It means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty."[79] The lot of the labourer and the artisan was found to be worse than it was in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, before the great Reform Act had been passed.[80] And while the Anti-Corn Law League, the Socialist propaganda of Robert Owen, and the agitation for factory legislation, all promised help and attracted large numbers of workmen, the Chartist movement was by far the strongest and most revolutionary of all the post-reform popular agitations.

Chartism went to pieces because the leaders could not work together, and were, in fact, greatly divided as to the methods and objects of the movement.

By 1848 Bronterre O'Brien had retired from the Chartist ranks, Feargus O'Connor was M.P.for Nottingham--to be led away from the House of Commons hopelessly insane, to die in 1855--and Ernest Jones could only say when the Chartist Convention broke up in hopeless disagreement, "amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee has been trampled out, and elements of our energy are scattered to the winds of heaven." In spite of its failure, Chartism kept alive for many years the desire for political enfranchisement in the labouring classes.

That desire never died out.

Although Palmerston, the "Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet"-- so Disraeli accurately enough described him--was Prime Minister from 1855 to 1865 (with one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-class enfranchisement.