said, in the want of a clearly defined object on the
part of the working-men themselves.

Since the working-men do not respect the law, but simply submit to its
power when they cannot change it, it is most natural that they should at
least propose alterations in it, that they should wish to put a
proletarian law in the place of the legal fabric of the bourgeoisie. This
proposed law is the People's Charter, which in form is purely political,
and demands a democratic basis for the House of Commons. Chartism is the
compact form of their opposition