110 ENGLISH SAGA

Under this sober stimulus Chartism died and was buried, and
its place taken by radicalism and academic republicanism. The
latter was not so much a practical attempt to overthrow monarchy
as a creed. It was no tat all blood-thirsty; to cater for its high-tea
tastes the title of Harney's "Red Republican" was changed to
"The Friend of the People." It met at places like the Discussion
Hall in Shoe Lane, the Temple Forum in Fleet Street, the Cogers
tavern near St. Bride's and the John Street Institution, Blooms-
bury, where the chairman sat in a canopied chair with pipe and
brandy and water, and the famous Mrs. Dexter lectured on and
in the "bloomer" costume. Its adherents were eager young
artisans who had educated themselves. They were much
enamoured of foreign revolutionaries whose doings they
followed with intense and quite uncritical enthusiasm: for
them they generously subscribed their scanty pennies and when,
as destitute fugitives, the latter fled to England, they lionised
them in a humble but fervent way. .In the eyes of these English
radicals Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Germans and other oppressed
minorities were all heroes and pioneers of European freedom;
had they been able to see the national tyrannies into which their
faiths were to be transmuted, they would have been horrified.
Incidentally their foreign friends with the ingratitude of their
kind were apt to be a good deal less enthusiastic about them.

For as these interesting exiles found to their annoyance,
England was not a revolutionary country at heart. Given a
modicum of bread and beer and a little liberty and leisure to
enjoy himself, the sweating toiler in the classic island home of
the proletariat proved astonishingly good-humoured. In August,
1848, the year of revolutions, a middle-class writer in a popular
journal noted in rhyming couplets how—

"Townward from Richmond, at the close of day,
Two of us were on foot returning straight,
We having dined—the fact 'tis meet to state—
A pleasure van there passed us on the road,
Which bore of honest folks a goodly load;
Holiday makers, of the class and rate
Of working people, by our estimate.
The party was obstreperously gay;
Slightly elate, it may have been, with beer.
Joining in chorus as they roll'd along,