To follow the “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 “deep sighing” of the agricultural poor, and noted with indignation the successive invasions of their freedom by Enclosure Acts and press-gangs and trials for sedition, and all the other implements of tyranny.

  “The Good Old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes,
   And each old English peasant had his Good Old English spies
   To tempt his starving discontent with Good Old English lies,
   Then call the British Yeomanry to hush his peevish cries.”

To a race of peasants thus enthralled and disciplined the Mirage appeared in the guise of the first Reform Bill.  If only that Bill could pass into law, the reign of injustice and oppression would cease, starvation and misery would flee away, and the poor would rejoice in a new heaven and a new earth.  But no sooner was the Royal Assent given to the Bill than the Mirage—­that deceitful image of joy and refreshment—­receded into the dim distance, and men woke to the disheartening fact that, though power had been transferred from the aristocracy to the middle class, the poor were as badly off as ever.  The visible effects of that disillusionment were Chartism, rioting, and agrarian crime, and there was a deep undercurrent of sullen anger which seldom found expression.  As late as the General Election of 1868 an old man in the duke-ridden borough of Woodstock declined to vote for the Liberal candidate expressly on the ground of disappointed hopes.  Before 1832, he said, arms had been stored in his father’s cottage to be used if the Lords threw out the Bill.  They had passed it, and the arms were not required; but no one that he knew of had ever been a ha’porth the better for it; and he had never since meddled with