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One of the most memorable of General Elections under the Ballot Act surely was that held in December, 1918, following the passing of the Representation of the People Act and the close of the World War, when women voted for the first time. The scenes I saw in London on the polling day, that historic Saturday, made a profound impression on me. Women in thousands flocked to the booths as well as men. Many wives and mothers of the working class brought their babies in perambulators. What did they think of it all? They were not subdued in demeanour and thoughtful, in keeping with the greatness and gravity of the occasion. On the contrary, they were joking and laughing, as if quite elated at the notion that they should be voting for a Member of Parliament—and a Parliament in which, as it turned out, a representative of their own sex was to sit for the first time in the person of Lady Astor, of the Sutton Division of Plymouth.
Even so, was not this the last word in ordered and organized democracy? Could there be, I asked myself, a more advanced and striking manifestation of the free citizenship in the most perfectly planned Republic? Then I wondered what the Barons of Magna Charta—whose statues I have so often looked upon in the House of Lords—would have thought of it, those feudal lords who, over 600 years before, extracted from an absolute King the first great enunciation of constitutional liberty? Nay, why go back so far and remotely? What would the working men who, as a protest against the denial of electoral reform in July, 1866, tore down the railings of Hyde Park, have thought of it? What they wanted was the extension of the franchise to male householders. They could never have imagined that their grand-daughters would have that which they themselves did not then possess—the vote for a Parliament the least fettered in the world by a written Constitution and the most omnipotent in the exercise of its legislative powers.