History of the Four Georges, and of William IV, Volume 4 — lxxi. Reform, Part 2

[Sidenote: 1831--Lord John Russell and the Reform Bill] Lord Grey's Cabinet would have nothing to do with the ballot.

With this exception the draft scheme as submitted by Lord John Russell was accepted by Lord Grey and his colleagues.

Then it was laid before the King, and the King, according to Lord John Russell, gave it his ready and cheerful sanction.

There were indeed some observers at the time who believed that the King had cheerfully sanctioned the whole scheme of reform as proposed, because he still confidently believed that nothing but the wreck of the Ministry was to come of it.

However that may have been, it is certain that the King did give his full sanction to the measure, and the Government prepared to introduce the first Reform Bill.

It was arranged that the conduct of the Bill in the House of Commons should be placed in the hands of Lord John Russell.

This arrangement created, when the Bill was actually brought forward, a good deal of adverse criticism in the House and in the country.

Some prominent members of the Opposition in the House of Commons persuaded themselves, and tried to persuade their listeners, that Lord Grey's Cabinet, by adopting such an arrangement, showed that there was no sincerity in the professed desire for reform.

If the members of the Cabinet, it was argued, are such believers in the virtue of reform, why do they not select one of their own body to introduce the measure?

Lord John Russell was only Paymaster of the Forces, and had not a seat in the Cabinet, and if he was taken out of his place and put into the most prominent position it could only be because no member of the Cabinet could be found who was willing to undertake the task.

{133} The answer was very clear, even at the time, and it is obvious indeed to the generations that had an opportunity of knowing how eminently Lord John Russell was qualified for the work which had been entrusted to his hands.

He was a member of one of the greatest aristocratic families in the land, and one of the practical dangers threatening the Reform Bill was the alarm that might spread among the wealthier classes at the thought of a wild democratic movement upsetting the whole principle of aristocratic predominance in the English constitutional system.

Still more important was the fact that Lord John Russell, who had distinguished himself already as the most devoted promoter of constitutional reform, was a man peculiarly qualified by intellect and by his skill in exposition to pilot such a measure through the House of Commons.

Lord John Russell had not yet won reputation as a great Parliamentary orator; nor did he, during the whole of his long career, succeed in acquiring such a fame.

But he was a master of the art which consists in making a perfectly clear statement of the most complicated case, and in defending his measure point by point with never-failing readiness and skill throughout the most perplexing series of debates.

It was pointed out also, at the time, that if Lord John Russell was selected to introduce the Reform Bill, although he was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet, thus too had Edmund Burke been selected to introduce the East India Bill, although he, like Lord John Russell, was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet.

Indeed, to us, who now look back on the events from a long distance of time, the impression would rather be that Lord Grey had little or no choice in the matter.

He was not himself a member of the House of Commons, and therefore could not introduce the Bill there.

Brougham had ceased to be a member of the House of Commons, and was therefore out of the question.

Lord Althorp, who had not yet succeeded to the peerage, and had a seat in the representative chamber, was, as we have already said, the poorest of {134} speakers, and utterly unsuited for the difficult task of steering so important a measure through the troublous sea of Parliamentary debate.

Lord Grey, of course, was thoroughly well acquainted with Russell's great abilities and his peculiar fitness for the task assigned to him, and could, under no circumstances, have made a better choice.

But our only possible difficulty now would be to say what other choice, under the existing conditions, he could possibly have made.

[Sidenote: 1831--Need for secrecy about the Reform Bill] Tuesday, March 1, 1831, was the day fixed for the introduction of the Reform Bill in the House of Commons.

In the mean time, as we learn from all who can be considered authorities on the subject, the nature and the plan of the proposed reforms were kept a profound secret, not only from the public at large, but even from members of the House of Commons itself, with the exception of those who belonged to the Administration.

Ministerial secrets, it is only fair to say, are generally well kept in England, but instances have undoubtedly occurred in which the nature of some approaching measure, which ought to have been held in the profoundest secrecy until the time came for its official revelation, has leaked out and become fully known to the public in advance.

There is, of course, great difficulty in preventing some inkling of the truth getting prematurely out.

Cabinet Ministers generally have wives, and there are stories of such wives having caught stray words from their husbands which put them on a track of discovery, and not having the grace to keep strictly to themselves the discovery when made.

No such mischance, however, appears to have attended the preparation of the Reform Bill.

It is said that there must have been more than thirty persons who had official knowledge of the Ministerial plans, and yet it does not appear that any definite idea as to their nature was obtained by the public.

It may perhaps be asked whether there was any solid reason for attaching so much importance to the keeping of a secret which on a certain fixed and near-approaching day must, as a matter of fact, be a secret no more.

Of course the imperative necessity of secrecy would be obvious {135} in all cases where some policy was in preparation which might directly affect the interests of foreign States.

In such a case it is clear that it might be of essential importance to a Government not to let its plans become known to the world before it had put itself into a condition to maintain its policy.

In measures that had to do with commercial and financial interests it might often be of paramount importance that no false alarm or false expectations of any kind should be allowed to disturb the business of the country before the fitting time came for a full declaration.

But in the case of such a measure as the Reform Bill it may be asked if any great advantage was to be gained by keeping the nature of the measure a complete secret until the hour came for its full and official explanation.

With regard to this Reform Bill there were many good reasons for maintaining the profoundest possible secrecy.

If any premature reports got out at all they would be sure to be imperfect reports, indiscreet or haphazard revelations of this or that particular part of the Bill, utterly wanting in balance, symmetry, and comprehensiveness.

The whole thing was new to the country, and there would have been much danger in fixing public attention upon some one part of the proposed reform until the public could be in a position to judge the scheme as a complete measure.

Lord Grey's Government had to deal with two classes of men who were naturally and almost relentlessly opposed to each other--the more clamorous reformers and the enemies of all reform.

It was of immense importance that the latter class should, if possible, be prevailed upon to see--at least the more intelligent and reasonable among them--that the Government had not gone so far in the direction of reform as to make it seem a threatened revolution.

It was, on the other hand, of immense importance to prevail upon the former class to see that the Government had not so stunted and dwarfed its proposed reform as to render it incapable of anything like a political and constitutional revolution.

Any sudden explosion of feeling on either side brought about by some premature {136} and imperfect revelation might have caused the most serious trouble in the country.

[Sidenote: 1831--Introduction of the Reform Bill] Moreover, none of the ministers could possibly profess to be quite certain as to the genuine wishes and purposes of his Majesty King William the Fourth with regard to the Reform Bill.

The King was not always in the same mood on the same subject for any two days in succession, or indeed for any two hours of the same day.

If the opponents of all reform were to get a knowledge of the clauses in the Bill least favorable to their own ideas as to their interests, and were to make a commotion among the owners of the soil, the immediate effect might be to discourage the King altogether, to fill his mind with a strong desire for escape from the uncongenial part of a reformer and an overmastering anxiety to get rid of his reforming Ministry.

If, on the other hand, the Peterloo men, the Chartists generally, and the populations of the northern towns were to get into their minds through some imperfect revelation that the Ministerial Bill was not intended to do half so much for them as they were demanding, and if in consequence there were to be a stormy agitation throughout the country, then it was quite possible that the King might take alarm and tell his ministers that it was hopeless to think of conciliating such agitators, and that the safety of the State, and especially of the monarchy, could only be provided for by postponing reform until some more favorable opportunity.

For all these reasons, and many others, the leaders of the Government had their hearts set on keeping well their secret until the right hour should come for its official disclosure, and it is a fact of some historical interest, even to readers of the present day, that the secret was faithfully kept.

The 1st of March, 1831, was a day of intense excitement and even tumult in and around the House of Commons.

We are told that never before in that generation had there been so great a crowd of persons struggling for seats in the galleries of the House of Commons.

It is recorded, as an illustration of this intense eagerness on the part of the public, that every available seat in the House {137} was occupied for hours before the business of the day began.

This, however, is not a statement that could fill with surprise any reader of the present day.

We have been accustomed lately to read of occasions when not merely crowds of strangers anxious to obtain seats, but crowds of members positively entitled to get seats, have had to take their stand at the outer gates of the House of Commons hours before daybreak on the morning of the day when some great measure was to be introduced, that they might get a reasonable chance of a place, in order to hear a speech which could not possibly begin before four o'clock in the afternoon.

Certainly the House of Commons did not then consist of nearly as many members as it has at present, and the reformed House of Commons has not even yet been so reformed as to impress it with the idea that there ought to be so many seats for so many members.

However that may be, it is quite certain that there was intense interest manifested by the public on the day when the Reform Bill was to be introduced; that immense crowds of people made for the Parliament buildings, and that the approaches to the House of Commons were besieged by an excited and tumultuous crowd.

There was, in fact, such a rush made to secure the seats in the galleries available for the public, so much noisy struggling and quarrelling for seats, that the Speaker was at last compelled to intervene and to declare that if quiet was not at once restored it would be his duty to have the House cleared of all strangers.

Order was thus restored after a time, and at last the moment arrived for Lord John Russell to introduce the Reform Bill.

That was indeed a moment of genuine historical interest.

The descriptions given at the time by listeners tell us that Russell began his speech in tones which were unusually quiet, low, and reserved even for him.

It may be said at once that throughout his whole career in Parliament Russell's manner had been peculiarly quiet and repressed, and that his eloquence seldom had any fervor in it.

That he was a man of deep feeling and warm emotions is certain, but both in public and private life there {138} was a coldness about him which often led strangers into the quite erroneous belief that he kept apart from the crowd because he was filled with a sense of his aristocratic position and wished to hold himself aloof from contact with ordinary mortals.

As a Parliamentary debater he was singularly clear, concise, and unaffected.

He was a great master of phrases, and some odd epigrammatic sentences of his still live in our common speech, and are quoted almost every day by persons who have not the least idea as to the source from which they come.

His speech on the introduction of the Reform Bill was even for him peculiarly calm, deliberate, and restrained.

It contained some passages which will always live in our history, and will illustrate to the reader, more effectively than a mass of statistics or political tracts might do, the nature and proportions of the absurd anomalies which Russell was endeavoring to abolish.

It may be well to mention the fact that it was this speech which, for the first time, introduced and adopted the word "Reformer" as the title of the genuine Whig, and applied the term "Conservative," in no unfriendly sense, to the Tory party.

[Sidenote: 1831--Lord John Russell's speech] Lord John Russell opened his speech by a vindication of the representative principle as the first condition of the English constitutional system.

He made it clear that in the early days of our Parliaments this principle had been distinctly acknowledged, and, to a certain extent, had been carried out in practice.

Then he showed how the principle had come to be less and less recognized in the arrangement of our constituencies and the allotment of representatives, until at last there had ceased to be any manner of proportion between representatives and population or any practical acknowledgment of the main purpose for which representatives were to be selected.

Everything had tended, in the mean time, to make the owners of the soil also the owners and masters of the representation.

Lord John Russell employed a series of illustrations, at once simple and striking, to impress upon his audience a due understanding of the extraordinary manner in which the whole principle of representation had been diverted.

{139} from its original purpose.

He assumed the case of some inquiring and intelligent foreigner, a stranger to our institutions but anxious to learn all about them, who had come to England for the purpose of obtaining information on the spot.

The stranger has the nature and the purpose of our Parliamentary system explained to him, and he is assured that it rests on the representative principle.

He is told that the House of Commons is assembled for the purpose of enabling the sovereign to collect the best advice that can be given to him as to the condition, the wants, and the wishes of his subjects.

The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know.

Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his people.

The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons.

He is shown a stone wall with three niches in it, and he is informed that those three niches are privileged to contribute two members to the representative assembly.

Lord John Russell described with force and masterly humor a variety of such sights which were pointed out to the stranger, each description being an accurate picture of some place which long since had lost all population, but still continued to have the privilege of sending representatives to Parliament.

Then Lord John Russell changed his form of illustration.

He took his stranger to some of the great manufacturing and commercial cities and towns of England, and described the admiration and the wonder with which the intelligent foreigner regarded these living evidences of the growth and the greatness of the nation.

Here then, no doubt, the stranger begins at last to think that he can really understand the practical value of the representative principle.

Thus far he has only been bewildered by what he has seen and heard of the empty stretches of land which are {140} endowed with a right to have representatives in the House of Commons, but now he begins to acknowledge to himself that a people with such great manufacturing communities can send up to London representatives enough from their own centres to constitute a Parliament capable of advising with any monarch.

Then, to his utter amazement, the distracted foreigner learns that these great cities and towns have no right whatever to representation in the House of Commons, and have nothing whatever to do with the election of members.

[Sidenote: 1831--The proposed reforms] The imaginary foreigner who knew nothing about the principle of the workings of our Constitution before his arrival in the country might well have been amazed and confounded, and might have fancied, if he had been a reader of English literature, that he had lost his way somehow, and instead of arriving in England had stumbled into the State of Laputa.

He might well indeed be excused for such bewilderment, seeing that an English student of the present day finds it hard to realize in his mind the possibility and the reality of the condition of things which existed in this country within the lifetime of men still living.

Lord John Russell then went on to describe the manner in which the Government proposed to deal with the existing defects of the whole Parliamentary system.

He laid it down as the main principle of the reforms he was prepared to introduce that a free citizen should not be compelled to pay taxes in the imposition and levying of which he was allowed to have no voice.

The vast majority of free citizens could in any case only express their opinions as to this or that financial impost through their representatives in the House of Commons.

This principle had of late been allowed to fail so grossly and so widely in its application that the House of Commons had almost entirely ceased to represent the will of the people.

Lord John Russell explained that the chief evils with which the Government had to deal were three in number.

The first was the nomination of members of Parliament by individual patrons.

The second was the nomination of members by close corporations.

The third was the {141} enormous expense of elections, which was principally caused by the open bribery and corruption which had almost become a recognized accompaniment of every contest.

He proposed to deal with the first evil by abolishing altogether the representation of the nominal constituencies, the constituencies that had no resident inhabitant, the boroughs which at some distant time had had houses and inmates, but of which now only the faintest traces were visible to the eye of the traveller--like, for instance, the extinct communities of whose existence some faint memorial evidence might be traced on Salisbury Plain.

The Census last taken, that of 1821, the Government had resolved to accept as a basis of operations, and Lord John Russell proposed that every borough which, at that date, had less than 3000 inhabitants should cease any longer to send a member to the House of Commons.

All boroughs that had not more than 4000 inhabitants should send in future only one member each to Parliament.

The principle of nomination by individuals or by corporations was to come to an end.

The "fancy franchises" were to be got rid of altogether.

In the boroughs every householder paying rates on houses of the yearly value of ten pounds and upwards was entitled to have a vote.

The Government, however, proposed to deal mercifully, so far as possible, with the existing interests of voters, although the process of extinction was summary and complete with regard to the so-called rights of patrons and of corporations.

For instance, resident voters, under the old qualifications, were to be allowed to retain their right during their lives, but with the lapse of each life the qualification expired and the owner of such a vote could have no successor.

When dealing with the counties Lord John Russell announced that copyholders to the value of ten pounds a year and leaseholders for not less than twenty-one years at an annual rent of fifty pounds and upwards were to have the franchise.

The abolition of the small boroughs and the uninhabited constituencies would reduce the number of members in the House of Commons by 168, and Lord John Russell explained that the Government did not {142} propose to fill up all these vacancies, being of opinion that the House was already rather overflowing in its numbers and had a good deal too many members for the proper discharge of its business.

[Sidenote: 1831--The principles of the Reform Bill] Some of the vacant seats were, however, to be assigned to the cities and towns which were then actually unrepresented in the House of Commons.

Seven of these towns were to have two representatives each, and twenty smaller but still goodly towns were to have one representative each.

Even at this day it may still come as a matter of surprise to some readers to learn that the seven towns which in 1831 were wholly unrepresented, and to which the Bill proposed to give two members each, were Manchester, which was to include Salford;

Birmingham, Leeds, Greenwich, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, and Sunderland.

The Government proposed to give eight additional members to the metropolis itself--that is to say, two members each to the Tower Hamlets, Holborn, Finsbury, and Lambeth.

The three Ridings of Yorkshire were to have two members each, and twenty-six counties already represented, and in each of which there were more than 150,000 inhabitants, were each to have two additional members.

It is not necessary to go more fully into the details of the scheme which Lord John Russell expounded elaborately to the House of Commons.

In Ireland and in Scotland there were some slight differences as to the scale of the qualification from those that were proposed for England;

but in the three countries the principle was the same, and the right to vote was associated with a certain occupation of land or payment of household rating, and new constituencies were created where towns, unrepresented before, had grown up into recognized importance.

By the changes that the Bill proposed to make no less than half a million of new voters were to be created throughout Great Britain and Ireland.

For the purpose of diminishing the enormous expense of elections it was proposed that the poll should be taken at the same time in separate districts, so that no voter should have to travel more than fifteen miles in order to record his vote, and {143} that the time over which an election contest could be spread should be greatly reduced, and reduced in proportion to the size of the constituency.

It is as well to say at once that that part of the Reform Bill which aimed at the due reduction of election expenses to their legitimate and necessary proportions proved an utter failure.

No reduction in the amount of what may be called working expenses could have diminished, to any satisfactory degree, the evil from which the country was suffering at that time, and from which it continued to suffer for more than another generation.

Bribery and corruption were the evils which had to be dealt with, and the Reform Bill of 1831 left these evils as it had found them.

The Bill, however, did, in its other provisions, do much to establish a genuine principle of Parliamentary representation.

To begin with, it proclaimed the principle of representation as the legal basis of the whole Parliamentary system.

It abolished the nomination of members, whether by individual persons or by corporations.

It laid down as law that representation must bear some proportion to the numbers represented.

It made actual, or at least occasional, residence a qualification for a voter.

These were the main principles of the measure.

The attention of readers will presently be drawn to the manner in which the Bill failed to answer some of the demands made upon the Government by the spreading intelligence of the country, and left these demands to be more adequately answered by the statesmen of a later generation.

Enough to say that with all its defects the Bill, as Lord John Russell explained it, was, for its time, a bold and broad measure of reform, and that it laid down the lines along which, as far as human foresight can discern, the movement of progress in England's political history will make its way.

{144} CHAPTER LXXII. THE GREAT DEBATE.