WHEN the Chartists marched on Parliament in 1839 to protest the plight of Britain's working class they did not, as some feared, batter down the doors. Instead, in a tactic they were to use twice more in the next decade, they brought forth a scroll that stretched for three miles and contained 1,200,000 signatures. Each time the lawmakers bluntly rejected their demands. Despite this failure, the Chartist movement was a dramatic expression of a right that runs threadlike through Anglo-American history, secured in Eng land first by the barons, then by Parliament, and...
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