THE FIGHTING FIFTIES 109

even more ignominously: here the liberator, Smith O'Brien,
was taken prisoner by a railway guard after a broil in the widow
McCormack's cabbage patch.

• *»••••
It was not surprising, as the dust of the' European arena
setded down and a dishevelled continent tried to return to
normal, that the English congratulated themselves. In Doyle's
cartoons of 1849 one can see them doing so—a fat, good-
humoured, smiling English working family sitting by its own
fireside with a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall and a
newspaper on father's knee describing the awful state of Europe;
while round the border scowl and grimace a crew of mad,
savage foreigners—Spanish peasants chasing priests with knives,
licentious and brutal soldiers charging barricades, the artillery-
men of tyrants bombarding defenceless capitals, and slavish
Frenchmen worshipping a Napoleonic hat and jackboots on
bended knees. The liberty enjoyed by a Briton was never so
attractive as when contrasted with the slavery of his neighbours.
1 The truth was that the British working-class, which, though
for a time capable of popular frenzy and exaggeration, always
returns in the end to its normal state of phlegmatic good-
humour, had tired of revolutionary politics. With the aid of
the railways and the 7d. loaf it was learning to accept urbanisa-
tion as its lot. The improvement in trade and the growing
attempts of the middle-class to ameliorate the factory towns
assisted the change. The first effect of the repeal of die Corn
Laws was largely psychological; it took the bitterness out of
public life. The mob orator with flashing eyes, a brogue and a
leaning to incendiarism was superseded by the earnest student
reading in the public library and taking minutes at small
meetings of the republican elect under a gas jet. It was the age
in which Karl Marx, driven from the continent by the.suppres-
sion of the German and French workers' revolutions, setded in
furnished rooms at Camberwell and started in the fusty calm
of the British Museum to evolve his universal but apparendy
harmless philosophy of hate.1

lAmong his innumerable hates were the gods, the Christian religion, his parents,
his -wife's uncle—"the hound"—his German kinsfolk, his own race-^Ramsgate is full
of fleas and Jews"—the Prussian reactionaries, his Liberal and Utopian Socialist allies,
the labouring population—"Lumpenproletariat" or riff-raff—democracy—* parlia-
mentary cretinism"—and, of course, the British royal family, "the English mooncalf
and her princely urchins," as he called them. His self-imposed task he defined as "the
ruthless criticism of everything that exists*"