But although the operation of laws can only be gradual to cure, however rapid they may be to cause, the great mass of the people of England looked to immediate relief from their sufferings as the certain result of the popular triumph of reform. They were doomed to disappointment on the very threshold of victory. During the last three years of the protracted struggle the Whigs had invoked the physical aid of the people, and there can now be little doubt that it was that physical aid which had finally decided the battle. When Birmingham threatened to march on London, and when enormous masses of people in the large cities of the kingdom pledged themselves not to pay taxes until the Reform Bill was made law, privilege ceased its opposition. But the people had fought for themselves as well as for the Whigs, and when the victory was gained they found the Whigs alone had got the spoils. The people were as much in the cold as ever. The three great anchors of a pure and true representative system of government--the ballot, manhood suffrage, and short parliaments--were notoriously absent from the new scheme. It was only to be a change of masters, and a change that by no means promised well, for the old Tory landholder with all his faults and his prejudices was generally a gentleman, always an Englishman, and often a humane man; but this new mill-lord was often a plutocrat, always a shrewd man of business, and generally one who reckoned his operatives as mill-hands, and never troubled himself about their heads or their hearts. Thus, instead of a sudden realisation of benefit the people found themselves worse off than ever, lower wages, new and oppressive poor-laws, no voice in the law-making, and quite at the mercy, wherever they possessed the limited franchise, of the will of their masters. Little was it to be wondered at, therefore, that in the seven years following reform they should have grown more and more discontented, and that, borrowing from their old Whig leaders the lesson of force so successfully set by those chiefs, they should have everywhere formed themselves into an association prepared to pass the bounds of peaceful agitation in support of their demand for manhood suffrage, the ballot, and short parliaments. All these principles of Chartism Charles Napier well knew long before he accepted the northern command, but of the actual starvation and abject misery of the lower orders in the great manufacturing towns he knew little; and side by side with his military movements and plans in case of attack we find him from the first equally busy in the study of the state of the people, and equally urgent in his representations to the Government, that while _he_ would answer for the order and peace of the moment, _they_ must initiate and carry out the legislation which would permanently relieve, if it could not cure, this deep distress and widespread suffering.