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 Iwas 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.Ispoke 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."Arenascent 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.
