GREAT BRITAIN WILL TRY NEW DEMOCRACY
Great Britain Will Try New Democracy AMEASURE which doubles at a stroke the parliamentary electorate, enfranchise! six million women, provides for absent (and even proxy) voting by three million...
...and a few months more carried their cause to a victorious conclusion which could hardly haye been reached in a full decade of peace...
...The effect of these stupendous changes upon the relative strength of parties, and upon the course of British legislation and politics, remains to be determined...
...six million women, provides for absent (and even proxy) voting by three million soldiers and sailors, redistributes seven hundred parliamentary seats, introduces a scheme of proportional representation, paves the way for a new balance of party forces, and in short, throw* open the floodgate for democracy in a great conservative nation—such is the British "Representation of the People" Act, which received the royal assent on February 6. Two years of war brought the advocates of woman's suffrage an advantage which no amount of agitation had ever won for them, namely, the backing of the Government...
...To a considerable extent, the revolution has already been accomplished...
...It has been charged that the driving force behind the suffrage clauses of the late act was the Labor party, which expects to turn the new stream of electoral power to account in winning the coveted control of the nation's affairs...
...This is at best but a half-truth...
...Now that men were to have the suffrage as persons, it was more than ever difficult to withhold it from women...
...Yet it is not to be doubted that the mass of the newly enfranchised men, and at least half of the enfranchised women, are of liberal, and in many cases radical bent.—By Frederick Austin Ogg in Review of Reviews...
...Indeed, in the present juncture—in the face of woman's incalculable service to the nation—to withhold it is quite impossible...
...No oue doubts that Britain is headed toward a mighty political and economic overturn in consequence of the war...
Vol. 10 • August 1918 • No. 8
