An equally remarkable feature of the League, though its immediate political importance was much less, was its use of a women's branch, which took an active part in the work. This was the first organized employment of women in practical politics. The women who took part in Reform demonstrations like that of Peterloo belonged to an impotent class, and did little active work. The women of the Anti-Corn Law League did not make speeches.[255] But short of appearing on public platforms they did the same kind of work as their men. Politics were at last acknowledged by the most powerful class in the State to be women's work as well as men's. For the moment there was no demand that women should control their own political affairs. But the one step followed inevitably from the other. It was impossible that a woman of strong character should thus engage in a strenuous political agitation without acquiring some of that desire for personal control which is the essence of democratic politics. Among the men of the League there were probably few who would have allowed women to work with them except as subordinates, and the supporters of the women used language which showed that they were not very far removed from the eighteenth century. "I offer no apology," quaintly says the historian of the League, "for the course they took, for I never {202} had the smallest doubt of its perfect propriety and its perfect consistency with the softer characteristics of female virtue."[256] It did not occur to him that, even if it had been inconsistent with those softer characteristics, it might still have been consistent with the desire of the women to use their natural powers as they themselves, and not as he, thought fit. Men had not yet got to the point of allowing women to regulate their own lives in their own way. But when they admitted that they might safely take part in serious public business, they sowed seed which has since borne much fruit. The modern Women Suffrage movement began in those Northern districts where the League was powerful, and it has made least impression in those quarters where the League was weak.