The year 1842 marks the culmination of Chartism and will be remembered as the year of the general strike in the North of England, and of the apparent imminence of a social revolt; but the collapse of the general strike and the repressive action of the government took, for the time being, all driving force out of the agitation. When times improved, and trade started to prosper, Chartism lost ground; the Trade Unions began to detach themselves from schemes of social revolution, and to make their immediate objective the improvement of the conditions of the workers in regard to wages and employment. Chartism continued as a political movement, with varying fortunes, up to the year 1849. What it achieved up to 1855 is thus summarized by Mr. Beer in Vol. II of his _History of British Socialism_, p. 190: “After a desperate contest of thirty years’ duration, Chartism had come to an end. It had not been a struggle of a plebs for equal rights with the patriciate to spoliate and enslave other classes and nations, but a class-war aiming at the overthrow of the capitalist society and putting production, distribution, and exchange on a co-operative basis. The working-class was apparently defeated. “Baffled and exhausted through erratic leadership, untold sacrifices, and want of proper mental munitions, they retired from the field of battle, bleeding and decimated, but little aware of the great results they had achieved. They only saw the shattered ideals and broken hopes that lay strewn on the long path they had been marching and counter-marching from 1825 to 1855, not knowing that it was from the wreckage and debris of those shattered ideals that the material was gathered for building and paving the road of social progress.