A History of the Chartist Movement by Julius West '^
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DA 5'Sf ,7 uate Due APIH=fe»62BZ ^jotr3 m3--r? -pPE^m*^ CAT. NO. a3233 Cornell University Library DA 559.7.W51 1920 "'®J?nX.„S.',.«te. Chartist movement 3 1924 028 231 409 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028231409 r44ZUui /KeA^ A HISTORY OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT BY JULIUS WEST '^ WITH AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR BY J. G. SQUIRE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN GOMPANY 1920 n p\^oq4''i3 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frame and London. INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR JULIUS WEST was bom in St. Petersburg on March 21 (9th O.S.), 1891. In May, when he was two months old, he went to London, where from that time onwards, his father, Mr. Semon Rappoport, was correspondent for various Russian papers. At twelve years of age West entered the Haberdashers' (Aske's) School at Hampstead. He left school in 1906, and became a temporary clerk in the Board of Trade, assisting in the preparation of the report on the cost of living in Germany, issued in 1908. On leaving the Board of Trade, he became a junior clerk in the office of the Fabian Society, then in a base- ment in Clement's Inn. (It was there that in 1908 or 1909 I first saw him.) To get to the Secretary's room one had to pass through the half-daylight of a general office stacked with papers and pamphlets, and on some occasion I received the impression of a new figure beyond the counter, that of a tall, white-faced, stooping youth with spectacles and wavy dark hair, studious-looking, rather birdlike. The impression is still so vivid that I know now I was in a manner aware that he was unusual long before I was conscious of any curiosity about him. I had known him thus casually by sight for some time, without knowing his name ; I had known his name and his repute as a precocious boy for some time without linking the name to the person. He was said to read everything and to know a lot of economics ; a great many people were getting interested in him ; he was called West and was a Russian, a collocation which puzzled me untU I learned that he was a Jew from Russia who had adopted an English name. Although stiU under twenty, he was already, I think, lecturing to small labour groups when I got to know him more inti- mately. He knew his orthodox economics inside out, and was ; ii INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR in process of. acquiring a peculiar knowledge of the involved history of the Socialist movement and its congeners during the last hundred years. He was, in fact, already rather extraordinary. His educa- tion had been broken off early, and he always regretted it but I have known few men who have suffered less from the absence of an academic training. Given his origins, his early struggle, his intellectual and political environment, the ease with which he secured some sort of hearing for his first small speeches to congenial audiences, one might have expected a very different product. It would not have been surprising, had he, with all his intellect, become a narrow fanatic with a revoluntionary shibboleth ; it would not have been strange if, avoiding this because of his common sense, he had been drawn into the statistical machine and given himself entirely to collecting and digesting the materials for social reform. He took a delight in economic theory and he had a passion for industrial history : the road was straight before him. But the pleasure and the passion were not exclusive. Although it is possible that his greatest natural talents were economic and historical, and (as I think) likely that had he lived his chief work would have been along lines of which the present book is indicative, he was in no hurry to specialize. He had a catholic mind. Behind man he could see the universe, and, unhke many Radicals of his generation, behind theproblems and the attempted or suggested solutions of his time, he could see the wide and long historical background, the whole experience of man with the lessons, moral, psychological and political, which are to be drawn from it, and are not to be ignored. You may find in his early writings (though not in this book) all sorts of crudities, flippancies and loose assertions ; he was young and impulsive, he had been under the successive influences of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton, and lacked their years and their of command language ; he had a full mind and a fluent pen which, when it got warm, sometimes ran away. But at bottom he was unusually sane ; and his sanity came in part from the intellectual temper that I have sketched, but partly from a sweet, sensitive and sympathetic nature which made iniustice ; INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR iii as intolerable to him as it was unreasonable. He did not always (being young and having had untU the last year or two little experience of the general world of men) realize how people would take his words ; but I never knew a man who more quickly or more girlishly blushed when he thought he had said or written something wounding or not quite sensible. Julius West's life was conspicuously a life of the mind. But if the reader understands by an intellectual a man to whom books and verbal disputations are alone sufficient, reservations must be made. It is true that he was a glutton for books : he collected a considerable library where Horace Walpole, Marx, Stevenson, Mr. Conrad, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Marlowe " stood together. His father writes ; He was a great reader, and his literary taste even as a schoolboy was remarkable. He scorned to read books written specially for children, but used to enjoy the reading of classical writers even at the age of seven or eight years, and his knowledge of all Shakespeare's dramas was astonishingly complete." But he was restless and roving rather than sedentary. He was capable of running great physical risks and enduringhardships beyond his strength he travelled as much as he could, and had the authorities admitted him into the Army, he would, unless his body had given out, have made a good soldier. He did not mistake books for life ; but one had the feeling that life to him was primarily a great book. His nature was emotional enough : he fell in love ; he was deeply attached to a few intimate friends ; and there was an emotional element in his politics and his reactions to all the strange spectacles he saw in his last years of life. Bijt ordinarily what one thought of was his curiosity rather than his emotions ; his senses not at all. If at one moment one had peeped into his affectionate nature the next one was always carried off into some " objective " discussion. His curiosity about things, his love of debate, gave him a refuge during trouble and an habitual resort in ordinary times. He seemed incapable of any idle thing. Most of us, with varjdng frequency, wUl make physical exertions without obtain- ing or desiring reward beyond the effort and the fatigue ; or we will lie lapped in the gratification of our senses, happy. ' iv INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR without added occupation, to drink wine or sit in silence with a friend and tobacco, or encumber a beach and feel the hot sun on our faces, or loll in a green shade without even a green thought. Or we will travel and see men and countries, or take part in events for the mere exhilaration of doing it. But what- ever his physical activity, Julius West would always have been the curious spectator, observing and learning, recording and deducing, with history in the making around him ; and, whatever his physical inactivity, his brain would never have been asleep, or his senses dormant. If one walked with him, there were few silences ; a punt on the river with him would have meant (unless he were reading) eager, peering eyes and speculations either about the surrounding objects, and what people had said about them, or else about Burke, Bakunin or some such thing. For aU his energy, I never knew his ambi- tion, or was clearly convinced that he had any other ambition than to see and learn aU he could, and produce his results. all He attempted sorts of literary work ; parodies, short stories, criticism. It was to be expected that the criticism would be chiefly concerned with doctrine, and that the other work would be defective and full of ideas. Partly, I suppose, all this writing was the by-product of an intellectual organ which could not stop working but demanded a change of work ; partly his very curiosity operated : he saw what other men had written, and he wanted to find out what it would be like to write this, that and the other thing. But he had neither the sensuousness nor the selfishness (if that hard word may be used of that detachment and that preoccupation) of the artist, nor the reverence for form that demands and justifies an intense application to general detail which is not, to the hasty eye, very significant. As a rule he was exclusively preoccupied with the general purport of what he wanted to say. But it was not unnatural that a young man with his heart, his imagina- tive intelligence and his wide reading, should have begun his career as an author with a book of poems.