In 1832, a Manchester factory worker named Thomas Potter stood outside Parliament, watching gentlemen in top hats debate whether men like him—who operated the machines driving Britain's wealth—deserved a vote. Inside, legislators argued that only property owners had enough 'stake in society' to make political decisions. Potter owned nothing but his labor, yet his twelve-hour shifts powered the Industrial Revolution.

This scene repeated across Europe and America throughout the nineteenth century: workers, women, and minorities demanding what seemed impossible—that voting rights belonged to people, not property. The journey from aristocratic privilege to universal suffrage would take over a century of strikes, protests, and revolutionary moments that redefined what democracy actually meant.

The connection between property and voting seemed perfectly reasonable to eighteenth-century minds. British philosopher Edmund Burke argued that only those with 'permanent fixed interest' in a country—meaning land—could make decisions affecting its future. In 1789, even revolutionary France limited voting to men paying taxes equivalent to three days' wages. America's founders restricted suffrage to white male property owners, roughly 6% of the population.

This wasn't simple elitism but a worldview where political rights flowed from economic independence. Landowners couldn't be bribed or coerced, the argument went, while wage earners depended on employers and might sell their votes for bread. John Adams warned that removing property requirements would lead to 'confusion and destruction,' as the poor would vote to redistribute wealth from the rich.

Yet industrialization shattered this logic. By 1850, factory owners wielding enormous economic power often couldn't vote in their newly built industrial cities, while rural landowners with declining influence controlled Parliament. Manchester, with 400,000 residents and massive textile wealth, had no parliamentary representation, while Old Sarum—literally an empty field—sent two members to Parliament. The absurdity became impossible to ignore.

The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 marked the violent collision between industrial workers and political exclusion. When 60,000 Manchester workers gathered peacefully to demand voting rights, cavalry charged into the crowd, killing fifteen and injuring hundreds. The tragedy exposed the fundamental contradiction: the workers who generated Britain's wealth had no voice in its governance, while their demands for representation were met with sabers.

Workers discovered their economic power could force political change. The Great Reform Act of 1832 came only after industrial cities threatened general strikes that would have paralyzed Britain's economy. Belgian workers won voting rights in 1893 through coordinated strikes that shut down coal mines and railways. German Social Democrats used their unions' organizational strength to become the largest party in the Reichstag by 1912, despite restrictions designed to limit working-class representation.

Each victory revealed a pattern: workers first organized for economic goals—higher wages, shorter hours—then realized the same solidarity could win political power. Trade unions became schools of democracy, teaching coordination, negotiation, and collective action. By 1900, even conservative politicians recognized that industrial democracy and political democracy were inseparable; you couldn't have factories full of organized workers and parliaments full of only aristocrats.

The truly radical leap wasn't extending votes to workers but arguing that voting was a human right, not a privilege earned through wealth, education, or gender. When John Stuart Mill proposed women's suffrage in Parliament in 1867, members literally laughed. Yet within fifty years, his 'absurd' idea became law across much of the Western world. The logic that excluded women—emotional instability, domestic duties, protection from public life's corruption—crumbled under its own contradictions.

World War I accelerated what decades of argument couldn't achieve. How could governments demand total sacrifice from citizens—conscription, rationing, factory work—while denying them political voice? Women who built munitions and drove ambulances made mockery of arguments about feminine fragility. Working-class soldiers who died in trenches exposed the obscenity of property requirements. The war made universal suffrage not a gift but a debt owed.

New Zealand granted women voting rights in 1893, Finland gave universal suffrage in 1906, and by 1920, most Western democracies had embraced the principle. The speed of change was breathtaking: ideas dismissed as dangerous radicalism in 1900 became constitutional amendments by 1920. Each expansion proved fears groundless—women didn't vote to prohibit alcohol and destroy society, workers didn't vote to confiscate all property. Democracy, it turned out, was far more stable when everyone had a stake in it.

The journey from aristocratic privilege to universal suffrage transformed not just who voted but what democracy meant. Each expansion—to the middle class, workers, women, racial minorities—required overthrowing assumptions that seemed natural and eternal to those in power.

Today's voting rights, won through strikes, protests, and countless individual acts of courage, remind us that democracy isn't a fixed system but an ongoing struggle to match political power with human dignity. The Manchester worker watching Parliament in 1832 couldn't imagine his great-granddaughter would one day sit inside it—but she does, because he and millions like him refused to accept that some people matter more than others.