Vocabulary, grammar and text exercises

1. Analyze the words, define parts of speech and translate the words.

mankind statesman equipment

immoral simplest craftsman

continually holding metalware

2. Read the following definitions and choose a suitable word for each one.

A large group of people living in one area or a large group of people with the same race and language; a cause of/or a reason for an action; that from which something is made, started, built, developed or calculated; knowledge which depends on testing facts and stating general natural laws; a person not quite a slave forced to stay and work on his or her master’s land; a ruler of a state who has to rule by birth; a ruler or a master.

__________________

a lord, science, a monarch, a nation, basis, a motive, a serf.

3. Translate into Russian paying attention to the vocabulary of the text.

1. None of the revolutions of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, which were mainly bourgeois in character, carried out their promise of liberty, equality and justice.

2. The working class did not get the legal right to organize until 150 years later.

3. Blacks remained slaves until about 80 years later

4. Even the most limited reforms were made only after the people waged the sharpest forms of struggle.

5. The situation evoked a tremendous mass upheaval.

6. Finding no response to their grievances the farmers took the path of struggle.

7. The uprising was defeated, but it had a profound effect on the whole future of American history.

8. The legislature was compelled to take some actions to provide relief.

9. Dissatisfaction with a loose confederation form of government in general and fear of future revolts were the backdrop for convening of the Constitutional Convention.

4. Read the sentences and translate them paying attention to:

1. Modal Verbs.

1. The constant rivalries among various elements of the moneyed class and the fear of the lower classes could not be handled in such a decentralized society.

2. In every society where property exists there will be a struggle between rich and poor … mixed in one assembly equal laws can never be expected.

3. Overdue on the national debt accumulated, continental securities fell sharply, and army offices had to sell at a huge loss the scripts they had received in lieu of pay.

4. But it is difficult to understand how anyone late in history can deny that class motivations were not the central feature of what took place.

5. In Massachusetts the governor had to own 25 across of settled land or fifty unsettled.

6. This is not to deny that here and there some delegates could not rise above monetary interest and approach a problem from an idealistic point of view.

2. Passive Voice:

1. Cynicism regarding the confederation was expressed by John Adams.

2. All through the summer of 1786 community and town meeting were held all over the country demanding reforms in favor of the people.

3. The uprising was defeated but it had a profound effect on the whole future of American history.

4. The farmers too, were not represented.

5. A poll tax was required in New Hampshire, North Caroline and Pennsylvania.

5. Look through the paragraphs 12, 13 and say whose ideas were included into the Convention.

6. Find in the text the passages where the authors speak about the position of farmers and their attempts to struggle for their rights.

7. Render the text.

Text 12

CHARTISM

As 1848 was a watershed in France, so Chartism in Britain marked a similar transition from the older forms of popular movement to the new. Chartism was the first independent movement of the British working class, and it dominated all political thinking and government domestic policies in the first ten years of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was, in short, a movement of the greatest possible significance; yet it was riddled with diversity and contradictions. On one hand, it drew its political programme not (like the Paris craftsmen) from a new stock of socialist ideas, but from the radical parliamentary reforms of the past. When William Lovett and the London Workingmen’s Associations, aided by Francis Place, drew up the Six Points of the People’s Charter in 1838, including manhood suffrage, payment of members, secret ballot, and annual parliaments, they were repeating almost in every detail what a Reform Committee in Westminster, of which Charles Fox had been a member, had drafted fifty-years before; and in cities like London and Birmingham, cities of ancient crafts and petty workshops, much of the enthusiasm for the Charter sprang from the disappointment of radical craftsmen with the failure of the Whigs to give them the vote by the Reform Bill of 1832. To such men, the campaign for the Charter was a new stage in a long and protracted struggle not to win something new but to reclaim ancient and “natural” rights.

Chartism meant different things to different men; to some, the right to vote, to others, the end of the hated workhouses of the New Poor Law, the ten-hour day or simply more food to fill a hungry belly. It was natural therefore, that it should operate at different levels, having both national and regional or parochial manifestations. These might merge and overlap, or they might be separate in both time and space, or they might run along parallel lines and, while owing a common allegiance to the Charter, seem not to be connected in any way with each other. In one sense, in fact, the story of Chartism is that of the various attempts made to impose the Six Points of the Charter on an reluctant, and generally bitterly hostile, Parliament. The core of the campaign was the collection of signatures, canvassed in workshops, factories, and public meetings, to a series of National Petitions addressed to the House of Commons. The first Petition, launched at Birmingham in 1839, attracted 1,280,000 signatures; but it was curtly rejected by the Commons after they had heard Lord John Russel condemn the Charter as a threat to property. The experience was repeated in 1842 and again in 1848. Before the second Petition was launched, the Chartisis hit on the novel device of forming a National Charter Association. By 1842 it had enrolled 48,000 members. This time the Petition was signed by 3,317,702 persons – a far larger number that that of the country’s voters; but Parliament was unimpressed and rejected it as it had the first. For some years the bitter divisions among the Chartist leaders made it seem that Chartism was dead; but in 1848, under the stimulus of economic depression and the events in France, the movement once more revived. This time six million were claimed (though there may have been only half that number) and a great demonstration was called on Kennington Common in London to give the Petition a send-off. The demonstrators were peaceable enough but the government, fearing French agents and Irish rebels even more that English rioters, mustered 170,00 special constables and a large military force under the aged Duke of Wellington to disperse them. It was, wrote Lord Palmerston, “a glorious day, the Waterloo of peace and order.” It was also, to all intents and purposes, the end of Chartism as a national political movement.

But the campaign for the Charter in terms of National Petition to Parliament was only one aspect of Chartism; and for our purpose not the most significant. The intense hostility between classes, similar to that in France in June 1848, of which Chartism was both a symptom and a cause, was due not so much to the Charter itself as to the great series of strikes, riots, insurrections, and popular demonstration that development in its wake and that drew its supporters together. These outbreaks, which sometimes preceded and sometimes continues beyond the Chartist petitioning movements, but more generally served as a kind of continuous backcloth to them, also occurred in three main cycles, each roughly corresponding to a period of trade depression: the spring of 1837 to January 1840; mid-July to end-September 1842; and February to August 1848. The issues varied widely and though support for the Charter was generally a common factor this was not always so.

The first outbreak began in 1837 with a great protest movement in the northern manufacturing districts against the operation of the Poor Law of 1834. It preceded the publication of the People’s Charter by several months and only gradually, through such leaders as J.R. Stephens and Feargus O’Connor, became harnessed to the Chartist movement. Between August 1838 and July 1839 the accent was strictly on political campaigning for the Charter; but once the Petition had been presented to Parliament, the movement changed its form. Even before the Petition had been presented, 30,000 Tyneside pitmen struck work in support of the Charter and encouraged the Chartist Convention in Birmingham, when Parliament proved obdurate, to call for a “Sacred Month”, or general strike, to coerce Parliament to change its mind. Within a week, the Chartist leaders had had second thoughts and called for token strikes, and there were “turn-outs” and demonstrations of Bolton spinners and Durham and Northumberland miners, and riots in Birmingham, Manchester, and Macclesfield in July and August; but the movement failed both from the lack of response and from the divisions among the leaders. After this followed John Frost’s armed march on Newport in Monmouthshire in November 1839 and a brief, equally abortive, rising in Sheffield and the West Riding in the winter of 1839-1840. The second phase of the Chartist special movement broke out in the summer of 1842. Like the first, it began quite independently of the national Chartist leaders: the “Plug-Plot Riots”, as they were called, were primarily concerned in their opening stages with such economic issues as higher wages and the abolition of truck (payment in goods in lieu of wages), and spread rapidly through all the principal manufacturing areas. It was only after several days’ delay that a Chartist conference, assembled in Manchester, decided to give them its blessing. Meanwhile, too, the strikers themselves had linked their economic demands with the political aims of the Charter; but this time the movement was already more than half spent. It ended, soon after, in a massive toll of arrests and sentences to prison and transportation. The last phase, a far widespread and less significant affair, was that of 1948. By this time, after a further depression in 1847, economic conditions were already on the mend; and only minor disturbances, including a food riot in Glasgow, preceded the presentation of the third National Petition to Parliament on April 10. After this followed a number of armed “insurrections”, in a minor key and on a minor scale, in Manchester and London; but these were not so much local social outbursts, fed by local grievances, as the last flick of the trail of a dying political movement.

Chartism, in fact, was a rich and many-sided popular movement, the heir of a radical political tradition but equally the child of poor harvest and the poverty, bad housing, ill health, and unemployment that attended the growth of a new industrial society. As such, it looked to the past as well as to the present realities for its solutions, and its forms of action and expression, like its leaders and the divergent social elements that composed it, blended the old and the new. The nature of industrial disputes was changing, and though there were elements in Chartism that looked back to both the violence and the “golden age” of an idyllic past, there were others for whom the present held other prospects and offered other methods of redress.

Among both leaders and followers there were many who dreamed of returning, through the Charter, from the grim social realities of the present to the old Jacobean ideal of society of small masters and skilled craftsmen; and O’Connor, for whom machinery and the industrial age were and anathema, thought he could solve the workers’ problems by skimming off the surplus urban population and putting it back on the land.

Yet, for all these Utopian yearning and speculations, Chartism, as the product of an evolving industrial society, was bound, in order to survive so long, to seek out new means to impress itself on the nation’s conscience. It found them in the political agitation for the Charter, in the National Charter Association, in early forerunner of a “labour” party, and in the workers’ industrial movement, particularly that of 1842. These, too, had deep traditional roots: the Charter itself, as we have seen, derived from earlier radical models, and the industrial movement might still develop into old-style attacks on property. But in neither case was there really a reversion to the past. The Six Points meant something very different when addressed to the “black hands” of the industrial areas from what they had meant when addressed to the clergy, gentry, and the “middling” housekeepers of Westminster; and the potters and colliers of Hanley, for all their antiquated forms of action, had, though the Charter, acquired a political purpose and vision of the future that were denied to the rioters of 1780 and 1791. In short, while Chartism mirrored the death throes of a dying society, it was even more expression of the birth pangs of a new.

PHONETIC EXERCISES

1. Read the following words paying attention to the way of pronunciation of the stressed vowels.

/a:/ craftsmen, drafted

/i/ similar, significance, contradiction, committee, symptom

/u/ movement

/u:/ drew, include

/ :/ diversity /ai/, disperse, merge, purpose, occurred

/ei/ failure /j /, campaign

/ju:/ enthusiasm, due

/ou/ owing, impose, though, parochial /k/

//\/ reluctant, enough, roughly, constable

/)/ hostile

/):/ launched, glorious, supporters, watershed

/æ/ canvassed, blackcloth

/e/ threat, dead, intense

/i:/ experience, repeated, allegiance/d∫/

/i / fearing

/ai/ kind, cycle, sign

/ai/ riot

/E/varied

2. Read the words aloud. Mind the way of pronunciation of suffixes.

/id ζ/ suffrage, cottage, village

/t∫/ signature

/s/ simultaneous, stimulus

3. Pay attention to the pronunciation of the following words.

/-/ doubt, condemn, column

4. Read the following words paying attention to the rules of pronunciation of the letter “c”.

significance, contradictions, ancient, socialist, space, core, precedent, association.

5. Read the following proper names correctly.

France, Chartism, Queen Victoria, Paris, William Lovett, London Workingmen’s Association, Francis Place, Charles Fox, Birmingham, Lord John Russel, Duke of Wellington, Lord Palmerston, Waterloo, Stephens, Feargus O’Connor, Kennington, Durham, Northumberland, Manchester, Macclesfield, Newport, Monmouthshire, Sheffield, West Riding, Glasgow, Jacobin, Hanley.