86 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



as a kite. It met with rapturous response here and everywhere. 

 All over England the rustic belief in him was pathetic ; he was in 

 the words of Virgil's Nisus, the god of their desires ; they 

 believed that he would come like Elias to restore all things ; 

 holding in his hands free education, parish councils, three acres 

 and a cow. His name, and his name alone, won the rural con- 

 stituencies, and created the parliamentary majority. . . . 



" The rapidity of their political growth was astonishing. 

 Ten months before scarcely a single agricultural labourer realised 

 what the franchise meant ; he did not know the value of his 

 vote ; did not believe that it could be secret, or that he could give 

 it against the wish of his employer and landlord." 1 



Both of these country parsons wrote after the General 

 Election of 1885, and both evidently wrote with some exag- 

 geration. That ten months before the election scarcely 

 an agricultural labourer knew what the franchise meant 

 was surely over-estimating his ignorance, for Arch and his 

 colleagues had been agitating for the vote for some years. 

 That the labourer did not believe the ballot could be secret 

 was however generally true, as unfortunately it is true even 

 to-day in some rural districts. Canon Tuckwell tells of the 

 pressure brought to bear upon men who were voting for the 

 first time by making them sign a pledge that they would 

 vote for the Tory candidate. So stern was this fighting 

 parson over this act of political intimidation that he pat- 

 rolled the village street on election day and threatened 

 with confinement in Warwick jail any employer who dared 

 to intimidate his labourer. His public statement circulated 

 in all the leading papers that if men were asked to make a 

 promise which was illegally obtained, they should without 

 hesitation break their promise at the polling station, aroused 

 a tremendous controversy of moral philosophy which set 

 all the tongues of the impeccable wagging and the pens of 

 the casuists scratching. 



That the political education of the agricultural labourer 

 was not complete, as far as the knowledge on which side 

 well-known statesmen stood, may be taken for granted, and 

 that in some counties even Gladstone could not be clearly 

 identified, is illustrated by a story told me by a Sussex school- 



1 Reminiscences of a Radical Parson. 



