human
Mirage of receding triumph through long years of hope deferred was the lot of Labour generally, and it was especially the lot of agricultural labour. The artisans gained their political enfranchisement in 1867, and, though they made remarkably little use of it, still they had the power, if they had the will, to better their condition. But the agricultural labourers remained inarticulate, unnoticed, unrepresented. A Tory orator, said--and many of his class agreed with him, though they were too prudent to say it--that the labourer was no fitter for the vote than the beasts he tended. But there were others who knew the labourers by personal contact, and by friendly intercourse had been able to penetrate their necessary reserve; and we (for I was one of these) knew that our friends in the furrow and the cow-shed were at least as capable of forming a solid judgment as their brethren in the tailor's shop and the printing-works. There was nothing of the new Radicalism in this--it was as old as English history. The toilers on the land had always been aspiring towards freedom, though social pressure made them wisely dumb. Cobbett and Cartwright, and all the old reformers who kept the lamp of Freedom alive in the dark days of Pitt and Liverpool and Wellington, bore witness to the