Wealth and political power were very much more popularly distributed
in the Middle Ages than they are now; but we will pass all that and
consider recent history. The franchise has never been largely and
liberally granted in England; half the males have no vote and are not
likely to get one. It was _never_ granted in reply to pressure from
awakened sections of the democracy; in every case there was a perfectly
clear motive for granting it solely for the convenience of the
aristocrats. The Great Reform Bill was not passed in response to such
riots as that which destroyed a Castle; nor did the men who destroyed
the Castle get any advantage whatever out of the Great Reform Bill. The
Great Reform Bill was passed in order to seal an alliance between the
landed aristocrats and the rich manufacturers of the north (an alliance
that rules us still); and the chief object of that alliance was to
_prevent_ the English populace getting any political power in the
general excitement after the French Revolution. 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. I say
that men have not been compelled by iron economic laws, but in the main
by the coarse and Christless cynicism of other men. But, of course,
this way of talking is exactly in accordance with the fashionable
and official version of English history. Thus, you will read that the
monasteries, places where men of the poorest origin could be powerful,
grew corrupt and gradually decayed. Or you will read that the mediaeval
guilds of free workmen yielded at last to an inevitable economic law.
You will read this; and you will be reading lies. They might as well say
that Julius Caesar gradually decayed at the foot of Pompey’s statue. You
might as well say that Abraham Lincoln yielded at last to an inevitable
economic law. The free mediaeval guilds did not decay; they were
murdered. Solid men with solid guns and halberds, armed with lawful
warrants from living statesmen broke up their corporations and took away
their hard cash from them. In the same way the people in Cradley Heath
are no more victims of a necessary economic law than the people in
Putumayo. They are victims of a very terrible creature, of whose sins
much has been said since the beginning of the world; and of whom it was
said of old, “Let us fall into the hands of God, for His mercies are
great; but let us not fall into the hands of Man.”