g near. Dickens put
on record, in chapter xxvi. of _Little Dorrit_, the alarms which
agitated respectable and reactionary circles. The one point, as
Dickens remarked, on which everyone agreed, was that the country
was in very imminent danger, and wanted all the preserving it could
get. Presently, but not till 1867, the second revolution arrived.
Some of the finest oratory ever heard in England was lavished on the
question whether the power, formerly exercised by the aristocracy
and more recently by the middle class, was to be extended to the
artisans. The great Lord Shaftesbury predicted "the destruction
of the Empire," and Bishop Wilberforce "did not see how we were
to escape fundamental changes in Church and State." "History,"
exclaimed Lowe, "may record other catastrophes as signal and as
disastrous, but none so wanton and so disgraceful." However, the
artisans made a singularly moderate use of their newly acquired
power; voted Conservative as often as they voted Liberal; and so
again belied the apprehensions of the alarmists.

When the workman of the town had been enfranchised, it was impossible
to keep his brother who worked on the land permanently in the position
of a serf or a cipher. So we began to agitate for the "County
Franchise"; and once again the cry of "Revolution" was heard--perhaps
in its most typical form from the lips of a Tory M.P., who, as
I said before, affirmed that the labourer was no fitter for the
suffrage than the beasts he tended. Even ten years later, Lord
Goschen, who was by nature distrustful of popular movements,
prognosticated that, if ever the Union with Ireland were lost, it
would be lost through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To
those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts,
the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely
unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds of clubmen
and town-dwellers.

So, in each succeeding decade, the next extension of constitutional
freedom has been acclaimed by its supporters as an instalment of
the millennium, and denounced by its opponents as the destruction
of social order. So it had been, time out of mind; and so it would
have been to the end had not the European war burst upon us, and
shaken us out of all our habitual concernments. Now "the oracles
are dumb." The voices, of lugubrious prophecy are silent. The Reform
Act which has become law this year is beyond doubt the greatest
revolution