ss
perfectly unequalled. The Chartists, who were all but innocent of
bringing about this uprising, who simply did what the bourgeoisie meant
to do when they made the most of their opportunity, were prosecuted and
convicted, while the bourgeoisie escaped without loss, and had, besides,
sold off its old stock of goods with advantage during the pause in work.

The fruit of the uprising was the decisive separation of the proletariat
from the bourgeoisie. The Chartists had not hitherto concealed their
determination to carry the Charter at all costs, even that of a
revolution; the bourgeoisie, which now perceived, all at once, the danger
with which any violent change threatened its position, refused to hear
anything further of physical force, and proposed to attain its end by
moral force, as though this were anything else than the direct or
indirect threat of physical force. This was one point of dissension,
though even this was removed later by the assertion of the Chartists (who
are at least as worthy of being believed as the bourgeoisie) that they,
too, refrained from appealing to physical force. The second point of
dissension and the main one, which brought Chartism to light in its
purity, was the repeal of the Corn Laws. In this the bourgeoisie was
directly interested, the proletariat not. The Chartists therefore
divided into two parties whose political programmes agreed literally, but
which were nevertheless thoroughly different and incapable of union. At
the Birmingham National Convention, in January, 1843, Sturge, the
representative of the Radical bourgeoisie, proposed that the name of the
Charter be omitted from the rules of the Chartist Association, nominally
because this name had become connected with recollections of violence
during the insurrection, a connection, by the way, which had existed for
years, and against which Mr. Sturge had hitherto advanced no objection.
The working-men refused to drop the name, and when Mr. Sturge was
outvoted, that worthy Quaker suddenly became loyal, betook himself out of
the hall, and founded a "Complete Suffrage Association" within the
Radical bourgeoisie. So repugnant had these recollections become to the
Jacobinical bourgeoisie, that he altered even the name Universal Suffrage
into the ridiculous title, Complete Suffrage. The working-men laughed at
him and quietly went their way.

From this moment Chartism was purely a working-man's cause freed from all
bourgeois ele