395,866 have 2 votes;
704,549 voters, having two, three or four votes, cast 1,717,871 votes, a majority of 88,523 over those having one vote;
One man one vote!
In Belgium a man over twenty-five years of age gets an extra vote if he owns property. He is granted another vote if he has a university diploma. He casts a fourth vote if he is over thirty-five years of age, is the father of a family and pays taxes on more than a certain amount of property. The majority of the industrial population thus have only one vote, while the rural, well-to-do and richer people outvote each wage earner by two, three or even four votes. The rural population thus controls the city industrial population and the church is charged by the Socialists with controlling the rural vote.
Against this rule of the minority, this great demonstration of 1911 was a protest. But to the onlooker from abroad it then seemed to be a patriotic proclamation of Belgium’s one great hope of national evolution without revolution. The primary cause of the movement which has culminated in the present national strike was the defeat of the liberal and Socialist coalition in parliament by a combination of the government and clerical forces in the elections of 1912. The Socialist congress summoned to meet the issue brought to a crisis by that event decided upon a general strike as a last resort if all other means of obtaining manhood suffrage failed. But before resorting to that measure a general suffrage bill was introduced into parliament by the Socialists and supported by the liberals. As serious consideration of it was refused by the clerical and government authorities, a general strike was voted on April 14.
Whatever the full effect of this national political strike may be, those who are the keenest observers concede that the making of history is in the movement of Belgian labor for one man one vote suffrage.
Certain it is that a movement of the people capable of maintaining and increasing for so many years a labor vote in parliament until it numbers more than one-third of the total must be reckoned with. If now the tolerance of this Belgian Socialist Party toward those who honestly oppose its principles and methods, at this supreme crisis in its history and the national development, grows with its strength and equals its determination, it will improve the greatest opportunity the Socialist cause has ever had in the sphere of practical politics to demonstrate and promote its co-operative commonwealth.
II.
WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING
If the Belgian strike is a world-event of the first magnitude for the general public, it has a still greater significance for the world’s ten or twenty million Socialists. The two wings of the Socialist movement are equally interested; the reformers and conciliators, because the strike aims at a purely political reform, and involves co-operation with a part of the capitalists, both in order to win success now and in order to get immediate use out of the suffrage after it is won; the revolutionists and advocates of class struggle because the strike forces a large loss on many unwilling employers and gives training for later and more aggressive strikes for the purpose of raising wages, cutting down profits, and paving the way to social revolution.
These essential facts are being widely understood. Take, for example, the following editorial paragraphs from the influential and progressive, but by no means radical, Chicago Tribune: