No one can read Macaulay's speech on the Chartists, for
instance, and not see that this is so. Disraeli's further extension of
the suffrage was not effected by the intellectual vivacity and pure
republican theory of the mid-Victorian agricultural labourer; it was
effected by a politician who saw an opportunity to dish the Whigs, and
guessed that certain orthodoxies in the more prosperous artisan might yet
give him a balance against the commercial Radicals. And while this very
thin game of wire-pulling with the mere abstraction of the vote was being
worked entirely by the oligarchs and entirely in their interests, the
solid and real thing that was going on was the steady despoiling of the
poor of all power or wealth, until they find themselves to-day upon the
threshold of slavery. That is The Working Man's History of England.
Now, as I have said, I care comparatively little what is done with the
mere voting part of the matter, so long as it is not claimed in such a way
as to allow the plutocrat to escape his responsibility for his crimes, by
pretending to be much more progressive, or much more susceptible to
popular protest, than he ever has been. And there is this danger in many
of those who have answered me. One of them, for instance, says that women
have been forced into their present industrial situations by the same iron
economic laws that have compelled men.
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