CONCLUSION
Two political movements may be noted to-day in Great Britain by all who are interested in such things: the Labour movement and the Women’s movement for political enfranchisement.
The efforts of the past twenty-five years to establish a separate socialist party in parliament have not been directly successful, but the Labour Party has managed to return a group of some thirty workmen to the House of Commons, and these men are the responsible and trusted leaders of the trade-unions and the Independent Labour Party. Without requiring any formal acknowledgment of socialist belief, the Labour Party is largely inspired by socialist teaching, and its goal is the conquest of government by the labouring people, and a more even distribution of wealth by the gradual expropriation of the landlord and the capitalist. While adhering strictly to constitutional methods of agitation, giving full respect to the procedure of parliament and the legal conduct of elections, the leaders of the Labour Party, in their speeches at public meetings, use much of the old revolutionary talk of John Ball and Robert Ket, and the arguments of Winstanley for the popular ownership of the land. To the Labour Party as to the Chartists democratic politics are but a stepping-stone to social reform, and as in the days of the Chartists the strength of the Labour Party is in the industrial districts of the North of England, and in South Wales.
The Women’s movement, on the other hand, while demanding nothing but the right to the franchise, and claiming this right to a voice in the affairs of the State on the old constitutional ground of Pym and Hampden—that those who pay direct taxation to the government must have some political control of the expenditure—boldly avows in the face of government refusal the necessity for revolutionary methods to acquire the franchise. More than 600 women have gone to prison in the last four years in the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and the methods adopted have startled the public, created an enthusiasm, and generally aroused the attention of a formerly indifferent parliament to the claim of women to political enfranchisement.
Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary energy and activity of this union and the daring and resource of its members have made the women’s demand for the vote a vital question in politics.
Both these movements—the agitation of the Labour Party for a fuller and more abundant life for wage-earners, and the agitation of the women for political enfranchisement are proceeding in our midst—a guarantee that the centuries of struggle for freedom are not fruitless.
“The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour, so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in strife with them—this is a great part of a man’s life.”
The End.