of their opportunities. But
if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in
order to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatory
tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no
Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it.
If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of
using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced,
that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the
future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund
or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have
any chance of permanent success.

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, to protectionists,
trust-promoters, and socialists that they should drop their various
movements and so confine politics to less exciting questions, falls,
naturally enough, on deaf ears.

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women is met by that
sort of hesitation and evasion which is characteristic of politicians
who are not sure of their intellectual ground. A candidate who has just
been speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when he is
heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which would justify the
continued exclusion of women from the franchise. Accordingly a large
majority of the successful candidates from both the main parties at the
general election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female suffrage.
But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, of those who gave that
pledge seem to be trying to avoid the necessity of carrying it out.
There is no reason to suppose that they are men of exceptionally
dishonest character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final
decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that certain differences
exist between men and women, though they do not know what those
differences are, nor in what way they are relevant to the question of
the franchise. But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in
their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively near future,
probably be settled by importunity on the one side and mere drifting on
the other.

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters which in our
explicit political arguments we treat as settled, is increased by the
growing urgency of the problem of race. The fight for democracy in
Europe and America during the eighteenth and early nin