ABSTRACT

Democracy, in its triumphant and self-confident form, came to the world from the United States, in association with the doctrine of the Rights of Man. In England, the first thorough-going democratic movement, that of the Chartists, took its philosophy in the main from America, but it failed, and was succeeded, after an interval, by a new demand for popular representation, led first by Bright, the friend of Cobden, and later by Gladstone, who, during the Parliament of 1841-46, had become Cobden’s disciple. The inspiration of this later successful movement was derived from the Philosophical Radicals, one of whose most important effects on British politics was the character which, except during the Chartist interlude, they gave to democratic theory.