official story that the official classes tell that by this time the
working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience. Either
story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage, which,
therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing that, so
long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story, it seems
to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up with Female
Suffrage or not.

Now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately
educated people have absorbed from childhood is something like this. That
we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power and wealth
were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King's power was
broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that this piece-meal
improvement was brought about by one class after another waking up to a
sense of citizenship and demanding a place in the national councils,
frequently by riot or violence; and that in consequence of such menacing
popular action, the franchise was granted to one class after another and
used more and more to improve the social conditions of those classes,
until we practically became a democracy, save for such exceptions as that
of the women. I do not think anyone will deny that something like that is
the general idea of the educated man who reads a newspaper and of the
newspaper that he reads. That is the view current at public schools and
colleges; it is part of the culture of all the classes that count for much
in government; and there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to
end.


That Great Reform Bill

Wealth and political power were very much more popularly distributed in