Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/693

Great Britain and her Empire . 533 many seats in the House of Commons were controlled by members of the House of Lords. After long delay a bill was passed in 1832 which deprived fifty-six of the so-called "rotten boroughs" of their ancient right to elect members, and forty-three new boroughs were created. Arrangements were made for extending the right to vote to the more prosperous classes, but nearly all workingmen and farm hands were still excluded. 954. The Chartist Movement. The reformers were not satis- fied with these changes and drew up a charter and presented it as a petition to Parliament, demanding, among other things, that all men be permitted to vote, that the balloting be secret, and that the members of Parliament should be paid, so that poor men might afford to accept seats in that body. These " Chartists," as the reformers were called, organized great parades to give pub- licity to the petition and claimed to have got over a million signa- tures to the charter. Parliament paid no attention to the petition nor to a similar one which the Revolution of 1848 encouraged the Chartists to prepare. There were some uprisings of the working people, which were put down by the police ; but no considerable revolt took place as on the Continent. But in 1867 Parliament agreed to double the number of voters, and in 1884 the number was increased by two millions. Still many poorer laborers were not permitted to vote. 955. Establishment of Universal Suffrage. No further exten- sion of the right to vote was made until the early twentieth cen- tury. Then the women began to demand the vote as well as the men, and a militant suffrage party appeared and resorted to various forms of violence to gain attention. After ten years of discussion Great Britain finally became a democracy in 1917, when Parliament passed a bill granting the right to vote to adult males, and to about six million women who "occupied" land or houses or were the wives of "occupiers." 1 1 The granting of the right to vote to women is one of the most important and inter- esting events of the early twentieth century. Australia granted suffrage to women in 1901 ; Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark between 1907 and 1915. The World War established the same right not only in England but in the United States, Russia, Germany ( Hungary, and other countries.