CHAPTER VIII PARLIAMENTARY REFORM THE hour had struck, and Grey, with his Whig following, came in to carry parliamentary reform. Reforming the government was, but it was still aristocratic. Tradition and the chances of political war together had done for the British aristocracy what the deepest policy might have dictated, dividing it between the political parties, giving it the leadership of both, and putting progress under its control. Whig magnates were lords of pocketboroughs which they sacrificed to the country and their party. Democracy was represented in the cabinet, if at all, by Brougham the chancellor, who with all his volatility and violence, proved in the end no untamable patriot. The leader in the Commons was Lord Althorp, the chancellor of the exchequer, an excellent man of business, noted and trusted as a paragon of downright honesty, all the more perhaps because he was somewhat bovine and lacked the gift of speech. Lord Durham, Grey's son-in-law, wayward and overflattered, showed how an aristocrat might throw himself into a popular cause, court the people, and be a high aristocrat still. Palmerston and other followers of Canning joined the government, though Canning had been a sworn opponent of parliamentary reform. They adhered to their master's general liberalism without the particular and almost unaccountable exception. 1831 1831 On the memorable 1st of March, 1831, the Reform Bill was brought in by Lord John Russell, chosen for that henour, though he was not in the cabinet, on account of his devotion to the cause, in which he had already moved, and his historic name. It was a drastic measure, and to Tories sounded like the knell of doom. Grey was no revolutionist, but he thought that to be final, hist measure must be complete. In England the Bill made a clean sweep of the rotten boroughs; deprived a number of petty boroughs of one member; gave representation to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other large towns and metropolitan districts; gave a large additional representation to the counties; in the counties gave copyholders and leaseholders as well as freeholders votes; for the towns established a uniform ten-pound household suffrage, abolishing the more extended suffrage in the few boroughs in which by custom it had prevailed. Corporations were deprived of their electoral monopoly. On Scotland, in place of representation by superiorities or corporations, elective representation, nearly on the same scale as that of England, was bestowed. In Ireland the boroughs were taken from the close corporations and given with the same qualifications as in England to the citizens at large. There followed, inside and outside parliament, an immense debate, in which every tongue and pen was called into play. Outside parliament, reform had its thundering organ in the Times, which founded a power destined largely to sway opinion down to our own day. In argument, reform easily swept the field. Who could devise a rational defence of the representation of a mound or an old wall; the return of ninety members by forty-six places, with less than fifty voters each; the nomination of one hundred and fifty-seven members by eighty-four men ; the election of the majority of the House by fifteen thousand out of three million male adults; the exclusion of copyholders and leaseholders; or the existence of the beggarly and corrupt nest of Cornish boroughs? Who could plausibly maintain that the manufacturing interest ought to be denied its share of political power? The Tories pointed to the number of eminent men who, through the nomination boroughs, had found entrance to public life. There was force in the argument where the patron was generous and allowed his nominee to be independent; but nominees generally were bound to go with their patrons, while for one young Pitt or Canning there were nominated a dozen mere retainers and agents of private designs. It was alleged that all great interests were practically represented. The manufacturing interest, whose seats were new-born cities, was hardly represented at all, while the overwhelming preponderance of the landlord interest was attested by corn laws, game laws, and laws of every kind framed for the benefit of the land-owner. Gross anomaly, had there been nothing more, would have called for reform, since it deprived the constitution of respect. The only real defence, or rather the plea for caution and forecast, was that on which the Duke of Wellington touched when he asked how, with a House of Commons elected on democratic principles, the king's government was to be carried on. The House of Commons was no longer the mere representation of the people, one of two co-ordinate branches of the legislature, and subject to the supreme authority of the crown. It had drawn to it the sovereign power, executive as well as legislative, since How the ministers were the creatures of its choice. sovereign power was to be wisely and safely exercised. by an assembly of six hundred and fifty-eight men elected by popular suffrage, was a problem to which in these great debates attention was not sufficiently directed, and which still remains unsolved. Popular representation may give expression to the will of the people, though distorted by the passions, the corruption, the trickery, and the various accidents of elections; but what is wanted is government, not by will, but by the reason of the community, the ascendancy of which popular representation without safeguards can hardly be trusted to secure. In the parliamentary debates Lord Grey is dignified and impressive, he speaks with the weight of age and long devotion to the cause of reform. To the Lords he speaks as one of their own order with which he stands or falls. Macaulay is lucid and very brilliant in exposition of a clear case. But, on the whole, the debates are somewhat disappointing to one who looks in them for great lessons of statesmanship. There will hardly be found in the speeches of the framers a distinct forecast of the practical effects of their measure, or a clear idea of the polity which they expected and intended to produce. They seem scarcely to be aware that they are profoundly altering the practical constitution. Nor do they dwell, as might have been expected, on that necessity of admitting the newly-born interest to a share of political power which was not the least obvious or the least pressing reason for the change. The speeches on the other side were either carping attacks on the special provisions of the Bill, or vague declamations against democracy and predictions of revolution and ruin. Some attempted to misapply the principles of private property to the franchises and charters of the rotten boroughs, and contended that to justify forfeiture delinquency must be proved; as though power intrusted by the state for a public purpose could not by the same authority be resumed. The delinquency was proved by the record of misgovernment. As in early days the crown had chosen at its discretion from time to time the boroughs to be represented in the House of Commons, the wisdom of our ancestors was really on the side of free selection. The defenders of rotten boroughs of course vowed that, though opposed to the plan before them, they were not enemies to all reform. Why had they resisted the transfer of the franchise from East Retford to Birmingham? Croker and Wetherell, who did most of the fighting on that side, were mere mouthpieces of prejudice or of the vested interests of abuse and corruption. In their criticism there is nothing statesmanlike or instructive. Peel was fettered by Wellington's fatal declaration and by his party ties. Had he been free, it may be surmised that instead of opposing the measure he would have accepted it with a good grace and amended it in the conservative sense, as, with the forces at his command, the House of Lords being entirely with him, he might certainly have done. His large mind could not possibly share the reactionary fanaticism of Croker and Wetherell or have been deluded by the sophistries of chartered right. His speeches are wanting in elevation and breadth. His own apology for hopeless resistance is its salutary impressiveness as a lesson against light tampering with the constitution. This is the weakest part of his career. In temper the debates did no dishonour to the political |