which has as yet been effected "by due course of law."
It has doubled the electorate; it has enfranchised the women; it
has practically established universal suffrage; it has placed all
property, as well as all policy, under the control of a class,
if only that class chooses to vote and act together. All these
effects of the Act (except one) are objects which I have desired
to see attained ever since I was a boy at Harrow, supporting the
present Bishop of Oxford and the late Lord Grey in the School Debating
Society; so it is not for me to express even the faintest apprehension
of evil results. But I am deliberately of opinion that the change
now effected in our electoral arrangements is of farther-reaching
significance than the substitution of a republic for a monarchy;
and the amazing part of the business is that no one has protested
at any stage of it. We were told at the beginning of the war that
there was to be no controversial legislation till it was over.
That engagement was broken; no one protested. A vitally important
transaction was removed from the purview of Parliament to a secret
conference; no one protested. If we suggested that the House of
Commons was morally and constitutionally dead, and that it ought
to renew its life by an appeal to the constituencies before it
enforced a revolution, we were told that it was impossible to hold
a General Election with the soldiers all out of the country; but
now it seems that this is to be the next step, and no one protests
against it.

But these may be dismissed as constitutional pedantries. So be
it. The Whigs, who made the Constitution, may be pardoned if they
have a sneaking regard for their handiwork. Much more astonishing
is the fact that no resistance was offered on behalf of wealth
and privilege by the classes who have most of both to lose. The
men of L100,000 a year--not numerous, according to the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, but influential--have been as meekly acquiescent
as clerks or curates. Men who own half a county have smiled on
an Act which will destroy territorial domination. What is the
explanation? Was their silence due to patriotism or to fear? Did
they laudably decline the responsibility of opposing a Government
which is conducting a great war? Or did they, less laudably, shrink
from the prospect of appearing as the inveterate enemies of a social
and economic revolution which they saw to be inevitable? Let us
charitably incline to the former hy