DARK SATANIC MILLS' 69

There were more urgent ones to answer which concerned not
posterity but the present. If reflection could not teach the
intellect that men who. inhabited the same country were
dependent on one another, germs could. Typhus and putrid
fever took a less individualist view of man's nature than the
economists. The microbes of infection never acknowledged the
law that every man could find and maintain his own separate
level. Asiatic cholera in 1831 and typhus in 1837 and 1843 from
their strongholds in the industrial towns defied every effort of
hastily improvised sanitary police and chloride of lime to dis-
lodge them and threatened to devastate the whole country.

There were other warnings that a nation could not neglect
a substantial part of its population without endangering its
safety. A sullen and savage proletariat, growing in numbers,
was turning against the rest of the community, its symbols
and traditions. Carlyle, with his poet's sensitiveness, felt from
the seclusion of his Chelsea study the imminence of some terrible
explosion among the northern workers. "Black, mutinous
discontent devours them. . . . English commerce, with its
\Ğadd-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable
Pri^is steam demon^ makes all paths uncertain for them, all
life a bewilderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance,
the first blessings of man are not theirs. This world is for them
no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebel-
lion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all
men. . . ."*

In such a soil -the orator of social revolution and the agitator
could look for speedy returns. In the year of Victoria's accession
a People's Charter was put forward by a small group of radical
members of Parliament, dissenting ministers and Irish and
Cornish orators. It demanded the immediate transfer of electoral
power from the middle-class electorate of 1832 to the numerically
superior labouring class through universal franchise, the ballot,
annual parliaments, the abolition of the property qualification,
payment of members and equal electoral districts.

The Charter, which was submitted to mass meetings in
Birmingham and London in the following year, caught on like
wildfire in the industrial towns. The agitation soon assumed
an alarming aspect. At meetings arms were called for by excited

EaS> 1T. Carlyle, Chartism- F