THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

8

The Handitch election flung me suddenly into prominence.

It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not

trouble the reader with a detailed history of events that must be

quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge

stacks of journalism have dealt with Handitch and its significance.

For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a

comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity.

We obtruded no editor's name in the BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet

been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist

and writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was

definitely a person, in the little group of persons who stood for

the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large

extent, my affair. I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much

one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I

was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a

young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to

do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-

Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.

My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not

think I should have got the chance of Handitch or indeed any chance

at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the

seat with its long record of Liberal victories and its Liberal

majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest.

The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible

Socialist candidate were providential interpositions. I think,

however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to

fight for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going

to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to talk." And until

the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a

battlefield as a hoarding. And so it was the Endowment of

Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English

politics.

Plutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when the thing began.

"They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you about the

Family," he said.

"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said;

"is that queer?"

"Not when you explain it-but they won't let you explain it. And

about marriage-?"

"I'm all right about marriage-trust me."

"Of course, if YOU had children," said Plutus, rather

inconsiderately…

They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the

HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of garbled quotations and

misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I

spoke for an hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy

of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest and completest

exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever

been made up to that time in England. Its effect on the press was

extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented space

under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang

myself; the Conservatives cut me down or tried to justify me; the

whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the

subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book-stalls

within three days. It sold enormously and brought me bushels of

letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At

meeting after meeting I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before

polling day Plutus was converted.

"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished

the Liberals! To think that such a project should come from our

side!"

But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was

won. No one expected more than a snatch victory, and I was in by

over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from

apologetics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A

renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief daily

on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives

had been ever the pioneers in sanely bold constructive projects.

I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing Margaret by the night

train.