Читать книгу Women's Suffrage - Fawcett Millicent Garrett - Страница 3

"We have filled the well-fed with good things, and the hungry we have sent empty away." – From the Politician's Magnificat.

The year 1880 opened cheerfully for suffragists. There was a series of great demonstrations of women only, beginning with one in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in February. The first little bit of practical success too within the United Kingdom came this year, for suffrage was extended to women in the Isle of Man. At first it was given only to women freeholders, but after a few years' experience of its entirely successful operation all feeling of opposition to it died away, and it was extended to women householders. The representative system of the Isle of Man is one of the oldest in the world, and the House of Keys is of even greater antiquity than the House of Commons.

The general election took place in March and April 1880, and the Liberals were returned to power with a large majority. Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister, and it was well known that the extension of Household Suffrage in the counties would be an important feature in the programme of the new Government. Mr. Goschen declined to join Mr. Gladstone's Government, because he was opposed to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to the agricultural labourers. It is strange how the whirligig of time brings about its revenges. Mr. Goschen held out to the last against the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourers, but after the election of 1906 he publicly congratulated a meeting of Unionist Free Traders on "the magnificent stand the agricultural labourers had made for Free Trade!" If his counsels had prevailed in 1880, not one of these men would have had a vote and could have made a stand for Free Trade or anything else. But in politics memories are short, and no one reminded Lord Goschen, as he had then became, of his stand against the labourers' vote a few years earlier.