To one man, Ernest Jones, it seemed, in 1845, that before all else must come political enfranchisement, that the social miseries and discontents of England were not to be cured save by the people of England. The evils might be mitigated by ameliorative legislation, but it was not enough that the decencies of life--then very far beyond the reach of the mass of town and country labourers--should be secured for people; the main thing was that people should have freedom to work out their own industrial salvation. So in 1846, Ernest Jones plunged boldly into Chartism. He quickly became a leader, and his reputation has endured: for Ernest Jones was the most respected, single-minded, and steadfast of the many who sat in Chartist conventions. Chartism for him was the cry of the uncared-for, because voteless, multitudes, and Ernest Jones was ready to give his life that the cry should move the rulers of the nation. It was a bad time for England in 1846, that was plain,[139] and Ernest Jones, believing with the average Englishman that in politics lay the key to necessary change, was henceforth a Chartist advocate and till his death the faithful preacher of democracy. Without becoming a socialist, Ernest Jones, in his “Songs of Democracy” and in his speeches and newspaper writings, is clear that political enfranchisement was but the high road to social and economic reform, that the Charter was to bring a better distribution of wealth as the consequence of a better distribution of political power.[140] Ernest Jones was twenty-seven when he joined the Chartist movement. The son of an army officer--who had been equerry to the Duke of Cumberland--and educated on the continent, Ernest Jones came to England when he was nineteen, and was duly presented to Queen Victoria (as Robert Owen had been) by Lord Melbourne in 1841. He married a Miss Atherley, of Cumberland, and settled down in London, writing novels, verses, and newspaper articles. In 1844 he was called to the Bar, and two years later took the step which separated him from the friends and acquaintances of his social order, and placed him on the hard and strenuous road of the political agitator. Averse from faction, realising the fatal folly of internal jealousies and strife, and alive to the importance of discipline in the army of revolt, Ernest Jones did his best to work with O’Connor--and was naturally charged with cowardice by the Chartists who hated O’Connor’s supremacy. In 1847 he began writing in the _Northern Star_, and was joint editor with O’Connor of _The Labourer_. His “Songs of Democracy” were to the Chartists what Ebenezer Elliott’s “Corn-Law Rhymes” were to the Free Traders, and his “Song of the Lower Classes” has retained a place in the song-books of social democrats to our own day.