Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/61

 upon the waters, you shall most certainly find it again. But alas! that all these good hopes are only fulfilled "after many days." Surely the working women of England have paid the price of political emancipation over and over again! It is no mere insignificant statistical fact that these millions of workers live laborious days of poverty-stricken and upright independence, and produce by their labour so large a proportion of the material wealth of the country. Here is a force that must in the end be reckoned with. "Power to him who power exerts." We know of course that it is only a question of time; that there is no government in the world, however autocratic, that can in the end keep five millions of its responsible workers out of all political rights whatsoever. "Great is the truth and shall prevail," says Coventry Patmore; "when no man care if it prevail or no." This, at all events, does not seem likely, for the working women's representatives get more and more urgent in their appeal. Every month and every year that this measure of justice is denied to us, the condition of the working women becomes more and more desperately difficult. In fact, we are bound to care more, not less; and this for a very simple reason: Every year that goes by sees the slow development of the tendency to nationalise all industrial questions. Political and industrial issues can be no longer disentangled. The very trade unions that forty years ago shouted down their more progressive members with cries of "No politics," are now running candidates of their own at elections. Industrial questions are gradually shifting