Also, the poor were not wholly voteless. The owner of a freehold worth forty shillings a year had a vote; and a number of odd old franchises existed which gave quite poor people a certain weight at elections. They could not return a Labor member (such a thing was then unheard of); but they could sometimes turn the scale as between the Conservative landlord and the Liberal employer. If the Conservatives and Liberals had understood that their political interests were the same, and that they must present a united front to Labor, the employees would have had no hope except in revolution. But the Conservatives and Liberals did not understand their commercial interests. The Conservative clung blindly to his old privileges: the Liberal followed the slot of his new profits as thoughtlessly as a hound follows the slot of a fox. Both of them wanted to be in Parliament because it gave them personal importance, opening the way to the front bench, where the Cabinet Ministers sit, and to knighthoods, baronetcies, and peerages. The Liberals considered themselves the party of reform because they had carried the Reform Bill, and, as the employees wanted all sorts of reform very badly, took it for granted that they would always vote gratefully for the Liberals. Under this delusion a Liberal Government made a bid for popular support by offering votes to the working class. The Conservatives at first opposed this so fiercely that they turned the Liberals out at the next election; but a very clever Conservative leader named Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield, a Jew who had begun his political career, like Karl Marx, as a champion of the proletariat, persuaded the Conservatives that they were really more popular in the country than the Liberals, and induced them to make the very extension of the franchise they had just been opposing. Naturally the employees, when they got some votes in this way, used them to get more votes; and the end of it was that everybody got a vote, including at long last the women, though the women had to make a special and furious fight for their inclusion, and did not win it until the national work they did when they took the place of the absent men during the war of 1914-18 shamed the country into enfranchising them. The proletarian voters who could formerly only turn the scale between Conservative and Liberal can now turn out both Conservative and Liberal, and elect candidates of their own. They did not at first realize this, and have not fully realized it yet. They began by timidly sending into Parliament about a dozen men who were not called Labor members, but working class members of the Liberal Party. It became the custom for Liberal Governments to give a minor ministerial post to some mild middle class professor who was vaguely supposed to be interested in factory legislation and popular education, and who was openly treated as a negligible nobody by the rest of the Cabinet.