. The claim of
the House of Lords to reject the bills of the Commons has been, in our
time, subjected to the criticism formerly extended to the royal
prerogative, and an Act--the Parliament Act--has now been passed which
formally requires the Lords to accept, without serious amendment, every
Bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions.

The transition from monarchy to aristocracy in England was brought about at
the price of civil war. In many countries democracy has been born in
revolution, and the birth pains have been hard and bitter. But in England
in the nineteenth century democracy was allowed to come into being by
permission of the aristocracy, and has not yet reached its full stature. It
is true that violence, bloodshed, loss of life, and destruction of property
marked the passage of the great Reform Bill; that more than once riots and
defiance of law and order have been the expression of industrial
discontent; but on the whole the average Englishman is content to wait for
the redress of wrongs by Parliamentary action. Women have quite recently
defied the law, refused to pay taxes, and made use of "militant methods" in
their agitation for enfranchisement. But the women's plea has been that, as
they are voteless, these methods have been necessary to call attention to
their demands. Democratic advance has often been hindered and delayed by
government, and by a national disinclination from rapid political change;
but as the character of government has changed with the changed character
of the electorate and the House of Commons, so resistance to democracy has
always been abandoned when the advance was widely supported, and further
delay seemed dangerous to the public order.

The House of Lords is thus seen to yield to the popular representatives in
the House of Commons, and the government, dependent on the House of
Commons, to listen to the demand of women for enfranchisement.

While the House of Commons completes its assertion of political supremacy,
and insists on the absolute responsibility of the chosen representatives of
the electorate, the agitation for the enfranchisement of women is the
reminder that democracy has yet to widen its borders. Progress to democracy
in the last one hundred years is visible not only in the enlarged number of
enfranchised citizens, but in the general admission that every extension of
the franchise has been to the public good; not only in the fact that men of
all cla