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Cabinet on the Reform Bill then determined upon (Lord Derby, however, afterwards stated that General Peel, one of the three seceding ministers, had some time before the Cabinet of the 23rd expressed his strong objections to the Reform Bill then adopted, but had consented to waive his objections for the sake of the unity of the Ministry). As soon as the Council concluded, Lord Derby went to Windsor to communicate with Her Majesty on the Reform Bill, and I heard no more of the subject till the Monday morning. On the Monday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, I received an urgent summons to attend Lord Derby's house at half-past twelve o'clock, on important business. At that hour I reached Lord Derby's house, but found there only three or four members of the Cabinet. No such summons had been anticipated, and consequently some of the ministers were at their private houses, some at their offices, and it was nearly half-past one before the members of the Cabinet could be brought together. As each dropped in, the question was put, 'What is the matter? Why are we convened ?' and as they successively came in, they were informed that Lord Cranborne, Lord Carnarvon, and General Peel had seceded, objecting to the details of the bill which we thought they had adopted on the Saturday. Imagine the difficulty and embarrassment in which the Ministry found themselves placed. It was then past two o'clock. Lord Derby was to address the Conservative party at half-past two; at half-past four Mr. Disraeli was to unfold the Reform scheme (adopted on the previous Saturday) before the House of Commons. Literally, we had not half an hour-we had not more than ten minutes-to make up our minds as to what course the Ministry were to adopt. The public knows the rest. We determined to propose, not the bill agreed to on the Saturday, but an alternative measure, which we had contemplated in the event of our large and liberal scheme being rejected by the House of Commons. Whether, if the Ministry had had an hour for consideration, we should have taken that course was, perhaps, a question. But we had not that hour, and were driven to decide upon a line of definite action within the limits of little more than ten minutes."

At two o'clock, then, the change of front was determined on, for the sake of keeping the Ministry together, and propitiating the seceding members; and at half-past four Mr. Disraeli rose in his place in the House of Commons, furnished with arguments and statistics wholly different from those which five or six hours before he had intended to make use of. A notable instance of that ready ability which seldom or never deserted him throughout his political career.

It was soon felt, however, by the Ministry, that this condition of things was unsound, and could not last. The measure explained on the 25th satisfied neither Conservatives nor Liberals. A large meeting of Liberals, held at Mr. Gladstone's house, decisively condemned it; while from their own friends and supporters the Government received strong and numerous protests against it. What was to be done? Lord Derby once more called his Government together, and they agreed to retrace their steps, even at the cost of the three objecting ministers. "To

save the ship of Reform, the captain and crew gallantly sacrificed three Jonahs to their own safety." Upon the 4th of March, Lord Derby, in the House of Lords, and Mr. Disraeli, in the Commons, announced the resignation of Lord Cranborne, Lord Carnarvon, and General Peel, the withdrawal of the measure proposed on the 25th, and the adoption by the Government of a far more liberal policy than that represented. Both in the House and in the country there were naturally some rather free criticisms passed upon a Government who, three weeks before the announcement of a Reform Bill brought forward by them, had not come to an agreement upon its most essential provisions, and upon a sudden emergency, and to keep their members together, adopted and brought forward a makeshift measure, which their own sense of expediency, no less than public opinion, afterwards obliged them to withdraw. General Peel's explanation of his resignation of office, in the House of Commons, on the 5th of March, may be quoted as an interesting expression of the real feeling of the older Conservatives with regard to Reform. Had he considered the Government pledged to Reform, he said, when he was offered a place in it in the preceding year, he should certainly not have joined it. But no pledge was required of him, and he was informed of no definite plan of action on their part. As time went on he became convinced, like the rest of his colleagues, that Reform in some shape was inevitable; but he had strong opinions of his own as to the lawful extent of Reform; and when the resolutions were drawn up, the fifth resolution made him begin to doubt. After Mr. Disraeli's speech on the 11th of February, he saw plainly that the tendency of the Government was towards a far more liberal Reform policy than he was himself prepared to support. long, however, as he imagined himself to be the only objector in the Cabinet, he consented to waive his objections at least, temporarily; but when he found that Lord Cranborne and Lord Carnarvon, after a careful examination of the figures, had come to the same conclusion, and felt the same fear as himself, he at once decided to withdraw from the Ministry rather than have anything to do with passing what he could not but look upon as a measure of household suffrage.

As

"It was on February the 16th," said Lord Cranborne, "that I first heard of the proposition (household suffrage, guarded by various conditions) which I believe has now received the formal sanction of Her Majesty's Government. I then stated at once that it was a proposition which, to my mind, was inadmissible. I believed at the time that it was abandoned; but on the following Tuesday, the 19th I think, the proposition was revived, and revived with the statement of certain statistics. After we separated on Saturday the 23rd, I naturally gave myself up to the investigation of those figures. The position was one of extreme difficulty. The materials which I had were, in my opinion, exceedingly scanty. The time I had for decision was forty-eight hours. On the Sunday evening I came to the conclusion, that although the figures on the whole had a fair seeming, and although it appeared, when stated in block, that upon them the proposed reduction of the franchise might be safely

A.D. 1867.]

MR. DISRAELI INTRODUCES THE REFORM BILL.

adopted; yet it appeared to me that, with respect to a very large number of boroughs, they would scarcely operate practically as anything else than as household suffrage." In these marchings and counter-marchings of the Government much valuable time had been thrown away. "No less than six weeks of the session," said Lord Grey, "have been wasted before any step whatever has been taken." The Conservative leaders, however, vehemently protested that it was no fault of theirs; and now that the confession had been made, and the three refractory colleagues got rid of, affairs did at length assume a business-like aspect. "It is our business now," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "to bring forward, as soon as we possibly can, the measure of Parliamentary Reform which, after such difficulties and such sacrifices, it will be my duty to introduce to the House. Sir, the House need not fear that there will be any evasion, any equivocation, any vacillation, or any hesitation in that measure."

In the interval between these Ministerial explanations and the production of the real Reform Bill in Parliament various great meetings of their supporters were held by the leaders of both parties. At a meeting held in Downing Street on the 15th, Lord Derby explained to 195 members of the Conservative party the distinctive features of the proposed bill. Startling as the contemplated changes in the franchise must have seemed to every Conservative present, only one dissenting voice was heard-that of Sir William Heathcote, who declared, in strong terms, that he wholly disapproved of the measure, and that he believed, if carried out, it would destroy the influence of rank, property, and education throughout the country by the mere force of numbers. The scheme, of which only a few fragments were as yet generally known, was given to the public on the 18th of March, when Mr. Disraeli described it at much length in the House. And although the measure at first proposed was so largely altered in its passage through Parliament, that by the time it had become part of the law of England its original projectors must have had some difficulty in recognising it as theirs, it is worth while to take careful note of its various provisions as they were originally drawn up, that the action of the two great parties engaged throughout the subsequent struggle may be the more plainly understood.

The first quarter of Mr. Disraeli's speech was taken up by a review of the past history of the question-an old and well-known story, somewhat impatiently listened to by the House. He picked the various Reform schemes of his predecessors to pieces, and finally declared that the principle at the bottom of them all-the principle of value, regulated whether by rental or rating-had been proved by long experience to be untenable and unpractical, and the Government were now about to abandon it altogether. The rental standard, indeed, had been put out of the question by the vote on Lord Dunkellin's amendment in the preceding summer. "The House," said Mr. Disraeli, "in one of the largest divisions which ever took place within these walls, asserted a principle with regard to the borough franchise which was carried by a majority. That principle was that the borough franchise should be

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I take it for granted that if

founded on rating.
ever there was a decision of the House of Commons
which meant something, it was that decision which deter-
mined the fate of the Ministry; and if anything ever
had the character of authority in this House, it was the
vote arrived at on that occasion. The House, I assume,
meant by the decision then arrived at, that the person
who was to be entrusted with a vote to elect members of
Parliament should be one with respect to whom there
should be some guarantee and security for the regularity
of his life and the general trustworthiness of his conduct;
and the House thought that the fact of a man being rated
to the relief of the poor, and being able to pay his rates,
gave that fair assurance which the State had a right to
require."

Behind this last declaration, so cleverly fathered upon the House, it was immediately felt, lurked household suffrage. Nor was Mr. Disraeli slow to disclose his secret. The very next paragraph of his speech announced that, in the opinion of the Government, any attempt to unite the principle of value with the principle of rating, any such solution as a £6 or £5 rating franchise, would be wholly unsatisfactory. "The moment we endeavoured to control the operation of the principle of rating by a standard of value disturbing elements appeared, which promised no prospect of solution and gave no chance of permanency. We then proposed to ourselves to examine the whole question of occupation in boroughs, and see what would be the effect of the application of the principle of genuine rating, without reference to value." In the boroughs of England and Wales, Mr. Disraeli went on to say, there are at present 1,367,000 male householders, of whom 644,000 are qualified to vote, leaving 723,000 unqualified. Now, if we examine these 723,000, we shall find that 237,000 of them are rated to the poor and pay their rates. So that if the law were changed in such a manner as to make the borough franchise dependent upon the payment of rates only, unrestricted by any standard of value, these 237,000 would be at once qualified to vote, making, with the 644,000 already qualified, 881,000 persons in the English and Welsh boroughs in possession of the franchise. There would still remain 486,000, belonging mostly to the irregular and debatable class of compound householders-householders paying their rates, not personally, but through their landlords. Now, as the Government thought that the franchise ought to be based upon a personal payment of rates, it became a great question as to what was to be done with these 486,000 compound householders. "Ought the compound householders to have a vote ?" As a compound householder the Government thought he ought not to have a vote. But he was not to be left altogether in the cold. Ample opportunities were to be afforded him for raising himself out of the anomalous position to which the Small Tenements Acts had consigned him. Let him only enter his name upon the rate-book, and claim to pay his rates personally; and having fulfilled the constitutional condition required, he would at once succeed to the constitutional privilege connected with it. It had been said that the working classes did not care enough about the suffrage to take so much

trouble to obtain it. "That, however," said Mr. Disraeli, oracularly, "is not the opinion of Her Majesty's Government." Thus 723,000 additional persons might, if they wished, obtain the franchise under the new bill. To these were to be added all those who paid 20s. a year in direct taxes, whether compound householders or not; while, to prevent the working classes from swamping the constituencies and nullifying the influence of the middle and upper classes, the Government brought forward the curious expedient of dual voting. "Every person," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "who pays £1 direct taxation, and who enjoys the franchise which depends upon the payment of direct taxation, if he is also a householder and pays his rates, may exercise his suffrage in respect of both qualifications." In simpler words, a householder might have two votes-one for the yearly payment of £1 in imperial taxes, and one for the personal payment of rates. Now, the persons who would have been benefited by this dual vote would have been all, or nearly all, householders at a rental of £20 and upwards, so that the direct taxes qualification would have enfranchised hardly any new voters, while it would add considerably to the number of votes possessed by the wealthier classes of the constituency. "This," it has been said, as far as the rest of the electors (of the poorer classes) were concerned, would have had a disfranchising effect, by reducing their votes to one half their relative value."

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If the measure bears some reference to existing classes in this country, why should we conceal from ourselves, or omit from our discussions, the fact that this country is a country of classes, and a country of classes it will ever remain? What we desire to do is, to give every one who is worthy of it a fair share in the government of the country by means of the elective franchise; but, at the same time, we have been equally anxious to maintain the character of the House, to make propositions in harmony with the circumstances of the country, to prevent a preponderance of any class, and to give a representation to the nation."

Alas! for Mr. Disraeli's figures when they came to be handled by Mr. Gladstone. Instead of 237,000, it was stoutly maintained by Mr. Gladstone that scarcely 144,000 would be admitted to the franchise by extending it to all who personally paid their rates. And as to the facilities to be offered in such tempting profusion to the compound householder for obtaining a vote, they amounted to this-that he was to have the privilege of paying over again that which he had already paid. It was difficult to believe that he would ever avail himself of this privilege to any great extent. Practically, the bill did nothing for the compound householder; so that, while it would introduce household suffrage-nay, universal suffrage-into villages and country towns where there was no system of compounding for rates, in large towns, like Leeds, with a population of a quarter of a million, where the majority of the inhabitants were compound householders, its effect would be little or nothing. Comparing the case of Leeds with that of Thetford, Mr. Gladstone said: "In the borough of Thetford the bill of the right hon. gentleman will go to establish something very close upon universal suffrage. Thetford is a village, or, rather, an assemblage of villages constituting a rural district; it is, strictly speaking, no borough at all. There is a population of 4,200, of whom 829, or one in five, are male occupiers. That proportion is close upon universal suffrage. And the same proportion throughout England would give a constituency of FOUR MILLIONS, which I imagine would entirely close the mouth of Mr. Beales. An immense proportion of the people of Thetford are the mere peasantry of the country, and by that I mean they are unskilled labourers. Nothing can be more pre

The dual vote, however, provoked such hot opposition that, as will shortly be seen, the Government eventually withdrew it. The direct taxes qualification, Mr. Disraeli calculated, would add more than 200,000 to the constituency; and the three other "fancy franchises," as they were called-the education franchise, the funded property franchise, and the savings bank franchise another 105,000. In all, the Government held out the splendid promise of an addition of more than 1,000,000 voters to the borough constituency. In counties the franchise would be lowered to £15 rateable value -a reduction which would enfranchise about 171,000 additional voters; while the four lateral franchises mentioned above would bring the number of new county voters up to about 330,000. With regard to the redistribution of seats, the Government had substantially the same proposals to make as those originally described to the House on the 25th of February. Mr. Disraeli, posterous than that you should say to a peasant, or however, vigorously defended them from the charge of common hodman, or day labourer, earning 1s. 6d. or 2s. inadequacy which had been brought against them in the a day, in a town where there is no composition in force, interval. Neither the Government nor the country, heYou shall have your franchise for nothing, and be put said, was prepared to go through the agitating labour of constructing a new electoral map of England; and this being the case, all that would be done would be to seize opportunities as they arose of remedying grievances and removing inequalities by some such moderate means as those proposed in the bill. The Chancellor of the Exchequer concluded his speech as follows:-" It may be said that this bill, in providing a system of checks and counterpoises, tends still further to strengthen the barriers of class. If there are checks and counterpoises in our scheme, we live under a Constitution of which we boast that it is a Constitution of checks and counterpoises,

on the register without knowing it;' while in great communities, such as the vast parishes and boroughs of London, and many other towns of the country, you absolutely fine, both in time and money, or both, the compound householder."

In fact, the results of the bill, had it been passed as it was originally drawn up, would have been almost grotesque. In Hull, for instance, where the Small Tenements Act is almost universally enforced, the number of personally rated occupiers under the £10 rental who would have been enfranchised by the bill would have been 64 out of a population of 104,873; while in the sinall

A.D. 1867.]

MR. GLADSTONE'S SPEECH ON THE SECOND READING.

borough of Thirsk, where the system of compounding for rates was not in use, 684 would have obtained the franchise as personal ratepayers. In Brighton, where compound householders abound, the bill would have enfranchised 14 out of every 10,000 occupiers under the £10 line; while in York it would have enfranchised 100 out of every 1,000. The enfranchising effect of the bill would have been between "six and seven times as great in the boroughs not under Rating Acts as in the others."

It is more than probable that in framing their measure the Conservative Government foresaw none of these anomalies, and that they were revealed to them and impressed upon them in the course of debate. There was, in fact, no adequate knowledge among them of the working of those complicated details of rating machinery upon which they made the whole effect of their bill ultimately depend. With regard to the secondary franchises-the direct taxes franchise, the education franchise, &c.-Mr. Gladstone contended that the figures quoted by Mr. Disraeli were wholly erroneous and visionary, and that the new voters it was supposed they would admit were no more substantial than Falstaff's men in buckram. For himself, he had no belief in the principle of rating as a bulwark of the Constitution; and to base the possession of the franchise upon the personal payment of rates, he thought fundamentally wrong. To the proposition of dual voting as a safeguard of household suffrage, he declared himself inflexibly opposed. It could only serve as a gigantic instrument of fraud, and was nothing less than a proclamation of a war of classes. And where was the lodger franchise, so highly praised by the Conservatives in 1859, and which all the world had expected to find in the bill? If that were added, and the so-called safeguards of dual voting and personal payment of rates done away with, the Liberal party would accept the bill as a whole.

A short debate followed, in which Mr. Lowe reappeared, to do battle as warmly against the Reform Bill of the Conservatives as he had formerly waged it against that of the Liberals. Mr. Lowe had been duped; but he was not yet prepared to confess it. Later on, when concession after concession had been made by the Government, and a far more Radical measure than any Liberal Ministry had ever dreamt of was on the point of becoming law, Mr. Lowe did indeed make ample and public confession of his mistake, and loud and bitter were the expressions of his wrath and mortification. But at this stage of the matter the "Cave" had still some confidence in Conservative principles and time-honoured Conservative traditions, and refused to believe that the party they had helped to put into power would ever betray them so completely as was afterwards actually the case. They disliked the bill, and said so; but for some little time they trusted to the genuine Conservative influence still existing behind the Ministerial benches for its modification. Lord Cranborne, a seceder from the Tories, as Mr. Lowe had been from the Liberals, made a short but energetic attack upon the bill on this occasion. "If the Conservative party accept the bill," he said, "they will be committing

257

political suicide: household suffrage, pure and simple, will be the result of it, for no one can put any faith in the proposed safeguards; and, after their conduct last year, it is not the Conservatives who should pass a measure of household suffrage."

During the interval between the introduction of the bill and the motion for the second reading, an important meeting of the Liberal party was held at Mr. Gladstone's house on March 21st, to consider whether opposition should be offered to the second reading. Mr. Gladstone said, "Since the printing of the Government bill, having applied myself day and night to the study of it, I have not the smallest doubt in my own mind that the wiser course of the two would be to oppose the bill on the second reading." He thought, however, "that the general disposition of the meeting would not bear him out in that course;" and to maintain the unity of the party, he was willing to sacrifice his own personal opinion. "If ministers were content to abandon the dual voting, and to equalise the privileges and facilities of the enfranchised in all cases, however the qualification arose, then the measure might be made acceptable. If they would not concede these points, then he thought that the Liberals should not permit the measure to go into committee." It was already evident that both sides had made up their minds to pass some kind of Reform Bill during the session, and that both were prepared to make concessions rather than offer to the country once more the pitiable spectacle of a great measure of necessary Reform overthrown by party spirit and party warfare. Still the Liberals were determined to wrest certain points from the Government; and in his speech on the second reading (March 25), Mr. Gladstone thus summed up the defects in the bill, which must, he said, be amended before the Liberals could give in their adhesion to it:

1. Omission of a lodger franchise. 2. Omission of provisions against traffic in votes of householders of the lowest class, by corrupt payment of their rates. 3. Disqualifications of compound householders under the exist ing law. 4. Additional disqualifications of compound householders under the proposed law. 5. The franchise founded on direct taxation. 6. The dual vote. 7. The inadequate distribution of seats. 8. The inadequate reduction of the franchise in counties. 9. Voting papers. 10. Collateral or special franchises. Every one of these ten points, except the second, were finally settled more or less in accordance with the demands of the Liberals, a fact which in itself is an instructive comment on the experiment of government by minorities," which Mr. Disraeli was making with such great success.

66

In contradistinction to Lord Cranborne, Mr. Gladstone maintained that while the bill seemed on the face of it to be a measure of household suffrage, it was in reality nothing of the kind; every concession in it was balanced by a corresponding restriction, and what it gave with one hand it took away with the other. For the dual vote he had nothing but hard words: "At the head of the list stand those favoured children of fortune-those select human beings made of finer clay than the rest of their

fellow-subjects-who are to be endowed with dual votes. Upon that dual vote I shall not trouble the House, for I think that my doing so would be a waste of time." And, indeed, the general opinion of the House had already pronounced so decidedly against it, that no purpose would have been served by discussing it at length. Mr. Gladstone went on to declaim afresh against the fine which the bill would inflict upon the compound householder before he could obtain his vote. Sir William Clay's Act in 1857

he attacked the bill as one that would "flood some towns with thousands of voters, and only add a few in other towns." We have already given some instances of these inequalities of operation; but a few more quoted by Mr. Gladstone may be added. In Abingdon, a town under the Small Tenements Act, 35 would have been qualified as personal ratepayers, while 574 compound householders would have been excluded (assuming, as the Liberals very rightly assumed throughout, that the

[graphic][merged small]

had enabled compound householders above the £10 rental line to place their names upon the register, provided they paid the reduced rate or composition paid by their landlords. Why should compound householders below the £10 line be obliged by the present bill to pay the full rateable value of their houses, while their richer neighbours were allowed a reduction of twenty-five or thirty per cent.?

Then followed an elaborate and masterly examination of the probable results of the bill, if passed in its original form. Making use of some important statistics, the return of which had been lately moved for by Mr. Hunt,

"facilities" offered to the compound householder for obtaining a vote were no facilities at all, but rather penalties imposed upon the attainment of it; and that, therefore, practically, the bill excluded him from the franchise). In Carlisle, 406 would have been qualified, and 3,571 excluded; in Evesham there would have been 40 qualified, and 464 excluded, and so on. In boroughs under the Rating Acts, the whole number qualified would have been 25,064, while 139,377 would have been excluded. The effect of these figures was still further increased when Mr. Gladstone went on to consider the case of towns not under the Rating Acts. In these, he said, the franchise

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