It is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent a
literary artist as Mr. Laurence Housman, but I do not deal here so
specially with his well known conviction about Votes for Women, as with
another idea which is, I think, rather at the back of it, if not with him
at least with others; and which concerns this matter of the true story of
England. For the true story is so entirely different from the false
official story that the official classes tell that by this time the
working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience. Either
story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage, which,
therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing that, so
long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story, it seems
to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up with Female
Suffrage or not.
Now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately
educated people have absorbed from childhood is something like this. That
we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power and wealth
were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King's power was
broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that this piece-meal
improvement was brought about by one class after another waking up to a
sense of citizenship and demanding a place in the national councils,
frequently by riot or violence; and that in consequence of such menacing
popular action, the franchise was granted to one class after another and
used more and more to improve the social conditions of those classes,
until we practically became a democracy, save for such exceptions as that
of the women.
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