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Sorbonne endeavouring to found an eclectic school of metaphysics. M. Guizot had written his " History of Civilization in Europe," and M. de Tocqueville was soon to produce his great work on "Democracy in America." The new turn of thought was in the direction of positive research, and it had its influence on politics. The French seemed to be demanding of the reactionary Ministers of Charles X. pretty much what we were demanding of ours. The people of this country were in full sympathy with the champions of freedom across the Channel, and the Revolution of July, by the example it set and the emulation it inspired, helped us to bring our own rotten edifice to the ground.

From this point both countries took a fresh start, and if we carry our thoughts on to 1848, when Louis Philippe lost his throne rather that allow a Reform Banquet to be held in Paris, and when the Chartist movement came to a climax on Kennington Common, a rough parallelism may be traced between their respective fortunes. The difference lay in the manner in which the new institutions were worked, and in the varying facilities afforded for a further extension of Reform. The Reform Act of 1832 gave us a vigorously reforming Government. The besom was handled freely. Colonial slavery was abolished; our municipal corporations were reformed; the Poor Laws were put upon a sounder basis; and some of the more rank abuses of public patronage were swept away. But the Act itself was soon found to be only a poor instalment of the boon which had been so clamorously asked for and so anxiously expected. The bulk of the people began to inquire what it had done for them, and they could find no satisfactory reply. They had agitated for the suffrage, and it had been given to the tenpounders. They had trodden the wine-press, and others quaffed the wine. The new suffrage, moreover, set up an invidious distinction where none existed previously. The right of electing members of Parliament belonged under the old system to the freeholders in the counties and to certain privileged towns. It was an affair of ancient customs, of venerable statutes, of charters and vested interests, which, as the rime of antiquity was upon them, had a certain title to respect. There was no intentional exclusion of any class of persons in the State, and such disabilities as existed affected everybody within their range, whether rich or poor. The populations of large towns, like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, were unenfranchised in the mass ; workmen, shopkeepers, merchants, and professional men. There was no sense of social humiliation in being without the suffrage. None could say that they had been selected for exclusion, and had been left outside the pale of the Constitution as unsafe or unfit. But the Reform Bill of 1832 drew an arbitrary line at a certain social level, giving votes to all who reached it or were above it, and leaving unenfranchised or disfranchising all below. The poor scot-and-lot burgess who had his franchise already, was permitted to retain it so long as

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he lived, provided he paid his rates; but once lost, it could not be regained; and when he died, the occupier who succeeded him in the same dwelling did not succeed to his vote. The special note of the Act was that it selected a qualification possessed by comparatively few of those who obtained a living by manual labour. They were banned in the lump. Every community was divided into the privileged and the non-privileged, and the latter were three or four times more numerous than the former. On nomination days they assembled in front of the hustings and shared in the vote by show of hands, but they were shut out from the poll-booth two days later, when perhaps their favourite candidate went to the wall. The new system was vulnerable all round. The constituencies were glaringly unequal. A multitude of growing towns in the north of England were left without representation. There was a property qualification for members, the absence of the ballot exposed the poorer voters to intimidation, and Parliament sat for seven years-grievances once deemed so flagrant that the Reform schemes drawn up fifty years before had provided for their removal.

Under these circumstances a fresh agitation was inevitable. It found able leaders in Feargus O'Connor, Henry Vincent, and, the finest spirit among them, Ernest Jones. The Chartists demanded universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, the abolition of the property qualification for a seat in the House, payment of members, and annual Parliaments. Their arguments were sane, but they gradually slid into violence. They were confronted by an impenetrable phalanx of ten-pound householders, and as they saw no royal road to the citadel they played with the idea of taking it by storm. There were riots at Birmingham, there was an armed outbreak at Newport, resulting in trials for high treason and capital sentences, which were commuted, and several worthy men, more zealous than prudent, were sent to gaol. The movement was checked for a time, but it soon revived, and finally reached its climax in the famous demonstration of the 10th of April, 1848. Chartism as an organization did not survive that day. Its monster petition was discredited; Ernest Jones was convicted of sedition, and the extravagances of Feargus O'Connor found an explanation a few years later in a Commission of Lunacy. In the Chartist explosion of 1848, French and English politics touched once more. In both countries it was a question of Parliamentary reform. Louis Philippe resisted, hesitated, then fled. This time the French broke with the monarchy, and a National Convention was soon dexterously paving the way for the new Empire. On our side. we quietly made up our mind for a further extension of the suffrage. That which extinguished the Chartist movement was not the array of special constables on Kennington Common-Louis Napoleon carrying his bâton among them as a friend of order: it was Free Trade, the

gold discoveries in Australia, and the sudden flush of prosperity which broke over the land. But the Chartist lesson was not lost. It was seen that the time had come for a further advance. The ice was broken in Parliament in 1853 by Lord John Russell, the "little John Finality" of former years, but the Crimean war interposed delay. The question was again taken up and virtually settled by Mr. John Bright's brilliant orations of 1858, though the second great Reform Bill did not pass till ten years later, when the paralyzing influence of Lord Palmerston was withdrawn, when the fortunes of the Liberal party were in the hands of Russell, Gladstone and Bright, and those of the Tories under the educational discipline of a detached and brooding genius of splendid talents who understood his generation.

We do our political work slowly. It is our pride to hold abstract reasoning at a cheap rate, and to borrow our logic from facts. It is the safer method, if only we keenly watch to see when the premisses have been duly framed, and it is time to draw the inference. The danger is that this part of the process will be delayed too long. Perhaps no Legislature in the world besides ours, after giving the suffrage to the householders in the towns, would have stopped short of giving the same boon to the householders in the counties. We saw that our task was left unfinished, but for the moment it did not trouble us. There was no effective demand for the larger extension, and we preferred to wait till the outsiders should begin knocking at the door. The landed interest, supreme in one House of Parliament and powerful in the other, entered a silent but formidable protest against further change. What we did was to draw in the counties the invidious line which the Act of 1832 drew in the boroughs. We reduced the qualification for the suffrage to a point which included all the comparatively well-to-do, and excluded the whole body of the agricultural peasantry, every man belonging to the soil who earned his living by manual labour. The same result followed as formerly in the towns. The exclusion was too specific not to be felt and resented even by a class whom the habits of centuries had schooled into servile subjection to their betters. It happened also that in the manufacturing districts the country was bespread with communities having all the characteristics of town life, the same quick intelligence, the same discipline, and the same desire to take an active part in public affairs. Meanwhile a land question soon began to take shape in the counties. The agricultural labourers were agitating for an advance of wages. The movement spread like wildfire in the south, and the labourers were on the whole victorious. A new portent was seen in the formation of Agricultural Labourers' Unions. Men straight from the plough took to haranguing their comrades on the village green and aspired to seats in Parliament. Foreign competition in meat and grain, by threatening rent, and with it the basis of an

hereditary aristocracy, exhibited the land question in a more alarming aspect and gave a new element of life to rural politics; while the manufacturing artisans were loudly complaining of a system of tenure which every year sent a host of farm labourers to the towns to battle with them for a livelihood, In these circumstances the extension of household suffrage to the counties became a practical question. The state of parties helped it on. Perhaps a desire to give the finishing touch of symmetry to the political edifice had something to do with it. The resistance of the House of Lords lent éclat to the occasion, and the condition on which Lord Salisbury proposed to surrender, the formation of approximately equal electoral districts, conceded a notable point of the old charter.

The work of reform, so far as the suffrage goes, is now substantially complete. Other questions will be raised before long, such as the duration of Parliaments, the payment of members, and the position, or composition, of the House of Lords. But the people can have little more direct power than they have now, and in the use of it they are protected by the ballot. The House of Commons derives its authority from all the households in the land. At every fireside there sits a voter. Perhaps we do not yet fully realize the momentous character of the change. We hear of a nation in arms; we present the spectacle of a nation in council, the poorest and the most unlettered equally with the rich and the learned having a voice in deciding its destinies. Other countries have as wide, or a wider suffrage, but no foreign voter has so much power as ours. In the United States there stand as a breakwater against the will of the people the adamantine walls of a written Constitution. It is written on paper, but it is perhaps the most solid political fabric in the world. Congress, which assembles under it, and draws from it all the authority it possesses, has no power to meddle with it, jot or tittle. The Supreme Court is entitled to pass under review all acts of legislation, and any measure which does not harmonize with the Constitution is ipso facto void. The Constitution may be amended, but only by a process so elaborate and so difficult that, except at rare crises, it is impracticable. We have no fixed Constitution-that is, we have, in some real sense, none at all. What we appeal to under that venerable name is a set of charters and Acts of Parliament which we have agreed to regard as fundamental, beneath and around which are clustered usages, modes of procedure and understandings more or less valid and sacred. they contain nothing which a vote of the Legislature cannot repeal and undo. The Constitution was one thing a hundred years ago, it is something else now, and fifty years hence it will be what the people have chosen to make it. The only check upon the popular will is the House of Lords, and what that amounts to can be easily estimated. That House must undergo a change. So much is admitted, but if

we are wise we shall take care to establish some precautions against ourselves, so as not to deny to the nation that which individuals prize so highly in the management of their private affairs, the benefit of second thoughts.

Plural voting, one of the abuses of the forty-shilling franchise, is a remnant of the old system which Mr. Gladstone did not propose to abolish. Wealthy men may have qualifications in half a dozen constituencies. The multiplication of forty-shilling freeholds was one of the means by which some northern counties were won during the struggle for Free Trade. This was legitimate, but it is easy to manufacture votes on the forty-shilling basis where the qualifying tenure is absolutely fictitious. The "one man, one vote" principle is the only effectual remedy for the nuisance, though it would be much abated if all elections were held on the same day. The wide extension of the suffrage will make some change in old political ideas and modes of action. It is a tradition dating from sixty or eighty years ago to regard the Government as a power apart from the people and adverse to their interests. This might well be the case when a handful of landlords returned a majority of the members of the House of Commons, and in a less degree at a later time when the House represented only a tithe of the adult male population. All this is changed. After allowing for modifying influeuces, the broad fact must be accepted that on the morrow of a general election the House of Commons represents the opinions of a majority of the nation, and that the Government, which cannot stand a day without the support of a majority of the House of Commons, is equally representative. So with every branch of the Executive, from Secretaries of State down to the rural police. It is the national will in operation. It used to be so in theory; now it must be our own fault if it is not so in fact. At present it may be an act of self-denial to make the admission, and it is possible that we are learning the hard lesson for the first time, though experience shows it to be universally true, that power, wherever placed, whether in the hands of an autocrat or in those of a majority of the people, is intrinsically liable to abuse. Nevertheless, the will of the majority is an ultimate fact in democratic communities, and we must compound as best we can for its accompanying infirmities. Even if the democracy should prove Conservative, and should take as its war-cries the mob-shibboleths of the old "Church and King" days, what are we entitled to say except that the people are misled and that Liberals must turn missionaries?

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Some modification has taken place in the position and functions of public meetings and popular demonstrations," considered as means of influencing the action of the House of Commons and the policy of the Government. Public meetings began to be an institution little more than a hundred years ago, in connection with the movement for

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