The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1918. THE BRITISH ELECTIONS

Waikato Times, Volume 89, Issue 13937, 12 December 1918, Page 4

The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1918. THE BRITISH ELECTIONS

The circumstances in which the general election will be held in the United Kingdom this week surround the event with unusual interest. The elections will be carried out in conformity with the far-reaching amendments in the electoral law, embodied in the Representation of the People Act which received the Royal assent in February last. The new law doubled at a stroke the electorate of the United Kingdom, raising it from eight millions to sixteen millions, thus far transcending in results any previous legislation of the kind. A vast concession has been made to British democracy. As regards the male population, the elections will be conducted on the basis of universal suffrage. The general application of a simple residential qualification means the sweeping away of all the obstacles by which thousands of men, thoroughly qualified for the vote, were previously deprived of it through some temporary loss of qualification or other technical defect. The franchise has been extended also to certain classes that hitherto were virtually ignored, consisting of men whose occupations rendered it difficult and often impossible for them to vote at elections. The case of merchant seamen, fishermen, commercial travellers, and so forth, has been met by the adoption of the "absent voters' list"—an expedient with whieh this Dominion is familiar. By these means, moredver, the Home Parliament has solved the problem of the suffrage for soldiers and sailors upon active service, who form so considerable a section of the adult manhood of Great Britain at the present time. Not only will these men be given every facility, wherever they may be, for exercising the franchise next week, but the desire of Parliament that all the men who have fought for their country should have their voice in the settlement of their country's affairs is manifested in the fact that the age qualification for the army and navy is fixed at 19 instead of 21 years.

The new law reveals perhaps its most interesting feature, however, in the measure of enfranchisement which it extends to women. The vote is not given yet to women on the liberal principle upon which it has been extended to men; but, as a commentator observes, "if one-half of the women of the country have obtained their political rights at a single blow it is far more than the! men have ever done in the long history of their political emancipation." Under the electoral law as it now stands every woman over 30 years of age who occupies a home, large or small, or any landed property of the annual value of £5 of which either she or her husband is the tenant, has the right to become a parliamentary elector. It is clear that the war, in creating a disturbance of population which forced the question of electoral reform into the foreground, and particularly in bringing into prominence the value and variety of woman's power of work, contributed in an important degree to eliminating the old ppposition to the extension of the suffrage to women in the Old Country. And although the measure of enfranchisement accorded to women is incomplete, the election which is approaching will be differentiated from all its predecessors by virtue of the exercise of votes by women, and by the fact that the people will go generally to the poll possessed of a suffrage which will be recognised as a personal right inherent in the individual, and not, as formerly, resting upon the elector's relationship to some property in a constituency.

Besides various other provisions, including a considerable reduction in the scale of the election expenses of candidates, the new enactment governing the elections embodies an important change from the old system in respect to the holding of the poll. The law now requires that all the polls shall be held on the same day—a system that has long been in practice in other parts of the Empire. This provision will put an end to the complaint that the fixing of polling days by returning officers was unfair to one party or the other, and tended to influence one election by the knowledge of the results in another. Moreover, the protraction of a general election over a number of days gave the opportunity for plural voting and, it is alleged, for interference by outside workers, while it must also have caused a serious interruption of business. A sidelight upon the democratisation of the British general election upon lines with which we are familiar in this Dominion is afforded in the right now accorded a candidate to use for the purposes of a public meeting any public elemeritary school in receipt of a Parliamentary grant situated within the constituency for which he is standing. ,ifc js suggested tiiat this provision will prevent d good deal of heart-burning which was caused in the past by narrow-mindedness and by the exhibition of local political antipathies.