Note 24 — ROBERT LOWE, VISCOUNT SHERBROOKE AGAINST THE REFORM ACT: HOUSE OF COMMONS, MAY 31, 1866.

Note 24, p. 235.—How crying the need of reform had been before the great Reform Act of 1832, a glance at the previous state of England will show. It was only in name that England was ruled by a representative government. A majority of the House of Commons were actually the creatures of the peers, or of other personages high in power. Like Church livings, the great lords had seats in the Commons to dispense. Some seats were openly for sale. The value of the two seats of the town of Gatton, which had only seven electors, was commonly estimated at £100,000. At a time when such cities as Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham were actually without representation in Parliament, the paper borough of Old Sarum, which had no inhabitant at all, had two members accredited to it. Scotland was even worse off. One example of the conditions there will suffice. The county of Bute contained but one voter, who—irresistibly suggestive of Mr. Gilbert’s Pooh-Bah—at elections was at once chairman, proposer and seconder of his own return, recorder of the successful vote, and unanimously elected candidate! The criminal absurdity of these matters, so completely patent, long before 1832 had stirred the people and even some of the statesmen of England. Among those who had written or spoken for reform were the great Chatham, and the younger Pitt; so too had felt John Wilkes and Sir James Mackintosh. And then came the French Revolution, which England hailed as the harbinger of her own reforms. When the French had won so swiftly the battle for freedom, what could not the English do? All the world knows how, in the days of the guillotine and the Terror, these English illusions faded. Forthwith, and for nearly a generation of men, England’s whole energies were turned from her domestic troubles to crush the child of that Revolution in which she had thought to see the breaking of a new day. Napoleon at last conquered, all the old social unrest swept back. But against the reformers there were arrayed all the conservative elements of a most conservative country,—the classes and professions, and a Government confirmed in tenure by the victories of a Titanic war. It was a long struggle. Again did the example of France, in her expulsion of the Bourbons in 1830, give renewed heart across the Channel. As has so often happened, the people found their successful leader in the class which contained their natural opponents. Not even the prestige of the Duke of Wellington, still the national hero, and head of the anti-reformers, could avail against Earl Grey, the man of the hour, who at last won for his country real reform.