In a letter of the day before yesterday I was concerned to defend 
the Chartists and their leader Feargus O’Connor against the attacks 
of the radical bourgeois press.’ Today, to my great satisfaction, I can 
tell you something which confirms what I suggested about the spirit 
of the two parties. You will judge for yourselves to whom French 
democracy ought to give its sympathy: to the Chartists, sincere 
democrats without ulterior motives, or to the radical bourgeois who 
so carefully avoid using the words people’s charter, universal suffrage, 
and limit themselves to proclaiming that they are partisans of 
complete suffrage! 

Last month a banquet took place in London to celebrate the 
triumph of democratic opinion at the last elections. Eighteen radical 
members of Parliament were invited, but since the Chartists had 
initiated the banquet all these gentlemen defaulted, with the 
exception of O’Connor. The radicals, as we see, are behaving in a 
way which makes it quite predictable how they will honour their 
pledges made at the last elections. 

One dispensed with their presence the more readily as they had 
sent one of their worthy representatives—Doctor Epps, a timid man 
and a petty reformer, conciliatory towards everybody except the 
active and energetic men of our opinions; a philanthropic bourgeois 
who burns, he says, to free the people, but who does not want the 
people to free themselves without him; in fact, a worthy partisan of 
bourgeois radicalism. 

Doctor Epps proposed a first toast to the sovereignty of the people, 

* See previous article.— Ed. 

but so generally lukewarm apart from a few slightly livelier passages 
that several times it aroused murmurs among the assembly. 

“I do not think,” he said, “that the sovereignty of the people can be obtained 
through a revolution. The French fought three days’; they have been cheated out of 
national sovereignty. Nor do I think that it can be obtained by long speeches. Those 
who speak least do most. I do not like men who make a lot of noise; big words do not 
make big deeds.” 

These indirect sallies against the Chartists were received with 
numerous marks of disapproval. It could not be otherwise, above all 
when Doctor Epps added: 

“The bourgeoisie has been slandered among the workers; as if the bourgeoisie was 
not the very class which alone can obtain political rights for the workers. (‘“No! No!”’) 
No? Is it not the bourgeois who are the electors? And is it not only the electors who can 
give the vote to those who do not have it? Is there anyone among you who would not 
become a bourgeois if he could? Ah! If the workers would give up their pots and their 
pipes, they would have money to support their political agitation, they could do much 
to contribute towards their freedom,” etc., etc. 

Such is the language of the men who reject O’Connor and the 
Chartists! 

The speakers who succeeded Dr. Epps energetically rebutted the 
strange doctrines of the radical doctor, amid much applause by the 
assembly. 

Mr. MacGrath, member of the executive committee of the Chartist 
Association, recalled that the people ought not to have confidence 
in the bourgeoisie, that they had to win their own rights by 
themselves; it was not proper to the dignity of the people to beg for 
what really belonged to them. 

Mr. Jones reminded the assembly that the bourgeoisie had always 
forgotten the people; and now that the bourgeoisie sees the growth 
of democracy, he said, it wants to use it to overthrow the landed 
aristocracy, and crush the democrats as soon as it has attained its 
objective. 

Mr. O’Connor, replying still more directly to Dr. Epps, asked him 
who had crushed the country with an enormous debt, if it were not 
the bourgeoisie? Who had deprived the workers of their political 
and social rights if not the bourgeoisie? Who had, that very 
evening, refused to respond to the people’s invitation, if it were not 
the seventeen honourable bourgeois to whom the democrats had so 
unfortunately given their votes? No, no, capital never represents 
labour! The lon and the lamb would lie down together before 
capitalists and workers were united by interests and feelings! 

Mr. Harney, editor of The Northern Star, gave the last toast: “Our 
democratic brethren throughout the world! May their present struggle for 

The Chartist Banquet in Connection with the Elections of 1847 363 

liberty and equality be crowned with success!” Kings, aristocrats, priests 
and capitalists of all countries, he said, are allied together. May 
democrats of all lands follow the same example! Everywhere 
democracy marches forward. In France, banquet follows banquet in 
favour of electoral reform; and the movement is developing on such 
a scale that it must lead to a happy result. Let us hope that the 
masses, this time, will profit from this agitation, that the reform won 
by the French will be worth more than what we won in 1831.! 

There can be no true reform as long as sovereignty does not 
wholly belong to the nation; there is no national sovereignty as long 
as the principles of the constitution of 1793! are not a reality. 

Mr. Harney then gave a picture of the progress of democracy in 
Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and ended by disavowing, for his 
part, in the most energetic terms, the strange doctrines of Dr. Epps 
about the rights of the bourgeoisie.