With all the daring of twenty-six I set out to teach the Conservative
party their business. This is how I began my article which appeared on
the 24th of July, 1886.
In their hearts the Conservatives cannot really believe that anyone with
less than ?100 a year willingly votes on their side. 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.... 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 conditions of life do Englishmen vote as a
herd.
Here is how I ended it:
Conciliation or 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 class-prejudices and to their emotions, and chose, instead, the
harder and seemingly less generous policy, based on reason rather than
on sentiment, on conviction rather than on despair.
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