beyond that limit. In 1917, in the midst of the Great War, Parliament is busy with a third wide extension of the electorate which, if carried out, will virtually establish universal suffrage for all males, and, accepting with limitations a doctrine which Lovett considered too impracticable even for Chartists, will allow votes to women under a fantastic limitation of age that is not likely to endure very long. The changes of 1867 and 1885, with the more drastic ones under discussion in 1917, will bring about something as nearly approximating to equal electoral districts as geography and a varying increase of population make possible. Its effect will be the greater since the drastic limitation of plural voting, and the abolition of the freeholder's time-honoured qualification, make voters, as well as votes, more nearly equal in value. One only of the Six Points has been regarded as undesirable, namely the demand for annual parliaments. Yet even here the recent curtailment of a normal Parliament's life from seven years to five is a step in that direction.
Even minor articles of the Chartists' programme, not important enough to be included in the Six Points, are either adopted or in course of adoption. The payment of returning officers for their services, the relegation to the rates of the necessary expenses of elections, the shortening of the electoral period, with the view of concentrating elections on a single day, are now approved, and it will be a short step from a maximum of two votes to the Chartists' veto of all plural franchises. Thus as far as political machinery goes the Chartists have substantially won their case. England has become a democracy, as the Chartists wished, and the domination of the middle class, prepared for by the Act of 1832, is at least as much a matter of ancient history as the power of the landed aristocracy.
In the light of the adoption by the State of the whole of its positive programme it is hard to reproach Chartism with failure. But let us not overstress its success. Against it we must set the fact that not a single article of Chartist policy had the remotest chance of becoming law until the movement had expired. It was only when Chartism ceased to be a name of terror that the process of giving effect to its programme was taken up by the middle-class Parliaments of the later Victorian age. The pace only became quick when, after 1867, Parliament, with each extension of the franchise, grew more susceptible to working-class pressure. But the Chartist
