My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the _National Associations Gazette_. The problem it set itself out to deal with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in argument with other reformers laying down――too dogmatically as I thought――that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not much good sense in his reasoning.
From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all, remains with us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable, white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham. This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I liked the mystery of him.