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THE TIMES
5 October 1855

Morning Chronicle.    George Routledge and Co., 3 Farringdon-street.
THE POEMS OF ERNEST JONES—In one vol., price 3s. 6d., cloth lettered.

HE BATTLE-DAY.  By ERNEST JONES.  This volume also contains—The Cost of Glory, The Peer's Story, Cries of the Nations, Leawood Hall, Plough and Loom, Echoes from Within.  "It is noble.  Byron could have envied.  Scott could have applauded."—Walter Savage Landor to the Author.   "There is real poetry in this volume Fancies such as a poet of Arcady would bring together.  Nothing is strained, nothing exaggerated.  What we have said and quoted will send many of our readers in search of 'The Battle-day.'—The Athenæum.   "A feast of pleasing variety.  The battle pulses with living and fiery action.  Society needs to be told in oft-repeated tones what Mr. Ernest Jones has told it.  Scores of persons will derive nurture from and pleasedly listen to his minstrelsey."—The Critic.   "Persons who expect that the great Chartist leader will infuse low Radical ideas in low Radical fashion into his verses will find themselves mistaken.  He sometimes introduces the wretchedness of the poor and the oppression of the rich, but his language is not stronger than that of novelists or other poets upon the same theme."—The Spectator.   "Poetry in the strictest sense of the term—'Thoughts that breath and words that burn.'"—The Observer.   "He has a rich imagination; his diction is sparkling, and at the same time chaste; his ideas are lofty, and he throws around them a warm and ever gorgeous colouring.  Surely true poetry."—The Illustrated London News.   "A genuine poet.  He must ever be read with untiring pleasure.  In these poems he is not more democratic than Tennyson, and not more socialistic  than Lord John Manners.  The story is admirable told, intensely poetic.  We take leave of it with cordial commendation."—Tait's Magazine.   "The beautiful volume of poems before us is a real song to both the old world and the new."—New York Citizen.   "Mr. Ernest Jones is a man of great and varied talents.  His new volume of poems abounds in striking scenes, and bears the sign and sigil of genius.  Full of poetic fancy and manly sentiment."—The Morning Post.   "One of the most charming things we have ever read.  Lines that carry us away with their fieriness and beauty.  Something more than good.  We have no hesitation in heartily recommending this volume of poems."—The Morning Advertiser.

London, Geo. Routledge and Co., Farringdon-street.

 
NEW YORK TIMES
MARCH 1, 1855.

Chartism—What it is.

 Parliamentary Reform, as carried in 1832 by a compromise—the Tory Peers abstaining from voting against it, at the special request of WILLIAM IV.—was not such a full measure of improvement as the British public expected, desired, or were entitled to.  For over forty years, (that is, from the time when (WILLIAM PITT, its early advocate, had turned against it,) the Tories lead earnestly resisted it.  During all that long recess, its supporters—nick-named Radicals, because they went for Radical Reform, or were under a cloud—were voted factious, and looked on so coldly by people in power that even CANNING himself, though he had latterly and gradually so liberalized his opinions that his former colleagues made it a pretext for separating from him when he became Premier, resisted Parliamentary Reform to his dying day.  After two years of exciting legislative and popular strife, which sometimes verged on Revolution, it was carried by the Whigs.  But their enrichment—partly owing to concessions engrafted on it to weaken Tory opposition, partly to an oligarchic dread of giving too much power to the masses—was but a half-measure, after all.

    From the very first, the People (who had swelled the cuckoo-cry of "The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill!") were discontented with it.  True, it abolished certain pocket-boroughs over which Tory influence had established a mastery, through property.  But it perpetuated certain Whig Peers and rich Commoners as masters of, and dictators in, other rotten boroughs.  The actual gain to the People was that such great towns, with vast population, as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, (and a few more,) obtained the privilege of returning members to Parliament.  The Bill, once passed, was declared by the Whigs in office to be "a final measure;" and popular contempt fixed upon Lord JOHN RUSSELL, official mouth-piece of that declaration, the adhesive sobriquet of "Lord John Finality."

    Ever since—that is, for the last twenty-three years—the People had been pertinacious in demanding the reform of the Reform Bill, and successive Governments, Whig as well as Tory, have constantly been dodging away even from the mere discussion of the demand.  Discontent was engendered, and became the parent of Chartism.  As a popular movement, Chartism became as unfashionable as Radicalism had been in "the good old times."

    What is Chartism?  It means the organization of a party, determined to work out their Charter, (or new Bill of Rights,) to the improvement and extension of the national representation, so that every man among the population, of proper age, should have a voice, really and truly, in their own House of Commons.  As the name denotes, the members of that branch of the nation's legislature should exclusively be drawn from the people—from the Commons or Commonalty of the British Islands.  But at present every other member of that House is a Peer's son or near relative—an official, a pensioner, or a person holding some situation of profit under the Crown, and more or less subject to Ministerial influence.  Out of the present 658 members of Parliament, 270 are Peers' sons, heirs-presumptive, grandsons, brothers, nephews, sons-in-law, cousins, or near connections, and fully three-fourths of these invariably vote in favor of the Aristocracy and against the People.  Add pensioners, sinecurists, and persons holding naval or military rank, and the full tale of 500 will be made up, leaving no more than the odd 155 real representatives of "the Commons of Great Britain and Ireland."

    It may be cited, as a curious and striking illustration of John Bull's hereditary, almost innate, subserviency to whatever is connected with the Nobility, that Chartism has never gone to the length of demanding the exclusion of Peers' relatives from the House of Commons—although, without such exclusion, the Branch of the British Legislature never can truly represent the People.  The discontented have simply and solely gone for the reform of the more obvious abuses.

    The Charter, for which the objector; to this state of things contend, contains what am technically called the Five Points. They are classed as follows:
 

    At present, by a special enactment, no Parliament can last longer than seven years.  The Prime Minister can dissolve it at any period within this time; but on the average, owing to changes of the Administration, no Parliament, during the last half century, has sat for more than three years.

    Open voting is the present rule at the elections.  The ballot has been loudly demanded as a protection to voters, and, in the House of Commons itself, a large number, though not a majority of the members, have declared themselves in favor of it.

    The third demand is Universal Suffrage—that every man who has attained the age of twenty-one shall have a vote for the election of a representative in Parliament.  At present, in the British Islands, the possession of a certain amount of property, or the tenancy of land or houses, not beneath a certain income, qualifies a man to vote.  This restriction acts unjustly, because unequally—to say nothing of the anomaly of the vote actually being for the property, not for the man.  For example, the metropolitan County of England, (Middlesex,) containing a population of 2,000,000, has less than 15,000 electors, who return two members—exactly the same number returned for the small County of Rutland, by 1,800 electors, out of 22,983 inhabitants.  Again, the petty borough of Honiton, with 3,427 inhabitants, (out of whom only 273 are qualified to vote) seeds two members to Parliament, while Salford, adjoining the city of Manchester, has only one member returned by 2,950 electors, out of 85,108 inhabitants.  Chartism seeks to amend this injustice and inconsistency, by adapting Parliamentary representation to population.

    The necessity for each member having a property qualification is another grievance which Chartism would fain remove.  In Scotland alone, may a member be returned to Parliament without being able to show, on oath, that he possesses £600 a year, if he is to represent a county, and £300 a year if he is to sit for a city or borough.  But the exception, in favor of Scotland, is very small, there being only 53 members for the whole of that country, while there are 605 for England, Wales and Ireland.  Thus, should any constituency in these parts of the United Kingdom unanimously elect, as their Parliamentary representative, a man of character, talent and principle, in whom they place unbounded confidence, he cannot take his seat in the House of Commons, unless he shows that he possesses £600 a year, if returned for a county, and half that annual income if for a city or borough.  True it is, that even in the present Parliament, there are several members who really do not own an acre of land.  How, then, have they shown the property qualification?  Have they deceived the Legislature?  Have they sworn falsely?  No.  They have evaded perjury and taken their seats on a nominal qualification.  It is easy enough for a man to obtain a legal grant of a fictitious qualification.  If he thinks he has a chance of being elected, the party to which he belongs will easily procure him a rent-charge for the requisite amount on the property of some landowner on the same side of politics—the parchment conveyance never leaves the party who grants it—the candidate, however, can swear that he is legally possessed of the property it seems to grant.  Thus, several gentlemen enter Parliament, from time to time, on false pretences,—in plain words, their first action is as near a fraud on the Legislature as wicked ingenuity can frame.  Chartism would wholly abolish the property qualification, and allow a poor man, if duly elected, to take his seat in the House of Commons.

    The last aim of Chartism is to return to the ancient practice, (it prevailed as late as the time of Charles I.,) of allowing subsistence money to each member of Parliament—precisely as is done in America in the case of the National Legislature at Washington and the local Legislatures in the different States.

    Such are the Five Points of the Charter.  Here, where they very closely resemble our own system, they cannot he considered extravagant or impracticable.  In England they have long been unpopular with the middle class, who are more or less connected with, or cherish a slavish partiality for, the Aristocracy.  Above ally, the Whigs have been and are the bitter opponents, persecutors, and prosecutors of the Chartists.

    Chartism is essentially a popular movement.  Few men of property are connected with it.  In Parliament it has only one champion—THOMAS SLINGSBY DUNCOMBE, member for the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury.  There is a chance that, whenever the long deferred reform and extension of the Reform bill shall take place, the Tories (if then out of office,) may make a bold bid for popularity, by recognizing and adopting, against the do-little policy of the Whigs, the broad principles on which Chartism is based.  If they should do this, all the ultra-liberals will join with them.

    Is Chartism Republican?  By no means.  Mr. DUNCOMBE, its Parliamentary child and champion, has sworn allegiance to the British Monarch over and over again.  So did FEARGUS O'CONNOR.  Many of the Chartist leaders hold republican opinions.  ERNEST JONES, however, does not.  All that Chartism avowedly strives for is the amended Parliamentary representation of the people, on the basis we have here indicated.  That great failure, the Chartist monster meeting of April 10, 1848, though a demonstration in favor of the then recent revolution in France, was not a republican affair, either in speeches or action, as regards England.  Grant the Chartists what they claim—and that is not much, after all—and the concession, instead of weakening will strengthen the Monarchy in England.  In time, no doubt, it will abridge the usurped power of the Oligarchy.