THE NEW VOTERS.
IN their hearts, the Conservatives cannot r. ally believe that any one with less than ..t100 a year willingly votes on their aide. A victory in a popular constituency always astonishes them. They cannot restrain a feeling that by all the rules of reason and logic they ought to have lost. What inducement, they wonder, can the working men have to vote for them? Lord Beaconsfield, of course, never shared such notions as these. He saw, no doubt, the truth clearly ; but, perhaps, only because he was neither an Englishman nor a Conservative, and could view the game from outside. He knew that the pretended analogy of foreign democracies was no analogy at all, and that in England the people were no more likely to vote solidly and consistently in one mass for Radicals and Liberals, than were the voters on the narrower franchise. Yet his party never sincerely believed what he told them, and only followed him because they saw no other escape from their difficulties. The last extension of the franchise has again shown that he was right, and that in no condition of life do Englishmen vote as a herd. The new voters, contrary to all expectation, do not vote solidly for the Liberals. The Tories always fancied that they mist do so because they are supposed to have nothing to lose, and bemuse the Liberals can promise most. Yet, as a matter of fact, the new voters use their judgments on questions that come before them just as the " classes " do. On the Unionist question, the rift is as deep among them as it is in London clubs. Men with them are Unionists or Home-rulers, according to temperament, or the liability to be affected by a particular line of argument, just as they are elsewhere. Yet we do not believe that the Tories, in spite of many lessons, will ever realise their position fully, or see what a great reservoir of Conservatism they have to draw upon, if they only know how. They are always liable to sink bask into this position of think- ing that it stands to reason that the labourers must naturally vote against them ; and that their only way to fight is by using all the influence of various kinds which they can command. And yet it is absolutely certain that the use of this influence— which really means either indirect promises of payment or promotion, or else that veiled intimidation which the em- ployer always knows how to use on the employed—is the very means which will not accomplish the end. The voters partly suspect that promises and cajolery are being used to make them do something against their own interests, and partly think it a good joke to take in their betters by voting against wishes tiresomely and persistently insisted. upon. The in- timidation acts still more effectually and directly. Whatever the merits or whatever the voter's own convictions, he feels he must vote against the intimidator, or the man whom he suspects of a desire to intimidate him, in order to show his own in- dependence. Englishmen are stubborn. None are more so than the labourer. When the squire and the parson let him alone, some of this stubbornness is kept for the active poli- ticians in his own rank of life who want his vote. When they do not it is all reserved to counteract his naturally conservative tendencies. What thus injures the Tory Party in the rural districts is the weakness of the Tory Party everywhere. If they had more faith, they would have more strength. This selfishness, this belief in a low ideal of human nature, this blind conviction that it is impossible that if the poor have the power they will not want to rob the rich, is what so often takes the heart out of Conservatism in England, and makes Conser- vatives always despair as a party at the slightest reverse. It is a pity, but perhaps not without its compensations, for though it will sound a paradox to politicians who share in Sir Henry Maine's fears for government, it is none the less true that there is something of danger in the dogged want of sympathy with change which is natural to the labourers in the agricultural counties.
It is very common for the people who believe in the Hodge of the comic papers to fancy that the labourer has no ideas on political questions, and that he is absolutely ignorant of the pur- poses for which he chooses a Member. As a matter of fact, those who know the labourer best, know that he is by no means the kind of person who fancies that he is to get a cow for nothing. They can, nevertheless, understand how to many people it is absolutely incomprehensible that the labourer should be able to understand the issue at a General Election. The labourer in England has very strongly a trait, common to country-people in all lands,— he is intensely sensitive to ridicule. He is pathetically nervous at the idea of talking about something in which he may make a blunder, and so he resolutely refuses to appear to know any- thing about politics. Still, though not articulate to those above him, he generally takes a definite view, which, rightly or wrongly, satisfies himself. His reason's, if he explained them to people who use a different political language, might seem ridiculous, or such as to show he had not grasped the situation. Yet, because his politics are thus often inarticulate to us, it would be very foolish to assume that his views, if he could have them translated, would not represent something perfectly reasonable and tenable. It has been said that at this Election the new voters have everyWhere taken very little interest in the issue before the country. We doubt this. In many places the ex- treme difficulty bf getting at the rural voters and of explaining to them the teal issue accounts for this apparent indifference. When the hay is on the ground, as it has been throughout the time when the me'etings were being held, and when men stop in the fields till 8 or 9 o'clock at night, it has been almost im- possible for a Unionist who has been attacking a sitting Home-
rule Member to get at the constituency. Mr. Evelyn Ashley, in a letter in the Ti?aes of Tuesday, tells how he fought the
Unionist battle in Nemeth Dorset, end ho'w he seduced his very powerful opponent's majoirity front 4489 to N5, and this though he was only a fortnight in the field, and absolutely without organisation. We believe him implicitly when he says that had he been able to get the labourers to meetings and to lay the case before them, he would have gained the seat. He might have added, too, that the season of the year has closed a means of argument other than meetings which was found very popular with the new voters in the autumn. In the country during the summer, the labourer has no time to read. In the long November evenings, he read with an eager- ness which surprised those who knew his habits, the political leaflets which were showered upon him. In July, he has little time to himself ; and a man who has been working in the hot sun all day is too sleepy for even the most seductive of political literature. And yet, with all these drawbacks, in how many cases has the attempt to reach the agricultural labourer, and to put before him the Unionist arguments, been successful beyond all expectation ! There was nothing else but Unionist arguments to make the labourers desert a man so deservedly popular as Sir Thomas Acland in West Somerset ; and yet they undoubtedly did desert him. As remarkable was Lord William Compton's defeat in Warwickshire. Not only wealthy himself, but exerting a great aristocratic influence, supported by Mr. Joseph Arch and the Labourers' Union organisation, combining, in fact, every shade of Liberal in- fluence in an extremely popular and engaging personality, he yet had to learn that a great number of the labourers who voted for him last time had made up their minds that Home- rule was not for the good of the country. That they should have done so has astonished many a Unionist, and made him feel half-ashamed that he had ever feared for the result. Yet such fears were not unnatural when the temper with which the Unionist arguments were often met by the more active and more talkative labourers can be represented by
such phrases as the following Your arguments are all very well. If Home-rule would be what you say, it would be a bad thing. But we do not believe you are representing it fairly, for if what you tell us is Home-rule were really so, we are sure Mr. Gladstone would never have proposed anything of the kind,' This, though at first sight unpromising, proved, we believe, in many cases the first step to political conversion; for when a man was shown that Lord Hartington, Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamber- lain, and Mr. Jesse Collings represented the Home-rule pro- posals in the same way, and that this view could be fortified from Mr. Gladstone's own speeches, the man who took up the position we have stated was really won.
On the whole, the manner in which the new voters in England have stood the test of the General Election has been full of the highest hope. They and their earlier enfranchised fellows in the towns have proved that the English masses—to use once again that unnatural and unhappy contrast which we hope may now be banished from politics for ever—can be relied on to show themselves no less patriotic and no less resolute than the classes above them ; and to show also that they are perfectly willing to recognise and to take up that " burden of Empire," with all its high duties and responsibilities, which till now has not been directly theirs. The most critical Election that has ever taken place in English history came upon them suddenly and unexpectedly. Men who had only once voted before in their lives, who had only six months ago been recruited into the service of the State, and whose political education had hardly begun, were called upon to decide on a question of supreme importance ; on a question which many thought it utterly hopeless to make them understand ; on a question where, it is true, argument and common-sense were on one side, if the issue were only understood, but where the dazzling rhetoric, the earnest- ness, and the passionate vehemence of the great hero of the English democracy were on the other. A states- man whom they were entreated to follow as " the only man who had ever done anything for the working classes," asked them to trust him and to help him to do justice to those of their own kind who were Struggling and oppressed. His opponents had nothing but dull facts and common-sense argu- ments with which to meet this appeal ; and those for the most part arguments which seemed by their nature to preclude a reliance upon the feelings of mercy and justice 'which had been so passionately invoked. Conciliation and Coercion was the cry everywhere. And yet the majority of the new voters, to their eternal honour, proved their political infancy so full of sense and patriotism, that they let go by unheeded the appeals
to their clamprejudices and to their emotions, and chose indeed, the harder and seemingly less generous policy, based onseasda rather than on sentiment, on conviction rather than on despair. As the trial was severe, so is the honour due to the new voters lasting and conspicuous.
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