Chapter VII

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM AND THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE PEOPLE

The Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century changed the face of England and brought to the manufacturing class wealth and prominence. The population of Lancashire was not more than 300,000 in 1760, the West Riding of Yorkshire about 360,000, and the total population of England 6,000,000. The inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Crompton, Watt, and Cartwright revolutionised the cotton trade in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and increased enormously the production of woollen goods. England ceased to be mainly a nation of farmers and merchants; domestic manufacture gave way to the factory system; the labouring people, unable to make a living in the country, gathered into the towns. The long series of Enclosure Acts—1760-1843—turned seven million acres of common land into private property, and with this change in agrarian conditions and the growth of population England ceased to be a corn-exporting country, and became dependent on foreign nations for its food supply.

While these industrial and agrarian changes meant a striking increase in wealth and population, they were accompanied by untold misery to the common people.

With this transfer of the balance of economic power came a good deal of rivalry between the manufacturers and the landed gentry, the latter becoming more and more Tory, the former more and more Radical. As all political power, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. These yeomen and small landowners had been the backbone of the Parliamentary Party in the days of the Stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to sell out and invest their property in other ways.

The story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth.

The Need for Parliamentary Reform

The point for us to note here is that the changed economic conditions made Parliamentary reform a necessity, and brought the question of popular enfranchisement within sight. It was useless for Burke to maintain the incomparable beauty of the British constitution; English politicians might be indifferent to political theories of democracy, and heartily dislike any notion of radical change, but the abuses were too obvious to prevent reform.

Whatever the size of the county it returned two members elected by freeholders, and the cost of a county election was enormous. Some of the boroughs, especially in Cornwall, were tiny villages. Eighteen members were returned from such boroughs in that part of Cornwall which now returns one member for the Liskeard Division. The fields of Old Sarum belonged to seven electors and returned two members. As there was no habitation whatever in this "borough" of Old Sarum, a tent was put up for the convenience of the returning officer at election times. No general law decided the borough franchise. Local custom and various political and personal considerations settled who should vote for members of Parliament. Places like Westminster and Preston had practically manhood suffrage. In most of the "corporation boroughs" the franchise was restricted exclusively to freemen of the borough, and to the self-elected non-resident persons who composed the governing body before the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835. A small number of rich and powerful men really worked nearly all the elections. Seats were openly bought and sold, and a candidate had either to find a patron who would provide him with a seat, or, failing a patron, to purchase a seat himself. Fox first entered Parliament for the pocket borough of Midhurst, and Sir George Trevelyan has described how it took place. Midhurst was selected by the father of Charles James Fox as "the most comfortable of constituencies from the point of view of a representative; for the right of election rested in a few small holdings, on which no human being resided, distinguished among the pastures and the stubble that surrounded them by a large stone set up on end in the middle of each portion. These burbage tenures, as they were called, had all been bought up by a single proprietor, Viscount Montagu, who when an election was in prospect, assigned a few of them to his servants, with instructions to nominate the members and then make back the property to their employer. This ceremony was performed in March, 1768, and the steward of the estate, who acted as the returning officer, declared that Charles James Fox had been duly chosen as one of the burgesses for Midhurst, at a time when that young gentleman was still amusing himself in Italy."

Three years earlier Burke had entered Parliament as a nominee of Lord Rockingham's. Gibbon sat in the House for some years under patronage. Gladstone first became a member by presentation to a pocket borough, and later spoke in praise of this method of bringing young men of promise into Parliament. John Wilson Croker estimated that of six hundred and fifty-eight members of the House of Commons at the end of the eighteenth century, two hundred and seventy-six were returned by patrons. Men of more independence of mind who could afford to buy seats did so, and many of the reformers—including Burdett, Romilly and Hume—thus sat in the House.

Manufacturing Centres Unrepresented in Parliament

It was not so much that the landowning aristocracy were over-represented in Parliament by their control of so many pocket boroughs, as that great manufacturing centres were entirely unrepresented. The middle-class manufacturers had no means of making their influence felt in the unreformed House of Commons, for towns of such importance as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham sent no representatives to Parliament. This meant that Parliament was out of touch with all the industrial life of the nation, and that nothing was done till after the Reform Act in the way of serious industrial legislation.

The Reform Act of 1832 changed all this. It disfranchised all boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants—fifty-six in all; allowed one member only to boroughs with between 2,000 and 4,000; gave representatives to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and to several other large manufacturing towns and London boroughs; extended the county franchise to leaseholders and £50 tenants at will; and settled the borough franchise on a uniform qualification of occupation in a house of £10 rateable value. It also fixed two days, instead of fifteen, as the limit for county elections, and one day for boroughs.

The Passage of the Great Reform Bill

The Reform Bill was not carried without much rioting in the country, and some loss of life.

The Duke of Wellington was at the head of the Tory Ministry in 1830; and though he declared in face of an Opposition that was headed by the Whig aristocrats, and included the middle-class manufacturers and the great bulk of the working class in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands, that "no better system (of Parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man" than the unreformed House of Commons, and that he would never bring forward a reform measure himself, and should always feel it his duty to resist such measure when proposed by others, yet, in less than two years after this speech Wellington's resistance had ended, and the Reform Bill was carried into law.

What happened in those two years was this: At the general election in the summer of 1831, the popular cry was "the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill."

"The whole countless multitude of reformers had laid hold of the principle that the most secure and the shortest way of obtaining what they wanted was to obtain representation. The non-electors felt themselves called upon to put forth such power as they had as a means to obtaining the power which they claimed." And the non-electors were enormously successful. For they "combined their will, their knowledge, and their manifest force in political unions, whence they sent forth will, knowledge, and influence over wide districts of the land. And the electors, seeing the importance of the crisis—the unspeakable importance that it should be well conducted—joined these unions."

The Reformers carried the day at the elections, and the new House of Commons passed the second reading of the Bill on July 8th, by 136: 367-231. On September 21st the third reading passed by 345 to 236. Then on the 8th of October the House of Lords threw out the Bill by 199 to 158, and at once fierce riots broke out all over the country, in especial at Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol.

At Derby the jail was stormed. At Nottingham the castle was burned, and of nine men subsequently convicted of riot, three were hanged. At Bristol, the jail, the Mansion House, the Customs House, the Excise Office, and the Bishop's Palace were burned, and twelve lives were lost in three days.

The new session opened in December, and again the Bill was introduced, and this time the second reading had a majority of 162: 324-162. The House of Lords hesitated when the Bill came up to them at the end of March, 1832; allowed the second reading to pass by 184 to 175, and then in Committee struck out those clauses which disfranchised the "rotten" boroughs—uninhabited constituencies like Old Sarum. Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, at once resigned, and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to form a Tory anti-reform Ministry. But the task was beyond him, the temper of the country was impatient of any further postponement of the Bill. Petitions poured in urging Parliament to vote no supplies, and resolutions were passed refusing to pay taxes till the Bill became law.

On Wellington's failure to make a Government, William IV. had to recall Grey, and the Whigs resumed office with an assurance that, if necessary, the King would create sufficient peers favourable to reform, so that the Bill should pass.

The battle was over, the anti-Reformers retired, and on June 4th, 1832, the Reform Bill passed the Lords by 106 to 22, receiving the Royal Assent three days later.

The Whigs protested that the Reform Bill was a final measure, and Sir Francis Burdett, the veteran reformer, was content to vote with the Tories when the Act had become law. But there is no finality in politics, and the Reform Bill was only the removal of a barrier on the road to democracy. The Tories described the Bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the Act of 1832 neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its foes. What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since 1688, to the richer members of the middle class—the big farmers in the country, the prosperous shopkeepers in the towns. The working class was still voteless, and the old democratic franchise of Preston and Westminster was gone from those boroughs.

The first reformed Parliament met early in 1833, and the change in the character of the House of Commons was seen at once. Government accepted responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before. The New Poor Law, 1834, and the new Municipal Corporations Act, 1835, were the beginning of our present system of local government. Slavery was abolished in all British Colonies in 1833.

Greville, in his Memoirs, gives us an impression of the new regime in Parliament as it appeared to one who belonged to the old dethroned aristocracy.

"The first thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... There exists no party but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the Tories, without a head, frightened, angry, and sulky."

The Working Class Still Unrepresented

But the working classes were the really disappointed people in the country. They had worked for the reformers, and their energies—and their violence—had been the driving force that had carried the Bill into law. If their expectations were extravagant and their hopes over-heated, the more bitter was their distress at the failure of the Reform Act to accomplish the social improvements that had been predicted.

Chartism

So the working class in despair of help from the Government, decided to get the franchise for themselves, and for twelve years, 1838-1850, Chartism was the great popular movement. The Five Points of the People's Charter were proclaimed in 1838: (1) Universal Suffrage; (2) Vote by Ballot; (3) Annual Parliaments; (4) Abolition of Property Qualification for Members of Parliament; (5) Payment of Members. A Sixth Point—Equal Electoral Districts—was left out in the National Petition.

Although the Chartist demands were political, it was the social misery of the time that drove men and women into the Chartist movement. The wretchedness of their lot—its hopeless outlook, and the horrible housing conditions in the big towns—these things seemed intolerable to the more intelligent of the working people, and thousands flocked to the monster Chartist demonstrations, and found comfort in the orations of Feargus O'Connor, Bronterre O'Brien, and Ernest Jones.

The Charter promised political enfranchisement to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. So it seemed in the 'Forties—when one in every eleven of the industrial population was a pauper.

In spite of its failure, Chartism kept alive for many years the desire for political enfranchisement in the labouring classes. That desire never died out. Although Palmerston, the "Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet"—so Disraeli accurately enough described him—was Prime Minister from 1855 to 1865 (with one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-class enfranchisement. Palmerston's very inactivity drove Liberals and the younger Conservatives to look to the working classes for support for the measures that were planned. The middle class was satisfied that the artisans could be admitted to the franchise without danger to the Constitution. Palmerston's death in 1865 left the Liberal Party to Earl Russell's premiership, with Gladstone as its leader in the Commons. Reform was now inevitable.

The Bill as first introduced in 1866 was a moderate measure, making a £7 rental the qualification for a vote in the boroughs. It was too moderate to provoke any enthusiasm, and it was hateful to the old Palmerstonian Whigs and most of the Conservatives, who objected to any enfranchisement of the working class. By a combination of these opponents the Bill was defeated, the Liberals retired from office, and a Conservative ministry under Lord Derby, with Disraeli leading the House of Commons, was formed.

The Hyde Park Railings (1866)

It was seen quickly that there was a very real demand for the enfranchisement of the town workman—the agricultural districts remained unawakened—and Reform Leagues and Reform Unions sprang up as they had done in 1831. Then in London came the incident of the Hyde Park railings, which gave a distinct impetus to the Reform movement. What happened at Hyde Park was this: the London Reform Union decided to hold a monster demonstration in Hyde Park on July 23rd, but the Chief Commissioner of Police had declared the meeting must not take place, and ordered the gates to be closed at five o'clock. Mr. Edmund Beales, and other leaders of the London Reform Union, on being refused admittance, drove away calmly to hold a meeting in Trafalgar Square, but the great mass of people remained outside the park, "pressed and pressing round the railings." Some were clinging to the railings; others deliberately weakened the supports of the railings. Park Lane was thronged, and all along the Bayswater Road there was a dense crowd. The line was too long for the police to defend, and presently, when the railings yielded to the pressure, the people poured in to the park.

The Guards were called out, and a detachment arrived at the park, but the people only cheered the soldiers good-humouredly. Not even a blank cartridge was fired that day.

All through the autumn and winter great demonstrations took place in the large towns and cities of the country in support of the demand for the enfranchisement of the workman, and when Parliament met in February, 1867, a Reform Bill was promised in the Queen's Speech. To Lord Derby the measure was frankly a "leap in the dark," and one or two Conservative ministers (including Cranborne, afterwards Lord Salisbury) left the Government in disgust. But the Conservatives generally chuckled at "dishing the Whigs," and the Bill, with considerable revision, was passed through both Houses of Parliament by August.

Household Suffrage

The third Reform Act, giving household suffrage to the country districts, was passed by Gladstone in 1884, and it was followed by a Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885. By these two Acts the agricultural labourer was enfranchised, a service franchise was created for those who were qualified neither as householders nor lodgers, and the principle of single-member equal electoral districts—on a basis of 54,000 inhabitants—was adopted. Only twenty-three boroughs, the City of London and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, retained double-member representation. The membership of the House of Commons was increased from six hundred and fifty-eight to six hundred and seventy, the present total; and the franchise remains as it was fixed in 1885—occupation and ownership giving the right to vote.

Working-Class Representation in Parliament

With the extension of the franchise the change in the personnel of the House of Commons has become marked. The more wealthy of the middle class entered in considerable numbers after 1832; the Acts of 1867 and 1884 made the entry of the workman inevitable. The miners were the first to send Labour representatives to Parliament, and to-day their members outnumber those of any other trade. Since 1892 industrial constituencies, chiefly in Yorkshire, Lancashire, South Wales, and the mining districts, have gone on steadily electing and re-electing working-class representatives—trade union secretaries and officers for the most part—and with the formation of a National Labour Representation Committee in 1900, these representatives became a separate and distinct party—the Labour Party after 1906—in the House of Commons.

Enfranchisement to secure representation for the redress of grievances has been the principle that has guided the English people towards democracy. Both the middle class and the working class were convinced that enfranchisement was necessary if the House of Commons was to be in any real sense a representative assembly, and both have used enfranchisement for obtaining representation in Parliament. The return of forty Labour Members at recent general elections is evidence that a large electorate supports the Labour Party in its desire to carry in Parliament legislation that will make life a better thing for the labourer and his family; and in the House of Commons the Labour Members have won a general respect. As a matter of fact, the House of Commons to-day is in every way a more orderly, a more intelligent, more business-like, and better-mannered assembly than it was in the days before 1832.

No stronger evidence of the value of Parliamentary representation to the working-class can be offered than the large output of what may be called labour legislation in recent years. It is true that Lord Shaftesbury's benevolent and entirely disinterested activities promoted Factory Acts in the first half of the nineteenth century, but in the last twenty years measures for the amelioration of the lot of the workman have been constantly before Parliament.

Removal of Religious Disabilities—Catholics, Jews, and Freethinkers

The nineteenth century was not only the century of popular enfranchisement; it was the century that saw the removal of religious disabilities, and the free admission to Parliament and to the Government of Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, Jews, and Freethinkers.

In the year 1800 Roman Catholics in England were excluded from Parliament, from the franchise, from the magistracy, the Bar, the Civil Service, from municipal corporations, and from commissions in the Army and Navy. Pitt was willing to abolish these disabilities on the passing of the Act of Union, and the Irish people were bitterly disappointed that the disabilities remained. But George III. refused all assent to the proposals, and Pitt resigned. Several times the House of Commons passed Catholic Relief Bills, which were thrown out by the Lords, and it was not till 1829, when "the English ministry had to choose between concession and civil war," that Peel and the Duke of Wellington yielded and persuaded their party to admit Catholics to Parliament and to the Civil and Military Services.

The repeal of the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics—Acts of Elizabeth that inflicted penalties on priests who said mass in England, and on Roman Catholics who attended mass—took place in 1844, and in 1866 the Parliamentary Oath was amended and made unobjectionable to Roman Catholics.

A Roman Catholic is still excluded by law from the Crown, the Lord Chancellorship, and the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, but many Roman Catholics are members of Parliament—members of all parties—and the late Lord Ripon, a Catholic, sat in a Liberal Cabinet.

In 1846 Rothschild was elected as a Liberal M.P. for the City of London, but the law did not permit him to take his seat. Then for some years Jewish M.P.'s were allowed to take part in debates and sit on committees, but were not allowed to vote. Finally, in 1858, the Lords, after rejecting the measure for ten years, passed the Jews' Disabilities Bill, which removed all restriction. The Right Hon. Herbert Samuel, M.P., is the first Jew to sit in the Cabinet, for though Disraeli was of the Jewish race, he was a Christian in belief.

Although in 1800 various Acts on the Statute Book required Nonconformists to subscribe to the religion of the Church of England before taking part in municipal affairs, these Acts had long been a dead letter. All that was done in the nineteenth century was to repeal these Acts, and to throw open the universities and public offices to Nonconformists. It is only, however, in recent years that Nonconformists have filled posts of high importance in the Cabinet.

The last attempt at restriction on the religious beliefs of members of Parliament was made in the House of Commons itself, when Charles Bradlaugh, after being duly elected M.P. for Northampton, was by the action of the House excluded from his seat. Bradlaugh was a frank disbeliever in Christianity, and the House of Commons refused to allow him either to take the oath or make an affirmation. For five years (1880-5) the struggle lasted—a Liberal Government being in power all the time—and three times during that period the electors of Northampton triumphantly returned Charles Bradlaugh as their member, only to be answered by resolutions of refusal and expulsion passed by the House of Commons against their representative. It was a repetition of the battle Wilkes had fought one hundred and twenty years earlier, and it ended in the same way. A new Parliament assembled in January, 1886 (after a general election in November), the new Speaker (Mr. Peel) permitted Bradlaugh to take the oath in the usual way, declined to allow any interference, and the battle was over. Two years later a general Affirmation Bill was carried on the motion of Bradlaugh, and became law. When Charles Bradlaugh lay dying in January, 1891, the House of Commons passed, without dissent, a resolution expunging from the journals of the House the old resolutions of exclusion.

The Enfranchisement of Women

The nineteenth century then will always be noted as the era of steady advance towards democracy, especially in England. Enfranchisement of the workman, and his representation in Parliament, have transferred the government of the country from an aristocracy to the middle class and the working class, for to-day, alike in Parliament and in the permanent Civil Service, men of the middle class predominate, assisted by those who served apprenticeship in mine or workshop. The removal of religious disabilities has ended the old rule that confined the business of the legislature and the administration of justice to members of the Established Church of England, and Roman Catholics, Jews, Nonconformists, and Freethinkers now take their share in all public work.

One disability only remains—the sex disability that denies the parliamentary franchise to women. In the middle ages women were excused from parliamentary attendance, but there was no notion that their powers and privileges as landowners were shortened because, on account of their sex, they were granted exemption from Parliament and from juries. In 1868 a test case—Chorlton v. Lings—was brought, and the judges decided that women householders were not to be registered as electors, and it was left to Parliament to pass a Women's Enfranchisement Bill. From the time of John Stuart Mill's advocacy in 1867 there have always been supporters of Women's Suffrage in the House of Commons, and in the last five years these supporters have been growing in numbers. Only the refusal of the Government to give time for the discussion of the Bill in Committee has prevented a Woman's Enfranchisement measure, which on several occasions has received a second reading, from passing the House of Commons; and the announcement by the present (1911) Government that full facilities for such discussion are to be granted next year (1912) would indicate that the removal of political sex disabilities is close at hand. Women are not asking for adult suffrage, but are willing to receive enfranchisement on the terms that qualify men as electors, and the Conciliation Bill, as it is called—because members of every political party have agreed to make it their Bill—would place on the roll of electors rather more than a million of women voters.

The demand for the parliamentary franchise is with us the expression of that deep dissatisfaction at the unequal relations of the sexes that is felt by many men, and by far more women, all over the civilised world. As the middle-class man and the workmen of Great Britain were sure that they could not get from Parliament an understanding of popular grievances, still less fair treatment, until they possessed the right to choose their own parliamentary representatives, so women are convinced that there can be no adequate adjustment of these unequal relations until they too enjoy the same privilege of citizenship; for enfranchisement and representation are the two chosen instruments of democratic government in our day.