l88 ENGLISH SAGA

had so far escaped shipwreck—presumably through the smallness
of the population and the immensity of the territory—democracy
seemed in the 'sixties to be culminating in disaster. The
educated classes in Britain believed that the war waged by -the
vulgar Yankees and their backwoodsman President against the
aristocratic Southern cotton-planters could only end in one way.
Even the liberal-minded Punch^ until the final magnanimous
apology over the great democrat's murdered corpse,1 persistently
depicted Lincoln as a crude demagogue, half clown and half
dictator. His defeat by an army of gentlemen appeared inevitable.
The triumph of the North, after three years of disaster,
surprised the English ruling "classes. It did not surprise the
British factory hands who grasped from the first the real
significance of the " slaveowners' war." Their strong sympathy
for Lincoln's cause helped to prevent the recognition of the
South by the government of Palmerston and Gladstone. During
the cotton famine caused by the blockade in 1862-3, t'ie patient
fortitude of the cotton operatives impressed and shamed their
betters. Gladstone's pronouncement that such men were
entitled to a place in the constitution awoke an answering chord
in thousands.

The movement towards electoral reform, stagnant since the
collapse of the People's Charter in the 'forties, took on a new
complexion. It coincided with the end of the Palmerstonian era
and the succession of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership in the
Commons. In 1866 a Liberal government introduced a bill
reducing the occupation franchise in the counties from £50 to
£14 and in the boroughs from £10 to £7. By this it was hoped to
add another 400,000 voters to the electorate.

The bill's promoters regarded it as a* logical step in the process

of advancing the happiness of the greatest number through the

exercise of intelligent self-interest. It was now assumed that the

better class of working man was a rational being. In mating

^ him master of his destiny and the nation's, he could be trusted

s like his bourgeois betters to follow the law of his own advantage

and so automatically serve the common weal.

But though the Liberals were in a majority their whig sup-

1 *Yes, he Kad Jived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil and confute my pen,
To make me ovrn this hind of princes peer,
Thii rail-splitter a, true-bonx king of men."

-iPitncht X