Page:Home rule (Beesly).djvu/4

4 of any one of them until its turn for consideration in Parliament is seen to have arrived. People will not waste their time on projects of law which may have to wait years before they can be dealt with. In the meantime, 556 members for Great Britain are kept slaving at Irish questions, great and small, in which the mass of British electors neither have nor feel the slightest interest. This may be very glorious. It may enable Her Majesty the Queen and Empress to hold her head some inches higher among the sovereigns of Europe. It may inflate an upper-class Englishman with a sense of imperial grandeur. But it is time the ordinary elector, the working man and the small tradesman, asked himself how he is a gainer by it.

"What an ignoble ideal," cries a West-End journalist, "is this that you are holding up before the workman! Are great questions of policy, on which all educated men agree, to be treated from his purely personal standpoint?"

In the first place, Mr. West-End journalist, all educated men are not agreed, as you know very well. But let that pass. "Education," as you understand the word, has very little connection with political insight, and still less with true patriotism. What you mean by educated men, are people whose parents could afford to send them to schools and colleges, from which most of them brought away nothing in the way of education but a wretched smattering of dead languages and mathematics. Say "well-to-do people" at once, for that is what you mean. Well, they have had the management of England hitherto, and we see what they have made of it—a very pleasant country for well-to-do people. In future, the working class are going to have, I do not say the management of England—I am well aware that except in very exceptional moments they will never have that—but considerable influence over its management; and you may depend upon it that they will try to make England a somewhat pleasanter place for the working class than it has been hitherto.

There happens to be an important difference between the "personal stand-point" of the workman and that of the well-to-do citizen. It has been thus expressed by