CHAPTER SIX

Shooting Niagara

* Those who take * leaps in the dark,' as we are doing,
may find themselves in unexpected places before they
recover the beaten tracks again.9*—Fwude> Oceana, 75.

"The life of a constitution is in the spirit and dis-
position of those who work it"—Bagehot.

IN 1864 while the Commons werfe perfunctorily debating a
private member's motion for reform of the franchise—a
question which in the view of most people had been dead
since I8321—Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
electrified the House by declaring that every man who was not
incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of
political danger was morally entitled to come within the pale of
the constitution. The declaration marked the beginning of a
new phase in English history. Electoral power which thirty-
two years before had passed from the aristocracy to the middle-
class was now to shift by ordered but rapid stages to the masses.
The workers by virtue of their numerical superiority were to
become the dominating class of the future.

A few years before no one but a few fanatic reformers
regarded such a development as within the sphere of practical
politics. Pure democracy was an ultimate goal: an equal vote
for every citizen a pious aspiration, widely honoured like the
beatitudes and acceded to by none. The rough type produced by
the factory and the housing conditions of the factory town was
not one to which the wealth, safety and honour of a rich and
ancient kingdom was likely to be entrusted, even by the most
sanguine. Where in other European countries, like republican
France, democracy had been tried, the result had been an orgy of
blood, plunder and anarchy followed by a military despotism.
A practical people like the British, felt little drawn to such
visionary courses.

Even in America where the experiment of eighty years back

1 John Bright, attempting an agitation in favour of household suffrage in 1859,
observed it was like "flogging a dead horse."

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