The startling English by-elections of the last few weeks have called attention to the working of the new electorate in Great Britain and set men pondering about its possibilities in a way a general election failed to make them think. Democracy in the sense of government of a great state by the absolute and unfettered authority of the majority of its own citizens of all ranks and conditions is a modern experiment. The United States of America are the oldest democracy in the world to-day.
 
How many realise that Britain became a democracy for the first time in 1917? Until then the majority of its adult population had no voice in the making or administration of the laws that ruled their lives.
 
The United States of America, France and Italy have adopted universal suffrage as the basis of authority for many a year. So have the British Dominions, but Britain herself, the pioneer of [Pg 283]representative institutions, until recently shrank from the experiment of adult suffrage. Before the Reform Act of 1832 the total electorate of this country numbered only 3 per cent. of the population. The distribution of power amongst this small percentage was so arranged that even the 3 per cent. represented in effect no more than at best 1 per cent.
 
A generation of turmoil and agitation, almost culminating in revolution, succeeded in forcing through a measure which increased the 3 per cent. to 4.5 per cent. of the population! It is true that the distribution of votes was more equitable, but even with that improvement to call this ridiculous percentage a democracy would be absurd. Another generation of growing agitation ensued. This also ended in violence. Then Mr. Disraeli, one of the boldest and most venturesome of British statesmen, in 1867 doubled the electorate. His measure increased the number of voters to 9 per cent. of the population.
 
Disraeli's audacious plunge horrified some of his aristocratic supporters and shocked many Whigs. "Bob" Lowe had already foretold calamities that would follow Gladstone's more cautious proposals. Seven years later saw the election of the first Tory[Pg 284] parliament since 1841. So much for the prophecies of the men who always fear evil must flow from justice.
 
Fifteen years after the Disraeli measure the Gladstone administration added another 7 per cent. to the electorate. The Gladstone proposals, which raised the number of voters to 16 per cent., were so vehemently contested that they nearly precipitated a Constitutional crisis of the first magnitude. Ultimately, however, they were carried, and there the franchise remained until the war.
 
The electorate that, through its representatives, accepted the German challenge in 1914, and was therefore responsible for involving the country in the most costly and sanguinary war it ever waged, represented one-sixth of the population and about one-third of the adults. The conscription act converted the country to the injustice of this state of things. Millions of men were forced to risk their lives for a policy which they had no share in fashioning. Millions of women faced anxieties and tortures worse than death in pursuit of the same policy, and yet no woman was allowed to express any opinion as to the selection of the rulers who led them to this sacrifice.
 
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It was felt to be so unjust that in the exaltation of war, which lifted men to a higher plane of equity, this obvious wrong was redressed. Hence the greatest of all the enfranchisement acts, the Act of 1917, that for the first time converted the British system of government into a democracy.
 
How has it worked? It is too early to speak of its results. Mr. Austen Chamberlain in a letter[10] has called attention to one aspect of its operation. He emphasises a fact which is already known to every man who has passed through the experience of a contested election, that nearly one-half the new electorate is unattached to any political party.
 
If you deduct out of the total the numbers of the old electorate which had already formed ties of a party character, you will find from the result of the elections that more than half the new electorate is free and floating about without any anchor or rudder and ready to be towed by the first party that succeeded in roping them. Millions of the new electors are too indifferent or too undecided about political issues to take sides at the polling booths.
 
In the hotly contested election of January, 1910,[Pg 286] 92 per cent. of the voters went to the poll. At the second election which took place in the same year the percentage was 89. The slight difference between the two elections would be accounted for by the fact that in the second election the register was old. Compare these results with the two elections which have occurred since the 1917 enfranchisement. At the 1918 election 64 per cent. only of the voters could be induced to make the acquaintance of the ballot-boxes. This might be explained by the inevitable political apathy which follows a great war. The pulse of party beat feebly and irregularly. The old party organisations had, through five years of neglect, fallen into complete disr............