9

Gornell University Library
Dthaca, New York

 
Cornell ty Library
JN548 1867 .E78

| iia

1924 030 4
olin

 

 

 
JK
58
LW
ESSAYS ON REFORM.
 
ESSAYS ON REFORM.

Hondon :

MACMILLAN AND CoO.
1867,

(The Right of Translation tz reserved.)
LONDON:
R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET IILL.
PREFACE.

THE writers of this collection of Essays have been
drawn together by general similarity of opinions and
by a common desire to contribute, each on the topic
with which he happens to be most familiar, to the

~ solution of the great problem which at present occupies
the mind of the nation. But they are not otherwise
responsible for the contents of each other’s Essays, which
most of them have not seen.

The present collection contains Essays bearing directly
on the Reform of the House of Commons. It is hoped
that its contents may help to show that the demand
for a more national Parliament is not a mere cry to
which it would be folly and weakness to give way, or
the expedient of a party anxious to attain power by
the aid of popular agitation, but a conviction seriously
entertained and capable of being supported by arguments
worthy of the attention of those who wish to legislate
deliberately and in an impartial spirit for the good
of the whole people.
vi PREFACE.

It is commonly alleged that, though a more national
Parliament might in itself be an improvement, no
national questions can be pointed out, with which such
a Parliament would deal better than they are dealt
with under the present system. This allegation will
be met by Essays on some great national questions,
in which the attempt will be made to show that those
questions might be more hopefully approached by a
Government representing and carrying with it the whole
nation. It was originally intended that both classes
of Essays should be included in the same collection ;
but this has been found, both on account of the bulk
and of the pressure of time, to be impracticable ; and
the Essays belonging to the latter class will therefore
form a separate collection, which, it is hoped, will shortly
issue from the press, under the title of “ QuEsTrons

FoR A REFORMED PARLIAMENT.”
LIST OF SUBJECTS AND AUTHORS.

ESSAY I.
THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM, AS
STATED BY MR. LOWE.

By tne Hon. G. C. Broprick, M.A. Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
Page 1

ESSAY II.

THE POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASSES.
By R. H. Hurroy, M.A. Page 27

ESSAY LIT.
ON THE ADMISSION OF THE WORKING CLASSES AS PART
OF OUR SOCIAL SYSTEM ; AND ON THEIR RECOGNITION
FQR ALL PURPOSES AS PART OF THE NATION.

By Lorv’ Hoventon, M.A. Trinity College, Cambridge ; and Hon. D.C.L.
Oxford. Page 45

ESSAY IV.

THE BALANCE OF CLASSES.

By ALBERT a Dicey M.A. Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.
Page 67

ESSAY

ON THE CHOICE OF REPRESENTATIVES BY POPULAR
CONSTITUENCIES.

By Lustre Srepuen, M.A. Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Page 85
viii LIST OF SUBJECTS AND AUTHORS.

ESSAY VI.
}\ REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS.

By Joan Boyp Kinnear. Page 127

ESSAY VII.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, OR INDIRECT
REPRESENTATION.

By Bernarp Cracrort, M.A. Zrinity College, Cambridge. Page 155

ESSAY VIII.

ON THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS.
By C. H. Pearson, M.A. Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Page 191

ESSAY IX.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH.

By Gotpwin Smirn, M.A. Fellow of University College, Oxford.
/ Page 217

Pe?
ESSAY X.
THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY.
By Jamus Bryce, B.C.L. Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Page 239

ESSAY XI.

OPPORTUNITIES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF GOVERNMENT
IN ENGLAND.

By A. O. Rutson, M.A. Fellow of Magdalen Coliege, Oxford. Page 279

ESSAY XII.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833.
By Sir Georce Youne, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Page 309
ESSAYS ON REFORM.

I.

THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM,
AS STATED BY MR. LOWE.

BY GEORGE C. BRODRICK.

THERE lies on the very threshold of Parliamentary
Reform a previous question which must be effectually
cleared up before we can proceed further. It is the
question whether, in discussing any measure, practical or
prospective, for the extension of the franchise, we are at
liberty to entertain considerations of justice at all, or
whether our judgment is to be solely guided by con-
siderations of expediency. For, if all our ideas of justice
must indeed be dismissed as irrelevant ; if a moral claim
to representation is nothing but a metaphysical or sen-
timental abstraction, and neither virtue nor intelligence
confers even a presumptive title to a share of political
power; if the franchise is a privilege to be given or
withheld by the existing legislature according to their
own estimate of the use likely to be made of it, and if
that estimate is to be formed with exclusive regard to
the ends of good government, whatever those ends may
be ;—then it is manifest that most of what has been hitherto
said and written on both sides of this great subject has

an B
2 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essar I.

been said and written in vain There will still remain an
essential difference between an adequate and an inade-
quate ideal of utility, a difference so broad and deep as
to be almost co-extensive with that between utility and
right; but the spirit, as well as the standard, of inquiry,
will be purely utilitarian. Our language will have to be
borrowed from political economy, rather than from
ethics, and the controversy between the advocates and
opponents of progressive enfranchisement must be con-
ducted on the hypothesis that men have no rights but
what the law gives them—an hypothesis upon which
there is much to be said against constitutional govern-
ment, and in favour of slavery itself.

It is perhaps needless to point out that such was
exactly the ground occupied and defended with rare
ability by Mr. Lowe in the debates of the two last
sessions. ‘The brilliant essays on constitutional govern-
ment delivered by him, respectively, on the 3d of May,
1865, the 13th of March, the 26th of April, and the
3d of May, 1866, embody a perfect repertory of utili-
tarian objections to any downward extension of the
suffrage. They were received with unbounded applause
at the time by the Conservative party in the House
of Commons and the country, and never were the doc-
trines of Benthamism more triumphantly applied to a
political question than in these luminous speeches,?
Though an almost superfluous amount of criticism hag
been lavished on their most vulnerable points, a very
general impression still prevails that Mr. Lowe’s main
position never has been, and never can be, shaken—an

1 These Speeches, with some Letters on the same subject, and a Preface
by Mr. Lowe himself, have lately been republished in a volume, to which
reference will be made in the following notes as “ Speeches and Letters.”
Broprick.] UT/LITARIAN ARG UMENT AGAINST REFORM. 3

impression which sensibly weakens the cause of Reform,
and which, therefore, it is high time, if possible, to
remove." We cannot afford to leave so redoubtable a
fortress, untaken, in our rear. Should it appear that this
famous argument—effective as it was, and exhaustive as
it purported to be—consists of a fallacious deduction
from premisses demonstrably unsound, involves an entire
misconstruction of the views which it purports to expose,
and leads to conclusions which its author himself would
repudiate, we shall advance with more confidence to an
examination of those practical views which it was de-
signed to support.

What, then, are the fundamental propositions upon
which Mr. Lowe builds his own reasoning? They are
stated with sufficient precision in his speech against the
Borough Franchise Bill of 1865, and in his two first
speeches against the Government Reform Bill of 1866.
“T take the liberty of putting aside the sentimental
argument, simply observing that the single question is
of good government.”’ ‘ When we speak of a Reform
Bill, when we speak of giving the franchise to a class
which has it not—of transferring the electoral power from
one place to another, we should always bear in mind
that the end we ought to have in view is not the class
which receives the franchise, not the district which
obtains the power of sending members to Parliament,
but that Parliament itself in which those members are to

1 In a Speech delivered on February 25, 1867, Mr. Lowe himself expressed
a fear that he had succeeded in convincing nobody. His success has been
greater than he seems to be aware. He has convinced nobody that any party
can hold office without conceding the principle of progressive enfranchisement,
but he has convinced many people that progressive enfranchisement will be
mischievous to the best interests of the country,

2 Speech of May 3, 1865, Speeches and Letters, p. 39.

B2
A ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

sit, and for the sake of constituting which properly those
powers ought alone to be exercised. To consider the
franchise as an end in itself—to suppose that we should
confer it on any one class of persons because we think
them deserving, that we should take it away from one
place because it is small, or give it to another because
it happens to be large, is, in my opinion, to mistake the
means for the end.”?.... “The second is a much
humbler, but a much sounder doctrine, and that is,
that the franchise, like every other political expedient,
is a means to an end, that end being the preservation
of order in the country, the keeping a just balance of
classes, and the preventing any predominance or tyranny
of one class over another.”*

The general purport of these passages, amplified and
illustrated as they were by their context, cannot be mis-
understood. They not only represent the public good, in
the sense therein explained, as the supreme end of legis-
lation, but they proscribe the influence of any sentiments
which have not a direct reference to that end.°

J. Here, then, is the first issue between Reformers and
Mr. Lowe. Those who are acquainted with the philo-
sophy of Bentham will not fail to recognise in this canon
of political utility the radical defect of that ethical sys-
tem which confounds the motive with the criterion of
conduct, and assumes that because the moral value of
actions may be determined by their ultimate tendencies,
they should therefore be performed by the agent with
the well-being of the human race consciously present to

i Speech of March 13, 1866, Speeches and Letters, p. 64.

? Speech of April 26, 1866, Ibid. p. 105.

§ Full expositions of Mr. Lowe’s theory will be found in Speeches and
Letters, pp. 33-39, 84—85, 103107, and in the Preface, pp. 3—6.
Bropricx.] ULILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 5

his mind. Nor is this a mere speculative heresy, when
so interpreted as to make political deliberation a mere
calculation of consequences ; it vitally affects Mr. Lowe’s
whole argument against progressive enfranchisement.
When he invites us to judge of a past measure, such as
the Reform Bill of 1832, by its effects rather than by its
conformity to any preconceived notions of justice, we
cannot shrink from accepting the challenge; for utility,
though far inferior to justice as a motive, is far superior
to it as a test. The Reform Bill of 1832, therefore, must
stand or fall by our experience of its results, and ex-
perience teaches us that, having been advocated on
grounds of justice, and resisted on grounds of expe-
diency, it has in fact produced very beneficial conse-
quences which few even of its promoters foresaw. But
the experience by which alone the Reform Bill of last
session could be condemned has yet to be acquired.
When we are invited to judge of a measure, not past but
future, by results not ascertained but conjectured, or
suggested by doubtful analogies, we may well demur
to such a method of arbitrament. The adaptation of the
utilitarian rule to prospective contingencies involves what
logicians call a fallacy of time. Real facts are more
trustworthy than the dictates of political justice ; but the
dictates of political justice, so far as they are warranted
by our knowledge of human nature, and sanctioned by
the reason and conscience of mankind, are more trust-
worthy than hypothetical facts.

We could not, then, consent to discuss the merits of a
contemplated Reform Bill upon this basis, even if the con-
ception of political utility proposed to us were ever so
comprehensive. But Mr. Lowe, unlike Bentham, does
6 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

not include among the proper objects of legislation the
satisfaction of the feelings and aspirations of the masses
for whom Government exists, and ridicules the very
notion of studying to “ elevate”* them by the franchise,
Sometimes he describes the aim which should guide the
statesman in deliberating on Reform as “ the happiness
of the people at large ;”” sometimes, as we have already
seen, he virtually limits it to “the keeping a just balance
of classes ;”* sometimes he insists that it must be con-
centrated upon the composition of the House of Commons
itself* It matters little which of these principles we
elect, for, as expounded by Mr. Lowe, they are all fatally
defective, even from the utilitarian point of view. They
all equally leave out of sight the popular will, an element
upon which the success of any Government which does
not rely on military force, must entirely depend. They
all ignore the possible value of political education, if not
as an end in itself, yet as a means of bringing the greatest
possible amount of intelligence to bear on the common
weal, and of increasing the sum of general happiness.
They all exalt administration into the highest function
of government, whereas it is the most essentially mecha-
nical, and depends for its energy on that motive power
which it isthe characteristic virtue of self-government to
supply effectively.

But each of them is also open to special exceptions.
Before we adopt any idea so vague as “the happiness
of the people at large,” for an ultimate standard of
representative institutions, we ought, according to Mr.
Lowe’s own rule, to ascertain, by the light of experi-

1 Speeches and Letters, p. 37. * Thid. p. 38. 3 Thid. p. 105,
4 Ibid. pp: 64, 86—95, and Preface, p. 6.
Bropricx.]. UTZILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 7

ence, whither it is likely to lead us. The answer of
history is decisive. “The happiness of the people at
large,” is the familiar watchword of despotism. It ig
the despot, in every age and of every type, who pro-
fesses to do everything for the people, though nothing by
the people, and who cuts down the tree of liberty in his
eagerness to obtain its fruits. The vice of despotic
government, however paternal, and that which renders it
as ruinous economically as it is morally degrading, con-
sists not in its wilful neglect of popular interests, but in
its contempt for popular opinions, in treating the people
as passive materials for benevolent superintendence ; and
this vice must attach, more or less, to every government
constituted with reference to the happiness only, and
without reference to the voice, of the governed. Again,
what can be more arbitrary than a hydrostatic theory of
representation based on an equilibrium of classes? What
isa “class” but a purely artificial aggregate, which may
consist of hundreds, thousands, or millions, according to
the fancy or design of its framer? To know what is a
just balance of classes, we must have determined before-
hand what degree of weight each ought to possess in the
State, and have solved most of the problems which it is
the special function of a reformed Parliament to investi-
gate. Not long ago, it was considered a, fair distribution
of legislative power that a few hundred noblemen should
not only compose one estate of the realm co-ordinate
with the Commons, but should also exercise, through
relations and nominees, a preponderating influence in
the popular branch of the Legislature. No one now
ventures to maintain such a paradox, but the self-interest
which formerly made it credible has not ceased to
8 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

operate. What appears to a landlord or employer “a
just balance of classes,” may appear the very reverse to
an impartial critic, as well as to a tenant or artizan,
especially if it has been adjusted on the monstrous sup-
position that the more numerous a class is, the more
jealously should it be excluded from the franchise. It is
scarcely necessary to dwell on the suggestion that in
supporting or rejecting a Reform Bill, we should be
guided not by respect for the rights, or even for the
interests, of those whom it would enfranchise, but only
by its presumed effect on the constitution and character
of the House of Commons. It would follow almost
inevitably from this proposition that if nomination by
the Crown would, in most cases, give us a better delibe-
rative assembly than election by the people, it would be
well to entrust the choice of members to Her Majesty.
A committee thus selected might, indeed, be superior to
the body returned by the present constituencies in all
respects but one. It might, and perhaps would, contain
more individual eminence, more public spirit, and more
virtue, but it would not be representative. It might
labour exclusively for the happiness of the people at
large, it might devote itself to the preservation of order
in the country, the keeping a just balance of classes, and
the preventing any predominance or tyranny of one class
over another; but, inasmuch as it would be a royal
council and not a chamber of popular delegates, its
legislation would be futile, and its maintenance impos-
sible. Had the unreformed House of Commons been
as enlightened as it was obstructive, it could not, for a
similar reason, have been tolerated much longer. Men
who have arrived at years of discretion will not submit
Bropricg.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINS? REFORM. 9

to leading-strings or to the guardianship of trustees
chosen for them. It is highly important, no doubt, that
Parliament should be as efficient as possible, but the
paramount object, because the most essential condition,
of its existence is, that it should duly reflect the will of
the people.

The utilitarian argument against progressive enfran-
chisement is, therefore, self-refuting. It cannot be shown
that good government, or the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, as conceived by Bentham, would be
consistent with a general sense of injustice among the
people, an entire want of confidence in their rulers, a
latent antagonism, or even a sullen indifference, to the
policy which is carried out in their name, and at their
expense. Yet unless this be shown, Mr. Lowe’s case
breaks down, by his own confession. The moment we
entertain considerations of this kind, and consult the feel-
ings of the unrepresented classes, we -transgress the line
which he traces so carefully, and admit, in some degree,
those claims of morality and justice of which he never
fails to speak with sovereign disdain.’ Whether or not
the claims of morality and justice may be reconciled
with the doctrines of utility, is no longer the question ;
for Mr. Lowe admits no alternative between embracing
the inferences drawn by himself from those doctrines,
and taking our stand on the “@ priorz rights” of man.

1 As, for instance, in the Speech of March 13, 1866, Speeches and Letters,
p. 85 :—‘ Government goes not deal with justice, it deals with expediency.
-The object isto construct the best machinery for the purpose to which it is to
-be applied. We may violate any law of symmetry, equality, or distributive
justice, in providing the proper machinery to enable us to do what is required
of us.” So, again, in the Speech of April 26, 1866, Speeches and Letters,
p. 131 :—“I simply deny that justice has anything to do with the matter ; it
is purely a question of State policy.”
10 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I,

This charge, repeated so often, and in so many forms,
during the debates of last Session,’ deserves closer ex-
amination than it has received. We have seen that
utilitarianism does not involve, or even sanction, the
concessions which he requires us to make ; we have next
to inquire whether the rejection of utilitarianism involves
the reductio ad absurdum to which he would drive us.
II. A more definite form may be given to this second
issue, by a citation of the sentence, so persistently and so
grossly misrepresented, in which Mr. Gladstone stated
the moral, as opposed to the utilitarian, theory of repre-
sentation : “I say that every man who is not presumably
incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness
or political danger is morally entitled to come within
the pale of the Constitution.”? In this proposition is
defined—not, indeed, with scientific accuracy, but with
accuracy enough for all purposes of fair controversy—

1 Speech of May 3, 1865, Speeches and Letters, p. 35:—“ And to what
do the arguments of those who, like the Chancellor of the Exchequer, advo-
cate the right of the working classes to be admitted to the exercise of the
franchise, amount? To that assumption of the & priori rights of man which
formed the terror and the ridicule of that grotesque tragedy the French
Revolution. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the onus pro-
bandi lay with his adversary, he must have meant that anterior to the exist-
ence of society there was vested in every man some personal @ priori right
which nobody had authority to touch. When Mr. Mill, in like manner,
speaks of every citizen of a State having a perfect right to a share in its
government, he appeals to some & priori considerations, in accordance with
which every man would be entitled not only to be well governed, but to take
part in governing himself.” Statements to. the same effect occur in the Speech
of May 31, 1866, Speeches and Letters, p. 174; and in the very first page
of the Preface.

2 Speech on Mr. Baines’ Borough Franchise Bill of 1864. Compare with
this statement the unqualified assertion of human equality in the American
Declaration of Independence, adopted in Congress July 24th, 1776 :—“ We
hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal ; that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” &c.
Broprick.] UTILITARLAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 1]

the principle of progressive enfranchisement. That prin-
ciple, like all others, rests on certain presumptions, is
subject, in its application, to certain conditions, and
appeals for its verification to the evidence of experience.
The presumptions on which it rests are such as the
equality of all citizens before the law,’ and the possible
existence of political rights which have not yet acquired
a legal sanction. The conditions of its application are
those specified by Mr. Gladstone—that the claimant of
the franchise must be personally competent to exercise
it, and that his enfranchisement would not involve any
political danger.? The experience to which it appeals for
its verification is that which teaches us, for instance,
that men, for the most part, understand and manage
their own affairs better than others who have counter-
interests to serve—that men pay taxes and obey laws
more loyally when they have taken part in voting the
former and making the latter—and that men who are
denied the privileges are apt to forget the duties of
citizenship.’

It would be too much to expect that any generali-
zations from experience, founded as they must be on

1 That is, that one citizen’s interests are of equal concern to the State with
those of any other citizen, not that one citizen is equally qualified with any
other to exercise political power. It might appear needless to indicate this
distinction, but that it is habitually overlooked by Mr. Lowe, as in page 5 of
the Preface to Speeches and Letters.

2 Mr. Lowe must entirely have forgotten this most important qualification
when he directly accused Mr. Gladstone of maintaining “that the franchise
is due to every one whom you cannot show to be unfit.”—Speeches and
Letters, p. 131.

3 These are but a few out of many similar lessons derived from experiences
The mention of them is, however, sufficient to rebut Mr. Lowe’s bold
assertion, that the arguments in favour of what he calls “ Democracy” are
“mostly metaphysical, resting on considerations prior to, and therefore in-
dependent of, experience.”—Preface to Speeches and Letters, p. 3.
12 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I,

a limited induction, should command an unreserved
assent from a political adversary. Still less are we
entitled to demand that Mr. Gladstone’s statement of the
conditions upon which political rights should be granted,
or his opinion that these conditions have been fulfilled
by a considerable proportion of our own_working classes,
should be accepted, even provisionally. Upon this part
of the field it was reasonable and inevitable that every
inch of ground should be hotly contested. But Mr.
Lowe thought to secure a more decisive victory by turn-
ing the enemy’s position. He must needs fasten a belief
in @ priori rights upon all who support the moral argu-
ment for progressive enfranchisement, and defy them to
maintain those rights in debate. When he declared
“that the arguments of those who advocate the right of
the working classes to be admitted to the exercise of the
franchise amount to that assumption of the @ priort
rights of man, which formed the terror and the ridicule
of that grotesque tragedy, the French Revolution,” he
must obviously have meant one of two things—either
that, in fact, that right has been generally advocated
on that assumption, or that, logically, it can be defended
on no other assumption. It would be difficult to decide
which allegation is the more groundless. To dispute
the former, would be a mere waste of time, until a
single passage, affirming or implying the @ priori right
of man to the franchise, can be produced from the
works or speeches of any living Reformer. The latter
is, happily, capable of exposure without the necessity
of proving a negative. If it were impossible to con-
ceive of any right prior to law, yet not absolute, but
relative—not inherent, but derivative—not indefeasible
Broprick.] U. TILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 13

or unconditional, but dependent on other rights no less
sacred—then, and then only, could Mr. Lowe be justified
in gratuitously identifymg the moral rights which Mr.
Gladstone alleges with those @ priori rights which he
himself derides. On the contrary, not only is it possible
to conceive of moral rights varying in character and
degree with social progress, but many such are recognised
by jurists of every school,’ as well as in popular language.
Of the privileges and securities to which the name of
“rights” has been given, a very few—such as the right
of personal] liberty, and the right of self-defence—have
been designated, perhaps not very philosophically, rights
of nature. Others are known as legal rights; and this
class includes and contains so large a proportion of
moral rights in a well-governed country, that it is seldom
necessary to look beyond them, except for purposes of
legislation. For these purposes, however, it is quite
essential that we should realize the existence of rights,
both civil and political, distinct from so-called natural
rights, and paramount to legal rights, which may pro-
perly be termed moral rights. Among the civil nghts of
this class is that of every citizen to protection from the
State ; among the political rights of this class is that of
every nation, in an United Kingdom like our own, to a
share in the Imperial Government. Not even Mr. Lowe
would deny that every British subject is ‘
titled” to be protected, or (which is the same thing in
other words) that the State is morally bound to protect

‘morally en-

1 Bentham himself fully recognises rights of this kind, though he prefers
to describe them as ends, or objects, of legislation. One of these ends being
equality, and another security, in the possession of property, he tells us ex-
plicitly that where these two principles conflict, “ equality ought to give way.”
—Dumont’s Bentham, Principes du Code Civil, part i. ch. xi.
14 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I,

him against violence or aggression, whether or not our
present laws are effectual to that end. Not even Mr.
Lowe would venture to dispute the moral claim of Ireland
to come within the pale of the Constitution, if she had
no representatives in the Legislature. Then why should
he protest that a similar claim on behalf of an unrepre-
sented class cannot be entertained without acknowledging
the @ priort rights of man? Let him deny, if he will,
the existence of any rights but legal rights,’ and brave, if
he dare, the consequences of pushing the utilitarian creed
to extremes; but let him not practise on the English
dread of @ priori rights, to frighten less acute reasoners
into embracing it.

There may, therefore, be such a thing as a moral claim
of non-electors to the franchise ; it remains to consider
how its validity, in any given case, is to be determined.
This question really involves no abstruse metaphysical
inquiry into the origin of rights. The origin of rights
is one thing; their validity is another. The former
depends on the authority which is supposed to sanction
them; the latter depends on the forum in which they
are pleaded. The right of personal liberty itself is not
valid, though doubtless it ought to be, in countries where
slavery is part of the social system. The right of a man
to the fruit of his own labour would not be valid in a
community where all property was held in common.
Hardly any moral rights to political privileges are valid

1 Mr. Lowe would probably not shrink from accepting this challenge, if
we may judge by the following passage :—“ Thus the words ‘right’ and ‘ justice’
have a perfectly clear and defined meaning when applied to the administra-
tion of justice under a settled law, but are really without meaning, except as
vague and inappropriate metaphors, when applied to the distribution of
political power.”—Preface to Speeches and Letters, p. 5,
Bropricx.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 15

in Russia, not only because such privileges are not in
harmony with established Russian institutions, but also
because the people have not yet acquired the habits and
ideas to which they correspond. None but legal rights
are valid in any court of law ; and of legal rights, those
called equitable are not valid in our courts of common
law. What rights, then, may be pleaded as valid in the
English Parliament? All those, and only those, which
can be warranted by principles already consecrated by
a general consensus of the legislature and the nation.
The ultimate appeal is to the public conscience— to that
code of political morality which, however formed, tacitly
governs the course of legislation, and has found an im-
perfect expression in certain great constitutional maxims.
To assert that every duly-qualified citizen is morally
entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution,
unless it would be dangerous to admit him, is merely to
assert that his admission would be in accordance with
some article of this code, while his exclusion violates it.
Let it be supposed, for the sake of argument, that one of
these received maxims, sound or unsound, is that repre-
sentation should be proportioned, at least approximately,
to taxation. If, then, it could be shown that a large
share of the national burdens is borne by the excluded
class, their moral right to a large share of representation
would be, primd facie, established. Suppose, again, that
another maxim, approved by the moral sense of the
nation at large, affirms that legislative power in a repre-
sentative government is derived from the consent of the
whole people, expressed or implied. If, then, it should
be proved that a numerous and increasing section of the
excluded class is no longer content with the position
16 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

assigned to it, openly claims the franchise, and threatens
to withdraw its consent to the state of tutelage in which
it has so long acquiesced, this circumstance would, so
far, greatly enhance the moral right in question. But we
may go further. All existing qualifications are grounded
on a similar assumption that a certain degree of wealth
or education constitutes, not an @ priori right, but a
“moral right” to representation. To impugn the moral
right of an unrepresented class, however strong its cre-
dentials, is to impugn the moral right of the present
electoral body, and to justify the former in believing that
nothing but the law stands between itself and its enfran-
chisement. This is what is meant when the franchise is
described as “a debt” due to the working classes, or as
a “reward ” earned by their virtues. Such expressions are
obviously metaphorical, but not more so than a “balance”
of classes. Phrases which represent the franchise as a
mechanical instrument, or a chemical ingredient, for the
production of a predetermined result, are quite as capri-
cious, quite as indefinite, and quite as likely to convey a
false impression, as those which Mr. Lowe so unjustly
disparages. The difference is, that material illustrations
are far beneath moral illustrations in the dignity of the
sentiments which they suggest.

III. Having thus examined the reasons for discarding
motives of justice, and abandoning ourselves to motives
of expediency, in the distribution of legislative power,
we find them wholly untenable. The utilitarian argu-
ment, as developed by Mr. Lowe, is in effect an argument
against the first principles of political liberty ; the moral
argument, as limited by Mr. Gladstone, is defensible on
every ground consistent with those principles. Were the
Brovrick.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 17

antagonism between the apparent interests of the nation
and the legitimate claims of our fellow-citizens as direct
as Mr. Lowe conceives it to be, we should require stronger
proofs than he has adduced to justify us in absolutely
sacrificing the latter to the former. Happily, we are
placed in no such dilemma. The statesman, though
actuated by a sense of justice, and not deaf to the plea
of moral right, will not therefore shut his eyes to con-
sequences. He will admit, with Mr. Gladstone, that
“political danger,” if real and urgent, may render, not
the rejection, but the postponement, of demands other-
wise irresistible, a duty no less than a necessity. If,
then, Mr. Lowe can make good his contention upon this
third issue—if he can show that a moderate reduction of
the franchise, such as was proposed by the Government
last Session, would entail real and urgent political danger
—we may still be compelled, while denying his premisses,
to accept his practical conclusion.

It must be confessed that no pains have been spared
by Mr. Lowe to make this side of his position impreg-
nable. He has ransacked history, and laid under con-
tribution all contemporary experience, in the attempt to
demonstrate that it would be an act of downright suicide,
and little short of treason, for Parliament to admit but
one-tenth of the unrepresented class within the pale of
the Constitution. But what is the process whereby he
professes to have achieved the demonstration of this
astounding paradox? It may be described in a single
sentence. He lays it down as a postulate that such a
measure would be “a step in the direction of Demo-
cracy ;” and he constructs a hideous ideal of Democracy,
by combining all the worst features of ancient city-

c
18 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

governments with all the worst features of modern re-
publics and empires in which universal suffrage prevails.'
It is not a more or less popular representative govern-
ment, but this Democracy, which is tyrannical at home
and aggressive abroad, the enemy of all superiority, and
the slave of every selfish prejudice. It is Democracy which
prostitutes itself to the arts of demagogues and the bribes
of millionaires, which makes the ignorant majority omni-
potent, and teaches them to use terrorism, in the last
resort, to silence and crush the educated minority. It is
Democracy which concentrates all power in committees
of the legislature, which paralyses the executive power,
which dwarfs statesmanship, and which cannot even
tolerate the independence of the judicial bench.

Now, supposing this to be no caricature of Democracy,
or the government of the few by the many, and sup-
posing also (which is surely a supposition no less violent)
that an equally revolting picture of Oligarchy, or the
government of the many by the few, could not be pro-
duced by a similar method, it still remains to be proved
that a reduction of the borough franchise from 10/. to 71.
would conduct us to these dismal results. At first sight,
it would appear that a measure which leaves the pre-
rogatives of the Crown unimpaired, the House of Lords
in possession of a legislative power vastly multiplied by
social influence, and the great majority of the people still
unrepresented, falls very far short of establishing a De-
mocracy. To bridge over this logical chasm, however,
Mr. Lowe again has recourse to mechanical imagery. Once
quit the safe level of a 10/. franchise, and we are launched,

1 See, especially, the Speech of April 26, 1866, Speeches and Letters,
pp. 145—166.
Broprick.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 19

according to him, on an inclined plane, whose ever-steep-
ening gradients will hurry us forward helplessly with
increasing velocity, till we plunge into the Democratic
abyss. On that treacherous slope he assures us that no
courage or skill will avail to stop us, for “the thing is
fated,” and the power of resistance, on which he now
relies, will have passed away for ever.’

By the judicious employment of metaphors like these,
rather than by any analysis of facts, Mr. Lowe succeeded
in convincing no small proportion of the House of Com-
mons that in giving up the 10/. franchise they would be
resigning themselves to Democracy. We have now to
consider, in a calmer mood, whether the conviction thus
produced will bear the test of a retrospective scrutiny.

In the first place, we may well ask what is the
evidence, and what the source, of this mysterious law,
beyond the control of future Legislatures, which makes
it impossible to go so far as may seem desirable without
going further. We might be tempted to suspect that
Mr. Lowe borrowed the idea of it from M. de Tocqueville,
a writer to whom his obligations have been greater than
is generally known. But Mr. Lowe himself emphatically
repudiates the fatalism, which he imputes to M. de
Tocqueville. “M. de Tocqueville assumed that De-
mocracy was inevitable, and that the question to be
considered was, not whether it was good or evil in itself,
but how we could best adapt ourselves to it. This is
ignava ratio, the coward’s argument, by which I hope
this House will not be influenced. If this Democracy
be a good thing, let us clasp it to our bosoms: if not,

1 Speeches and Letters, pp. 50—52, 140, 200, 201. Pref., p. 13. Speech
of February 25, 1867,
C2
20 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

there is, I am sure, spirit and feeling enough in this
country to prevent us from allowing ourselves to be
overawed by any vague presage of this kind, in the
belief that the matter has been already decided upon by
the fates and destinies in some dark tribunal in which
they sit together to regulate the future of nations.” It is
quite true that M. de Tocqueville regarded Democracy,
in his own sense, as inevitable; not, however, because
the fates had so decreed it, but for the far better reason
that civilized society, as he supposed, was deliberately
moulding itself into the democratic type. Mr. Lowe’s
view differs from M. de Tocqueville's chiefly in this
respect—that he thinks it possible to check the demo-
cratic spirit of the age, and so to thwart destiny, by
standing still now, though impossible if the downward
impetus be once given.' Which is the more philosophical
of the two must be a matter of opinion, but Mr. Lowe’s
is certainly not the more statesmanlike. If it is absurd
to do what appears to us wrong, in deference to political
necessity, it is surely not less absurd to abstain from
doing what appears to us right, because we anticipate
that it will place our posterity at the mercy of the same
political necessity.

1 Mr. Lowe would have done more justice to M. de Tocqueville, whose
opinion as to the effect of meddling with the electoral qualification he quotes
so emphatically (Pref. to Speeches and Letters, p. 13), if he had referred to
some passages of a different tenor in the works of the same author. Such are
those in which M. de Tocqueville contends that, while all the faults of
democracy are patent, many of its virtues are latent ; that, in these days, the
most effectual, if not the only, means of reviving public spirit, is to associate
the whole people in the government ; that, in America, the dominant majority
consists, for the most part, of peaceable and patriotic citizens ; and that, in
England, liberal as our aristocracy is, the good of the poor has been con-
stantly sacrificed to that of the rich.—Democratie en Amérique (Bruxelles,
1837), vol. ii. ch. 1 and 6.
Bropricx.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 21

At all events, such a warning comes more than thirty
years too late. It was the Reform Bill of 1832 that
commenced the fatal descent towards Democracy by ex-
tinguishing the old customary franchises of boroughs,
and substituting the 10/. household suffrage, which is the
object of Mr. Lowe’s unqualified respect. The danger
of yielding to democratic tendencies might then be urged,
and was actually urged, with great effect; it has now
ceased to have any meaning. Finality was justly ex-
ploded within a very few years after that memorable
settlement, and everyone now acknowledges that each
successive generation has the sole right, as it assuredly
has the sole power, of discharging the responsibilities
which devolve upon it.

Let us, then, shake off the notion that we can be a
Providence to those who come after us, and we shall find
less difficulty in reducing the shadowy outline of “ De-
mocracy” to its true proportions. What is “ Democracy,”
after all? It is an ambiguous term, which sometimes
denotes a certain form of Government, and sometimes a
certain state of society. A democratic form of Government
may exist, as in the Southern States of America, where the
state of society is essentially aristocratic ; a democratic
state of society may exist, as in France since the Revolu-
tion, where the form of Government is oligarchical or de-
spotic ; but in either case there will be a perilous want of
cohesion in the community. A clear perception of this dis-
tinction will be of great service in laying the ugly spectre
conjured up by Mr. Lowe. No one can fail to see that in
England, as elsewhere, there is a tendency towards what
De Tocqueville calls an equality of social conditions.
This tendency, though no more inevitable than any other
ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay I.

moral phenomenon, is one which a legislator must accept
as a fact, because it is almost independent of legislation.
The real question is, whether our representative system
should be from time to time adjusted by the growing
requirements of our social development, or should be
employed as a barrier to retard its progress. Considering
how frail such barriers must be, against the giant forces
daily struggling to undermine them, the question surely
answers itself. The nation, speaking and acting through
the national Legislature, cannot safely treat Democracy as
something outside itself, or retain a form of Government
more aristocratic than is consistent with the social frame-
work on which it is built. Those who deplore the spread
of democratic sentiments and habits must combat them,
as they would combat religious error, by the influences
of literature and personal example. To combat them
by upholding political institutions which society has
outerown, is to create one of those fatal disruptions in
the body politic which bring about revolutions.

The further question whether progressive enfranchise-
ment, apart from its being “ a step towards Democracy,”
involves greater evils than it purports to remedy, is
beyond the scope of our present subject. That a Re-
former’s sense of justice must be tempered with prudence
has already been conceded. That prudence counsels a
postponement of Reform cannot be conceded for a
moment. It cannot be taken for granted that the great
mass of our countrymen are hostile to our Constitution,
nor, upon that supposition, is it by any means obvious
that its defence would be weakened by subtracting a
portion of the besieging force and adding it to the
garrison. As we cannot expel from our population those
Broprick.} UFILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 23

elements which form the strength of Trades Unions, it
may well be less dangerous to incorporate them in our
representative system than to leave them outside it.
These and similar considerations are quite sufficient, if
not to shift the burden of proof from the advocates to
the opponents of progressive enfranchisement, yet at least
to neutralize any Conservative presumption adverse to it.

Were it necessary to reinforce them by the exposure of
inconsistencies in the practical objections urged against
it, ample materials could be found in the speeches of Mr.
Lowe himself. It was he who, after protesting that a
measure enfranchising a few hundred thousand artizans
would disturb the balance of classes and inaugurate the
reign of Democracy, strove elaborately to prove that a
much larger number might acquire the franchise now, if
they would but practise a little self-denial.’ It was he
who, after foreshadowing the selfish and unscrupulous
tyranny of numbers, attributed to the working classes,
almost in the same breath, an entire indifference to the
success of a measure which he described as an approach
to that very consummation.” It was he who, endorsing
the transparent fallacy that property, with all the
countervailing advantages at its command, would be
“swamped,” and even “ disfranchised,” by its possessors
being placed in a minority, nevertheless pointed, again
and again, to the ascendancy of millionaires as one of
the worst consequences to ensue from an extension of the
suffrage.’

It is not, however, by such inconsistencies as these
that the incurable weakness of Mr. Lowe’s argument is

1 Speeches and Letters, p. 46—49. 2 Thid. p. 81.
* As, for instance, Speeches and Letters, pp. 80, 196, 210, 211.
24 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay I.

to be measured. It is to be measured by the imperfect
ideal of political utility which he presents to us, by the
distorted conception of moral right which he contrasts
with it and offers as the only alternative to it, by his
failure to appreciate the essential harmony of the two
principles when correctly applied, and by his confused
apprehensions of a coming “Democracy” now or never
to be averted. Since the superstructure cannot be stronger
than its foundation, the policy which rests on arguments
so erroneous must be rejected with it. It is well for the
country that it has already been rejected by the House
of Commons itself. We may admire these speeches as
brilliant efforts of Parliamentary eloquence, we may profit
by the many lessons of political wisdom contained in
them, we may even prize them as contributions of great
value to the history and literature of Reform, but no
such feelings can be allowed to obscure or silence our
conviction that counsels more delusive or more dan-
gerous were never submitted, at a most critical juncture,
to a deliberative assembly.

For these counsels are deeply imbued with that exclu-
sive spirit, the very soul of oligarchical statecraft, which
has so often proved the ruin, not of governments only,
but of nations. The vitality of all political organisms is
in proportion to their capacity of adaptation to altered
conditions of existence. It was because their philoso-
phers were ignorant of this secret, and their statesmen
could not rise above the traditions of a glorious past to
the idea of Panhellenic unity, that the Greek Republics,
which had defied Persia in arms, and still maintained a
peerless supremacy in all the arts of civilization, fell
helplessly before Macedonia and Rome. It was because
Brovrick.] UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST REFORM. 25

her emperors were not possessed by truly impcrial views,
and invoked too late the life-giving virtues of self-
government, that Rome herself, unable to assimilate
the vast populations which she had conquered, and
unequal to the exigencies of that “ampler day” then
dawning upon Europe, was at last weighed in the
balances and found wanting. History in every page,
down to the very latest, records the same testimony for
the warning alike of conquering races and of governing
classes. It is not degeneracy, moral or physical, that
directly causes the fall of empires and the decay of insti-
tutions, but the consequent failure of that insight into the
present and that foresight of the future which inspired
their original founders. If the stability of our own
Constitution has been the marvel of modern times, it is
chiefly because it has grown with the growth, strength-
ened with the strength, and expanded with the expansive
energies of the English people. Let it once be stereo-
typed into a permanent form, and prove itself incapable
of further development, and it will lose that which is the
essential principle of its life. We are now entering,
with the rest of Europe, consciously or unconsciously,
upon a new order of things—an order of things in which,
come what may, Labour must henceforth occupy a far
higher position than heretofore. Not to recognize the
rise of this irresistible power by a timely extension of
our representative system, is to break the spell which
has preserved its identity through the vicissitudes of six
centuries ; and, with it, to imperil the destiny of consti-
tutional government.
II.

THE POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE
WORKING CLASS.

BY R. H. HUTTON.

A GREAT deal has been said and written, much of it
no doubt, not unjustly though one-sidedly, on the unfit-
nesses of the working class for holding the balance of
political power in the State. If they are,—those of them
at least whom it is now proposed to admit to the
franchise, the artisans of the towns,—on the whole
superior in intelligence to the numerous class of small
shopkeepers immediately above them, they are no doubt
less thrifty, less disposed to be guided by those who are
their superiors in culture, less cautious in their political
instincts, less attached to the political institutions under
which they live. This coldness of feeling towards our
present political régyme proceeds in fact from what is
strongest and most manly in their character. The class
immediately above them, admire rank as rank, and wealth
as wealth ; there is nothing which the majority of them
covet more than an alliance with rank and wealth; there
is no form which their ambition is more apt to take, than
28 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay II.

a wish to secure for themselves the favourable recogni-
tion of rank and wealth, by a devotion almost servile
to the political leadership of the wealthy and the noble.
The most active and enterprising section of the working-
classes, on the other hand, feel no sympathy at all
with this spirit. They are more inclined to the opposite
political danger: and sometimes distrust men really
worthy of their confidence, because they belong to the
aristocracy of rank, wealth, or even culture. There is
therefore, I think, some show of reason for the greater
anxiety which is felt by Conservatives at the step they
are now asked to take, than was felt by the Conservatives
of the last generation at the step, in many respects far
more important, which was taken in 1832. But there
are, on the other hand, many very important charac-
teristics of the working class which are scarcely suffi-
ciently considered in calculating the probable results of
this change. And I believe that, in the long run, these
characteristics will be far more important than the more
immediate and more superficially obvious tendencies
which are now filling the minds of timid people with
the most extravagant apprehensions. For while the re-
actionary fecling against the classes now in possession
of power will probably not long outlive the monopoly
which has given rise to it, the other characteristics to
which I wish to draw attention in this paper, are likely
to grow with the growth of the working-class and
strengthen with its strength.

In the first place, though I readily admit that the
working class have nothing like the same caution and
self-distrustfulness of judgment as the class immediately
above them; and also, that they have not the same
Hurron.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 29

a

breadth of judgment—the same susceptibility to a great
variety of intellectual considerations—as the professional
classes of England; yet I doubt if any class in England
is at once so open to the influence of a few great ideas,
and so willing to make sacrifices for those ideas. The
aristocracy, as a class, are only in rare cases susceptible
to the influence of disinterested political ideas ; the great
territorial interest, which is concentrated in them, domi-
nates them, and makes them consider almost every
question in the light of that interest alone. The same
may be said of the next most important class in the
English nation,—the commercial class. With respect to
all wars, except Oriental’ wars, the commercial class is
apt to see nothing but the considerations, often no doubt
very weak, though often, not always, quite paramount
considerations, which should induce us to remain at peace
ourselves, and try to keep others at peace. The terri-
torial aristocracy sometimes supports the action of the
mercantile class, as in the case of the Italian War of
1859, from which it expected nothing but a stimulus
to French ambition, and, consequently, a menace to
English power ;—and sometimes, again, resists it ; as in
the case of the Dano-German War of 1864, when the
aristocracy deemed English honour, and territorial in-
terests—of both of which they consider themselves the
sole interpreters and the natural guardians—endangered
at once by the ambition of Germany, and by the peril to
a small maritime power. But neither the territorial class
nor the mercantile class is in the habit of examining
political questions by the single light of any great moral

1 Oriental wars have been generally undertaken at the instance, or for the
suke of the commercial class.
30 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IL. _

principle. With them the special interest almost always
predominates over all other considerations. It is different,
no doubt, with the professional and literary class. Their
minds are open, and open at every pore, at least to all
intellectual considerations, without subservience to any
overriding interest—which, indeed, in their case scarcely
exists. But then they are almost too porous, too open to
such influences, to discriminate sufficiently between the
great ideas and the small. The line they took in the
recent American Civil War illustrates this. It was not
sympathy with an aristocracy, gud aristocracy, which
governed them, as it governed a large part of the country
party, and of the House of Lords. Still less did they
share the mere mercantile terror, which cried, “ For
God’s sake don’t offend our best customers, and the power
that is certam to win by mere weight of wealth, the
Northern States.” But the professional men of our
educated middle class, though they looked impartially at
all considerations, showed no strong perception of the
moral proportion between them. They protested against
judging of any question by “simple issues.” They
perplexed themselves with refined constitutional con-
siderations, with considerations of the balance of power
and so forth. They piqued themselves on their imparti-
ality, and on seeing ‘‘a great deal on both sides,” and,
on the whole, contributed very little—less, probably, in
consequence of their culture than they would have done
without it,—to influence the policy of England on that
great matter. On the other hand the working class, though
they had a far deeper interest in the matter than the
professional classes, and that an interest opposed to the
line of policy they advocated, saw but one great idea
Hurton.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 31

involved in the struggle,—that of freedom contending
with slavery: and this decided them. Their want of
culture stood them in good stead. It acted as a sieve
to prevent any smaller considerations permanently in-
fluencing their minds ; so that they were swayed only by
what literary men characterised as “ much too simple
issues.” They saw the one great issue, and left out of
consideration all the comparatively unimportant issues,
to which our professional classes attached such undue
weight. They were ruled by an idea—a great idea—a
most disinterested idea, for it induced them to make
immense sacrifices, and to acquiesce in want as the price
of a triumph for that idea ; and, consequently, they were
able to throw their whole weight, which under the peculiar
circumstances happened, in spite of their not being repre-
sented, to be a very great moral weight, into the right
scale. We kept at peace for an idea, instead of “ going
to war for an idea ;” and this was in a very large measure
indeed the doing of the working class. Now surely there
is a very great advantage in having a class politically
strong in Parliament, which is thus unable to attach an
unreal intellectual value to the smaller political ideas, and
unembarrassed by that subtlety of mind, which makes
better educated men dwell on a multitude of small con-
siderations, till the great considerations are lost sight
of altogether.

The working class showed the same sort of rough
power again in discriminating Garibaldi as the true
popular representative of Italian unity, and combining to
do him honour. It is probable that, had they been
fully represented in Parliament in 1859, we should not
have hesitated to join France in recovering Italy for
32 LSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay II.

the Italians. And in that case, we should at the present
moment have far greater weight in Europe, and have saved
Italy from that weight of obligation to France, which
drew from her the cession of Savoy and Nice. No doubt
the same generous openness to great political ideas would
have inclined the working class to plunge England into
a struggle for Poland, which, even with France as an
ally, would probably have been hopeless and disastrous.
And I am most ready to acknowledge, that there are
cases in which this paramount influence of a great idea
over the artisan class, and the absence from their minds
of a sufficient regard for the difficulty or cost of a policy,
and for other considerations of the same character, would
lead them into political blunders. Still I cannot but
think, that we have in the influence of the territorial
and mercantile classes, which (even with the most ex-
tended franchise) must always be very powerful in
Parliament, an ample guarantee against any excessive
mobility to ideal or romantic considerations of a dangerous
kind, and that we need, more than it is easy to express,
the influence of a class in the state, open to great ideas,
but unsophisticated enough not to be moved by small
and subtle influences. In the intellectual culture of the
country, there is often a want of proportion, a failure in
discerning the enormous difference between the moral
principles and more conspicuous and powerful ideas
which permanently affect the destiny of nations, and
those inferior considerations which should affect only their
temporary policy. A great class, eminently alive to the
former ideas, and somewhat obtuse to the latter, swayed
by the great tides and oceanic currents which influence
the masses, unconscious of the finer influences which
Hurtoy.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 33

occupy (sometimes too exclusively) the minds of states-
men, will enable Parliament to keep in mind the com-
parative importance of different classes of political ideas
far more clearly than it does at present.

In speaking of the special openness of the artisan class
to great disinterested ideas, I have already implied, what
is, I believe, true, that, in proportion to its knowledge,
it is far more cosmopolitan in its sympathies than any
class now represented in Parliament: I need not say, of
course, far more cosmopolitan than agricultural labourers,
who exaggerate, from their ignorance, the wholesome
but narrow nationalism of the great landowners. It is
true that commerce, once enlightened as to the principles
of free-trade, has thrown all its influence into the scale
of peace and amity with other nations. But “enlightened
self-interest ” is only cosmopolitan up to a certain point.
It deprecates even a just and necessary war on account
of the blow to trade. Thus, though the commercial
classes deprecated all offence to the North in the
American War, they never heartily sympathised with
either party, and they were disposed to attach a ridi-
culous and wholly erroneous importance to the tariff
questions with which the quarrel was complicated.
Again, they deprecated the Italian War in 1859, and
the Prusso-Italian War of last year in the same one-sided
spirit. The mercantile classes are cosmopolitan only in
defence of universal trade. The artisan class, on the
other hand, is probably almost the only one in England,
which might be trusted to judge English policy abroad
almost as impartially as it would judge American, French,
or German policy, and to hold back its sympathy even
after we had engaged in a struggle, if the policy of

D
34 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IT.

England seemed to be selfish and wrong. This is partly
due, no doubt, to their grudge against institutions which
have not yet admitted them to their proper share of in-
fluence, and we may well hope that all the undue parade
of cosmopolitanism, all the tendency to that excessive
candour which rather Izkes to find England in the wrong,
will give way before the new pride which they will feel
in their influence over the national government of the
future. But I think that the artisan class, even after
its great and important share in the collective life of
the nation has been fairly recognised, will always retain
a livelier sympathy with the popular feelings and the
life of other nations than the classes now most influential
in politics,—a sympathy which will prove to be of the
greatest possible use im rectifying the excessive self-
esteem of our territorial classes, and the equally excessive
commercialism of our mercantile classes. The artisan is
least of all Englishmen identified with the accumulations
of past wealth,—with visible objects for the loss of which
he fears,—with resources that can only return their full
profit if they are carefully cherished for a long time in
the same place. These are the roots of excessive national
Conservatism, of an undue appreciation of those insulated
local interests which are liable to suffer by the shock of
foreign collisions and alarms. The artisan, on the con-
trary, carries his own wealth in the shape of skill with
him ; and it is not even, like the lawyer's or the sur-
geon’s skill, of a kind which depends upon an extensive
local connexion for its exercise. If he does not succeed
in the south one year, he may succeed in the north the
next. If he does not prosper in England this year, he
may prosper next year in the United States or Canada
Hurroy.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 35

or Australia, or even, if he can master the difficulties of
language, in France or Belgium. This is a condition
of things which tends to liberate him from the more
selfish prejudices of place and time, no doubt at the cost
of much which can be gained only by striking deep local
roots, but still which carries the great benefit with it of
opening the sympathies more readily to the deep popular
feelings of every nation. I venture to say that whoever
remembers the unmanly English panic of 1859, the ex-
clusively English point of view from which the upper and
middle classes beheld Napoleon III.’s Italian expedition and
anticipated the commencement of an European war such
as his uncle had commenced by a step (in its superficial
and geographical aspects) somewhat similar, will admit
that at that time Parliament very much needed what
the fair representation of the working class would have
given it,—a certain scorn for the selfishly English
point of view, for the anxious and angry “ What will
become of us if this goes on?” which was echoed about
amongst us, while liberty and national life for the great
Italian nation still hung in the balance. Doubtless the
artisans have less to loge, have, at least individually
much less to lose, and are therefore less lable to be
imaginatively upset by a disturbance of European order,
than our wealthier classes and our aristocracy. But for
this very reason they are more at liberty to judge the
popular movements of Europe without a perpetually
haunting arriére pensée as to the reflex effect European
events may have over what is exclusively English.
They had no desire that the Italians should throw away
their best hopes for the future, in order that we might
not have. to dread the possible fatalities attending
D2
36 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IT.

Napoleon’s rising star. And it ismy conviction that they
will introduce a very needful infusion of cosmopolitan
sympathy with other nations into our politics, without
making us in any noble or useful sense less English, or
less national than we now are. That a cosmopolitan
element is wanted in English politics, no tranquil observer,
I think, will deny.

But the most important of all the characteristic in-
fluences which may be anticipated from the representa-
tion of the artisan class, is the introduction into our
national politics of those large, and, however much mis-
applied, still radically true and noble ideas of the claims
of the organized whole over the individuals that constitute
it, which the artisan class have worked out at the expense
of so much sacrifice, and too often, no doubt, at the expense
of true freedom, in their Trade Societies. We have hitherto
looked upon these Trade Societies far too much as mere
instruments of war with the class of employers. This of
course they have been, and not unfrequently of very dis-
astrous war. But they have been much more than this.
They have been great voluntary organizations of extraor-
dinary vigour, indicating a sense of the value of organiza-
tion, and a distrust of mere scattered individual energies.
They indicate such an appreciation of the value of true
government as is found in no other class. They are all
of them, of course, mutual insurance societies, by the
help of which individual destitution has been aided out
of the general fund, and the pressure of special calam-
ities on individual places greatly mitigated. They have
promoted the circulation of labour, and supported men
whose services were not wanted in one place while they
were in search of another where they were wanted. In
Horron.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 37

short, they have operated to mitigate the extremes both
of prosperity and want, and to secure a more uniform
level, or, at least, a less abrupt and painful variation of
level, in the condition of the various branches of the
artisan class. Whatever may be justly said of the mis-
application of these great organizations, no one who
knows anything about them can be blind to the great
political qualities to which they bear witness,—the power
of sustained sacrifice for a common purpose, the fortitude
in suffering, the self-denial in prosperity, the nobleness
of individual self-devotion for the common cause,—in
fact, precisely those qualities which, when they are ex-
hibited for that wider organization called a nation, we
think worthy of the panegyric which in all ages of the
world patriots have received. When these same qualities
are exhibited on behalf of a body of working bookbinders
or amalgamated engineers, they naturally do not earn the
same high praise as when exhibited by Tyrolese in defence
of their country. Nor is the motive so noble. Yet, though
proceeding from a poorer motive, they show a political
discipline and a respect for collective life, a conviction on
the part of the individual that the body is greater than
its members, and needs their service, sometimes even their
sacrifice, such as is the more remarkable by reason of the
less stimulating motive which is found sufficient to hold
together these organizations. What J think may fairly be
hoped for, is the diversion of some of this high esprit de
corps from the narrow organization of the Trade Society
into the wider organization of the nation. There is plenty
of room for this. We have, I hope, nearly done with
the once useful but now almost obsolete jealousy of
government, which blossomed in the worship of the
38 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essar IT.

“voluntary principle,” and which used to maintain that
government was useful only as a system of police to
protect body and goods, while all other ends requiring
association should be worked out by voluntary associ-
ations alone. This was a theory suitable enough to a
time when the power of government was monopolized
by a small class, and was often used for the most un-
justifiable class purposes. But it only expressed the
wholesome dread of a strong central power, which was
rightly entertained so long as the centre of government
was not the centre of national life. I believe that no
class in the English nation is half so sensible of the
advantages of individual sacrifice for the sake of the
whole, and of the possibility of to some extent equalizing
the risks and hopes of all—not always indeed without
endangering the liberty or limiting the enterprise of the
individual—as the artisan class. In truth, what we have
at present to fear from this class, as may be seen in the
popularity amongst them of the proposed Permissive
Bill, is a tendency to encroach on the fair liberty of
the minority for the supposed moral advantage of the
majority. It would not at present be unreasonable to
fear that, if the artisans gained too soon the complete
control of government, they might impose undue restric-
tions on the genius and the tastes of the few for the
sake of protecting the multitude from the consequences
of its own moral weakness. This is undoubtedly the
tendency of prohibiting overtime, even for adults, or
discouraging it by requiring, when it is adopted, a much
higher rate of wages, instead of leaving the individual
labourer to judge for himself. As Mr. Hughes said in
a late Reform debate, the artisans have many of them
Hutroy.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 39

so high a conception of the obligation of the individual
workman to remain in his class and raise its level,
rather than to rise out of it into the richer class above,
that they regard a working man who so uses his liberty
as to prove that he cares more for his own fortunes than
for those of his class, as we should regard a public servant
—say a Governor-General of India—who should show by
his policy that he thought of his own advancement first,
and only in the second place of the honour and influence
of his country. This state of feeling is entirely confined
to the working class, and has arisen almost wholly out of
the semi-patriotism which the contests between the Trade
Societies and the Capitalists have fostered in the arti-
sans; and it is looked upon (I think very justly) with
suspicion and jealousy. It is indeed right that there
should be some organized social whole which every man
should regard with loyalty and devotion, but it is cer-
tainly undesirable that such a whole should be usually
smaller than the nation,—and mischievous that anybody
should suffer for not possessing an inner fold of class
patriotism within the outer fold of national patriotism.
If a man chooses to give himself up for the welfare of
any particular class, well and good ; but it should at least
be no reproach to another man to feel that his energies
fit him for some sphere different from that in which he
was born and bred, and that he will be truer to himself
by rising out of his class than by devoting himself to it.
Still, what seems to me so important is that this great,
though perhaps misdirected, class patriotism, which the
artisans have cultivated so carefully, and which has given
occasion for the display of so many noble as well as
ignoble qualities, should be turned to national account.
40 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay II.

In the other classes we have at last attained a tolerably
clear conviction what the liberties are which the indi-
vidual has a right to keep sacred from the invasion of
the State. But I think only the working class have
got,—partly from their trade organizations,—a clear
conception how much individuals owe, by way of self-
sacrifice, to the larger social organization to which they
belong. The first instance of the political action on a
considerable scale of artisans was an interference on
behalf of the ignorant and overworked children of the
cotton districts, and resulted in the Ten Hours: Act.
That act contained logically the germs of a measure for
compulsory national education, and practically recognised
that every individual is bound to sacrifice all hopes
of gain which can only be got at the cost of stunting
the life and growth of others. And I believe that a
wish for compulsory education and for limiting the hours
of children’s labour is by no means the only instance
of that spirit of individual sacrifice for the sake of the
greater life of the whole class or nation, which pervades
the very heart and imagination of the working class. The
principle of mutual insurance, which, in the Deferred
Annuities Act and in the Post Office Savings Bank,
Mr. Gladstone has stamped with the national guarantee,
is capable of much wider application ; and it is probable
that, as the working classes gain greater influence in the
State, they will be able to show us that, in our undue
confidence in unlimited competition, we have frittered
away many national privileges, which can only be shared
to the utmost extent by all, when they are administered
for the benefit of all by a really national Government.
I do not think we shall ever fully understand how much
Hurron.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 4)

a Government can do for the common life of the nation,
and that without curtailing any legitimate sphere of
individual liberty, till we have the spirit which has
shown itself in the great Trade Societies grafted into the
richer growth of our national politics. The cohesion of
no class of society, except the class of artisans, has ever
been strong enough to work out such ideas as these. The
cohesion of other classes has been based on merely selfish
interests, the interest of a party resolved to maintain its
privileges against all assailants. In the case of the Trade
Societies, the necessity for an external and militant
unity has no doubt been strong enough, but it has been
second to the necessity for internal and interdependent
unity,—the unity of mutual assistance and a common
life. Hence I think it is reasonable to expect that,
transferred to the larger sphere of politics, and tempered
by the influence of other political creeds, the self-denial,
the party good faith, the wonderful esprit de corps, the
solidarité which has been displayed in so marvellous a
degree by the artisans, will open a new era of political
organization.

And, finally, I do not in the least believe that they are
right who maintain, like Professor Blackie, that the en-
franchisement of the artisan classes will be unfavourable
to the individual ascendancy of great men, that it will pro-
mote fickleness, caprice, and irreverence for moral supe-
riority, such as is often attributed to democracies. On
the other hand, I should be inclined to fear a some-
what too great and careless trust in the leaders who had
gained the confidence of this class by complete honesty
and large popular sympathies. On small political ques-
tions the artisans will never be accurately informed, and
42 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay II.

consequently their representatives will be far less like
delegates with respect to most political questions than
are the representatives of better informed constituencies,
where individual voters have more political influence. |
suspect, for instance, that Mr. Gladstone, widely as he
differs from the mass of artisans on many points, would
be allowed, on ecclesiastical questions, to pursue his own
course more freely, and with far less danger to his ministry,
if he were leader of a House in which the working
class had large influence, than he ever will be in a Par-
liament such as we now have. After the artisans are
once satisfied with the sympathy, ability, and honesty
of their leaders, no class is so tolerant of differences of
opinion, or so willing to be faithful to leaders with whom
they cannot wholly agree. In fact, at the present moment,
notwithstanding the divergence of his wishes from theirs
on many important questions, Mr. Gladstone is probably
more popular with the artisans even than Mr. Bright,
who, on political subjects at least, has far oftener ex-
pressed their views. The reason is to be found mainly in
the business-like character of Mr. Gladstone’s sympathy
with the working class, the practical proof he has given
that, in spite of many opposite currents of intellectual
tendency, he has always been eager to lighten their
taxation, to devise new security for their savings, and to
welcome them in spite of political or religious differences
into the organization of the State, as “ our own flesh and
blood.” This being clear, those Conservative tendencies
of his which so greatly offend some intellectual Liberals,
seem to the artisans only proofs of conscientiousness and
sincerity, and make them, if anything, admire him the
more. I believe that the artisans will leave their Par-
Yicrtoy.] POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE WORKING CLASS. 43

liamentary leaders a larger freedom of action than is now
given by most constituencies, and this partly because
they care less about the niceties of political creeds,
partly because they have a stronger feeling of personal
loyalty to able leaders who, differing from them in
many things, still devote themselves to fight their battles
on the most important points of all. Certainly in the past
nothing has been more remarkable than the steadiness
with which the Trade Societies have acted on the judg-
ment of leaders in whom they had confidence, even when
their judgment in the particular instance seemed to be
wrong. Often this has operated badly, but it shows how
much liberty they are willing to give to their captains.
It may be doubted if there are at present any represent-
atives more conscious of individual liberty to act as they
please, without regard to the fancies of their constituents,
than Mr. Hughes and Mr. Layard, who represent the
working class almost alone. Of course, on one or two
great questions, they know that they have expressed the
deepest sympathy with the working man, and that on
these they must be faithful. But on all others very
great differences of opinion will scarcely ever need a
pardon while, in constituencies of another character, the
chance of re-election would often turn on a single un-
popular vote.

1 believe, then, that while the working class show
undoubtedly less intellectual range than the so-called
“ educated classes,” they show, partly on that account,
a more sure instinct as to which are the great political
ideas of the day, and a more unwavering fidelity to them,
which will be of the greatest use in increasing the efficiency
of Parliament. Further, that they will introduce into
44 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay II.

our foreign politics an element of more decidedly cosmo-
politan sympathy, which is greatly needed in England,
and is not at all likely ever to be in excess ; again, that
they will raise the popular value felt for the Govern-
ment as an instrument of organizing our national life,
and subordinating individual selfishness to the good of
the whole State ; and last, that so far from diminishing
the personal influence of really liberal and able states-
men the working class will lend them a new power
which in our middle-class Parliament they have never

yet wielded.

Nore, Page 30, line 17.—The Southern feeling of the Liverpool
merchants was exceptional, and the result of their special interest in
the prosperity, and their special connexion with the aristocracy, of the
Slave-owning States.
III.

ON THE ADMISSION OF THE WORKING CLASSES
AS PART OF OUR SOCIAL SYSTEM ;

AND ON THEIR RECOGNITION FOR ALL PURPOSES AS PART
OF THE NATION.

BY LORD HOUGHTON.

In urging the question of the extension of the suffrage, it
is by no means superfluous to require from our opponents
the admission that Representative Institutions are of
themselves advantageous to the community, and that our
present form of government is something more than a
fortunate accident of history. If protection to life and
property, intelligent and honest administration, the miti-
gation of physical evils by the application of science, the
instruction of the young and the care of the infirm, the
restriction of vicious propensities or the palliation of their
consequences, and the most effective and economical
organization of the means of national defence, are the
main offices and objects of governments, it is difficult to
defend the anomalies, confusions, and delays, which are
incidental to every parliamentary system that the wit of
man has hitherto devised. There is no reason that an
autocratic rule should now be deformed by the cruelties
46 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay III

and violences of the various tyrannies which mankind,
by the force of the social instincts, has been driven, in
other times and places, to endure. The highly-educated
nobility and the patriotic peasantry of Russia exhibit no
abhorrence of a political condition which places their
lives, liberties, and properties at the mercy of the Czar ;
while France, somewhat fretfully, but without serious
opposition, not only submits to a similar destiny, but
professes to find in it many of the social results of her
great Revolution.

Nor would it be fair to assume that an oligarchical
State, in the present civilization of the world, would
suffer from the abuses and corruptions that made the
dominant classes of ruder times odious and oppressive ;
rather is it probable that an enlightened sense of their
own security and interest would place the chief authority
in competent and sagacious hands. ‘he perils of power
are diminished by improvement of manners, no less than
by expansion of intellect.

The advocates of the present limitation of political
privileges may, however, assert their right of holding
any abstract opinion on forms of government, so long
as they believe that the representative system among
ourselves is the appropriate machinery to procure that
general assent and obedience to the laws which is neces-
sary for the peace and prosperity of our country. They
may remind us that the final, irresponsible Will, which, in
relation to its subjects, admits neither of judgment nor
control, and which in spiritual absolutism is represented by
a Papal Bull, and in temporal by an Imperial Ukase, here
resides in an Act of Parliament, and that the almost
universal reverence of the people for the laws, and their
Hoveutox. | NATIONAL UNITY. 47

ready submission to an executive which is rather a symbol
of authority than an actual overpowering force, demon-
strate that they are, in the main, content with the source
from whence that power emanates, and that, without the
interference of honest theorists or interested agitators, they
would desire no further alteration in the Constitution.

There is so much partial truth in these propositions
that those who are urgent for Reform cannot afford to
accept the test either of the beneficial results of legis-
lation or of the apparent satisfaction of the mass of the
community. They clearly perceive that such an admis-
sion would land them in an approval of the despotism
of a philanthropic and able autocrat or of a benevolent
slave-holding aristocracy ; they feel that in such a mode
of argument, the principles and benefits of Parliamentary
Government are entirely set aside, and that, if they are
to succeed in impressing on the minds of Englishmen the
duty and the worth of the participation of a larger portion
of the People in the political life of the nation, it must be
by appealing to another order of facts, and another range
of sentiments.

M. de Talleyrand used to say, that in a Revolution
every political position was not a boon to be granted,
but a fortress to be won. Now, it seems to us a charac-
teristic of the pacific and normal progress of our Con-
stitution, that each step has never been wholly the one
or the other. From the time that our history emerges
from the relation of conquerors and conquered, our rising
liberties have been recognitions of existing facts: the
principle has been taken for granted, the assault or the
struggle has been for its application. That principle is
the concurrence of the whole nation in the method and
48 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay ITI.

distribution of its government—not assumed by an
irresistible power, but legally and formally expressed
through certain trusted representatives. The spirit of
reverence that lies deep in the national character has
manifested itself in a devoted loyalty, whenever the
Sovereign has represented the mind and the heart of the
People, but has not arrested the sternest action of national
indignation, where that function has attempted to make
itself self-sustaining and self-sufficing: it was the same
sentiment that submitted with apparent servility to the
Tudor who broke with Rome, and visited with death the
Stuart that would have ruled without Parliaments. So
absorbing has been this feeling, that even that bond of
identity of nationality between Sovereign and Subject,
which in most nations has been a necessity of the relation,
has with us been superseded by political considerations,
and the throne of an ungenial German, ignorant of our
language and offensive to our manners, was defended
with zeal and fidelity in the senate and in the field.

So, too, assuredly with the governing classes, in whose
attributes and actions there are essential differences from
the aristocracies of other lands. The very early recogni-
tion of the principle of the general representation of the
People is all the more remarkable from the circumstance
of the alien origin of the great landholders, and the tempta-
tion on their part to exercise all the irresponsible privi-
leges of conquest. Yet the perception may have grown
up in their minds that this was the best, if not the only
way, in which the Nation, composed of such various races,
could be welded together, conflicting traditionary cus-
toms reconciled, old pretensions to property obliterated,
and present titles secured. The earliest Parliamentary
Hoveuron.] NATIONAL UNITY. 49

writs run as a summons to “ all persons soever and
tenants of whomsoever,” and refer to the ‘‘ common
interest and concernment of all men in the well-being of
the State ;” and until the reign of Henry the Third, even
the restriction of residence was unknown. It is the tone
of many writers’ to regard this and subsequent limitations
of the suffrage in counties and boroughs, as overt acts of
hostility and class-legislation, and to look on all develop-
ments of the Parliamentary system as usurpations of the
Popular Rights. But it is hardly consistent with this
view that the Law on this matter was never questioned,
and that every change was made on the plea of procuring
a truer and more effective exposition of the popular will.
In their contests with the Crown, the Nobility, no doubt,
offered a far stronger front when supported by a com-
pact and well-organized body of freeholders; and the
independence of the Towns was assured by those muni-
cipal regulations which absorbed, in some degree, the
popular privileges. Selfish and corporate ambition, no
doubt, did its work ; but the anomalies of freedom were
ever side-by-side with the anomalies of oppression. Such
tyranny as produced the commotions of Cade or Wyatt,
in what were at that time the manufacturing populations
of England, was rare and exceptional, and the assertion
of invaded rights is everywhere distinguishable from
lawless riot.

To those who can see in the history of the House of
Commons nothing but a series of usurpations and restric-
tions of original popular rights, it may also be suggested

_ 1 Including Mr. Chisholm Anstey, whose “Plea of the Unrepresented
Commons” is a valuable contribution to the argumentative and historical

literature of Reform.
E
50 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay ITI.

to consider whether this semblance is not mainly due to
the fact that the Commons did not represent any one
class in the community, but were a composite body, in
which all the interests and powers of that community
met together, so that every general conflict between
the Houses—that is, between the titled Order and the
representatives of the Citizens—has been avoided. It
was certainly better that the Nobility should strive
for influence in the Commons, through their wealth
and their intelligence, than that they should regard the
Commons as political antagonists or as a separate Estate.
Herein, indeed, lay the whole difference between Par-
liament being a control on the People or for the People :
herein dwelt the principle of the Self-government of the
Nation. What constituted that Self was, no doubt, a
frequent subject of conflict ; but the notion that outside
the electoral body there existed a mass of individuals,
conscious of political interests, capable of political con-
clusions, ready for political responsibility, and yet ex-
cluded for ever from any action by which they could
signify their desires or opinions, is thoroughly alien to
the nature of our historical Constitution, and belongs
entirely to an order of things where Charters are
treaties of peace between Princes and Peoples, and where
the sole object is to prevent the outbreak of future
hostilities.

It is a truism that the chronic existence of such a force
of Thought and Will existing apart from their legal
expression in Parliament must subtract from the repre-
sentative character of the House of Commons. Under
such circumstances an Act of Parliament would no longer
seem the final judgment which every Englishman is bound
Hoveuton.] NATIONAL UNITY. 5]

to obey, or submit himself to the verdict of that jury
which, in the emphatic language of legal procedure, is his
“country.” There would be in the mind of every recalci-
trant against authority a possible appeal to something
beyond—to an opinion which had nothing to do with
making the Law, and which only by inference could be
said to consent to it—an appeal to an indefinite belief in
a larger Justice, or a superior Wisdom. The respect for
the Law that prevails in Great Britain is not a sentiment
that can be generated in a day, by a Government of the
purest intentions. When the Law comes from above,
nothing less than theocratic power can ensure it rever-
ence ; and when it has been once regarded as an instru-
ment of violence and oppression, it is long indeed before
even its most beneficent discipline is willingly accepted.
The penal laws in Ireland have defiled the very fountain
of justice in the popular imagination, and rendered the
government of that docile and honest nation the most
difficult problem of our legislation, because the confidence
between the law-makers and the people is weak and
uncertain.

But, besides the worth of the co-operation of all the
acknowledged political mind of the country in the action
of Parliament, as a security for the common support of
the Law and public Order, there remains the deeper moral
effect of the exclusion from the open political life of the
State of ideas and beliefs, of hopes and fears, that
may operate to any extent on the individual or social
condition of its citizens. There is no more patent
and powerful lesson derived from systematic connexion
with Parliamentary institutions than that of the com-
pulsory limits of human endeavour in accomplishing the

E2
52 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IIT

happiness of Mankind. If not continually recruited with
youth and life, every political assembly would subside
into a habit of disappointment that might result in sullen
indifference. Only in new and fragmentary Conventions,
such as the French “Constituante,” or the Frankfort Par-
lament, the phantom of Society, regenerated by the
enunciation of sound principles and the imperative
demands of justice, reigns for a time, and vanishes in
confusion, often leaving nothing behind except a scandal
to liberty. And this is exactly what the experience of
Constitutional life prevents and neutralizes. The lapses
of the acutest intellects or the most accurate memories,
the failure of the most careful provisions, and the per-
version of the most honest intentions, are the daily
incidents which every Constitutional politician records
in others or in himself. These conditions may be for-
gotten by a momentary enthusiasm or an angry temper,
or they may be lost in rhetorical expression, but they
habitually tame the extravagance of theory and limit
the vagueness of generalization, The unexpected im-
pediments that daily occur in dealing with the wills and
actions of other men not only prevent any serious states-
man from attempting impossibilities, but leaven the poli-
tical thought of every Member of Parliament, and almost
of every reader of its debates.

Now the importance of this habit of mind is far
greater in the contemplation of social than of political
change. As it may be said to the disadvantage of
politics as a business, that the professed politician is
rarely a social reformer; so, on the other hand, the
security against the sudden and violent ebullitions of
social discontent afforded by a legitimate safety-valve of
Hovauton.] NATIONAL UNITY. 53

political discussion can hardly be overlooked. Analogies
with foreign nations are necessarily imperfect, but some-
thing more than a local or temporary application may be
safely made of the events of the year 1848 in our great
neighbour-country, which seems to have the double func-
tion of thinking and suffering for the world. After the
terrible experience of the first Revolution, and the violence
of asserted rights culminating in the triumph of actual
wrong, permanent order seemed at last secured by a
constitutional government, ably administered, eloquently
advocated, presided over by a Sovereign of large ex-
perience and benevolent will, and a royal family which
still, in exile, is eminent for talent and for virtue. So far
from any offensive resumption of power on the part of the
old aristocracy, they stood studiously aloof, an 1 seemed,
if not contented, at least subdued. The customs of
the people were assimilated to the equality of the laws,
and there were no symptoms of invading or affronting
privilege. And yet there existed a division of classes, as
complete as any of the ancient régime ; there was a chasm
as wide as ever separating sovereign and peasant; there
was a small governing body—a pays légal, and outside
of it a whole People to be governed. Now although this
people had submitted for many years to a despotism
gilded with national glory, it was still the same that had
dreamt the perfectibility of mankind through the means
of institutions, and had angrily protested against every
national evil as a personal injustice. As Rousseau had set
up the Contrat Social, there were now other writers and
orators, not indeed as eloquent, but quite as delusive, who
wrote and preached, with more or less sincerity and purity,
the doctrine,that States have only to act without individual
54 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay III.

selfishness, and to will that every man shall be happy, and
the Paradise of the devotee will at once be realized on earth.
The actual order of things might not be worse, they said,
in France than in other countries, but it must be swept
away, as the first step to the regeneration of the World.
These were the visions of men, who dwelt as much apart
from actual life as the monk of the strictest order in his
cell, and in the absence of political realities neither they
nor their disciples had any measure by which to judge
of the weight of their words or the value of their ideas.
It required only some chance evil audacity to set fire to
this train, and one morning Europe was aghast to learn,
that the Monarchy of the Middle Classes had been over-
thrown by a mere band of desperadoes working not on
the unreasoning fears, but on the unreasoning hopes of
the multitude, and that France had submitted almost
without a murmur. The short illusion of reconciliation
and the bitter end of the conflict of June in the streets of
Paris, (the most sanguinary reprisal of modern history,)
are lessons of something more than retribution; they
show that where the best aspirations and the worst
passions working in the popular mind are equally
secluded from the public eye, and denied the free atmo-
sphere of political debate, no material well-being will
ensure content, and no kindliness of the governing power
will divert suspicion. And thus it has come to pass that
the almost symbolic participation in the choice of the
government, which the people of France now enjoy,
stands for an immense majority of them in stead of the
securities for personal liberty and the energies and
interests of parliamentary institutions.

It was the inevitable defect of the very breadth of
Hovexton.} NATIONAL UNITY. 55

our Reform Act of 1832, that it had something of the
character of a Paper Charter. By the number of political
privileges that it abolished, rather than by those it con-
ferred, it wore, in some degree, the aspect of a new
constitution. Although in its deprivations it really did
little more than confirm the historical facts of the decline
and alteration of certain localities, and in its additions but
scantily filled-up the increased proportions of the body-
politic, yet, just demands had been so long delayed, and
manifest decrepitude so long neglected, that the illusory
fears of the aristocratic class, no less than the exaggerated
expectations of many that were benefited, seemed to
assume that something more had taken place than a
natural development of our political liberties. The rights
therefore, that the Act conferred wanted that prescription
which is so agreeable to the English mind, and were
rather an arbitrary settlement than a necessary con-
clusion. On the whole, however, it thoroughly satisfied
the people, and fully represented the active intelligence
of the community, but it said nothing and meant nothing
that established the ten-pounders, or any other electors,
into a permanent class, within whose arbitrament was
for ever to rest the choice of the representatives, and,
therefore, the legislation of the British Empire.

Unlike the “ Pays légal” that provoked the French
Revolution of 1848, our constitutional body of 1832 has
been sufficiently comprehensive of all interests and con-
ditions of society to retain for many years the political
confidence of the inhabitants both of town and country,
and the discontent, which in time arose, had a healthy
and definite origin. The reformed Parliament, indeed, did
not accomplish all that its sanguine founders promised
56 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay ITI.

to themselves or others; but disappointment was not the
soil from which a desire for further change upgrew.
Legislation might be tardy, but it was undoubtedly
beneficent, and when the House of Commons and its
leaders were in earnest, they were sufficiently strong to
bear down all opposition from the House of Lords. One
by one the towers of old intolerance fell to earth ; partial
interests of commerce or of agriculture gave way to the
advantage of the common consumer, and the more direct
incidence of taxation set free the springs of industry.
The occasional accessions of a Tory government seemed
rather to increase than diminish the introduction of
liberal measures, and the reproaches of the most querulous
or most violent were directed rather against laxity
or indifference, than against any presumed injury of
legislation. It would therefore be a narrow observation
that would attribute the revival of the question of the
representation to any especial discontent. The causes
were at once cognate and honourable to the spirit of
our Constitution. The very success of the Reform Bill
depended, not on the subsidence of the thoughts and
desires of the people into submission to a privileged
class, but on the peaceful and simultaneous develop-
ment of the national prosperity, the intellectual educa-
tion and the political sympathy of the nation. With-
out any one of these the future would not be secure.
But if these were obtained, the extension of the suffrage
from time to time would follow, as a natural con-
sequence ; and the only question for statesmanship to
determine would be to make that extension co-equal
with the political capacity and requirements of the
country. Thus, while other peoples place their demand
Hovenroy.] NATIONAL UNITY. 57

for popular intervention in the affairs of the community
on the ground of injuries to be revenged and wrongs
to be redressed, ours stood on the basis of benefits to
be extended and rights to be made use of. A man ask-
ing for the franchise was as far from the mendicant as
from the bandit: he was a recruit asking to serve and
the vote was the arm his country gave him.

If, indeed, the intention of the authors of the Reform
Bill of 1832 had been at variance with those principles ;
if their object had been to place a definite social barrier
between the legislative and the non-legislative portions
of the community, the point at which the line was
drawn was most unfortunate. In a country in which
the workman has, from time immemorial, been as free as
the peer, and in an age in which every day honest and
intelligent labour grows in esteem and respect, nearly
the whole of the persons, working for daily wages in the
infinite variety of trades and occupations throughout the
kingdom, would have been for ever excluded from any
part or interest in the administration of the government,
except by an occasional investment in fixed property,
which a very small portion could conveniently afford.
In a word, Capital stood on one side the line, and Labour
on the other. It was no mitigation of this evil that the
greater portion of these electors differed little, if at all,
from the excluded, except in the fact of the possession of
this small substantive wealth. In education, in manners,
in language, the recipient of wages was undistinguishable
from the smaller householder, and the independence,
variety of experience, and self-control incidental to his
less certain existence, often gave him a decided moral
advantage.
58 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IIT.

Nor were the immediate relations between this
privileged class and the working multitude without,
such as easily to produce a long acquiescence of the
latter in a political condition which made the former
not only their masters in the workshop but their legis-
lators in the senate, The indirect representation which
might be sufficiently real if the interests and wishes of
these bodies were identical, became a mockery when
the working-classes banded themselves together into an
opposing force, and defied their employers to an econo-
mical contest. The organization, which, with its good
of sympathy and its evil of restriction, had characterised
the Guilds of former times, has now passed from the
whole Trade into the working portion of several of them,
acquiring a powerful consistency ; and whereas, formerly,
each commerce looked on the outside consumer as his
enemy, now the master and the public seem combined
against the profits of the artisan. This is not the place to
do more than register the fact, and apply it to the question
of the suffrage. If the object of Parliament is to exclude
every dangerous and disturbing element, and to consult
above all things the peace of its deliberations and the
unity of its action, there is no doubt that the possibility
of an intrusion into its precincts of such a conflict of
principles and interests as exists in the Trades Unions,
would seem an anomaly and a degradation. But if the
idea of the integrity of the representation requires that
the House of Commons should be the centre of all political
life, the sole arena of serious social contest, the mirror of
the public mind, then the circumstance that outside of
its operations, unaffected by its influences of contact and
example, a tumult has been engendered and is increasing
Hoveuton.] NATIONAL UNITY. 59

in the judgments and passions of a large portion of our
fellow-citizens, tending to subvert the sound principles
of commercial freedom, to imperil the harmony of the
daily intercourse of wealth and labour, and to limit even
the individual freedom of Englishmen, is a matter of far
deeper anxiety than even the possibility of imperfect
legislation.

But why is it extravagant to anticipate that the same
salutary influences of intercourse and debate which have
gone so far to reconcile the conflicting interests of agri-
culture and manufacture will act effectively between the
employer and the employed, when, through their repre-
sentatives they stand face to face in the presence of the
common-sense of the House of Commons? It is, indeed,
a happy characteristic of that assembly that it has been
the great conciliator of the Nation. With some rare
exceptions, when religious passions have broken down
all natural obstacles, the usage of our legislature for the
last two hundred years has been one of gradual attri-
tion of the sharp and dangerous angles of a most various
society. To a careful observer there is nothing more
interesting than the growth of moderation and justice
which unconsciously takes place in the minds of violent
or narrow men, after they have taken a parliamentary
position. Nothing short of fanaticism can withstand it ;
and fanaticism soon becomes silent and slinks away.
The superiority of the collective tolerance of Parliament
to the historical prejudices of the country, has been shown
in their treatment of Roman Catholic and Jewish disabi-
lities ; the former, indeed, relaxed too late in many points
for political conciliation, but both abolished in advance
of the sentiments and fears of the mass of the people.
60 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essay ITI.

This admission, indeed, might support the argu-
ment now in vogue, that this and other proofs of the
intellectual or moral superiority of the sense of the pre-
sent House of Commons, in its relation to political
opinion, point out but too surely what will be the effects
in the tone and temper of the House, if that opinion
is more grossly and directly represented, and the in-
fluence of the class, whose daily labour excludes them
in a great degree from reflection and repose, becomes
predominant. There are two modes in which such a
change in the character of the representation might
be effected ; by the personal presence of members of that
class, or by the action of their representatives. With
regard to the first supposition, the apprehension of any
considerable number of Working-men, properly so called,
becoming Members of Parliament, is hardly worth con-
sideration. In the chances of the elections of large con-
stituencies, many opportunities for such a choice have
been already offered, and rarely, if ever, attempted: yet
in the present just complaint of the absence of the repre-
sentation of the thoughts and wishes of the operative
classes, such an endeavour would have been not only
justifiable but praiseworthy. Nor would the difficulty of
providing the proper means of subsistence for such a
delegate have been serious: a worthy gentleman sat for
many years in Parliament as a county-member, under
similar circumstances, being returned and salaried by
the tenant-farmers, and was treated with general respect.
-Any member of this stamp, especially if a man of natural
gifts, would be received with more than welcome, on all
. Subjects on which he had personal knowledge to impart
and personal experience to recount, by an assembly,
Hoveuroy, | NATIONAL UNITY. 61

wearied with doubtful and second-hand information,
and eager, above all things, for reality and facts. The
same reception would not, perhaps, be given to a repre-
sentative who was believed to have taken up popular
politics as a lucrative profession. Such a man will ever
obtain harsh judgment and scant credit from a British
Parliament, and after a few failures the experiment would
probably be abandoned, and the choice of the working-
classes would fall on men of independent position who
really sympathised with their objects and strove after
their welfare. But there is little fear of a deluge even
of philanthropists, for in a short time the specialty of
the representation of the working-class would become as
little acceptable as that of any other exclusive interest.
With all our talk of the separation and isolation of classes
in this country, which is so unintelligible to our brethren
on the other side of the Atlantic, the House of Commons
in its ordinary routine, and in its essential spirit, not
only gives no countenance to such distinctions, but acts
as a positive protest against them. Social superiority,
and even intellectual eminence to which it has not itself
contributed, are regarded rather with suspicion than with
favour, the moment that any design is visible of using
them as a pedestal from which to reach political power.
The watchful ostracisms and jealousies, incidental to a
republican order of things, are there just as dominant
as in old Athens or in present Washington.

But, it is further asserted, the larger introduction of
this popular element into the constituencies will so
debase and coarsen the whole procedure of elections, that
with all good-will on the part of the working-class to be
well represented, the more educated and refined portion
62 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay III.

of our society will be driven out of the political arena
by the very roughness of the contact, and end by be-
coming a separate social sect, like the Legitimists in
France, or the men-of-letters in America. The injury
done to the working of free institutions by the absti-
nence of any considerable body of citizens is certainly not
to be disregarded, and the probabilities of such an issue
must form part of our calculations. In France, indeed,
where a large body of the aristocracy live, so to say, in
a continued position of internal emigration, the nation
has nothing to do but to leave them in the full liberty
of their discontent ; but, in England, though signs have
unfortunately not been wanting of a disinclination on
the part of the representatives of the historic houses and
territorial principalities to live up to the responsibility
of their name and station, yet the aggravation of this
evil by the circumstance of the admission of a larger
body of plain working-men into the constituencies seems
very contestable. The consequent increase of numbers
would hardly have this tendency. The political dealing
with masses of men has about it something in which the
finest and noblest natures have ever found dignity and
delight. The appeal there is to sentiments which the many
feel better than the individual, and to interests higher than
those of any one self among them. There is, no doubt,
both some moral gain and political instruction in the
semi-private relations of any Member of Parliament with
a small constituency, when carried out in a friendly and
honest intention ; but the petty and personal annoyances
that are distasteful to men of leisurely habits and fastidious
tastes, are much more frequent under such circumstances
than in the connexion with a vast electoral body. It
Hoventon.] NATIONAL UNITY. 63

was hardly becoming that Lord Palmerston at his ad-
vanced. age, and in his position as First Minister, should
have been compelled, within a few months of his death,
to undergo all the inconveniences of a personal canvass
of the borough he represented, while it would have
been neither labour nor trouble to him, to have once
or twice addressed such a constituency as that of the
City of London. No one weightier example indeed of
this truth could be afforded than the story of the can-
didature and subsequent career of the shy and reluctant
philosopher, who has been vivified into the most active
political existence by one contact with the mother-earth
of popular sympathy, and who appears to find as much
satisfaction in the ruder exhibitions of public feeling,
as in the solution of the subtlest arguments.’ Those,
therefore, who anticipate any signal difference in the
general character and condition of the Members who
would be elected under a broader system, will in all
probability be as much disappointed as the prophets of
degradation and confusion. No man worthy of the posi-
tion need dread the enlargement of his trust or the
elevation of his duties.

A graver question lies before us in the results of
opinion at which these novel constituencies may arrive,
and which they will require their representatives to
advocate and maintain. Unless, however, our national
disposition undergoes some incredible change, it is dif_-
cult to suppose, under any redisposition of the consti-
tuent body, an exclusive and combined action of the

1 It is notable that the much-abused Metropolitan Constituencies have
never refused any candidate presented to them with claims to distinction in
politics, literature, or the public service, though unaccompanied by wealth
or high social position.
64 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay III.

Working-men of this country, neutralizing wealth,
ignoring intellect, rejecting experience. The very indi-
viduality which makes them aspire to independence, and
fits them for the suffrage, negatives such a supposition.
There may and will be certain storms of popular feeling
that may sweep over separate thoughts and sentiments ;
but the suspicion that the chronic condition of the mind of
the mass of the people should be an agreement of opinion
upon all important matters of foreign and domestic
policy, an agreement arrived at, not by a deference to
those whose opportunities of leisure imply means of
larger information, but by some intuitive process of their
own wills or passions, implies an entire inversion, not
only of English, but of human, nature. In communities
devoid of political education, no doubt, the people are
often unanimous in ignorance and in fear; but, just in
proportion as they have learned to think on such sub-
jects, diversities of thought become inevitable—just in
proportion as they are taught to argue, their inductions
will be various and their conclusions contradictory. The
very principles of emulation, of ambition, of contest, will
of themselves suffice to martial the manual Labour of the
country, quite as much as the Trade or the Capital, into
antagonistic bodies within themselves, and to divert
them, by the wholesome varieties of political action, from
purely sectional ideas and combinations.

That a certain tendency and inclination in what is
commonly called a Democratic sense will indirectly
manifest itself in a Reformed House of Commons, the
friends of Reform neither deny nor disguise. It is ex-
pected, and it is hoped, that there will be an increasing
habit of regarding and conducting measures as they affect
Hoveuron. ] NATIONAL UNITY. 65

the national well-being, rather than as they subserve party
interests or individual ambitions ; that there will be less
of compromise in the enforcement of that kind of legis-
lation which is generally admitted to be right in itself, but
difficult to apply to present circumstances. If you get
rid of the suspicions of partial and undue influences that
still hang about the traditions of a purely aristocratic
government, beneficial interferences and useful discipline
will be submitted to by the masses, which would now
be met with indignation and a spirit of revolt. Obli-
gatory education would be taken from a popular House
of Commons in a very different spirit than would follow
the injunctions of the most kindly patron ; an efficient
Aidile, who would now run the chance of being stoned
by the families he ejected from their pestiferous dens,
may come to be regarded as a social saviour, if he is
invested by the common opinion of the people with the
character of their own chosen magistrate and friend.
The impolitic retention of one unwise condition of the
devolution of landed property stands in the way of the
clear recognition of that perfect liberty of inheritance
which England and the United States alone enjoy.
When this is once removed, as it soon must be, the
question of primogeniture becomes one not of Law, but
of the Custom of the country, amenable to every modi-
fication that public opinion and the sense of right may
introduce, without any violation of the desires, or even
the prejudices, of the owners of property. If, indeed, a
clearer sense of the duties and interests of family life
brings about a modification of the system that educates
the younger children of the upper classes in luxury, and
then consigns them to a comparative poverty, which hardly
FE
66 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay ITI.

gives the men a fair start in life, and condemns a large
portion of the women to discomfort and celibacy, the
aristocracy themselves will be the chief gainers in the
extension of their influence and the happiness of their
homes.

The legislation of the future, indeed, cannot hope to
be infallible, and the exigencies of the hour may distort
political truth or overshade economic science. Free
governments are no safer than servile ones from fallacies
and delusions, and the United States and the Australias
are fascinated by the immediate comforts of the pro-
tective system, as had been the old European States.
The French Treaty was carried by the firmness of the
Emperor, in defiance of the views and wishes of his
people. Evils of this nature are incidental to the frailty
of human nature and the imperfection of human know-
ledge; and if they do mar the excellence of our political
future, we must look for consolation to the reflection
that the introduction of a larger popular element into our
ancient constitution is, after all, not a matter of free
choice, but an alternative. If we refuse this Reform, we
accept the responsibility of governing an unwilling and
reluctant people: if we reject what may be, in some
instances, a representation of defective knowledge and
short-sighted speculation, we must be prepared to en-
counter an organized ignorance from without, and the
boundless Utopia of revolutionary expectations: if we
will not admit the Working-men into the great school of
Public Life, we leave them to the free exercise of their
instincts and their passions: if we will not teach them
political wisdom, they will teach us political disaster.
IV.
THE BALANCE OF CLASSES.
BY ALBERT VENN DICEY.

“Tr is the principle of the English Constitution, that
Parliament should be a mirror,—a representation of every
class ; not according to heads, not according to numbers,
but according to everything which gives weight and
importance in the world without; so that the various
classes of this country may be heard, and their views
expressed fairly in the House of Commons, without the
possibility of any one class outnumbering or reducing
to silence all the other classes in the kingdom.” !

In these words Sir Hugh Cairns sums up that theory
of representation, which makes it the end of Parlia-
ment to be the representative of classes. This view is
entertained by persons who differ in every other poli-
tical opinion. It is the pet theory of so-called philo-
sophic Liberals, and of most intelligent Conservatives.
Nothing indeed can show its prevalence more clearly
than the indignant criticism excited by expressions of Mr.
Gladstone, which seemed, though in all probability untruly,

1 Speech, April, 1866, Hansard, vol. 182, p. 1463,
F 2
63 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

to intimate his adhesion to a totally different doctrine.
For it cannot be concealed that the theory of class represen-
tation is fundamentally opposed to the arguments, which,
till recently, have been employed by all democratic or
radical Reformers. Of such men, Mr. Bright is the most
eminent, as well as the most consistent leader; and the
idea which lies at the bottom of all his theories of
Reform, is, that representation should be primarily a
representation of persons—only in so far as it may be
so accidentally, a representation of classes. It is because
of his entertaining this belief, a belief shared by nearly
all the older Liberal leaders, that he is constantly re-
proached with the crudeness and unphilosophic character
of his policy; and the fact becomes every day more
apparent, that between persons who hold that the object
of Reform is more nearly to represent classes, and those
who cling to the opinion that its main end is gradually
to give the full rights of citizens to all persons, there
can be no ultimate agreement as to the course which
ought to be pursued by Parliamentary Reformers. It is,
therefore, of primary importance for all Liberals to make
up their minds whether Parliament ought or ought not
to aim at being, in the words of Sir Hugh Cairns, “a
mirror of every class ;” or whether it should aim to
represent persons, and leave the representation of classes
to take care of itself.

Before entering upon a discussion of the class theory
of representation, and the arguments by which it is
supported, it is well to clear away some misconceptions
by which that discussion is confused. It is often, for
example, asserted, that the most desirable kind of
Reform is one which should admit the working classes
Dicey.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 69

to a share of influence, without changing the balance
of power. Persons who use this language either do
not understand what their words mean, or mean some-
thing which they do not wish their hearers to under-
stand; for it is of the very essence of all Reform to
change the balance of power. If the working classes
gain influence, some other class must lose it; and if each
class remains with no more political power than before,
then there will have been no real Reform ; and it is not
to be supposed that either working men or any other
class, will be satisfied with a measure, simply because
it is entitled a Reform Bill, and because, while changing
nothing, it professes to change everything. If, on the
other hand, what is intended is, that the alteration to
be desired is one which shall leave the rich as powerful
as now, but effect some new distribution of power be-
tween the 10. householders and the working men, then
the wish expressed for a Bill which does not change the
balance of power, is doubly dishonest ; since it does not
express what it means, and seems to express what it
does not mean. For the desire really felt is not that
political power should remain unchanged, but that,
within certain limits, it should be surreptitiously shifted
in a particular direction.

It is again to be noted, that much which is often and
honestly said about the effects of giving representatives
according to numbers, is, strictly speaking, not argument,
but rhetoric. It is constantly asserted, with more or
less distinctness, that the enfranchisement of the masses
is the disfranchisement of the rich. Such an assertion
is, however, nothing more than a rhetorical mode of
70 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

saying that the influence of the rich will be unduly
diminished by a wide extension of the franchise ; for,
as a matter of fact, no man is disfranchised by the
enfranchisement of another. Take the most extreme
case, and suppose universal suffrage established. In this
case the wealthier classes might indeed be in a minority,
but they would be as far from disfranchisement as any
other equal number of persons in the kingdom. Under
the most unfavourable circumstances they would exer-
cise a controlling influence by supporting that section
of the people to which they were least opposed. But
the influence of a minority is always considerable, and
the influence of a rich minority could never be insig-
nificant. If a proposal were made really to disfranchise
all possessors, say of a thousand a year, rich men would
soon perceive the difference between being disfranchised
and being in a minority. One partner of a numerous
firm never dreams of stating that he has no vote because
he may constantly be outvoted; and expressions which
would be ridiculous applied to the transactions of private
life do not gain additional force or accuracy from being
applied to politics. The real question at issue is not
one of disfranchisement, but of supremacy. Advocates
of class representation desire such a political arrange-
ment as would enable a minority, in virtue of their
education, wealth, &c. to carry out their views, even
though opposed to the sentiments of the majority of the
people. Democrats, on the other hand, desire the gradual
establishment of a constitutional system under which,
in the case of a direct conflict of opinion between a
greater and a smaller number of citizens, the greater
Dicy.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 71

number may be able to carry out their own wishes.
There are arguments to be used in favour of the views
of either party; but the first requisite for weighing
such arguments is to perceive clearly what is the point
at issue. This point undoubtedly is, whether or not the
greater number of the citizens ought to be made ulti-
mately supreme in the affairs of the State.

The theory to which the passage quoted from Sir
Hugh Cairns’ speech gives expression may be summed
up in the following propositions :—

(1) A nation consists of classes.

(2) Each of these may have, or may conceive them-
selves to have, conflicting interests.

(3) It is therefore desirable that each class should be
duly represented.

(4) Since one of these classes greatly exceeds the
others in number, it must not be represented in pro-
portion to its numbers, because, if it were so, this class
would be supreme.

This theory is supported by arguments which assume
very various forms, but which may he reduced to a few
heads.

It is, in the first place, urged that the nation is in
reality an organization, of which classes are the essential
parts; and much ingenuity is shown in the use of
different metaphors, all of which aim at setting forth
the idea that a nation does not primarily consist of the
individuals who make it up. To most minds these
attempts to distinguish between the nation and the
individuals to be found in it, will appear as idle and
unsatisfactory as the Aristotelian discussions about the
natural priority of the individual or the State. And
72 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

without going into political metaphysics, ordinary writers
may be allowed to point out that though individuals
may be considered as members of ditterent classes, it
is as individuals that they either suffer or inflict wrong,
and that their individual interests can by no device
whatever be merged in that of the class to which they
belong. The assertion indeed of a most able writer
that “John Smith gué John Smith cannot be oppressed,
but John Smith gud artisan can,” neatly sums up what
will appear to most persons the exact opposite of the
truth, and affords a species of reductio ad absurdum
of the application of very doubtful metaphysics to the
defence of a doubtful political dogma.

It is not, however, reasoning of a transcendental kind
which has lent a weight to the theory of class repre-
sentation. An argument of real force, urged by some
speculators, is that the introduction into the legislative
body of members belonging to different orders of the
community would tend greatly to improve the character
of the legislature. No candid critic can deny that there
is some truth in this allegation. The remark, however,
may be justly made that representation according to
numbers is not inconsistent with the presence in Par-
liament of men belonging to different pursuits and
professions. The first French Assembly, after the Revo-
lution of 1848, was elected by universal suffrage, yet
amongst its numerous faults this was not one, that it
did not contain members from different sections of the
nation. It must further be noticed that it is not, and
never has been, a primary object of constitutional arrange-
ments to get together the best possible Parliament in point
of intellectual capacity. Indeed, it would be inconsistent
Diczy.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 73

with the idea of a representative government to attempt
to form a Parliament far superior in intelligence to the
mass of the nation. There is no doubt that most country
gentlemen were till recently, if they are not still, grossly
ignorant of political economy, yet no one supposes that
for the purposes of free government it would be desirable
to exclude from Parliament every squire who could not
understand the fallacies of Protection.

A remark of far more importance is, that this argument,
whatever it is worth, points towards the direct repre-
sentation of orders, and means that there ought to be
representatives of, for example, the Church, law, medicine,
the working classes, &c. seated in Parliament; and thus
its value depends upon the answer given to a question
hereafter to be considered, ¢.e. whether or not it be on
the whole desirable that Parliament should consist of
Members for orders. It will, however, be found that the
demand for class representation gains its force almost
exclusively from a single line of reasoning.

It is said that without class representation the interest
of individuals will never be fairly protected. Each
class (and the working classes may be considered in this
respect neither better nor worse than the rest of the
community) will always consider its own interest as
supreme, and therefore if it be sovereign will oppress all
other portions of the community ; hence it is of infinite
importance that no one class should be sovereign. But
representation of numbers would make the working
classes sovereign, and thus, in denying to them repre-
sentation according to numbers, statesmen deny them no
more than is refused to every other class.

This argument admits of profuse and effective illus-
74 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

tration. It is said, for example, that the working men,
being in a majority, might throw all the burden of
taxation on the shoulders of the rich, and expend all
the proceeds of taxation on the enjoyments of the poor,
or might establish laws for the protection of labour as
oppressive as the laws which English gentlemen estab-
lished for the protection of corn.

The weakness of this argument is that the truth which
it contains applies to all governments. The danger
pointed to in the supremacy of numbers is a danger
commen to all supremacy. No distribution of repre-
sentatives, no cunning device of political theorists, can
prevent the existence in every State of some person or
body of persons who can if they choose act contrary to
the interests of the rest of the community.

But if it be alleged that tyranny is specially to be
feared where numbers are supreme, there seems to be
little proof for the allegation. In all countries the
majority must be a fluctuating, unknown, indefinite
body, which has neither the will nor the power to act
with systematic tyranny. In England especially, where
classes are intermingled, and where it is absolutely im-
possible to draw a clearly marked line between the
different divisions of the nation,—where, for instance,
it is hard to say what are the limits of the so-called
middle class,—it is highly improbable that the whole of
the poor (and it is only when acting as a whole that they
could in any case be supreme) would act together as
one man in opposition to the wishes of all those who are
not technically working men.

For the so-called working class is, like all others,
notoriously broken into divisions; for example, of arti-
Dicey.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 79

sans and labourers. The legitimate influence—to use
the words in their true sense—of the rich and the
educated has immense weight with all who depend for
their livelihood on their wages. It is, indeed, a more
reasonable fear that a widely extended suffrage may
unduly increase the influence of landowners and capi-
talists, than that it will lead to the unexampled result
of placing the multitude in permanent supremacy over
the rich. There is, however, no use in blinking the fact
that occasions might arise on which the majority of the
nation might adopt a policy opposed to the judgment of
the minority. But on such occasions, it is as likely as
not that the majority might be in the right. The
American Union was saved because the energy and
decision of artisans and farmers overruled the hesitation
and weakness of the merchants of New York.

But, of course, the majority is no infallible ruler.
The working men of England might easily commit
errors as great—they could not commit greater—as
the mistakes committed by George III. and by Pitt.
If, however, the majority should fall into errors, it may
still be well that the majority should rule. All belief
in free government rests ultimately on the conviction
that a people gains more by the experience, than it
loses by the errors, of liberty, and it is difficult to
perceive why a truth that holds good of individuals
and of nations, should not apply equally to the majority
of the individuals who constitute a nation.

Advocates of class representation have expended im-
mense ingenuity in devising schemes for effecting an
hypothetical balance of power, and the complexity of
these devices has given an appearance of philosophic
76 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

profundity to the theory which makes such devices
necessary ; for it is difficult for any one to believe
that an object which needs thought and ingenuity for
its attainment may, after all, not be worth attaining.
But calm observers, though willing to give all due
weight to the objections which may be urged against
the representation of numbers, may yet be inclined to
suspect that thinkers who advocate the establishment of
a balance of power, entertain views open to greater
difficulties than are the theories which these thinkers
assail. It is, at any rate, worth while to remember that
a scheme may be philosophic, even though it be simple,
and though it command the support of Mr. Bright.

All schemes for effecting a so-called balance of classes
are open to a primary charge of utter impracticability.
Their object is to give “due” weight to each interest,
but no standard exists by which the “due” weight may
be measured. Mr. Disraeli is honestly convinced that
the landed interest has not its due share of power.
Most other persons would think a diminution of the
influence of the country gentlemen essential to the
establishment of a fair constitutional balance; but there
exists no test by which to decide between the correctness
of Mr. Disraeli’s views and the views of his opponents,
unless principles be introduced which are fatal to the
theory of the balance of power. Sir Hugh Cairns,
with his usual acuteness, perceives this difficulty, and
gets over it by the suggestion that each class should
have the power in Parliament which it has in the world
without. Unluckily, the very object of all sincere Re-
formers is to effect a change in the social and other
influences of different portions of society. It is, there-
Dicry.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 77°

fore, idle to hope to satisfy the demand for Reform
by creating a Parliament, the object of which is per-
maneutly to embody distinctions, which Reformers desire
to diminish. !

But even were it possible that persons of opposite
views, such as Mr. Mill and Mr. Disraeli, could be brought
to agree on the exact proportion of influence which
ought to be retained by the landed, commercial, and
working classes, under a future constitutional arrange-
ment, such an agreement would be as worthless as it
would be illusory ; for in politics nothing is more certain
than that it is impossible to predict how political and
social forces will adjust themselves under a new Consti-
tution. In 1832, no prophet could have foretold, as the
result of the Reform Bill, that the practical supremacy
of the middle classes would have been found compatible
with government through the nobility. Had it been
deemed requisite to ascertain beforehand what would be
the exact amount of weight given by the Reform Act to
each section of society, Gatton and Old Sarum might
still be sending up Members to Parliament, whilst Com-

1 Tt is not in truth to be supposed that a skilled lawyer, well accustomed
to practical life, intends deliberately to advocate any elaborate arrangement
for a representation of different classes. He would, doubtless, be content
with the existing state of things. What, however, he must be taken to urge
is, that any change ought to have as its object the giving representation in
accordance with the power of different classes out of Parliament. And the
policy he proposes may be easily shown to be open to the objection that has
been brought against it. The landowners or capitalists, for example, have
immense influence in modern society. Landowners and capitalists ought,
therefore, according to Sir Hugh Cairns, to have an immense share of the
representation. If this share be given them they will indubitably have the
power, which they are likely to use, of hindering changes which might affect
their own weight in society. Hence, deliberately to give to landowners and

capitalists representation according to their influence is to perpetuate and, as
it were, stereotype that influence.
78 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV.

mission after Commission was attempting to obtain
information, which is absolutely essential if it be desirable
to establish an elaborate balance of power, and yet is in
its own nature unattainable.

Theoretical speculators easily perform in imagination
feats which are found impossible by practical politicians,
and various enthusiasts have sketched out, with more or
less ingenuity and inconsistency, what should be the
exact balance of power established in what one of their
number has termed “the Constitution of the Future.”
Whoever wishes to see an excellent specimen of the
speculations of the men who are called “ thinkers,”
should read with care Professor Lorimer’s book, in
which this Constitution of the future is sketched out.
It is instructive, at any rate, to observe that a Professor
and a thinker, quite consistently with his theory, while
giving votes to every man in proportion to his merits,
gives only one vote to a simple citizen and ten votes to
the happy possessor of ten thousand a year, who, indeed,
would, under the Professor’s scheme, as a general rule,
have at least twenty votes.’ This is instructive, because
it points to the conclusion that the principles laid down
by Sir Hugh Cairns almost inevitably tend in practice,
as they do in Professor Lorimer’s theory, to the establish-
ment of a Plutocracy. But even this theory does not
fully exhibit one of the most important features of class
representation.

This feature is the introduction into Parliament of the
representatives of orders. The ablest and most sagacious
of the advocates of class representation distinctly con-
template this result, and, as before pointed out, one of the

Constitution of the Future, p. 174.
Dicey.] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 79

strongest arguments in favour of their theory is the
advantage which it is supposed would accrue to the
country from the presence in the legislature of the
members of different classes or orders. It is indeed
a boast of some able writers that, if they deny to the
working classes representation in proportion to their
numbers, they are willing to ensure the working classes
the possession of a certain body of, say fifty or a hun-
dred, special representatives of the masses. It is in
truth so apparent that any theory of class representation
must ultimately lead to the presence in Parliament of
members specially delegated to represent such different
classes, that it becomes a matter of importance in esti-
mating that theory, to settle whether the presence of
such members would be a national gain or loss. The
presence in Parliament of fifty or a hundred working
men, or at any rate distinct representatives of working
men, would not, it must be owned, in all points of view
be without advantage. But if these men sat as the
special representatives of a class, the advantage which
their presence might confer would be purchased by in-
calculable evils. It may be pointed out in passing, that
representation by orders, after having been tried in all
European countries, has been universally given up, and
this fact of itself suggests that such representation has
peculiar defects ; but the special evil which at the present
moment needs attention is that the proposed represen-
tation of orders threatens to introduce supremacy of
numbers in its worst form. Let there, for example, be
fifty special representatives of working men in Parlia-
ment, and these fifty men will inevitably become, not
members, but tribunes. Elected by a class numerically
80 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IV

the greatest, they will soon claim and exert an authority
beyond that given them by their numbers. On a
question of peace or war, they would have it in their
power to enter, on behalf of the mass of the nation,
protests against the course adopted by the majority
in Parliament, and such protests could not in practice
go unheeded whatever might be the theory of the
Constitution.

In this matter it is unnecessary to appeal to @ priort
reasoning. Irish and Scotch Members are from the
necessity of the case representatives of a class, and do
therefore exert a force out of all proportion to their
numbers. Few governments would dare to legislate
for Scotland or Ireland in the face of the united opposi-
tion of the Scotch or Irish Members. Any one who is
unwilling to see the working classes legislate for the
majority of the nation, as the Scotch Members legislate
for Scotland, will prefer the direct supremacy of numbers
to the indirect supremacy of a tribunate.

For class representatives have an inherent defect
beyond that of exerting undue influence. From their
very position they at once display and intensify class
feeling. What the leaders of Convocation are to the
body of the clergy, that the specially elected leaders
of the working men would be to the artisans. They
would be the most fanatical, the most narrow of their class.
Our county representatives, again, are a near approach to
the representatives of a class; and the country gentle-
men all but hooted down Mr. Mill because he tried to
make them understand that a sick cow ought not to
be valued at the price of a healthy animal. America
itself is a standing warning, not against the supremacy
Dicey. ] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 8]

of numbers, but against artificial schemes for insuring
a definite amount of power to certain classes, since the
whole theory of State Rights is nothing but a theory
of class rights carried out on a larger scale; and this
theory till recently obtained such weight throughout
America that most politicians were ready to attribute
a sort of sacredness to the rights of States, just as
enthusiasts for a balance of power are ready to see
something sacred in the name of a class. For it is
necessary to point out that, after all, there is nothing
specially to be reverenced in orders or interests. Half
the evils of modern England arise from the undue
prominence of class distinctions, and the fundamental
fault of class representation is its tendency to intensify
differences which it is an object of political Reform tu
remove.

In criticizing a theory of class representation, the
words “classes,” ‘ orders,” or “ interests,’ must be
constantly employed. The very employment, however,
of these expressions gives an undue advantage to the
view criticized. For it is, after all, to be suspected that
the very basis on which this view rests is not firm
enough to support the conclusions grounded upon it.
This basis is the assumption that English society can
be, for practical purposes, divided into classes or orders.
Classes no doubt exist, but they are not of the distinct,
clearly-marked, homogeneous kind which the class theory
of representation requires. In a society such as that
of the Middle Ages, where marked orders existed, re-
presentation by orders, with all its disadvantages, arose,
as it were naturally, from the surrounding condition of
civilization. In a society like that of modern England

G
82 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay. IV.

it is difficult to find the orders on which laboriously to
build a scheme of class representation. Take, for ex-
ample, a class frequently mentioned in political dis-
cussions, that of the 10/. householders. What, after
all, is the real community of view or interest, which
binds the members of the class together? They are
of different politics; they pursue different professions ;
they belong, in many cases, to different religious bodies.
Looked at in one point of view, they may be called a
class ; looked at in another, they are a disconnected
mass of different small classes. Take, again, any class
of Englishmen, from the highest to the lowest, and it
will be found to mix, by imperceptible degrees, with
the class below it. Who can say where the upper class
ends, or where the middle class begins? Who, again,
can draw a line which shall accurately divide working
men from small tradesmen? Yet if there exist a class
or order, it is the class of workmen. To those who sce
this class from without, and from a distance, it appears,
no doubt, much more of a class or order than it really
is; because its subdivisions escape notice. That these
exist is granted even by Conservative speakers, who,
hke Sir Hugh Cairns, injure the force of their argu-
ments by indulging in boasts of the Conservatism to be
found amongst artisans. But let it be fairly granted
that there is more class feeling among workmen than
amongst the rest of the community. The reason is not
far.to seek, Treated as a class, they have fallen back
upon their class feeling, and have devoted their energies
to class interests. If it had not been for the Reform
of 1832, the middle classes would form as distinct a
body as the working men, A free extension of the
Dicer. ] THE BALANCE OF CLASSES. 83

franchise in 1867 will, in thirty years, make the artisans
as little distinguishable from the rest of the nation as
are the men whose fathers in 1832 almost overthrew
the Constitution from which they were excluded.

Much indeed has been said and written by Professors
and theorists as to the unphilosophic character of the
Democratic view of Reform. This view is, however,
as a fact, held by men who, whether they think rightly
or wrongly, have as much right to the much abused
name of “ thinkers” as their opponents. The so-called
unphilosophic and vulgar Radicalism, with which poli-
ticians are taunted, who desire, slowly but ultimately,
to make the majority of the nation arbiter of the nation’s
destiny, rests upon two principles: the first, that on
the whole each man is the best manager of his own
affairs; the second, that citizens ought to be looked
upon, primarily, as persons, secondarily only, as members
of classes. Those who take this view need not be blind
to the advantages which may be gained by the free
representation in Parliament of different portions of
society. But they hold that, as a matter of fact, such
representation of classes as is desirable has been obtained
by gradually extending the suffrage to those personally
fitted for its exercise, without measuring beforehand
what might be the exact influence of such extension on
the balance of power. It is, moreover, in the opinion of
such radical Reformers, worth incurring some risk, to
bring the mass of the nation within the bounds of the
Constitution. The widest franchise any government is
likely to propose, would, after all, stop far short of
universal suffrage. The question, after all, therefore
is, whether the risk (if risk it be) be not worth running.

G2
84 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essa¥ IV.

The theory of class representation rests, indeed, on the
assumption that theorists can sketch out the future
of the nation; but this is an assumption which history
and experience emphatically contradict. It rests on
the further assumption, that national progress is best
attained by ingeniously balancing class against class,
and selfish interest against selfish interest. This as-
sumption is, indeed, expressed by Sir Hugh Cairns, in
a form which, from its very vagueness, commands
general assent. Most persons are captivated by the
idea of Parliament being a mirror of the nation; but
a speaker's meaning must be gathered as much at least
from the circumstances under which he speaks, as from
his mere words. The true interpretation of Sir Hugh
Cairns’ sentiments is to be found in the fact, that his
speech was made in opposition to a proposal, not for
universal suffrage, but for a very moderate extension
of the franchise, and that his political friends have
averred, that if Parliament is to be a perfect “ mirror,”
it should represent, at least as fully as at present, the
important class of landowners.
¥,

ON THE CHOICE OF REPRESENTATIVES BY
POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES.

BY LESLIE STEPHEN.

Amonest the popular objections to Democracy, there
are few more telling than its supposed tendency towards
a deterioration of public men. The argument is one
to which no candid observer will deny a certain weight,
but it is also one of which the weight is apt to be over-
estimated. It is a prevailing error to judge of nations
as we judge of people, by their manners. Many esti-
mable persons, we know, condemned the Americans as a
nation, because Members of Congress occasionally wore
dress coats by daylight and chewed tobacco: which
involves two or three errors of assumption; as that a
man who chews tobacco cannot possibly be a honour-
able and intelligent person; that the inferiority of the
Members of Congress to the English Parliament implied
that the rest of the nation was in the same degree
inferior to the rest of ours; and that a legislature is to
be judged rather by its manners than by the work
which it substantially turns out. Of course, there are
86 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

far more serious objections than these to be raised to
the American legislature; and the sentiments of the
kid-glove school of politicians are not to be taken as
the fair expression of English opinion. Still, it is a fact
that such vague prejudices floating in the ordinary
English mind, unduly discoloured our views upon Ame-
rican politics. Their prevalence makes one or two remarks
necessary, in order not to evade the argument, but to
strip it of undue exaggerations. And, first, I may recall
the very obvious consideration that the difference between
a legislature of gentlemen and one not of gentlemen,
may sometimes be rather a difference of form than of
substance. There is such a thing as bullying in refined
language, and telling lies, or receiving bribes, in accord-
ance with all the usages of society. English statesmen
have sometimes, it is said, blustered and browbeaten
weak countries and afterwards truckled to powerful
countries; if, in doing this, they have always used the
language of gentlemen, that is a good thing so far as it
goes, as doubtless of the two, it is better to have your
nose pulled gracefully than awkwardly ; but, for all that,
the important fact is that your nose has been pulled.
Corruption, again, is not entirely confined to the gross
form of receiving a bagful of sovereigns; the ingenious
practice to which Americans have given the expres-
sive term of “ log-rolling” may be carried on under a
different name and in modes less openly repulsive.
Somehow or other, a powerful pecuniary interest at-
tacked in the House of Commons has contrivances for
exercising an impalpable influence, whose delicacy would
be scandalously ignored were they to be described as bri-
bery. Our statesmen are above all suspicion of personal
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 87

corruption, and it is a fact of the highest value; but if
we spend immense sums on certain departments without
any corresponding effect, it is not uncharitable to suppose
that some one is the better for it. In short, corruption
is a disease of the Constitution, of which it is far less
easy to effect a radical cure than to change the symptoms.
An enlightened view of foreign politics, and a superiority
to narrow personal interests, is supposed to be charac-
teristic of educated gentlemen ; yet it would be hard to
say that the majority of English landholders have not
attended pretty fairly to their interests as a class, or that
they have not, on the whole, been distinctly opposed to
all the great causes which have lately attracted the
sympathy of European intelligence. The true reason
doubtless is that they sincerely believed the British con-
stitution to be the pattern to which all the world should
conform — and themselves to be the bulwark of the
British Constitution. These propositions may, or may
not, be true, but they fall in most felicitously with the
instinctive prejudices of a class.

It is necessary, then, to find some higher criterion of
the merit of a legislature than merely the average social
position of its members, or even their claims to be
gentlemen in the higher sense of the word. The ostra-
cism of the most intelligent classes, of which we have
heard so much, is unmistakeably a great evil; but, ad-
mitting this fully, and even admitting, for the sake of
argument, that it is a natural incident of Democracy,
we might still urge that it is not the worst of evils ; it
might be more disastrous that the intelligent classes
should predominate, and should use their power in their
own interest, causing corruption to take more refined,
88 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

but not less demoralizing, methods. The ultimate test
must be that upon which Mr. Lowe insisted so power-
fully ; we must judge a legislature as we Judge an artist,
by the quality of his work ; not by asking whether he
works in his court suit and rufHes, or in his shirt-sleeves
and with a pipe in his mouth. Other essays in this
volume deal with various arguments tending to prove
that the work done by a reformed Parliament will, on
the whole, be improved. The purpose of the present
paper is to consider what kind of alteration is likely to
take place in the tools by which the work is executed :
but we must remember that even if the tools were in
every respect inferior, they might still be employed to
more purpose ; and that we must estimate the anticipated
change by its probable bearing upon the efficiency of the
legislative machinery, and by no other standard. To the
common cry, “ Let us be governed by gentlemen ”—we
can only answer, “ By all means, if they will govern well.”
Even if they do not, we will fairly consider what price
it is really worth while to pay, in bad administration and
partial law, for the comfort of knowing .that our rulers
are “all honourable men.” But Parliament is, after all,
a place for transacting certain important national business,
and not a school of deportment, or a society for the
practice of rhetorical decorum. It would, therefore, not
be a conclusive answer to demands for Parliamentary
Reform, if it could be shown that Members of Parlia-
ment would, in the supposed case, be drawn from a lower
class, or even be men of inferior education and a lower
sense of personal honour. ‘The assumption that this
result will follow, supplies an admirable occasion for
taunts, especially to those who consider good taste to be
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 89

a safe guide in politics; but even were the assumption
accurate, the most important question would still remain
for decision. A rogue sometimes does better under the
master’s eye than an honest man unwatched; the un-
represented class might, with good reason, prefer inferior
members, over whom they could exercise an influence,
to the most exemplary of mankind entirely free from
such responsibility.

Thus much may be said in order to guard against
the exaggerated inferences sometimes drawn. But I
have no desire to evade the assertion that the character
of our legislators is of very high, although not the
highest, importance. The quantity of corruption and
jobbery which may be generated in high places, by
a dishonest body of representatives, is perhaps the
least important consideration. If there is an effective
control by public opinion, the work of the country is
somehow done, and the corruption produces an effect
of a secondary order; a great many pickings may be
gained by private individuals without any vital injury
to the public service. English public men have as high
a character as any in the world; but the English admi-
nistration is generally supposed to be as much hampered
by the spirit of routine and red tape as others by illicit
influences. The American Government is held up to
us as a type of Democratic degeneracy ; and the English
newspapers exhausted their vituperative resources in
denouncing its malpractices during the war. Yet, some-
how, ships, and guns, and men were obtained in spite
of incessant demonstrations of the utter impossibility
of the feat ; and their efficiency was kept up, at least as
well as our spotless administration could have done the
90 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essay V.

business. Corruption is a great evil; but, judged by
its apparent results in civilized countries, it is only in
very extreme cases, that it becomes so virulent as to be
a dangerous and not merely an annoying and offensive
disease. The most serious injury that would result
from a falling off in the character of our legislators
seems to be of a less tangible kind. The English Par-
liament is, in a degree quite unparalleled, the centre of
all the political discussion of the country. It is, there-
fore, exceedingly desirable that the discussion should
be of as high a tone as possible—that the orators should
really appeal to motives worthy of statesmen, and that
their characters should be so pure as to place their
sincerity above doubt. The good done by such speeches
as those of Mr. Lowe or Mr. Mill upon the Reform Bill
is not to be easily exaggerated; for they remove the
discussion from mere technical trivialities to the broad
grounds upon which alone it can be fairly decided ;
and the high personal character of many of our states-
men, which carries so much weight in the House, is of
real importance to the country at large, as showing that
political contests may be something better than a mere
struggle for office. In this sense, it is true that the health
of the political atmosphere depends, to no small degree,
upon the soundness of the representative body; if
politics are to be degraded into a selfish scramble,
dictated by personal interests, the degradation would
probably first show itself in the comparative rarity of
men of high principle in the House of Commons; if,
by the proposed change, additional obstacles were to
be thrown in the way of such men, it might fairly be
urged that we should be converting the chief body of
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 91

our political system into a centre of corruption; and
the whole system might be affected by the contagion.
I need only remark in passing, that even here there
is the counter-consideration that it is easy to exaggerate
even this effect. This reflex action of the House upon
the country has its limits. The sound moral condition
of the country depends upon far wider causes than
the mode in which the franchise is distributed ; and
will ultimately determine the status of parliamentary
morality, rather than be determined by it.

Finally, it is important that Members of Parliament |
should be drawn from our most highly-educated classes,
because it is only amongst them that we can count upon
finding statesmen of the highest order. It is impossible
to argue here as to the degree in which any individual
influence can affect national destinies; but every one
will admit that it is highly desirable that our statesmen
should be men of trained intellect, conversant, if possible,
with some branches of public business, able to distin-
guish the true course of the deeper currents of affairs,
and familiar with such thought as at present passes for
political science—until that science is created. We need
not look far for examples of the importance of this con-
sideration. The heads of our departments have been
too often young gentlemen, appointed apparently on
the theory that the art of legislating comes by nature,
especially to the sons of the great aristocratic houses.
It was a noble position for Pitt to be Chancellor of the
Exchequer at twenty-three; but, possibly, he might
have been a better financier if he had had a few more
years of study. In order frequently to obtain national
leaders of the highest order (and without subscribing
92 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

to Mr. Carlyle’s theories, I believe that such a leader
is a national blessing), we must insure a supply of men
qualified, not merely by intuition, but by careful political
study. 7
Having attempted thus shortly to estimate the im-
portance of the argument, let us endeavour to judge of
the light thrown upon it by experience. And here we
are met at once by the difficulty inherent in historical
parallels. The argument from a nation of one race, con-
stitution, and stage of civilization to another in which
all the circumstances are altered, is seldom sound: it
would frequently be fairer to invert the inference. What
has proved suitable to one cannot suit the other. A
constitution, said Hamilton, should fit a nation as shoes
fit the feet, and the fact that shoes fit A is a good
reason why they should not fit B. Thus the ordinary
course of declamation in this matter is to take the case
of America and the great English colonies, and to point
to the alleged deterioration in their politics. Before we
can admit that such deterioration, even if it exists, is
likely to produce the same effects with us, we must
inquire shortly into the main conditions under which it
has taken place. America has been constantly and
triumphantly cited to point this as well as a good many
other morals. American statesmen, it has been said,
have steadily fallen off. The statesmen of the Revolution,
and some of those who immediately succeeded them, rose
to the European level. Their successors have displayed
inferior education and ability; the men of eminence
have been gradually alienated by the growing corruption
of politics ; the game has been played so recklessly, and
resort has been had to such objectionable weapons, that
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 93

refined and delicate minds have been frightened away.
The business of the country has been left to those who
were not above joining in the dirtiest intrigues, or
pandering to the lowest popular prejudices. It was said
the other day that a wide extension of our own franchise
would throw our constituencies into the hands of mil-
lionaires and demagogues—of those who would buy the
votes of the mob, or induce them to take flattery in
place of cash. The same two idols, money and the mob,
are asserted to be already supreme in Washington : the
action of Congress is determined by those forces which
have produced the national terms of Log-rolling and
Buncombe; the natural consequence of which is the
lowering of the character of American statesmen, if it is
not rather the correlative result of the same causes.
Gentlemen cannot join in a scramble for place and
money, where the highest prizes are won by those who
are least afraid of dirt.

It is impossible without a close familiarity with
American politics to speak to much purpose of the
degree in which these assertions are well founded ; but
two or three remarks may be made. In the first place,
the degradation since revolutionary days, as measured
by the character of the most prominent men, seems to
be exaggerated by a simple cause. A man raised upon
the wave of a great political convulsion is easily taken
for a great man; Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and
Adams are surrounded by the halo of the most cherished
national glory, and their character has been estimated
accordingly. To any one who will study their works
it will appear that the two first were the only men
who can claim the praise of any original intellectual
94 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

force ; Jefferson was little more than a clever retailer
of epigrams of the French revolutionary school, whose
political career simply consisted in drifting feebly with
his party ; and Hamilton was a very energetic man of
business with a curious incapacity for seeing beyond the
British Constitution. To accept them as in any sense
great statesmen, seems to me to be a mere concession to
the requirements of national vanity. I think that any
one who will study the career of the succeeding genera-
tions,—of General Jackson, or of any of the great trio,
Clay, Calhoun, and Webster,—will come to the same
conclusion as regards them. Webster was the only one
of the four named who possessed the cultivated mental
power which we associate with real statesmanship.
Jackson was a rough backwoodsman, who could not
spell, and it is singularly disappointing to study the
lives or writings of any of the others in the hope of
finding any rich stores of political thought, or any deep-
sighted schemes of policy. They represented certain
theories which are still dear to their countrymen ; but
on comparing them with European statesmen of any
eminence, we cannot but be struck with the thinness of
their speculations, and the corresponding limitation of
their spheres of action. The supposed eminence of these
statesmen has probably given an undue impression of
their subsequent decline; I have dwelt upon it, how-
ever, not in order to contest the fact of such a decline
amongst the rank and file, as well as amongst the
leaders, but because the character of these statesmen
suggests certain important considerations as to the
peculiarities of American politics.

Two of these are very evident. It is useless to com-
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 95

plain of the inferiority of American statesmen unless it
appears that better material is passed over. Now, with
all its excellences, American society has a character-
istic defect, which is as evident in other directions as
in politics; it has not hitherto produced poets, or
philosophers, or artists, any more than great statesmen
up to the European level. This is put down by some
people to the universal scapegoat “Democracy :” to me
it seems to admit of a much simpler explanation with
a less philosophical sound; it is due to the aggregate
of causes which we mention when we call America a
“young country ;” that is, the temptations to a practical
life are so overwhelmingly great, as directly to dis-
courage any thorough intellectual training. A similar
peculiarity of England as compared with Germany, pre-
vents our competing with any success in their national
speciality of Professors, Every ambitious young English-
man takes to the bar or politics, or some active life, and
thus precisely the men most capable of distinction are
generally draughted off elsewhere. In England, however,
the competition is severe enough in every walk of life to
make some thorough training necessary. In America,
it is still possible to win some success with such facility,
that high training, like high farming, is there thrown
away. As the American farmer, with abundance of
fertile land, only scratches his ground, so the student
is content with a superficial culture of his mind. The
exceptions have not as yet been sufficiently numerous,
to form the nucleus of a really cultivated class, or to
raise the general standard. It is from this cause I think
that, whether we study American society, or books, or
history, we are struck with the same phenomenon—the
96 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

immense number of minds which rise to great practical
acuteness and facility, compared with the very small
number who rise to real originality and thorough culti-
vation. I do not doubt that this will alter as society
comes to a state of equilibrium, but, whilst it lasts, there
is one excellent reason for the paucity of highly cul-
tivated statesmen in Congress—namely, that there are
none in the country; the class from which they should
be drawn does not exist.

In the next place, a similar influence is exercised by
certain peculiarities of the American Constitution. If the
best and ablest men of America abstain from politics, it
is not merely because the political life has become arti-
ficially degraded, but because till the present time it has
been intrinsically of less importance as compared with
private life than it is in England. Congress is generally
compared with Parliament ; but the analogy is strikingly
imperfect. An Englishman meets Parliament, so to speak,
at every turn: if he wants to make a railroad or a drain,
or to bring about any ecclesiastical, or social, or legal
change, he must at some point apply to Parliament.
Every kind of agitation ultimately depends upon its
reception in Parliament, and all public discussion radiates
from parliamentary debates. If we were to strip Par-
liament of nearly the whole of its private business, to
take from it all action upon the Church, or education, or
social matters, all right to reform the great body of the
laws, and to submit to it only a small part of our system
of taxation, we should considerably diminish the direct
inducements of our ablest men to enter it. Yet we
should only be reducing it to the normal position of Con-
gress. But, besides all this, the American Congress is
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 97

unable to offer another characteristic attraction of its
English model. Although the war has at length decided
that the United States form one nation, no Constitutional
compact could fuse into one what was substantially an
ageregate of independent States. Congress has till now
partaken as much of the character of a diplomatic Con-
gress as of a Parliament; it has resembled a meeting of
delegates from independent nations as much as a supreme
legislature. This fact, and the consequent limitation of
its debates to certain specified subjects,—tariffs, banks,
and admissions of new States, have necessarily deprived
its debates of any special interest. They are scarcely
reported in the newspapers, and have incomparably less
weight upon public opinion than those in our English
Houses. But the result of all this is obviously to diminish
enormously the attraction offered to personal ambition.
To be sent as the delegate of a State to vote upon the
two or three points which Congress really has to decide,
and to make speeches which will be scarcely read in
the country at large, is evidently to fill an office with
very few attractions for political ambition, compared to
that of an English Member of Parliament with his innu-
merable opportunities for action, and for acquiring a
reputation. Without enlarging upon this, which seems
to be too often forgotten, I will only add that the cha-
racteristic abandonment in America to private energy of
matters which elsewhere are settled by the State, tells
with great force in the same direction. For example, the
one fact of the absence of a State-Church and of all the
politico-ecclesiastical quarrels due to the existence of such
a body, removes a whole series of most interesting ques-
tions out of the category of public affairs. Hence the
H
98 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

intrinsic inducements to a public life in America seem
to be comparatively so small—and were so much smaller
until the war brought up more interesting subjects—as
alone to explain why the most educated classes should
care little about entering the struggle. They have little
to gain, and much to encounter. A man may fairly say
that he can do more good as a private citizen by encou-
raging education and the various institutes due to public
spirit in America, than by intriguing to be sent as a dele-
gate to spend months in settling a tariff at Washington.
And, finally, America is a country in which, owing to
obvious circumstances, so little government of any kind
is required, that the profession of governing sinks into a
subordinate position.

These reasons, as I conceive, go some way to explain
the absence of really eminent men from the arena. of
American politics, so far as that absence is a fact. But
they do not explain the progressive deterioration which
has been asserted to take place. Of the extent to which
that deterioration is a fact, I need not speak ; I will
assume it to be true that politics have become so far
degraded that the practical administration of measures
has been handed over to a distinctly lower class than
that to which it formerly fell. In spite of any growth
of corruption amongst the ministers of the sovereign
people, the policy of that people is as much affected by
really high principle and conscientious motives as that of
any nation whatever ; and the policy is ultimately carried
out; but it no doubt suffers by the inferiority of the
instruments which give it effect. Now I think that no
one can fail to admit that the cause generally assigned
for their inferiority is a true cause as far as it goes; I
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES, 99

believe it to be also adequate. The whole social body of
the United States is to that of European countries almost
as an expanding vapour to a fluid in equilibrium ; all its
particles are in a state of rapid motion and change, they
are acted upon by intense and varying forces, and con-
sequently assuming new shapes and relations with a
rapidity to which we have no parallel. The constant
expansion from within of native American society would
produce sufficient instability ; but we are also incessantly
pouring in from Europe the overflowings of ignorance
and pauperism. Into the boiling caldron in which all
the social elements are working and seething, we turn a
steady stream of Irishmen and Germans to disturb the
balance of forces still more effectually. Of the effect
which the Irish vote produces in itself, it is needless
to speak, for it is only tov obvious and too thoroughly
known. The utter corruption of the local politics of
New York, which has been brought forward as an argu-
ment against Democracy, is one of the most striking
instances of the evil. To argue that, because the worst
part of an emigration chiefly formed of ignorant peasants
utterly unaccustomed to any form of self-government,
which gravitates to the lowest purlieus of a huge city,
is an admirable hotbed for corruption, therefore all popular
government is corrupt, is manifestly absurd. It would at
least generally be fair to set against it the admirable social
results in the self-educating country districts of New
England, or the energy and intelligence which have raised
Chicago. But the presence of such a corrupt element,
which has to be appeased and attracted, is fully sufficient
to account for the degradation of the politicians by whom
it is “ exploited.” Those who look to results and not to
H2
100 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

abstract “rights of man,” and admit that a constitution
has to be fitted to the people concerned, will not draw
from the comparative failure of universal suffrage applied
to an ignorant mob, any conclusive argument against the
success of a wide franchise under different conditions.
There is, however, another inference to be marked.
The Irish vote is not the only result of the political con-
ditions of the United States. The unstable foundation
upon which the political superstructure is raised, would
make itself felt under any circumstances. In any con-
stitutional country that part of the political machinery
which is defined by law is only a part, sometimes
the least important part, of the whole. The Caucuses
and Conventions of American politics, unknown to the
Constitution, are amongst the most striking peculiarities
of the system. The function which they discharge in
America, has to be discharged in England under quite
different conditions. In England there is little need of
a caucus either in the great party struggles of the nation,
or in the miniature struggles which take place in every
town and county. One reason is obvious. The great
English parties have certain recognised leaders to whose
judgment they allow a very large discretion, and the same
is generally the case in the fractions of parties which
fight similar battles in miniature in every constituency.
This is not due simply to the fact that leaders of parties
are regarded with less jealousy and more generous confi-
dence. We often trust them as little as possible; but,
unluckily, we cannot do without them. They have a
substantial power which we must recognise, however
little we may consider them to deserve it. That power
does not depend simply upon the possession of great
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 101

estates or great riches: it depends upon the instinctive
respect which long habits of party discipline have made
hereditary and inevitable. In every little constituency
there is some one who is supposed to exercise a mys-
terious power called “influence.” No one knows exactly
what he could do if he were disposed, or how many voters
he could coerce ; but by tacit consent he has a position
accorded to him which is probably out of all proportion
to his real power. The same principle holds good even
of the largest national parties ; there is a disposition to
follow the leadership of men belonging to certain families,
or placed in certain positions, in which none but the
irreverent dare to ignore a providential arrangement.
Now the discipline dependent upon tradition and custom
requires generations for its growth, and generations of
quiet and continuous development. A rude alteration in
the conditions of society, the importation into a country
town of a new class of labourers who “ know not Joseph,”
or the advent of a new class into political life, may break
it up altogether. In a country like the United States
these unrecognised and secret bonds are unknown, or are
constantly in danger of being snapped ; they may exist
in the more stable rural districts ; but in the large towns
which yesterday were a prairie, where streets spring up
as rapidly as houses in London, where instead of privi-
leges of medizeval antiquity there are bran new Consti-
tutions every other year, it is impossible that they should
exist. The system of Caucuses is the necessary sub-
stitute—for good or for evil—to enable political affairs
to be carried on. Where there is no natural political
hierarchy in which every one instinctively finds his place,
some artificial substitute must be devised. Of some of
i02 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

the bearings of this principle I will speak directly. Mean-
while it is evident how much advantage it gives to the
professional politician accustomed to rapid and shifting
intrigues, over the men who, in the case of stable social
equilibrium, would be selected as leaders by the sponta-
neous respect of their fellow-townsmen. This pheno-
menon is owing, not to the democratic Constitution of
the United States, but far more to its exceptional position
of political instability.

As an illustration of the magnitude of this influence,
let us consider this fact. The old States of the Union
are the only ones in which anything like a settled social
equilibrium has been attained. The great Western States
have grown up entirely within a lifetime, and the popu-
lation of such States as New York or Pennsylvania is in
large part composed of equally new material. It is only
in such States as some of the New England and of the
old Slave States, where the native-born population is in
‘a large majority, that we can find anything approaching
to the normal condition of things. Now, if we take the
composition of the House of Representatives, founded
upon the Census of 1860, we find that the Western
States (which seventy years earlier had no members) chose
114 out of 233 members, the New England and the old
Slave States had respectively only 25 and 35 votes, and
the Middle States 59. This gives some idea of the extent
to which the society was in what we may call the colonial
instead of the settled condition. As emigration had
for many years previous to the Declaration of Inde-
pendence been merely nominal, it is easy to estimate the
marvellous change in the political conditions of the
country. The strange thing really is, not that states-
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 103

manship had deteriorated, but that a population made
up of such new and slightly coherent materials, should
show such extraordinary powers of self-government. It
is not the falling off in the standard, but its partial
maintenance which requires explanation. I may remark
too, that as members of Congress have to be citizens of
the States which they represent, the inhabitants of the
newer States are compelled to elect men of such refine-
ment as they can find among themselves. They could
not, if they would, avoid choosing railsplitters to repre-
sent them occasionally—sometimes to tolerably good
purpose. When people complain of the falling off in the
polish of American statesmen, they should remember the
utter inversion of the conditions under which they are
chosen, and I think that they will find their wonder
inverted as well.

It would seem, then, that the comparatively low stan-
dard of the political leaders in America depends upon
many causes, some of which at least are totally inappli-
cable to England. Thus the actual insignificance in num-
bers of any highly educated class, the intrinsically small
importance of political as compared with private life,
the shifting and unstable condition of society, the con-
stant influx of a poor foreign population, and the conse-
quent absence of the system of hereditary party discipline,
are all of them most important causes, and all of them
peculiar to America as distinguished from England. Let
us endeavour to estimate the difference in political
results which this very great difference in social forces is
likely to make in the two countries.

In the first place, then, the essential inducements to
adopt a political life are likely to remain as great in
104 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

England as they ever have been, if not to increase,
whatever may be the changes in the franchise. Pazlia-
mentary power is now so all-pervading, it reaches every
man in so many different relations of life, and it daily
grows so much in importance, that it is not likely to
lose its charms for our ablest men. For good or for
evil, the process of centralization will certainly continue,
and more and more powers will be daily absorbed by
the central organ of our political life. Landowners and
capitalists cannot, on their own showing, afford to give
up their share of power without a struggle. The attrac-
tions to those who have at heart the political or social
Reforms which most affect the country, will certainly
not diminish. The only charm of a parliamentary life
which is likely to decay is that of the social position
of the members. A great infusion of the popular ele-
ment might certainly tend to diminish this inducement.
But even this charm depends chiefly upon the extent
to which the upper classes can retain their power, and
the whole question therefore resolves itself into this,
whether these classes will in fact be unable to obtain
a share of power so necessary to them in so many re-
spects; for it can hardly be doubted that they will be
desirous to do so. Let us first argue the question on
the assumption—of which I will afterwards consider
the accuracy—that they will not be obliged to adopt
such a test of political faith as will practically exclude
them ; or, in other words, on the assumption that the
proposed Reform will be such as to admit a tolerably
fair representation of all shades of political opinion.

The decision of this question is, I think, much
acilitated by a comparison of England with America.
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTIIUVEN CIES. 105

The political power of the English upper classes, like all
political power, depends upon two causes—upon the
pitvileges expressly conferred upon them by statute, and
upon the moral influence which, in one way or another,
they exert over their countrymen. It is too common to
argue as though constitutional arrangements created,
instead of giving effect to, the existing social forces, and
that argument involves a fallacy which constantly vitiates
the most showy political aphorisms. Thus, any large
Reform would materially diminish the power exerted by
means of nomination boroughs. The disfranchisement
of Calne would destroy part of the influence exercised
by one great family, that part which is overt and recog-
nised by the Constitution, and would deprive Mr. Lowe
of an easy means of obtaining an entrance into the
House of Commons—a circumstance which all parties
should sincerely regret. Still, a man of Mr. Lowe’s
talents would be very apt to find some other means for
gratifying an honest ambition. The advantages of small
boroughs have been set forth as eloquently as the advan-
tages of every anomaly which has become an integral
part of a system, and therefore been made of some use.
If every man had one leg six inches shorter than the
other, we should find it convenient for walking in certain
positions, and argue against an equalization in compli-
ance with a theoretical symmetry. Small boroughs have
doubtless been occasionally the means of introducing
men of talent—as have large boroughs; but we must
remember two things :—First, that men of talent have
a tendency to occupy the most comfortable berths, and
there are undeniable comforts in small boroughs ; but it
does not follow that if this particular avenue to success
106 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

had been closed, they would not have found others.
Secondly, we must take the system as a whole, and
must deduct from the advantages of introducing able
members, the disadvantage of introducing them in a
dependent position. If it was a gain to the country
that such a man as Burke could be brought into Par-
liament without an expensive contest, it was part of
that system which made it impossible for the most
profound political thinker to occupy more than a sub-
ordinate position in the Cabinet, as a dependant of the
great Whig families; the remnants of which are still
one obstacle to placing the most distinguished of our
present leaders in the position to which his hold upon
the country entitles him. The influence given by the
possession of small boroughs was, of course, chiefly used
for the benefit of the possessors; if it incidentally pro-
duced an occasional set-off to the abuses, the result can
only be considered as a very secondary and unimportant
consequence,

The main influence, however, of the upper classes
undoubtedly depends upon what may be called the
occult and unacknowledged forces which are not depen-
dent upon any legislative machinery. England is still an
aristocratic country ; not because the nobility have cer-
tain privileges, or possess influence in certain boroughs.
A power resting upon such a basis would be very fragile,
and would go to pieces at the first strain upon the
Constitution. The country is aristocratic, because the
whole upper and middle, and a great part of the lower,
classes have still an instinctive liking for the established
order of things; because innumerable social ties bind us
together spontaneously, so as to give to the aristocracy
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 107

a position tolerably corresponding to their political privi-
leges. If this instinct ever dies out, so that the political
ceases to be the expression of the social organization,
it will be utterly vain to bolster it up by legislation ;
any such expedients would be temporary, and cause
sufficient irritation to insure their downfall; it is be-
cause the correspondence has become palpably imperfect
that some Reform is now imperatively demanded. When
we consider the enormous power which the upper classes
can exert, either by the means of money or by the
prestige of rank and birth, we may fairly doubt whether
any extension of the suffrage would materially alter the
composition of Parliament. The representatives of the
people would naturally be selected chiefly from the classes
which would have such an undeniable advantage in the
struggle for votes. Why do not the ten-pound house-
holders even now return men simply to reflect their
own class-prejudices? Partly from the direct influence
of money or patronage, but partly also because an Eng-
lishman of that class likes a lord, and would give his
vote more willingly to a gentleman than to one of his
equals. Consequently a gentleman, if he only chooses
to enter for the race, has a great chance of winning it.
So, so long as the aristocracy are willing to provide us
with legislators, it is pretty certain that the demand
will equal the supply. When Lord Amberley was lately
a candidate for Leeds and Nottingham, he was only
known to the public by the ridicule of which he was
the butt. It will do him, doubtless, as little harm as it
generally does to a man with courage enough not to
be put down. But the readiness with which he was,
even then, accepted as a Radical leader, in spite of the
108 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

laughter, merely on the faith of his name and position,
is a sufficient proof, if proof were wanting, of the charms
of aristocratic title to the British public. In short, our
nobility have a sufficient interest in legislation to make
it impossible for them willingly to sacrifice advantages
of influence sufficient to make it impossible to oust them
against their will.

It is true, indeed, that an important change may be
expected, for the object of Reform is that there should be
achange. It is assumed to be desirable that the work-
ing classes should exercise more direct influence, and
that their opinions should be more fully represented.
The extension of the franchise without a change in “ the
balance of power” for which Mr. Disraeli sighs, appears
to be the very definition of a political juggle. It is
evident that if men like Lord Amberley are tobe elected
for large constituencies, they will have to pay for it by
reflecting popular opinions. Members of Parliament may
still be drawn from the superior social class, but they
will be drawn from that minority which is looked upon
by the remainder as traitorous to its own cause. I only
argue at present that the Radical noblemen will still have
an advantage over Radicals of lower position. Moreover
the direct influence of the aristocracy will of course be
diminished by the transfer of seats from nomination
boroughs to large towns. Instead of gentlemen put in
by the direct influence of great influence, we shall have
a larger number of men who, by any of the various means
known to electioneerers—by money, or rank, or influence
of any kind—can please a large constituency. The
nobility will exercise a power corresponding to their
position in the general opinion of their countrymen ; but
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 109

they will be exposed, so to speak, to a free competition,
instead of receiving a direct legislative protection. And
in this case, although it is absurd to argue that the
removal of protection would amount to a destruction of
their influence, it is, I hope and believe, true that it would
distinctly diminish it; or rather, those whose only hope
of admission to the House lies in the small boroughs would
be superseded by the class who can only hope for success
by means of large constituencies; although a very large
number of the present members would doubtless manage
to enter the blessed haven even if their present channels
of admission were closed. The narrow gate would be a
little narrower, and the broad gate rather broader than
before ; but the same class of men would still force an
entrance. We should endeavour then to compare the
excluded with those who would probably be admitted :
on the one hand there would be the young men who will
take a seat when it drops into their mouths, but who will
not trouble themselves to contest a large borough ; the
men of eccentric views who cannot accept any party
platform, but can nevertheless please a patron or buy up
a little town; the men who will invest money perma-
nently in political influence, but will not corrupt a large
and changeable constituency at intervals; and the young
men of ability who are put in by discerning patrons to
learn Parliament practice early, and become the Pitts and
Foxes of the future, but who would not have courage or
money enough to stand by themselves ; and other classes
too numerous to mention. On the other hand there would
be all those who by good or bad influences are able to
please the fancies of large bodies of men. Which system
is likely to provide the best test—to be most attractive to
110 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

gentlemen, and, what is far more important, to men of in-
tellect, education, and character ? The representative class
would be shifted. We should lose certain persons at one
end, and take in some at the other to supply their places.
The great bulk of representatives would probably be
drawn from the same class—from those who can afford
to have a strong desire to be members of Parliament ; but
the qualification would be somewhat altered as far as it
depends upon social position, and still more so far as it
depends upon opinion.

To strike an exact balance of the loss and profit to be
anticipated would doubtless be impossible. In a general
way, it may be said that the class of members now repre-
senting our metropolitan constituencies would be increased
at the expense of the class which represents the smaller
boroughs. If we were to compare the two classes by a
simple enumeration of their present representatives, no
one could say that there would be much loss in expe-
rience, or ability, or cultivation. Out of the eighteen
representatives of metropolitan boroughs, we find such
names as those of Mr. Mill, Mr. Géschen, Mr. Layard,
Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Torrens. It can hardly be asserted.
that eminent talents and position exercise a smaller influ-
ence in London than elsewhere. The truth seems to be,
so far as experience goes, that the contrary is the case.
In a small borough it is impossible to exaggerate the
pettiness of the interests which determine the issue. It
is not that money or social influence, or petty intimida-
tion, exercise an influence in a small constituency, which
they fail to exercise in a large one. Such powers are
powers all the world over, and no form of government
yet devised by man can prevent them from being even
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCILS. lll

too effective in an old and highly-organized state of
society. But in addition to the trifling quarrels which
distract Eatanswill in an election contest, stronger and
deeper emotions are effective in a large town. The little
puffs which produce a tempest in a teapot, are powerless
in a great popular body. When the public is thoroughly
excited by some great question of war or internal policy,
the members of small boroughs are comparatively shel-
tered. The storm passes by and harms them not. They
are safe in their little backwaters from the waves which
are propagated over the surface of a larger society. In
the presence of such questions as the part which England
should take towards America or the advantages of Free-
trade, the tradesmen of a country town still ask whether
Mr. A. B. will change his grocer, or Mr. C. D. turn out
half a dozen tenants. And even in calm times it is
simply useless to rely upon the power of enthusiasm. A
seat must be won by a series of petty intrigues, not by
appeals to principle or position. There are doubtless
certain advantages in this—especially to those who think
that by ignoring strong popular passions their effect can
be neutralized, or that such an ignoring is not more
likely to produce an undignified shilly-shallying than a
decided course of action. But the disadvantages are
also palpable. Take, for example, such a case as the last
Westminster election. Let us put it on the lowest
grounds on which even Mr. Mill’s opponents would
rely. It was, we will assume, decided by no very
exalted considerations. The voters were ignorant and
stupid. Many of them had never heard of Mr. Mill,
and knew no more of his logic than of Sanskrit. The
old party organizations were still useful, and Captain
112 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

Grosvenor’s cabs were an important agency in returning
the great political philosopher. All this and more may
be true, and may be fully granted. But it is also true
that the efficient cause of Mr. Mill’s election was the
enthusiasm which his name excited in a large number of
thinking and educated men; that the zeal with which
they supported him induced the electors to accept him
upon their recommendation ; and that, in short, whatever
were the intermediate steps by which Mr. Mill’s repu-
tation was brought to bear upon the electors’ votes, that
reputation really caused his election. If he had been
Socrates and Aristotle and the late M. de Tocqueville
rolled into one—if he had had the eloquence of men and
angels—no electioneering agent of experience would
have counted that fact as a force of any importance in
such a borough as Calne or Harwich. It would not have
brought him a vote, or influenced one petty tradesman or
labourer in comparison with a five-pound note or a threat
of discharge from employment. Even in a University
constituency, which really likes distinguished represen-
tatives after a certain pattern of distinction, his crotchets
would have told more against him than his abilities in
favour of him. But ina constituency like Westminster—
which is far from a favourable specimen of a metropolitan
constituency—the voters were ready to accept the unani-
mous voice of educated public opinion, and to overlook a
great many objections from religious and other prejudices.
The advocacy of the rights of women, of Mr. Hare’s
scheme, and of unpopular views upon theology, for which
Mr. Mill was notorious, were industriously urged, but
without any serious effect. And the election thus
amounts to a demonstration that, taken by itself, a great
STEPHEN, ] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 113

reputation is really a most powerful assistance in such a
contest. It would hardly be possible to select any man
of liberal views whose election could more conclusively
refute the theories about democratic dislike to men of
eminence, but of indiyidual peculiarities. In fact, the
common-sense view of the subject seems here to be true.
In a large body of men the great thing is to appeal ta
popular enthusiasm by effective advertisement, and no
advertisement is more effective than a really great repu-
tation amongst tolerably educated people. Even those
who do not know of it for themselves feel instinctively
its weight.

The same inference may be drawn from the elections
of such gentlemen as Mr. Hughes, Mr. Torrens, or Pro-
fessor Fawcett. That their political opinions are de-
cidedly democratic is true; and, no one will wish to
deny that an increase of large constituencies will increase
the number of democratic members. Bunt, given the
opinions, the men of most eminence amongst those who
hold them, will have an indisputable advantage as candi-
dates. I have endeavoured to point out the cireum-
stances which in my view more than account for the
opposite tendency exhibited in America, and I will not
repeat them. The more normal case, I believe to be
that which I have attempted to describe.

In a healthy and quiet condition of society, where the
lower orders are not united by any strong class prejudices
against the higher (and I will directly refer to this pro-
vision), I believe that these results may be naturally
expected. Wealth and rank and social estimation will
always produce an effect which no legislation can neu-
tralize. Wherever the area of selection is sufficiently

I
ll4 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

extended to make petty influences comparatively in-
operative, the influences of a great name and of political
enthusiasm will also produce a great effect. Democracies,
though accused in popular commonplaces of fickleness,
frequently show a touching faith in the idols whom they
have once adopted. When a man has once become a
symbol of some great principle, even when he has
become personally popular, with a class, he holds a
position of great strength, because the petty questions
which agitate a smaller body, are imperceptible. And
it would be easy to give many examples in which the
belief in a popular hero has been if anything unreason-
ably strong. It is only by the voluntary abdication of
the upper classes that the people may be led in time to
choose a lower class of leaders ; and there are, as I have
shown, many reasons why such an abdication is highly
improbable.

I have already remarked that it is dangerous to rely
too much upon parallels drawn from different countries.
Some light however may be thrown upon the subject, if
we do not apply results too hastily ; and I am glad to
quote the following passage from some remarks made by
M. Louis Blanc upon the experience of the French
elections :—

“Where a great town,” he says, “is included in the
electoral district, the disposition to choose men of emi-
nence is, and always has been, conspicuous, owing to the
fact that men are apt to become more enlightened when
brought into closer contact.

“ As an illustration of this, I will point out the results
of the election of 1848. Who were the men returned
by the Département de la Seine? Why, the most illus-
STEPHEN. ] POPULAR CONSTILUENCIES. 115

trious men in France: Arago, her greatest astronomer ;
Beranger and Lamartine, two of her greatest poets;
Lamennais, one of her greatest writers; Duvivier and
Cavaignac, both distinguished soldiers; Marrast, a most
brilliant journalist, by no means inferior as such to the
celebrated Camille Desmoulins ; Crémieux, Ledru Rollin,
and Marie, leading members of the French bar ; the vener-
able Dupont (de l’Eure), the most honoured character in
France, &e.

“ Now if, putting opinions entirely aside, you look for
those who stand uppermost.in the present Corps Légis-
latif, so far as talent and intellectual superiority is
concerned, you will find Jules Favre, Thiers, Pelletan,
Jules Simon, Emile Ollivier, who have all of them been
returned by the Parisians ; Berryer and Maric, have
been returned by the inhabitants of Marseille. I need
not add that if other eminent men like Michelet, Edgar
Quinet, &c. are not comprised in the list of representa-
tives of Paris, the reason is, that being determined to
have nothing to do with the Empire, they have shrunk
from presenting themselves as candidates.”

M. Louis Blane goes on to point out that under the
Imperial Constitution it has been provided that instead
of each department electing by general ticket (as Ame-
ricans would say), it is broken up into separate con-
stituencies, each electing one representative. The reason
was that less chance was anticipated of the Government
being opposed by men of eminence, when constituencies
were smaller ; and the result has been, in fact, that there
were far more eminent men in the National Assembly of
1848 than in the present body.

Now, English artisans may, or may not, be less intel-

12
116 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay V.

ligent than their French rivals, and the circumstances of
1848 were doubtless exceptional. Moreover, as French
constituencies were all of equal population, the com-
parison is between town and country constituencies,
not between Jarge and small. Still this goes strongly
to confirm the opinion which I have expressed that, in
such places as our large metropolitan boroughs claims
founded upon eminence and reputation will be recog-
nised, which in small country places are simply worth-
Jess. It is nothing strange that in large places the fact
that a man has been very much talked about, should be
a great advantage to him. And in a normal state of
things, where there is no counteraction of this by other
causes, I believe that the advantage will always make
itself felt. Nothing but a disorganization of all old
social ties, such as necessarily occurs in new countries,
or a complete corruption, which is certainly not com-
moner in a large than in a small area, can neutralize it.

Hence, I should anticipate that in large constituencies
in England, we should have, with a sprinkling of dema-
gogues, a large number of men of position, of talent,
and of reputation. They have an undeniable power, and
sufficient temptation to use their power. It is no small
advantage in itself, that at any rate we should have
more men wha, for whatever reasons, are popular with
large numbers, and can therefore obtain a degree of
confidence, the denial of which hampers many of the
ablest men now in Parliament.

And what would be lost ? We should lose, it has been
said, young men. Many young men of ability have
managed to please large constituencies, and not the less
for their youth, I doubt whether we should not obtain
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 117

a larger number of young men of real merit, by taking
those who have the spirit to fight an open battle, than by
selecting those who are willing to be put in for some
nomination borough by powerful friends. It is common
to paint the young man like Pitt or Fox, who goes
into Parliament early and learns the art of debating and
party tactics. Is this such an unmixed advantage ?
Did these young gentlemen learn the art of legislation,
which is rather more important than that of Parlias
mentary manoeuvring? Should we not find better
material by obtaining members who have learnt in
other walks something of commerce, or of law, or of
administration, in place of some of those who pick up
these matters incidentally whilst practising the govern-
ment of the country by instinct? Certainly the case
does not seem to be so clear as not to admit of an
argument. We should have fewer of those independent
gentlemen, the glory of our country, who govern us
from motives of pure ambition, and without any direct
self-interest. Well; people without a direct personal
interest have also their faults. They are very apt to be
ignorant, when they are not interested, and to be
governed by class prejudices in default of more direct,
but scarcely more prejudicial, interests. The balance of
advantage can only be struck by taking a wider point
of view than this. And, as a conclusion, the result to
which the whole investigation leads seems now to follow,
if we include a consideration already noticed, but not
discussed. The social forces which produce our present
Parliament would, as I have endeavoured to show,
produce a substantially similar result, if the present
constituencies were greatly enlarged ; but under a con-
118 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

dition which has hitherto been tacitly assumed. There
would be differences, and differences, as I think, to the’
advantage of the new system. We should probably have
fewer dilettanti statesmen entering merely to gain social
consideration, and with little real sympathy with the
great wants of the country; we should have more real
workers, on the whole more men of reputation and
experience, and, if some lowering of the social standard
might take place, there is no reason to anticipate a serious
lowering of the cultivation, much less of the efficiency of
the future members. But the condition which I have
hitherto assumed is that the persons to be enfran-
chised will be not merely the “same flesh and blood,”
but accessible to much the same influences as their
present constituencies. Beyond the pale of the present
franchise there extends a population which is not,
perhaps, separated by any sudden and profound chasm
from those within. I believe that the same forces which
operate in a higher sphere will affect even the lowest
classes to a considerable extent, and that, therefore, the
assumption made is not substantially inaccurate. I
think that the rich and socially eminent will be able to
meet competition in our open market more effectually
than they suppose.

But I will now suppose that the allegation of the oppo-
nents of Reform is substantially accurate ; that their fears
have some real ground, and that the lowest classes are as
distinct from the upper as the negro from the Yankee, I
must still dispute the validity of their logic. To some
extent their facts are indisputable. It is unfortunately
true to some extent, that when we advance much beyond
our present limits we come upon a stratum of entirely
STEPHEN.] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 119

different composition, with feelings, prejudices, and
interests of which the upper classes generally know as
little as if they inhabited a foreign country. Somewhere
between the highest and lowest there is a great social
gulf, which is very partially bridged over, and across
which there is not much communication. No one can
doubt that if the new Parliament were to be elected
exclusively by working men, it would apply itself to a
totally new set of questions, and show a totally new
spirit in many respects. In many respects, too, its
tendencies would perhaps be as narrow and more
ignorant than those of the present Parliament, although
I think that the questions discussed would probably have
a more important bearing upon the national welfare.
Now it is frequently assumed that any large extension of
the franchise would, in its practical results, amount to
such a complete transfer of power; and that the most
numerous class, by voting together, would entirely
extinguish the influence of the classes above them. In
short, the educated people, according to the usual phrase,
would be “swamped ;” and, although a full discussion
of this argument would lead me into a wider subject,
its bearing upon the narrower topic may be briefly
indicated.

I have hitherto endeavoured to point out that the
influences of rank, and wealth, and education, are not
limited by the recognition given to them in the Consti-
tution ; that, protected or unprotected, they will produce
an effect which no legislation can take from them. But
if the franchise is to include a large and totally hetero-
geneous mass,—differing profoundly in sentiment, in
religion, and in manners—may not the balance of power
120 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

be totally upset? To this I have answered, that I do
not believe that in a normal state of things there is any
class of English society in which money and social posi-
tion do not produce a great effect : hence I do not believe
that any complete transfer of power is possible, if desir-
able ; the effect of the natural social forces cannot be
eliminated by any legislative artifice. But let us now
assume that such a constituency as that supposed may
demand that their representatives should accept tests of
opinion, from which most educated men would shrink,
and that the representatives, although elected from the
same classes, would consequently be the Mirabeaus of
the class ; the minority, who would condescend to utter
the Democratic shibboleth, would usurp a very large share
of Parliamentary influence though they could not mono-
polize it. As I believe in Democratic principles, I should
welcome this change within due limits; but I admit
that it might lead to too small a representation of the
educated minority, and that it might tend to lower the
standard of Parliament. Granting this fully, I still think
that the argument conclusively proves the necessity of
a large extension of the suffrage; for what is the very
basis on which such arguments rest? It is that there is
at present a large class whose sympathies are totally
alienated from those by which the governing body is
determined, or, at least, who would, if they had their
way, insist upon a change of policy ; moreover that this
class is actually in the majority and so decidedly in the
majority, that it could overpower all the influences that
would be brought to bear by wealth and intelligence. It
is so united that it would force its demands upon us, and
could not be disintegrated by all the combined attacks
STEPHEN. | POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 121

directed against it. I believe this to be grossly exagge-
rated, and only to approximate to the truth in regard to
certain social questions in which the working classes are,
to a considerable extent, united. But, assuming it to
be true, how far is the remedy of excluding these classes
from any solid share of influence sound or satisfactory ?
Does not the fact of excluding them from legislative
influence, teach them to look to other means, and weaken
Parliament quite as much as it weakens the Demo-
cracy? We have constantly had the tyrannical practices
of Trade Unions dinned into our ears, as though they
supplied a conclusive reason against allowing workmen
to have the suffrage. To me, it seems equally conclusive
the other way. In the first place, the power of organi-
zation amongst workmen is even now becoming daily
stronger for good or for evil. No Parliament could
venture for a moment to interfere with it; it would
be as much as the British constitution is worth, to
touch a hair of the Trade Unions’ heads; our legis-
lation is necessarily timid and ineffectual because the
interested parties have no weight; therefore, as matters
at present stand, the evil, if it be an evil, spreads and
flourishes, and we must look on and do nothing. More+
over, the exclusion of workmen from the franchise tends,
if anything, to spread it faster ; if men have no chance
of receiving help from Government, they will look to
themselves, and no one can blame them. But it seems
to be supposed, that the workmen, if admitted to the
franchise, might attempt to help their principles by
direct legislation. Doubtless Members of Parliament
would have to discuss more questions affecting the social
welfare of their countrymen than they do now; and that
122 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

is one of the paramount reasons for Reform: but it is
quite another question whether workmen would be able
to enforce unfair demands better in Parliament than
out of it. Many excellent reasons may be given against
it. They would have to discuss these questions before
the whole nation, instead of fighting in the dark; the
whole intelligence of the country would be brought to
bear upon their claims and detect their unsoundness:
the mere putting them into shape and discussing them
would infallibly bring out the differences among the
workmen themselves. Even as it is, the men in a par-
ticular trade are generally beaten by the masters in
a struggle (we used to be told that the “inexorable
laws of Political Economy” proved that they would
always be beaten); this is some presumption that in
a struggle between labour and capital carried on in
Parliament, where all the other interests would be easily
arrayed and organized against unfair demands, they
would be still more decisively defeated. Even in Demo-
cratic America, the kind of legislation suggested has
not been carried out, although occasionally discussed ;
in England, the various influences which would in such
a case be brought to bear upon Parliament, would make
it perfectly hopeless. At the same time, the agitation
of questions affecting the welfare of the labouring man
is most desirable, and is even becoming essential to a
satisfactory state of Parliamentary health. Hence in
this case, and in others which I have no space to
discuss, we seem to arrive at the conclusion that the
plan of remedying an evil by ignoring it is radically
bad and short-sighted. It tends directly and energe-
tically to increase that profound division of classes
Sreruey.] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 123

which is one of the great evils of the time, and which
may some day result in the very catastrophe most
dreaded. Perseverance in the present system alienates
the working classes from the upper, because it implies
distrust of them ; but it does nothing, or next to nothing,
for the complementary object of restraining their power :
it only compels it to grow, as it were, in the dark,
instead of in daylight: and, at some future day, it must
come to the surface. I will not pursue this argument
with such questions as the effect upon foreign politics,
or other questions less directly connected with class
prejudices. I will merely observe that in them all the
same principle may be traced, that by forbidding one
of the chief social forces to act upon Parliament, Parlia-
mentary action is made vacillating and uncertain, but
the force is not itself neutralized.

To apply this to the more immediate question: the
choice of Members becomes of secondary importance
when compared with such considerations. If it were
true that the admission of the working classes to the
franchise would lower the Parliamentary standard ; if,
for example, it became common for working men to be
returned, it would be a cheap price to pay for filling
up the existing social gulf. It might even be worth
while for Mr. Lowe to play the part of Curtius. The
question of whether members would be a little more or
a little less gentleman-like becomes insignificant by com-
parison, This much, however, may be said: the one
essential condition for obtaining great statesmen is that
the body politic should be in sound health; and that
every class should be so far in harmony with others as to
have no profound political grievance rankling in its mind.
124 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay V.

Even now, when a nation is united by the working of any
powerful passion, great men come spontaneously to the
surface. Petty class jealousies and bickerings fritter away
the greatest talents, and render them valueless. The
moral which I have endeavoured to preach is, that this is
the first object at which we should aim, and that, if we
are successful in this, the other and more ornamental
reward of gentleman-like statesmen will be added to us
spontaneously. The deterioration of public men, of
which I spoke at first, appears to be a symptom of social
disease ; it may be due either to a complete upsetting
and distraction of all the old foundations—a dissolution
of the never hidden bonds of society such as we see in the
United States ; or, it may be due—and it is then a far more
serious symptom, because it looks more like decrepitude
than youth—to that pettiness of aim which is always
produced by a constitution formed so as to exclude any
class from its natural share of influence. In such a case
statesmen may be very gentleman-like and of irreproach-
able deportment, but all their plans will be marked by
a narrowness of conception, an indecision of outline,
which is the natural result of small jealousies. They
will be afraid to touch any question broadly and firmly,
because they may be upsetting a delicate balance of
power, or sacrificing the class interests of their con-
stituents, or, perhaps, because they feel that they must
respect, whilst they cannot ascertain constitutionally, the
prejudices of the excluded classes. And something like
this shilly-shallying, hand-to-mouth style of statesman-
ship seems to be characteristic of the English Parliament
just now. We could bear to see its members drawn
from an inferior position, if only they were more states-
SrEPHen,] POPULAR CONSTITUENCIES. 125

manlike in the higher sense of the word. But this can
hardly be expected till some decided stop is put to the
present haggling for a little more, or a little less, power,
and till we are allowed to set about serious improve-
ments under leaders who possess the full confidence of
the mass of their fellow-countrymen,
VI.
REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS.
BY JOHN BOYD KINNEAR.

THE same principles which demand an extension of
representation to classes at present unrepresented, make
it imperative that the distribution of representatives
should be re-adjusted. When boroughs containing only
a few thousand inhabitants can, by their votes, neu-
tralize or overpower the opinions of great cities, or
great counties, it is plain that the representation of
the latter must often be a mockery, and that their
population is virtually, if not nominally, disfranchised.
No mere extension of the suffrage can make Parliament
a true exponent of the opinion of the nation, or procure
for us the benefits of freedom from class legislation
and oligarchic government, until we redress the gross in-
justice which gives to the inhabitants of certain favoured
districts, sometimes even to one individual whose in-
fluence controls them, a hundred times the weight in
Parliament which is assigned to the inhabitants of other
districts. Accordingly, all Parties, and all Reform Bills,
from whatever side proceeding, have admitted that a
128 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essay VI.

redistribution of seats is an essential element of an
amendment of our Parliamentary system. So fully is
this recognised that the chief opposition to the measure
of 1866 was based upon its failure to deal simulta-
neously with this confessed evil. (See Note, page 153.)

It would be waste of time then to argue that
some change must be made. But the general assent
to this proposition by no means ends the debate.
As the admission that an extension of the suffrage
is necessary, still leaves undecided the limit at which
it should be fixed, so the agreement that there must
be a reapportionment of seats, only opens the ques-
tion of the extent to which it shall be carried. On
the one side are ranged the partisans of equal elec-
toral districts; on the other stand those who insist
that only the grossest inequalities should be removed ;
between them are partisans of every different degree
of change. And the divergence of opinion is made
less amenable to reason by the fact, that the evil,
which in this branch of our system needs remedy, is
peculiarly a matter of personal influence or local profit.
It affects rights which have come to be regarded less
as held for the public weal, than as an appanage of
private property. Every measure intended to deal
with it invites the opposition of party interests, since
it must inevitably have a direct and calculable bearing
on the strength of political divisions in the House of
Commons. In the House itself the discussion and
decision are subject to the anomaly that the representa-
tives of the very places which, by universal consent,
ought not to enjoy such predominance, are yet suffered
to speak and vote against the abolition of their own
Kinnear. ] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 129

indefensible privileges. But if such peculiarities largely
determine the current of parliamentary inclination,
they make it the more necessary that the public outside
should examine and enforce the real principles involved
in the question. Therefore, with the object of arriving
at a rational basis for agreement, it is well, discarding
all personal and party considerations, to review the
arguments adduced for and against the modified reten-
tion of small boroughs, on the sole point whether
they are, or are not, a beneficial element in the practical
working of our Constitution.

The subject may be simplified by first dismissing
from our concern any argument applicable to two
classes of such boroughs, respecting which no dispute
can arise at the present day. The first class comprises
the bribeable constituencies. It is indeed true that
bribery is not absolutely confined to the smallest
boroughs. But it is true that it is most common in these,
and produces in them the worst effects. When there
are only a few hundred electors, it is within the compass
of a wealthy candidate's means to bribe them all.
In this case no unbiassed opinion is exercised on his
merits at all, and he is sent to Parliament, to disgrace
and defile that august body, for the sole cause of his
riches and his dishonesty. But in a constituency of
several thousand electors, scarcely any purse could be
found heavy enough to supply bribes to all. Chiefly for
this reason it is that there is so little bribery in the
counties or in the large boroughs. In a close-run contest
there would, indeed, still be a possibility of deciding
it by a few bought votes; but the fact of its being
close run would at least imply that, in the honest

K
130 LSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

judgment of nearly a majority, the successful candidate
was a fit representative. Not only, then, would he
be a real representative of a fairly large constituency,
but he would be certified as, in their opinion, if not
immaculate, at least not disreputable,—a great im-
provement upon the opinion inspired by some of the
candidates for saleable boroughs now.

There was a different class of small boroughs which
was extinguished by the Reform Act of 1832, and of
which the conveniences are still spoken of regretfully
by those amateurs of statesmanship who have ever since
alarmed themselves with the difficulty, “How is the
Queen’s Government to be carried on?” These were
the Treasury boroughs. And it is undeniable that they
had certain practical advantages, which, though no
equivalent to their evil, may be alluded to here, merely
to show that such utility in no degree survives in the
operation of private nomination boroughs. All that
has been said in favour of the Treasury boroughs, as
insuring to the Government of the day a working
majority, or enabling it to introduce able supporters
into the House, or to make the best appointments to
its own offices, because sure of finding the nominee a
seat,—is obsolete and inapplicable to our modern system.
Under existing arrangements, neither great party can
attain such objects except by favour of some of its
adherents who happen still to retain possession of a
family borough. But when the advantages can no
longer be gained by the authority of the responsible party
chiefs, but only through the good graces of a leading
supporter, it is plain that the virtue of the system is
lost, Government is not: strengthened, but only made
Kixyear.] . REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 131

more dependent, when it has to rely for help on the
caprice of a single great house. Useful talent will not be
promoted, however much its aid may be required by the
Ministry, unless it can stoop to win and retain the favour
of some individual peer. And the selection of the best
men for offices is but seldom facilitated, when it becomes
a question, not of merit only, but of merit combined with
personal acceptability to the private patron of the seat.

Passing then to the consideration of such small
boroughs as actually survive, and are really defended,
we find them to be of two kinds. Some are considered
as independent of external influence, others are either
nomination boroughs, belonging to one family, or are
so distinctly under the influence of surrounding land-
owners, as to be virtually their tools. The advantages
alleged to arise from each description, are in some
respects distinct, in others common. Let us endeavour
to analyse them.

In favour of the first class, the small independent
boroughs, it is said that they represent the views and
interests of the body of inhabitants of small towns
throughout the kingdom. It would greatly aid the
appreciation of this argument, if those who press it
would tell us what such distinctive views and interests
are. What does the native of a small borough desire,
that is peculiar to himself and his peers? If it is a
local job, the short answer is, that he ought not to have
it. If it is any special adjustment of national questions,
it would be desirable that we should know, from good
authority, what it is. Ordinary common sense fails to
discover the imperial theme on which the small burgher

K 2
132 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

is essentially at variance with the citizen. Such consti-
tuencies consist of professional men and shopkeepers,
doing less business, and probably in general less educated
and enlightened, than the corresponding classes in large
towns ; but not of any inherently different political com-
plexion, and certainly having no separate interests in
public questions. Nor are they needed merely to give
variety, for there is abundant variety in the polities of
large towns. These notoriously differ among each other
on matters of Church and State, of Peace and War, of
Liberalism and Conservatism, and on every conceivable
topic of policy. In what respect does the constituency,
that is numbered only by hundreds, take up an attitude
which is not adopted by some one or other of the great
constituencies ? On what subject are the politics of the
small towns so utterly and specifically discordant from
all that finds acceptance with the multitudes, as to demand
separate and distinct representation ? Till some such sub-
ject be pointed out, adequate to the degree of authority
claimed, credit must be denied to an argument which
insists on the value of the opinion of very small towns
on imperial questions. And even if a case were made for
reserving to such towns a special representation of their
own ideas or interests, the proper method would evidently
be to group them all into constituencies of average size,
so as to afford to all of them a voice, rather than to
give the duty and the exclusive privilege of representing
them to a few, selected at haphazard from their number.
But then we are told of the value of small boroughs,
in affording openings to the introduction of special prac-
tical knowledge into the House of Commons. They
supply a mode of representation, says Mr. Disraeli, in
Kinnear. } REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 133

his speeches of last year, to the Colonies, to India, and to
the Bank of England, and he cites the names of one or
two eminent persons connected with these departments,
who happen to sit for small boroughs. The personal argu-
ment is, however, a foolish as well as useless one; and it
would be idle to retort by citing the names of the numer-
ous capitalists, East Indian Directors, and colonial mer-
chants, who have found it as easy to be accepted by large
cities as by small towns. It is contrary to experience as
well as to reason, to suppose that gentlemen connected
with such wide-spread interests would not find seats, if
insignificant boroughs were abolished. If, indeed, as re-
gards India and the Colonies, we deemed representation
in Parliament to be proper and important, it would cer-
tainly be better to grant it by means more direct and
certain, than by the retention of a class of English con-
stituencies, in which it is just possible that a chance
individual connected with these regions, may happen to
be elected. We ought to call on these great dependencies
to select their own representatives, rather than leave
them to be selected by a petty English village, and out
of the scanty list composed of the few men of Colonial or
East Indian experience, who happen to be smitten with a
taste for entering the British legislature.

Eygually insufficient is the allegation, that public ability,
unconnected with the local interests of large constituen-
cies, finds a peculiar recognition in small boroughs. The
fact is, that the most intense local feeling is notoriously
displayed in the smallest towns. Exceptions are of
course to be found, and these exceptions are made much
of. But on the other hand, an important constituency
has not only better means of judging of general ability,
134 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

being itself better informed, and more active-minded ;
but it is naturally desirous of obtaining for itself the
additional weight due to recognised ability in its repre-
sentatives. The City of London has shown a distinct
preference for an actual or possible Cabinet Minister.
Westminster has successively chosen a very distinguished
general, and the most learned and liberal philosopher of
his age. Lambeth elects Mr. Hughes; Finsbury, Mr.
Torrens; Brighton, Professor Fawcett: none with any
local connexion whatsoever, and known only as public
writers and speakers. All the leading members of the
late Ministry represented great constituencies ; and it is
impossible to point to any distinguished public man, who,
were small boroughs abolished, would not be eagerly put
in nomination for some of the large boroughs that would
take their places, and be certain of election, if his political
party had the preponderance. Indeed, the merit or
ability which fears to face a large community, must be
of a very tender and unpractical cast. There is no
healthy thought which cannot trust to find an echo in
the public mind. If, in the excitement of a great contest
of principles, it should be for the moment rejected and
thrust aside (as happened once to Mr. Cobden and Mr.
Bright themselves), it does not find itself bereft of in-
fluence. The platform and the press are open to it, even
during the brief period of exclusion from the House of
Commons. If it deserves its place, it will speedily be
reinstated ; if it is hopelessly in conflict with the spirit
of the age, why should the opinions of a great and in-
telligent population be neutralized or disregarded, in
order to find utterance in the House of Commons for
one clever man’s singularities ?
Kiynear.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 135

Having reviewed the subsidiary arguments founded on
the alleged personal and special advantages furnished by
the class of small boroughs, I now come to the great and
undoubtedly real reason urged for their retention. Mr.
Disraeli, with characteristic boldness, has often pressed
it in his discussion of the question; gallantly reckless,
that, in so far as it is admitted to be valid, it is destruc-
tive of every other ground on which he claims considera-
tion for his favourite class of constituencies. This main
plea is, that the existence of small boroughs is necessary,
to give a fair representation to “the landed interest,”
which without such aid, would find its representation in
the counties below its deserts, and insufficient to protect
its rights or its privileges. Now, in the first place, it is
clear that whatever boroughs subserve this purpose,
cannot at all, or at least, can only imperfectly and rarely,
fulfil the different object of supplying seats to un-
known talent, or to Colonial interests. These purposes
can only be combined, when the unknown talent, or
the colonial knowledge, happens to be so strongly biassed
in favour of the “landed interest” at home, that it will
on no occasion fail to give its support to the real patrons
of the seat.

But to take the argument in its simplicity, let us try
to find out what this new phrase “ landed interests” truly
means. It can only have one of two meanings, the just
rights of the owners of landed property, or their unjust
privileges. But who attacks their just rights? Where
is the proposal, seriously put forward by any class, for
encroaching on any just right of property, real or personal ?
The men who are now excluded from the franchise make
no such proposal. Is there any danger, that, when recon-
136 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

ciled to our institutions by admission to the franchise,
they will begin to entertain ideas of spoliation? The
pretence is absurd, so absurd that it is never put in plain
words. No Conservative orator ever defines the character
of the peril to the just rights of property, which he pro-
fesses to think he needs a double allowance of power to
protect himself from.

What is meant then by the protection of “the landed
interest” is the securing to its holders such an ascendancy,
that they “can do what they like with their own ;” that
they can regulate all matters connected with their own
taxation, or with the descent and management of their
estates, according to their own uncontiolled wishes ; that
they can maintain the social and political ascendency,
which by the system of an hereditary Peerage, of a
law of primogeniture, and the institution of an unpaid
magistracy, belongs in this country to their class. But
in making this demand for special and exclusive self-
government, they are utterly unconstitutional, for all
these things are concerns of the nation, not solely of men
of the class of landowners. Property, real and personal
alike, is secured to its owners by the power of the whole
community, and therefore the community has a distinct
title to fix the terms on which it shall be transmitted and
held. The maintenance of a House of Peersis a question
for the decision of the nation, not merely of the squires.
The administration of justice concerns the whole public,
not solely the game preservers. The laws that regulate
the descent and transfer of land, are of importance to
the nation at large, not merely to those who at this
moment own estates. Any attempt then to reserve a
preponderating influence in the legislature to those who
Kinnear. ] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 137

possess that single species of privileged property is un-
reasonable and indefensible.

Indeed, the whole talk of carrying on government by
the balance and for the benefit of “ interests” is a modern
and unconstitutional innovation. Government is for the
well-being of men, not for the defence of interests. It
has to deal with a thousand things more important than
property. Its primary object is the security of persons,
that of property is only secondary. The relations be-
tween Church and State, the education of the people, the
laws of marriage, and all other social relations, the relief
of the poor, the protection of life and reputation, and
nearly every foreign and colonial question, take precedence
in importance to any questions respecting property as
such, In all these things men are entitled to votes as
citizens, as individuals equally affected by the legisla-
tion, or by the policy the nation may adopt; and to
subordinate their authority in such matters to that of the
“landed interest,” is a doctrine subversive of freedom, and
tending to reduce our Government to that of a mere
oligarchy of agricultural wealth. In all such questions,
the accident that a man has inherited, or purchased, a
certain quantity of land, gives him no rational title to
a distinctive share of power. And in matters regarding
his special property, he has no more reason to claim a
peculiar weight in the legislation, than has the fund-
holder in respect of his stocks, or the cotton-broker in
respect of the bales that pass through his hands. The
idea of a governing class, whose claim to power is only
that it possesses property of a particular kind, is not
endurable in the present stage of civilization.

But if it is answered that the argument is not put
138 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

to the extent of demanding expressly a predominance on
the part of the “landed interest,” but only a representa-
tion proportionate to its numbers, let us see what its real
nature is, and what conditions it involves. Mr. Disraeli,
who may be taken as the leading author and champion of
this argument, tells us (I correct his figures by the latest
returns) that the boroughs have a population of 8,638,569,
with 334 members, while the counties, with a population
of 11,427,655, have only 162 members. He admits,
however, that the inequality is nearly redressed by the
fact, that 84 of the boroughs are under the influence of
the landed interest (Speeches, p. 457). This gives 246
members to the counties, and only 250 to the boroughs,
and this, he says, is a fair approximation to the rights of
the landed interest, though not a complete one.

But the first observation on this argument is, that it is
taking population instead of voters as the basis of com-
parison, precisely the claim set up by the late slaveholders
of the Southern States of America, who demand a re-
presentation equivalent to the number of negroes and
whites together, though only the whites are to be permitted
to vote. The number of county electors is but 540,271,
and those in boroughs are 489,166, a ratio of 9 to 8,
while the population is as 11 to 8. And if we consider
that the number of boroughs ascribed to the landed in-
terest by Mr. Disraeli is certain to be considerably less
than a more impartial arbiter would rate them at; we
may safely come to the conclusion, that the landed interest
has at present a representation in Parliament very
decidedly more than it is fairly entitled to, in regard to
the number of electors it comprises.

There is no reason, however, that Reformers should
Kinnear. ] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 139

hesitate to accept Mr. Disraeli’s principles, if only
they are legitimately carried to their consequences.
When he urges the claim of one section of the com-
munity to representation according to population, he
can claim for it no more than its true numbers entitle it
to, and he must admit that every other section should
be dealt with on like terms. It will not do for him to
seize on the total representation to which the whole
population of counties is entitled, and then divide it
among the different counties, so as to give a prepon-
derance to some single interest in which a part of that
population is concerned. Now he himself argues that
the counties, or the landed interest, is not identical with
merely the agricultural interest,—the landlords and
farmers and their labourers. (Speeches, p. 460-62.)
These he computes at only two millions out of the
eleven who make up the county population; but this
is an error, for the census states it (including the
families) at nearly five millions. The landlord and
farmer interest then, ought to have less than half the
total representation which is apportioned to the counties
and their dependent boroughs, while it is notorious that
they have nearly the whole. Out of the 246 members
ascribed to the counties by their leader, they ought,
according to his principles, to have little more than a
hundred.

What, then, should become of the rest? Mr. Disraeli’s
own doctrines will still supply the answer. He asks
a representation for counties founded on the population
of the whole, he is therefore bound to divide it among
them according to the population of each. This would
at once make some curious changes in the electoral map
140 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

of England, and a revolution in the strength of parties
in the House of Commons. Let us glance at the
most salient modifications. As the number of persons
to each Member is, throughout England and Wales,
about 40,000, it will be easy to see how a just
application of this principle would work. The result
of the arrangement based upon it, would be to assign
(in all cases excluding cities and boroughs at present
represented) 22 Members instead of the existing 4 to
the West Riding of Yorkshire, 5 instead of 2 to the
North Riding, 3 instead of 2 to the East Riding. To
North Lancashire it would give 9, to South Lancashire
15, to North Cheshire 4, and as many to South Cheshire ;
to East Kent it would give 4, to West Kent 6, to
Middlesex 9, to East Surrey 5, to North Stafford 4,
to South Stafford 6, to North and South Durham each
4 Members, all in room of the 2 belonging to each
constituency at present. At the same rate in Scotland,
Lanark would have 5, Aberdeen 3, Fife 2 Members.
Here would be 114 Members apportioned to these
counties instead of 35 at present, or an increase of 79.
The agricultural districts would not, however, gain
in anything like the same proportion. Bedford would
gain 1, Derby 3, Devon 5, Essex 5, Gloucester 2, Hants
1, Hertford 1, Lincoln 3, Norfolk 3, Somerset 4, Suffolk
2,in all 30. But this would be balanced by an actual
loss in other agricultural counties. Bucks itself, if all
had their due, would be mulcted of 1 Member, Cum-
berland of 1, Hereford of 1, Huntingdon of 1, South
Notts of 1, Rutland of 2, Westmoreland of 1, Wilts
of 1, Radnor of 1: while in Scotland, Peebles, Sel-
kirk Stirling and Sutherland, are each far below the
Kinyear.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 141

standard number. Thus 16 would be the total gain
of the purely agricultural counties, against 79 appor-
tioned by right to the mercantile and manufacturing
counties. But it is to be remembered that all these
additions to the county representatives would be attended
by the abolition of the small boroughs scattered among
the rural districts. Mr. Disraeli himself has stated, as
we have seen, the number of these which are to be
ascribed to the predominating influence of the “landed
interest” at 84 seats. It follows that if all these were
abolished, and if it were thought to be just to give an
equal number of members directly to the counties, it would
be necessary, in readjusting the county representation,
to assign nearly the whole addition to the non-agri-
cultural counties.

It is scarcely worth while here to notice another of
Mr. Disraeli’s grievances, the remedy for which would
be equally injurious to the cause he advocates. He
complains that the increase of population in boroughs
has overflowed their parliamentary boundaries, and now
seriously interferes with the just representation of the
landed interests in the counties. Estimating this, he
first states the whole increase of population in the
boroughs since the Reform Act (excluding the Metro-
polis) at “upwards of 3,000,000, much the greater part
of which is located without the boundaries.” (Speeches,
p- 367.) Afterwards, perceiving the danger of this
argument to his own case, he complains of Mr. Glad-
stone taking “much the greater part of 3,000,000,” at
2,000,000, and himself reduces his estimate to 1,500,000
(p. 462), which is certainly not the greater part of
three millions. But the result of transferring this
142 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

amount to the boroughs, would be to leave the counties a
population of less than ten millions, while the boroughs
would have above ten millions and a half. But, again,
the counties include unrepresented towns, having a
total population of a million and a half more, and
if these are transferred, as by parity of reasoning
they ought to be, and as Mr. Disraeli urges they
should be, to the borough interest, it would give to it
a total population of above eleven millions and a half,
while the counties thus denuded would have less than
eight millions and a half. Thus the final result of
Mr. Disraeli’s arithmetic, carried to its legitimate con-
clusions, is to lower the strength of his party to little
more than two-thirds of what it seemed to be ere the
calculations begin; while even of these two-thirds, a
very large proportion would belong, not to the “country
party,” but to the manufacturing districts, which are
but little favourable to the “landed interest.”

Let us now, however, leave the examination of mere
partisan claims, to consider what results would be
afforded by a more national and equitable apportionment
of representation. Neither justice nor independence
would, it is obvious, be attained while leaving any very
small constituencies in existence. Although perfect
equality of electoral districts is unattainable, it is quite
possible to reach such a position that no place shall send
to Parliament double the number of members returned
by the same number of voters elsewhere. And as
public opinion becomes more enlightened, such a reason-
able arrangement as this will doubtless be insisted on,
and by degrees established. But to do it now, and only
Kinnear. | REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 143

by way of disfranchisement, would demand a very
serious measure. It would imply, at least, the abolition
of all separate constituencies of less than 20,000 in-
habitants, and the taking the second member from all
with less than 40,000. This would involve no less than
177 seats, though it would apply to a total of only
965,000 of population. Nay, the mere disfranchise-
ment of boroughs under 10,000 would involve 69, having
now 107 members, and taking the second seats from
those under 20,000 would involve 23 more seats, though
the total population transferred to the counties by the
disfranchisement would be only 458,000. This would
seem a large measure, though certaimly no town under
10,000 inhabitants can be considered usefully or reason-
ably entitled to a distinct representative.

But there is a method often advocated, and recom-
mended by experience, by which we can avoid dis-
franchisement, while retaining the distinction, established
in our constitution for so long, and sanctioned by the
necessary difference in qualification, between town and
county constituencies. This is the process of grouping.
But in applying it the error must be avoided into
which Government fell last year, of recognising only the
present represented boroughs. There are very many
towns throughout England as fully deserving to form
parts of such constituencies, as those which are now re-
presented. And we may for the purpose of the investi-
gation conveniently fix the limit of each such town at a
population of 5,000, which is higher than that of many
represented boroughs in England, and of many that form
parts of groups in Scotland, but is taken by the Registrar-
General as the standard figure at which a village merges
144 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

into a town. We may assume for the purpose of our
examination that these groups can be arranged so as to
have one member for from 20,000 to 40,000 of popula-
tion in the smallest, although evidently the different
constituencies may be of such dimensions as to have one,
two, or three members to each. Comparing towns and
counties in this respect we shall have in England and

Wales—

 

 

 

 

 

 

i Members.
Population. 1 to 40,990.

In counties at present . . f . | 11,427,655

Deduct inhabitants of towns shires 5, 000. . | 1,495,079

Counties under new arrangement . . . .| 9,982,576 247

Boroughs now represented. . . . . . «| 8,638,579

Add inhabitants of towns above 5,000 . .| 1,495,079

Boroughs under new arrangement . . . . | 10,133,658 251

 

But still, after deducting the towns above 5,000 from
the counties, there will, on a fair distribution of the
representation among them, be a great preponderance due
to the manufacturing and commercial districts. The
four following counties alone would then still be entitled
to the members indicated :—

 

 

 

P: t Increase

Number tachi in Number

Members. entitled Members.
York . 8 25 17
Lancaster 5 18 13
Stafford . 4 8 4
Middlesex 2 4 2
19 55 36

 

 

 

 
. Kiyyear.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 145

Still more marked, however, would be the result if we
take, as we should do, the number of voters, actual or
prospective, as the basis of relative adjustment. In this
case, in transferring the towns of 5,000 and upwards
from county and borough constituencies, we must
estimate the loss of county voters, and the increase of
borough voters, according to the usual proportion found
to exist in each case between electors and population. [
give this estimate in round numbers only :—

 

Members.

 

BlECEDTS. 1 to 2,073.
Counties at present . . . «| 540,271
Deduct proportion in towns ‘abowe 5, 000 rue 67,500
Counties under new arrangement. . . . .| 472,771 227

 

Boroughs at present (excluding double entries) | 485,820
Add proportion for towns above 5,000 . . . 75,000

Boroughs under new arrangement. . . . . 560,820 271

 

 

 

 

 

And now, to see what effect an extension of the suffrage
would have, we must have recourse to estimates based on
the number of occupiers at the lower rates in counties
and boroughs, according to their relative population (see
Return 1866, Nos. 81 and 335), deducting from boroughs
the 28 per cent. and from counties the 25 per cent. which
is found to represent the difference between the number of
occupiers and actual electors. (Return 1866, No. 81, note,
and County Returns, supplement.) I take a 14/. occupa-
tion franchise in counties, and a 6/. in boroughs, because
we have returns for both, and nothing higher is likely to
be again proposed, or accepted, by Reformers, at least in
boroughs.
146 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Electors. Tea
Counties, less towns, as above . . . 472,771
Additional occupiers at 141. to 501... . 292,292
Less proportion in towns above 5,000 . 36,536)
255,756
Deduct 25 per cent. . . . . 63,939} 191,817
Counties with new franchise . . . . 664,588 221
Boroughs and towns as above . . 560,820
Additional occupiers 61. to 10/., less 28
percent... . 238,780
Add proportion for ioand sued 5 ,000. 37,000) 275,780
Boroughs under new franchise . . . 836,600 277

 

 

 

 

These figures suffice to show what would be the result
of the perfectly equitable application of the principle of
equal representation of counties and boroughs demanded
by Mr. Disraeli. Since the probable result would be to
assign 277 Members to boroughs, all of such magnitude
as to be reasonably independent of external influence, and
only 221 to the counties, while of these latter nearly 60
would be absorbed by four of the leading manufacturing
and commercial districts, it is plain that the arrangement
is one which all Liberals must be eager to concede to the
singular demand of the Conservatives. If the consequence
should be that the “landed interest” should find itself
greatly diminished in authority, it will be only in precise
accordance with justice and with the facts of the case.
But though the agricultural portion of the population
barely amounts to a fourth of the whole, and therefore is
really not entitled to more than a fourth of the represen-
tation, it will always (at least in our generation) be
able, by force of its position, to control a much larger
amount of representation than properly belongs to it, for
Kinnear. ] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 147

in the agricultural counties the non-agricultural part of
the inhabitants consist chiefly of humble artisans and
tradesmen, so dependent on the land as to be wholly
subject to its influence. Therefore, in assigning to the
agricultural counties the proportion of Members to which
their number of voters are entitled, we shall certainly
still give to the interest of the landowners a very ample,
and indeed an excessive weight in the House of Commons.

Tt will, of course, be understood that the figures given
above, which indicate the proportion of representation as
between town and country, are not intended to imply the
necessity of establishing precisely equal electoral districts
among the boroughs themselves. The preponderance
which would then be given to the large towns (the me-
tropolis alone being entitled in ratio of population to 75
Members) may be deemed a very good reason for not at
present adopting the principle in full. It may, however,
be remarked that the dread of this result giving too much
weight to one interest is exaggerated; for when a city
becomes so enormous as London, its component parts cease
to have any common interest. But in so far as the con-
stituencies of the great towns are enlarged, those of the
smaller towns will be proportionably diminished, so that in
regard to them it may be reasonable to take only 20,000
inhabitants—or about 1,500 voters after the franchise is
lowered—as the general proportion entitled to return one
Member. And this result may be very easily attained, in
most instances, by grouping, as is done in Wales and
Scotland, in which last the constituencies produced by
the aggregation of towns, with from 15 to 600 voters each,
average in gencral about 1,500 electors. This system is
found to work well in all respects. There has never been.

L2
148 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

a charge of bribery in any election in Scotland since the
Reform Act, save in the case of one single group; and
practically the evil is unknown. ‘This peculiarity is
indeed not solely to be attributed to the grouping system,
for it is perhaps still more distinctly due to the sounder
public opinion engendered, among both the voters and the
non-voters, by the more general diffusion of education ;
but it at least shows that grouped boroughs may be
expected to become free from the stain of corruption as
education makes way. The contests are not, as a rule,
more expensive than in single constituencies. And great
advantage follows from the extinction of both local in-
fluence and petty local feeling, through the combination
of towns more apt to be rivals than partners in merely
personal objects. Thus even in Conservative counties the
boroughs, small as they are numerically, return Liberals
without exception. And the representatives selected are
very often of high ability, though with no local influence
whatsoever. There have been numerous instances since
1832, in which a perfect stranger (in two cases an Eng-
lish landowner) has obtained a seat for a Scottish district
of burghs, preferred before candidates with larger local
connexion, but whose politics or capacities were less
acceptable to the general body of the electors. Thus
also Mr. Caird, the first tenant farmer who sat in the
House of Commons, was elected, not by a county, but by
the Stirling district of boroughs, though personally in no
way connected with that part of the country."

1 Seeking only to discuss principles, and not attempting to sketch a
Reform Bill in its details, I have confined, for the sake of simplicity, the
illustrations in the text to England and Wales only. But it need not be

remarked that a just application of the principles would demand that Scot-
land and Ireland should be simultaneously taken into account, and that their
Kiyyear.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 149

I have now refuted one by one the arguments gene-
rally adduced in favour of small separate boroughs, and
I have shown by what arrangements and with what
results they might be extinguished or combined, so as to
make independent constituencies. In dealing with these
topics, occasion has arisen for incidentally remarking on
the prevalent evils which belong to our present system.
But since it is so much the fashion, among unwilling
Reformers, to insist that seats should be taken from small
boroughs only in so far as absolutely necessary to satisfy
the demands of the largest of our now unrepresented
towns, it may be well, in concluding, to point out speci-
fically the reasons that demand the absolute extinction
of such minute constituencies, not merely because of their
uselessness, and of their absorbing a representation due
to others, but because of their peculiar evils, and their
injurious influence on our national life.

Even when we assume the constituency which is com-
prised in a small town to be independent of external
influence, it is far from being a favourable example of
the national mind. The fact is almost proverbially
recognised, that the society of such places is occupied
with the pettiest cares, and, most frequently, with mere
personal gossip. It is more concerned with its own
circle than with the great men of the nation ; more in-
terested in some point of local improvement or taxation
than with the affairs of the commonwealth. But what
the “society,” 2.e. the professional and independent
persons, of such places are occupied with, has, of course,

representation should be equalized with that of England, not indeed in ratio
of population, but in ratio of probable number of electors under the extended
franchise.
150 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

still more attraction for the small tradesmen and the
labourers, who happen to have a qualification. All the
influences which in large towns tend to withdraw these
from the thought of their individual interests, and to
lift them to the consideration of imperial questions, are
absent in the small towns. Where everybody knows
everybody else, and all the private affairs of everybody
else, it is inevitable that private scandal should be more
interesting than the affairs of State. Where there is no
circulation for a well-conducted newspaper, no audience
for a series of good lectures, no chance of a meeting at
which leading public men will be present, there is really
no' counteracting influence to operate towards the en-
largement of the mind, or the purification of the sense
of public morality. In these circumstances, the elevation
to the rank of a borough returning a Member to Parlia-
ment only augments the evil. It gives to every local
jealousy and every social division something to fight
about. It gives to every local job an additional chance
of success, and inspires its abettors with double fervour.
It offers a prize of victory to the local parties, quite
irrespective of any public questions. Only by grouping
such a small town with several others, that have different
local divisions and objects, each thus neutralizmg the
others, is there any chance that public questions shall
really be taken into consideration in elections at all.

The tendency of all such small separate boroughs is,
moreover, to deteriorate rather than to improve. A very
small constituency must always have a proclivity towards
bribery. Public opinion, which is the safeguard against
that crime, is liable in such circumstances to be seriously
affected by a very moderate number of renegades to
Kiyyear.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 151

principle. Where there are but a few hundred electors,
there is a possibility of bribing a considerable proportion,
and there is the motive that such a proportion may turn
the election. But if a considerable proportion feel dis-
posed to take bribes, they feel themselves strong enough to
stand by each other, and to defy the reprobation of their
more upright fellows. The thin end of bribery is thus
constantly liable to be introduced, and, when once intro-
duced, the whole wedge of corruption presently follows.
This, again, is to be obviated only by making the con-
stituencies so large and wide-spread that, in general,
bribery, except on an impracticable scale, shall be un-
availing.

Thus far of boroughs which profess to be independent
of external influence. But worse is the operation of
those which are subject to such influence. Then the
whole system becomes a degrading lie. Men vote not as
they think, but as they are ordered. They hear speeches
from candidates addressed to their judgment, and they
know they are forbidden to judge of them according to
their consciences. They profess to be swayed by regard
to the Constitution, and the interests of the State, and
they know that they are swayed only by the compulsion
of their landlord or chief customers. To adopt such
means of procuring representatives of the public opinion
of England in her great Council, is to take the foul
matter of a cancer, and inoculate with it the yet healthy
parts of the body. Infinite degradation only can follow
from so gross, so avowed public immorality.

For these reasons, whoever wishes well to the moral
and social progress of the country must earnestly urge
the entire abrogation of the system of small consti-
152 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VI.

tuencies. It is not that individuals in such constituen-
cies are worse than their neighbours, but that they are
placed in circumstances more trying to their intelli-
gence and virtue. By amalgamating them with others
we shall apply a counteracting influence to these circum-
stances ; while at the same time we shall gain a true re-
presentation of the prevalent currents of English feeling in
the various districts of the country. We shall substitute
regard for public affairs in the room of petty jealousies
and petty interests, we shall by degrees purge out the
taint of bribery, and subdue the fatal influence of in-
timidation. In so doing, while we gain so much, we
shall lose nothing, for we shall have constituencies more
ready than now to recognise public merit, and sufficiently
diversified in character to afford room for every variety
of intelligence, information, and practical ability,
Kiyyzar.] REDISTRIBUTION OF SEATS. 153

NOTE.

Although the grossness of the inequalities in the borough representation is
80 well known that it would be superfluous to press them in argument, it
may be worth while to add a few figures recalling their character.

The following boroughs have less than 5,000 inhabitants each, according to
the Census of 1861, and the number of voters is that given, in the returns of

last year, for 1864-5 :-—
Population. Voters. Members.

Marlborough . . . . . . . . 4,898 275 2
Northallerton. . . . . . . . 4,755 442 1
Evesham . . . . . . 1. . 4,680 337 2
Wells . . . 1... we 4,648 274 2
Dartmouth. . ...... . 4,444 282 1
Thetford . 2. 2... wy ye 4,208 224 2
MOE so. Gk Genta ety. ae p> 9 OO 382 2
Honiton . . 2... .. . 38,301 267 2
Lyme Regis . 2. 1 ww ys 8,215 250 1
Ashburton. . . .. 4. « « 3,062 350 1
Arundel. . 2. 2. 4. 1 1 1 wy 2,498 174 1

Totals . . . . . . 48,705 3,257 17

The following have from 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants :—

Voters. Members. Voters. Members.

Tewkesbury . . . 325 2 Cane . . . .. 174 1
Abingdon . . . 304 1 Lymington . . . 347 2
Leominster . . . 367 2 Launceston , . . 3871 1
Petersfield . . . 296 1 Richmond. . . . 316 2
Brecknock . . . 281 1 Harwich . . . . 386 2
Andover . . . . 255 2

Knaresborough . . 272 2 Totals . . .4,074 — 20
Thirsk... . . 380 1 ——

Then there are 17 boroughs, with populations between 6,000 and 7,000,
returning 28 members; and 12 between 7,000 and 8,000, returning 18
members. In all, 53 boroughs, with a population of 314,005, returning 83
members, or about one member to each 3,800 of population, more than
ten times the proportion in all the rest of England. The single boroughs
of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Finsbury, Tower Hamlets, and Maryle-
bone have each a larger population than the whole of these boroughs put
together, yet have each only two members. Tower Hamlets, with 34,115
voters, has but the same representation as Thetford with 224 ; so that each
elector in the latter counts as equal in power to 152 electors in the former.
The 11 boroughs with less than 5,000 population each, can outvote the whole
of the metropolis, with Liverpool and Manchester added, for these have but
16 members, though the population is 2,638,978 against 43,705, and the value
of the property assessed to income-tax is 2,903,873]. against 13,402I.
Vil.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS,
OR INDIRECT REPRESENTATION.

BY BERNARD CRACROFT.

AN analysis of the House of Commons, as it actually is,
appeared a not unnatural point of departure in a general
discussion of the question of Reform. To political readers
familiar with division lists the title itself of this chapter
would perhaps carry a sufficient meaning. Yet some-
thing more is here implied than an analysis of parlia-
mentary votes ; and as this volume is, I believe, addressed
to a larger public, a few preliminaries may not be
amiss. By an analysis of the House of Commons, the
‘analysis of the House itself as an electoral result of
a particular electoral system is here intended. But
it requires little reflection to perceive that such an
analysis, however conscientiously attempted, and how-
ever laboriously pursued, can at best only be suggestive.
To fix the political or any other complexion of six
hundred and sixty human beings, who may and do vary,
is a task which can never very exhaustively be fulfilled.
Even that most tenacious and most conservative of all
tenacious and conservative political institutions, the
156 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

British Parliament, is scarcely an exception to the rule.
I therefore ask such indulgence in the progress of my
undertaking as may seem to belong to the subject
undertaken.

Like everything else, the House of Commons may be
analysed in a variety of ways. It may, for instance, be
analysed into Liberals and Conservatives, into Protection-
ists and Freetraders, into Churchmen and Dissenters, into
Reformers and Anti-reformers. But these: familiar dis-
tinctions are subordinate to more general views of the
House of Commons in its representative character.

Taking a wider circle, perhaps the most general
division which arises on a first glance at the subject, is
of the Commons indoors, so to speak, and the Commons
out-of-doors ; and this again implies a classification of
Members within, and a classification of constituencies
without. This division, rough and idle as it might
appear, has one recommendation. It touches imme-
diately the whole question of direct and indirect repre-
sentation. And the distinction between direct and in-
direct representation is the key to the whole question of
Reform.

In an assembly of delegates an analysis of the dele-
gates themselves would be unnecessary, because an
analysis of the constituencies by whom they were
delegated would exhaust the subject. The personality
of each delegate would disappear, or disappear politically,
behind the direct power and voice of his constituency,
and any consideration of that personality would be a
matter of speculative curiosity, not of political interest.
But, in the English House of Commons, a Member not
being a delegate, but a representative whose freedom is
CRAcROFT. ] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 157

only limited by certain considerations, we have to take
into account both the Member himself within the House,
and such influence as his constituency may or might
be able to exercise upon him from without. The con-
stituencies have been discussed in another essay. The
present essay is chiefly concerned with the Members
themselves—with the Commons indoors rather than
with the Commons out-of-doors; and the end proposed
is to show what manner of House it is, take it all in
all, which is elected under the present elective system ;
and, being elected, what are the broad representative
results of their election. It is true the constituencies
cannot be kept entirely out of sight, but they will be
alluded to only so far as may enable the reader to
appreciate the full reasons for the stress laid upon the
distinction between direct and indirect representation,
between voting power at the polling-booth and repre-
sentative power in Parliament. It is not too much to
say that nine-tenths of the confusion, nine-tenths of the
hostility, involved in the controversies which have grown
round Reform, have arisen through losing sight of this
fundamental distinction. The arch and keystone of the
whole subject will be found there.

To take a salient but not by any means a solitary ex-
ample. The insurance offices have no direct represen-
tation in Parliament at all. They do not figure in the
Reform Bill. They are not boroughs, they are not
counties. At the polling-booth their voting power is
nothing. But in the House itself, partly owing to the
high character and great intelligence of their conductors,
partly owing to their prodigious wealth, and partly
owing to the enormous interests with which they blend,
158 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

they are most heavily represented. Between fifty and
sixty Members of Parliament are directors of insurance
companies; and when Mr. Sheridan, the recognised
leader of this influential phalanx, rises in his place to
plead for the remission of the Fire Duty, or expound
any other grievance connected with those offices, his
statements are listened to, quite independently of himself,
with an attention and a care conceded to one who
speaks not only with knowledge and authority, but with
a certain well-understood if undefined power at his back.
Constitutionally viewed, the representation of the insur-
ance offices in Parliament is unrecognised and indirect.
It is fortuitous, masonic. Practically it is none the
less powerful. There it is, a positive result of an elec-
toral system which knows nothing of insurance offices.
Here, then, is one example, which proves the necessity
of bearing in mind the fundamental distinction between
direct and indirect representation. Let us take one more
preliminary example, though of a different kind. The
aristocracy and the landowners are overwhelmingly repre-
sented not only in the House of Lords, but in the House
of Commons. A stranger might ask how and by what
means. The answer would be, certainly not in virtue of
their own voting power at the polling-booth. That is nil.
Certainly not by virtue of any legal enactment in their
favour. The Constitution recognises Crown, Lords, and
Commons; but the Lords alone have their seats secured
to them in the House of Lords by the Constitution. There
is no law compelling the constituencies to return any
patticular class of men to the House of Commons. The
property qualification has been abolished. How, then,
do members get there; and when there, how is their
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 159

representation of those who sent them there to be
measured and defined? The answer in the case of the
aristocracy is evident. They get there not by direct but
by indirect influence—by the power, in short, of their
prodigious antecedent advantages, by their irredeemable
start in the race for power. When there, they repre-
sent, derectly their constituencies, indirectly themselves ;
yet, from the very nature of things, in such a manner
that the indirect representation throws, and must neces-
sarily throw, the direct representation into the shade.
It is in the nature of things that a man’s self should
be nearer to him than his constituency. There is a
homely saying, that a man’s skin sits closer to him
than his shirt. And, without any imputation on their
good faith, so it is with Members of Parliament.
Single individuals are no doubt capable of preferring
the interests of others to their own. Single Members of
Parliament, with personal interests of their own, may
prefer public to private considerations. But, in the case
of classes dealing with class interests, it is the law of
their being that they should consider themselves para-
mount and necessary to the public welfare. Thus an
individual landowner may be indifferent to the claims
of land, and vote against them where he thinks it right ;
but a class of landowners, whomsoever else they repre-
sent, will have a tendency first to represent themselves.
That tendency may be checked, controlled, overruled—
it sometimes is—but it is always there.

Such a tendency is not peculiar to landowners. It
happens, however, that, in this country, a concurrence of
causes has given greater solidarity to their order, and
greater solidity to their power, than to any other class
160 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

in the community. Not only have they the natural
tendency of all orders and classes in all countries and
times, when they can, to represent themselves, but it
might almost be said that in this country they cannot
help representing themselves. So vast is their traditional
power, so broadly does it sit over the land, so deep and
ancient are its roots, so multiplied and ramified every-
where are its tendrils, and creepers, and feelers, that the
danger is never lest they should have too little, but
always lest they should have too much power, and so,
even involuntarily, choke down the possibilities of new
life from below. Whether they sit for rural or oppidan
constituencies, whether their politics are Radical, Liberal,
or Conservative, whether they represent Trade, Manu-
facture, or Agriculture, they belong to an order external
to all three. They find that order encamped in large
forces in the House on both sides. They have a common
freemasonry of blood, a common education, common
pursuits, common ideas, a common dialect, a common
religion, and—what more than any other thing binds
men together—a common prestige, a prestige growled
at occasionally, but on the whole conceded, and even,
it must be owned, secretly liked by the country at
large. All these elements, obvious in themselves, but
difficult to measure and gauge, go to make up that truly
and without exaggeration tremendous consent of power,
often latent, often disguised, never absent, which con-
stitutes the indirect representation of the aristocracy in
the House of Commons.

This, then, is another example of indirect representa-
tion. It differs, however, from that of the insurance
offices. There we have the case of a number of men
Cracrorv.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 161

returned by all manner of constituencies to represent
all manner of interests, who, once returned, happen to
answer the purposes of another representation,—a repre-
sentation probably never intended or even considered
by those who returned them. Material interests alone
are indirectly represented in behalf of the insurance
offices. No question of class feeling or class sentiment
is there involved. But in the case of a member of
the upper classes sitting in Parliament to represent the
interests of lower classes, we have to consider his
direct representation of the interests intrusted to him,
and then his indirect or spontaneous and unconscious
representation of himself—that is to say, of the general
sentiments, feelings, views, and also (for they cannot
be omitted) material interests of his own class, that
class among whom he lives, moves, and has (in many
more senses than one for the purposes of this analysis),
“ his being.”

These instances of indirect representation are only
two out of the vast number which belong to the time-
honoured anomalies of our system, but it is enough if at
first starting they enable the reader fully to realize the
importance in any discussion on Reform of keeping in
view the distinction between voting power at the polling-
booth, and representative power inside the House. With
a view however to carry those readers with me a step
further, who may think that they already see an answer
to the arguments which these instances may fore-
shadow, I will ask them to give full weight to one
more preliminary observation. It is this: If the argu-
ment so well known in the present day as the “swamping
argument” could have any application at all to English

M
162 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay VII.

affairs, those who rely upon it should consider this
fact. All the constituencies are swamped already, as it
is! Numbers already prevail there. Land, wealth, in-
telligence, are already outvoted at the polling-booth.
Yet so little are they outvoted in the House of Commons,
that they sit there alone, and the only question really at
stake is, whether, under such a constitution as ours is,
numbers as such can ever be heard there at all.

This brings me to the first branch of the analysis in
view :—direct representation, and its broadest division,
population and land. How is population, merely as popu-
lation, in the bald arithmetical sense of mere numbers,
represented in the House? How is land represented? At
first sight, and on a superficial view, the answer appears
decisive and unqualified. Numbers are, it might be
said, overwhelmingly represented there. Land not at
all, or scarcely in any decent ratio. Looking at the
United Kingdom as a whole, and dividing it broadly
into boroughs and counties, we find that a popula-
tion of eighteen million souls in the counties have
only 256 Members in the House of Commons, whereas
a population of eleven millions in boroughs have 396
Members.

Here then is a very striking aspect of the House of
Commons. It is divided into two broad sections of, say,
400 and 250 Members. The 250 Members represent
land, the 400 Members seem to represent population un-
connected with land; and, by an application of the
compound rule of three it may be shown that population
as against land is represented in the advantageous ratio
of more than two to one.

I dwell upon this, because it is one of those salient
CRacROFT.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 163

facts peculiarly likely to impress the imagination of a
practical people, and peculiarly adapted to shut out
the light of any more recondite arguments, how-
ever conclusive, on the other side. Doctor Johnson,
stamping his foot on the ground to shake down the
Berkeleyan cobwebs, was not more confident of the
strength of his position than the practical Tory, who
sets his foot on this great fact and proclaims that
land is grossly unrepresented. Yet “ this great fact”
is wholly delusive. It is honeycombed by a thousand
underground channels. True it is, that in the apparent
result the boroughs have 396 Members, the counties
256. But let us see how this gross result is “ redressed ”
in minute detail.

And first, of these 396 borough Members a couple
of hundred Members, at least, belong to what is called
technically the territorial class. The House may be
roughly divided into landowners, with their relatives (in-
cluding of course the aristocracy there), and mercantile
Members. ‘Those Members who belong to neither class
are so few, that they may for the present purpose be
neglected. The “F inancial Reform Almanack,” great and
most admirable in compilation, sets down the representa-
tives of the mercantile, manufacturing, and shipowning
interest in the House at eighty-four. I have gone over
the same ground in Dod’s “ New Parliament” with the
greatest care. But with the utmost diligence, and the
help of the “ Joint Stock Companies’ Directory,” and
every other source of information I could obtain, I
cannot discover that the mercantile, manufacturing, and

1 The six University Members are left out. They add to the indirect
representation of the landed interest.

M 2
164 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

shipping interests, including also owners of collieries,
have more than 122 Members in the House. Of these
four or five sit for counties. Then there are in the
House 78 bankers or bank directors, but many of
these are either landowners themselves or connected
with peers or landowners. Of those who remain, many
already figure in the list of merchants. On the whole,
the list of Members who are merchants or bankers, or
both, and nothing else, may fairly be taken at consider-
ably under 150. And this leaves out of view the
possibility and probability of their also being landowners,
though not known as such to the public. Deducting
these from the 396 borough Members, there remain 246
borough Members, who are almost to a man land-
owners, or connected with landowning interests. If
we add 246 to 256 we get 502 as the ascertained
number of the territorialists in the House of Commons.
The number is probably much larger ; but, as a curious
confirmation of a result for which, without a personal
knowledge of each individual in the House, it would be
impossible to vouch, the number of Public School men
and University men given in Dod is, as far as I could
count them,’ 429, and, as the list of the remaining 229
comprises some sixty or seventy names belonging to the
aristocratic element, additional light is thrown upon the
calculation.

As a general result, I fearlessly challenge the reader
to test my assertion, that not less than 500 Membets in
the House of Commons are either county Members, or,
if representing boroughs, either peers or relations of
peers, or landowners or under landowners’ influence.

1 They may be more. They are not less.
Cracrort,] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 165

In other words, land, which at first sight appears to
have only 256 Members in the House, has, in reality
and for practical nses too, some 500 Members, and more,
who get there by hook or by crook, men of the same
ideas and feelings and bias—men who, in spite of every
superficial political difference of opinion, belong, so to
speak, to one vast cousinhood. And this is one aspect
under which we begin to see how the representation of
mere numbers, so powerful on paper, is in practice
neutralized.

But that is not all. There are many other checks
besides. Six hundred thousand persons in the Tower
Hamlets have two Members in the House. But then six
thousand persons at Bodmin have two Members also, so
that one man at Bodmin politically outweighs ninety-nine
in the Tower Hamlets. Again, four hundred thousand
persons in Liverpool have two Members allotted to them,
while four thousand persons at Thetford also have two
Members, and thus one man at Thetford outweighs
ninety-nine at Liverpool. And so on, all the way up
one-half the boroughs, and all the way down the other
half.

Or look at it again in another light. Eleven boroughs,
with a total population of forty-four thousand persons in
round numbers, return seventeen Members. These eleven
boroughs are Wells, Totnes, Thetford, Northallerton,
Marlborough, Lyme Regis, Honiton, Evesham, Dartmouth,
Ashburton, Arundel. The gross estimated rental of these
towns amounts in the aggregate to no more than 200,0001.,
a sum less than the income of one or two of the great
English landowners. According to Dod, whose state-
ments, I hope, may be used without discourtesy, they be-
166 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

long respectively—belonged in 1852'—to the Dean and
Chapter of Wells, the Duke of Cleveland, the Duke of
Grafton and Lord Ashburton, Miss Pierse of Bedale Hall
and Lord Ailesbury, Mr. Attwood, Mr. Joseph Locke and
Viscount Courtenay, Lord Northwick and Mr. Rudge, Lord
Clinton, the Seales of Mount Boone, and the Duke of Nor-
folk. At the last: general election they returned Mr. Jol-
liffe, eldest son of Sir William Jolliffe, son-in-law of Lord
Enfield, and Captain Hayter, son of the late “whip ;” Mr.
Pender (unseated), a Manchester manufacturer, and Mr.
Alfred Seymour, a member of Brooks’s ; Mr. John Harvey
and the Hon. Alexander Baring, the former brother-in-
law of the eighth Earl of Cavan, the latter son-in-law of
the sixth Earl of Cardigan; Mr. Charles Mills, London
banker, son-in-law of the third Earl of Harewood ; Lord
Ernest Bruce and Mr. Henry Baring; Mr. Treeby,
“ opposed to rash innovations ;” Mr. Frederick Goldsmid,
supposed to have property in or near Honiton, and Mr.
Baillie Cochrane, great-grandson-in-law of the fifth Duke
of Rutland ; Mr. James Bourne and Mr. Edward Holland
—one the squire of Hackinsall, the other a former county
Member ; Mr. John Hardy, brother of the Right Hon.
Gathorne Hardy ; Mr. Jardine, a London merchant, of
the firm of Matheson and Co. ; and, finally, Lord Edward
Howard, the well-known representative of the English
Catholics.

The SEVENTEEN Members above-mentioned represent
eleven boroughs whose joint population is that of a big
parish (about half that of Kensington, for instance, which
has not even ONE Member), and whose whole real pro-

1 Mr. Dod’s “ Electoral Facts,” the only book of reference on this subject,
was last published in 1852. .
Cracrort. | ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 167

perty falls short of a great English fortune. On the
other hand, Birmingham, Finsbury, Lambeth, Leeds,
Liverpool, Manchester, Marylebone, Tower Hamlets,
Westminster, have only eighteen Members to represent a
population of 3,300,000, and a gross estimated rental of
2.4,300,0001.

Tt has been much the fashion until perhaps recently
to decry the Members of great constituencies. But the
Members for these, the nine largest boroughs in Eng-
land and Wales, will bear comparison for parliamen-
tary reputation with any other eighteen Members chosen
at random from great or small boroughs on both sides of
the House. They are Mr. Scholefield, Mr. Bright, Mr.
Torrens, Mr. Lusk, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Doulton, Mr. Bee-
croft, Mr. Baines, Mr. Horsfall, Mr. Graves, Mr. Bazley,
Mr. James, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Chambers, Mr. Butler, Mr.
Ayrton, the Hon. R. Grosvenor, and last, not quite
least perhaps, Mr. Stuart Mill. That is to say, at least
half of the Members for the nine largest boroughs have
parliamentary reputations in the country. If it is said
that I am travelling over old ground, that these facts
have long been admitted, that it is admitted numbers
are not represented as such in the House of Commons,
nor is it intended they should be, I can only reply that
I am not arguing here whether numbers should or
should not have a voice in Parliament, but attempting
to unravel the actual facts. The conclusions will be
stated presently.

What we have arrived at now is this, that the great
fact of the boroughs having 396 borough Members for
11,000,000 souls, and the counties having only 256
Members to represent 18,000,000,—that this wonderful
168 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay VII.

fact, which is the main argument for giving the counties
more Members, means really nothing at all. Bearing in
mind the distinction between direct and indirect repre-
sentation, the point to look at is not how many Members
sit for counties, but how many Members of the so-called
county class get into the House altogether, for counties
and for boroughs.

Tt does not matter, for instance, how a sugar merchant
gets into the House, if he gets there. When there, he
is there, and he represents sugar, with other sugar mer-
chants, or against them, as the case may be. The upshot
is, that sugar is “represented.” For let it be observed
here once for all—and I particularly beg the attention
of the reader to this point—representation is inde-
pendent of mere difference of opinion. I have excluded
delegation, and the whole of this analysis and any
conclusions I may endeavour to draw from it are
founded upon the hypothesis of representation. Now
sugar, for instance, is equally represented by the East
India sugar merchants and by the West India sugar
merchants in Parliament, whether they sit for this
place or for that, and whether they agree in opinion or
disagree. Representation, if the word is to have any
meaning of its own beyond delegation, must include
the representation of differences as well as agreements
of opinion. Thus Liverpool merchants and London
merchants differ widely in opinion. But trade is “repre-
sented” in the House both by the Liverpool merchant
and by the London merchant who happen to be there.

In the same way county Members represent land, and
the feelings, opinions, and traditions of the landed class,
including all their differences. A and B are cousins,
Cracrort. | ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 169

landowners, county Members. Both are Etonians, both
Oxonians, both Guardsmen, both have married daughters
of peers. But one is a member of the Carlton, the other
of Brooks’s. One isa Protectionist, the other a Freetrader.
One hugs primogeniture, the other thinks it better that
land should be as saleable as a watch. One is an enthusi-
astic defender of the Protestant faith in Ireland, the other
thinks that the Irish Church would be best swept off
the face of the earth. One hates America and all that
is American, drawing all his arguments from New York;
the other shrugs his shoulders, says the Americans are
the kindest people in the world, and points with a land-
owner's pride to the conduct of the Western farmers
during the late war. Here are differences enough in
all conscience. No doubt, too, one man belongs to a
majority, the other to a minority, in they common
class. But who can doubt that each in his own way,
and in the main, represents that class to which he
belongs, that he shares its more general likes and dis-
likes, its horizons and planes of thought and sentiment,
its secret affinities and secret repulsions, its vistas of
progress, its blank walls of obstruction. What he does
not represent—and represented still less before the
Reform Bill—is the mercantile feeling and fever, the
ardent faith im progress, the belief, often delusive, in a
mercantile millennium, to be obtained, partly by the
boundless development of human energy striving like fire
ever upwards, partly by unforeseen, but probable dis-
coveries, which at any moment may throw additional
millions into the lap of human comfort, and so raise
humanity another stage above the gulf of wretchedness
and want.
170 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIL

The landowner’s creed, pure and simple, is the creed
of calm and long possession. “He that is wretched,
let him be wretched still,’—Heaven’s decree, who made
man and the worm. It has the dignity of repose and
the serenity of the everlasting landscape. It abhors dis-
turbance and all that is new. It is thrifty, as not being
used to windfalls; niggardly, as being accustomed to
small losses. It is tenacious, to idolatry, of its power,
and for that will sell all that it has, and the education
of the poor. It believes there is nothing new under
the sun, and openly or secretly sneers at the wildness
and vulgarity of progress. Repose is its ideal in things
and men—the essence of its behaviour and nobility.
It thinks “aims” but forms of vulgarity, for every aim is
a confession of inferiority. He who is “THERE,” need go
no further: to aim is to confess to something beyond.
It aims no higher, condescends no lower. And so, in a
thousand forms, the root of all vulgarity and snobbish-
ness, in the landowner’s definition of vulgarity and snob-
bishness, is the absence of repose—fuss: fuss of good
manners, fuss of gentility, fuss of kindness, fuss of hostility,
fuss of disquisition, fuss of energy, fuss of haste, fuss of
eagerness. Nature, he thinks, cow-footed, stands for ever ;
even railways will pass away.

But if trade does not represent land, nor land trade,
still less does either represent labour. Land is repre-
sented in Parliament up to the eyes; trade can make
its voice felt, as in the matter of Protection. But there
is one other fact to be considered, most important for the
purposes of this analysis. Trade, since the abolition of
the Corn Laws, has tended more and more to coalesce
and blend with Land, and the landed interest. The
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 171

reason is plain: the bulk of English merchants and
mercantile men are also in different degrees landowners.
Protection was the only wall of separation between land
and trade. That wall removed, the material interests
of the two classes have become, and tend to become,
every day more indissolubly connected and inseparably
blended. Half the peerage have mercantile and manu-
facturing interests. The mercantile interest is itself a
hierarchy in which the little shopman looks up with not
unfounded hope to the position of the merchant, while
the merchant in his turn generally has one ambition at
heart, to found a county family. The landowners on
their part are often on the look-out for heiresses. Thus
the fusion of the two interests is becoming daily more
and more complete. The result is, that Parliament is,
and tends in this country more and more to become, a
Parliament of land and trade, not labour; of employers,
not of employed ; of officers, not soldiers; of admirals,
not sailors; of railway directors, rather than railway
travellers,

In dealing with the landed interest, as compared with
the mercantile, it has been found necessary to argue in
some degree hypothetically. It is almost impossible with-
out personal inquiry to find out, within a large debateable
margin, who is, and who is not, possessed of a landed
estate. But in the matter of the aristocratic interest
inside the House of Commons, Dod’s “ Parliamentary
Guide” furnishes the materials for a very adequate
analysis. According then to Dod, in the Parliament of
August, 1865, there were returned 71 baronets, 11 elder
sons of baronets, 19 younger sons of baronets, and §
grandsons of baronets ; a total for the baronetage alone
172 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

of 110. There were also 37 peers, or elder sons of peers,
64 younger sons of peers, and 15 grandsons of peers ;
a total of 116 Members of Parliament for the peerage,
and for the peerage and baronetage together a total of
226. Besides these there are one hundred Commoners
sitting in Parliament who are connected with the
peerage by marriage or descent. The aristocratic class,
or element, in the House of Commons has therefore a
grand total of, at least, 326 Members. And, unques-
tionably, this number would be found, if an exhaustive
search were made among other sources of information, to
be below the mark. When it is remembered that in the
fullest House on record, namely, on the 28th of April,
1866, those who voted in the majority had only 320
votes, the number 326, as the symbol of caste in the
House of Commons, is significant.

But even leaving out of view the remaining 120 or
130 Members who substantially belong to the same
class, there are one or two more calculations, which con-
firm the results obtained in this branch of the analysis.
The existence of 326 Members representing one class
in the House is only one view of the case. These men
are not mere separate units, like insurance office direc-
tors ; they are not a mere Venetian set of a few fami-
lies, but, to repeat an expression already used, one vast
cousinhood. It was lately said of Lord Granville, that
he represents the “cousins in Parliament.” If he does,
he may be congratulated on his political power, for “the
cousins” mean simply three-fourths of the House of
Commons, and the connexion of those three-fourths not
only with one another, but with the House of Lords.

There are in the House of Commons 79 Members who
Cracrort,] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 173

represent the alliance between peer and peer, 53 who
represent an alliance between a peer and a baronet, and
23 between baronet and baronet. Or taking another
view—117 Members in the House represent one peer-
age by marriage or descent, 67 members represent two
peerages, 18 represent three peerages. Nor is this con-
fined to the aristocratic element. Some time ago an
ex-governor of the Bank of England in the House of
Commons told one of the profoundest political writers
of the day, that he himself was related to thirty other
Members of Parliament, all sitting with him at that time.
And this view gives us an insight into the extraordinary
political solidarity of the upper classes. The parliamen-
tary frame is kneaded together almost out of one class ;
it has the strength of a giant and the compactness of
a dwarf. For in this respect one Parliament is very
much like another.

Again—and this consideration deserves the utmost
attention—there is in this country a distinct parlia-
mentary class, which numbers at the outside some three
or four thousand names. The total number of candidates
since 1832 is hardly over four thousand ; and if you look
down the list of polls since 1832 in Acland’s “ Imperial
Poll Book,” the same names recur again and again, not
only as successful Members, but as unsuccessful candi-
dates. Each constituency seems to be laid siege to by a
given number of men, who appear to remain round it in
expectancy, year after year, for five, ten, twenty years.
This class belongs to the upper ten thousand, and spends
its life in following the tide of public opinion in the con-
stituencies, and taking advantage of every new turn in
the tide. The Reform Bill made vast changes in the
174 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

legislation of the House of Commons, but, as Lord Russell
then prophesied, it has left class ascendancy quite un-
touched. Perhaps the number of new men is increased
by two or three score. Perhaps the men who are now
returned to Parliament are on the average older men,
sedater politicians, greater worshippers of the respecta-
bilities. Perhaps the result has been to increase what it
is difficult to describe otherwise than as political Philistin-
ism, especially on the Liberal side,—for there is no Philis-
tine like your respectable and wary Liberal Philistine,
with his old party watch-words and old party Shibboleths,
which he follows in a narrow grooye, afraid to look either
to the right or to the left. But on the whole the centre of
gravity of political power is just where it was before the
Reform Bill—far above the belt, nor is it likely that any
extension of the suffrage or any redistribution of power
will place it elsewhere. Under any Reform Bill, the same
classes who wield political power now will continue to
wield it. The real difference will be that as the con-
stituencies change, so will those who study their favour,
and they will take problems, social and political, into
consideration which they hitherto ignored.

To return to the analysis.

I have endeavoured to show that the representatives
of the landed class in the House of Commons number
about five-sevenths of the whole, and the mercantile ele-
ment about two-sevenths. Let me add one detail to show
that not only is population not represented in the House,
but that in Parliamentary Divisions upon subjects which
affect numbers directly and property not at all, numbers
are ignored. Two examples may suffice. In the division
on the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, on March 2d, 1866,
CracrorT. ] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 175

156 Members voted for the second reading, 176 against,
—adverse majority in Parliament, 20. But the electors
who returned the Ayes were 347,733, and the electors
who returned the Noes were 294,715; so that the elec-
toral majority in favour of the Bill was 68,018. Yet the
question whether or not a man may marry his sister-in-
law is one which affects the million quite as much as
the upper ten thousand,

Again, in the division on the Flogging Bill, in 1864,
there was a parliamentary majority for the Bill of 2,
and an electoral majority against the Bill of 90,540.
Yet this is certainly a point on which, under a Govern-
ment which professes to be not paternal or despotic, but
constitutional, numbers should have a voice. [If officers
may have an opinion as to what punishment befits a
gentleman, are the lower classes not to have an opinion
as to what punishment they consider appropriate to an
offence committed by members of their own class? To
deny it, would be to show a deficiency in that English
and popular constitutional feeling without which no man
in this country can be a really great statesman.

Numbers, then, as such are not at all represented in
the House of Commons—rather the reverse. Nor are
the working men represented as working men. Immense
stress was laid on the fact that they possess 25 per
cent. of the votes at the polling-booth, or 128,603 of
the borough votes in England and Wales. But how
are these votes distributed? Fifteen seaport towns
absorb 21,774. These are Bristol, Liverpool, South-
ampton, Birkenhead, Brighton, Devonport, Portsmouth,
Chatham, Hull, Dover, Hastings, Pembroke, Cardiff,

1 The latter result is taken from Acland’s “ Imperial Poll Book.”
176 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

Sunderland, Scarborough. And who are their Members ?
A highly interesting group. Mr. Henry Berkeley and
Sir Morton Peto, Mr. Horsfall and Mr. Graves, Mr.
Gurney and Mr. Moffatt, Mr. Laird, Mr. White and Mr.
Fawcett. I shall not trouble the reader with the whole
list of the 26 Members. He will find it in the Appendix.
I will only point out that only one among them really
represents the working man in the sense of understand-
ing and expressing his peculiar political views and tenets.
That is Mr. Fawcett. Then there are the 8 Metropolitan
districts, which absorb 40,448 working men, and here
again, out of 18 Members, the working man only gets
one representative, Mr. Hughes. Besides these, there
are 9 boroughs which absorb 20,726 more of the cele-
brated 25 per cent. without much rhyme,—namely, Nor-
wich, York, Oxford (of all places), Leicester,—and with
more reason, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Sheffield,
Nottingham, and Manchester. They returned, in 1865,
Mr. James and Mr. Bazley, Mr. Bright and Mr. Schole-
field, Mr. Morley and Sir Robert Clifton, Mr. Roebuck
and Mr. Hadfield, Mr. Harris and Mr. Taylor, &c. &c.
not one of them, not even Mr. Bright, being in any true
sense a working man’s Member. Thus, then, 82,948 out
of the 128,000 working men on the register are already
spent upon 32 boroughs, leaving an average of 271
working men for each of the remaining 168 English and
Welsh borough constituencies, without any further result
than to give them as a grand total, 2 out of 334 Members.
And I have not yet alluded to 6 of the 8 boroughs in
which they have an actual majority, and upon which Mr.
Dudley Baxter, in his ingenious pamphlet, laid so much
stress. The 8 boroughs are Coventry, Stafford, Maldon,
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 177

Newcastle-under-Lyne, Pembroke, Beverley, Greenwich,
and St. Ives. And here is the full list of the Members
they returned in 1865. Mr. Eaton, of London, a silk mer-
chant, and Conservative; Mr, Treherne, a barrister, and
Conservative ; Mr. Meller, a Conservative ; Mr. Sandford,
a Tory ; Mr. Earle, a Conservative ; Mr. Buckley, a near
relative of a former Member for the same constituency,
and a Conservative; Mr. Edwards, a Conservative ; Mr.
Sykes, a Conservative ; Mr. Paull, a Conservative. The
remaining 5 Members are Liberals:—Mr. Arthur Bass,
a Cambridge man; Mr. Allen, an Oxonian; Sir Hugh
Owen, Alderman Salomons, and Sir Charles Bright.
Nine Conservatives out of 14 Members are returned by
the only constituencies in which the working men have
an actual majority. Nor is there anything distinctive
in the class from which those Members are chosen. They
are much what any other 14 Members might be who
were chosen by any other 8 boroughs.

The working classes, then, who have 128,000 votes at
the polling-booth, and an actual majority in the elec-
tion of 14 Members, have in the House 2 real Members
of their own. The railways, which have hardly any
votes at the polling-booth, or hardly any they could
utilize if they would, have 179 railway directors in
the House of Commons, who represent railway share-
holders, not railway travellers. The bankers have 78
bankers and bank directors in the House, the insur-
ance offices 53. There appear from Dod to be only 12
brewers in the House, but it is quite certain that the
latent brewing element in the House is enormous. If
the Members were counted who possess all or a large
number of the public-houses round the boroughs they

N
178 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

represent, the list would not be small. It is a favourite
commonplace with landowners, that the power of land
is superior to all other power because it is lasting.
This is not quite so universally true as they suppose.
A. landowner may have enormous political influence,
his successor may be a cypher. And there are many com-
binations which beat land hollow for permanency and
efficiency. I will not mention names. But here for
instance is a case in pomt. A is possessed of a large
fortune, and has three sons, B, C, D. He makes B a
brewer, C a banker, and D a solicitor in the same town.
These three men soon monopolise the whole substantial
influence in the borough, and their power, like a three-
pronged fork, is planted as firmly in the land as if it
were part of the soil. All new influences grow round it,
and tend to strengthen and establish it, and not even the
blunders of those who possess it can shake it.

To proceed, among the 500 landowners, more or less,
and the 100 traders, more or less, who compose the
House of Commons, are also 179 railway directors, 78
bankers, and 12 brewers. Among the traders, Dod gives
7 ship-owners, 4 East India merchants, 10 iron masters,
7 cotton manufacturers and calico printers, 5 worsted and
carpet manufacturers, 2 silk manufacturers.

Again, 58 Members have been in the Guards, and 19
are members of the Guards Club ; 54 Members belong to
other regiments, and 52 are members of the other mili-
tary clubs; 48 Members are militiamen, 44 volunteers,
and 56 yeomen. The navy would seem to have only 11
Members in the House, but that number must fall short
of the truth. Accepting it, the total naval and military
element in the House numbers 271.
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 179

Turning to the Public Schools and Universities, the
number of Etonians in the House appears to be 105. It
is probably greater. Harrow has 52 voices to defend it ;
Rugby, 23; Westminster, who attends the debates her-
self, is satisfied with 17 spokesmen ; Winchester has 9 ;
Shrewsbury, 5; Sandhurst, 5; and Woolwich, 4. The
total number of Public School men in the House of Com-
mons is 227, a formidable number whenever a rooted
prejudice has to be attacked ; and what prejudice is so
rooted, so unconscious, so amiable, so defensible as a
school prejudice? Oxford may listen to herself out of 136
mouths ; Cambridge, out of 110; but Oxford has carried
off the Olympian prize, and may claim the Adyus dyopr}rns
of the age as her own. On the other hand, at the time
of the last general election, upon which this analysis is
founded (no notice being taken of subsequent changes),
Cambridge might claim the ava€ avipdv of half a cen-
tury. Among the Oxford men the following names
catch the eye:—Acland, Adderley, Baring, Briscoe,
Cardwell, Coleridge, Cranbourne, Denison, Ducane, Grant-
Duff, Elcho, Enfield, Ewart, Gladstone, Goschen, Gros-
venor, Hardy, Hayter, Heathcote, Henley, Hughes,
Hunt, Lowe, Lygon, Monsell, Morrison, Neate, Newde-
gate, Pakington, Palmer, Peel, Simeon, Wood. Among
the Cambridge men:—Bass, Beaumont, Beresford Hope,
Bouverie, Bruce, Buxton, Cavendish, Childers, Collier,
Fawcett, Forsyth, Gibson, Grosvenor, Hamilton, Hart-
ington, Hutt, Kinglake, Locke King, Lefevre, Bulwer
Lytton, Manners, Milton, Montagu, Palmerston, Royston,
Rothschild, Selwyn, Trevelyan, Urquhart, Walpole. Not
bad lists on either side. London University has 7 mem-
bers in the House; Edinburgh University, 9; Glasgow, 3;

N 2
180 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

Dublin, 27. Thus the total University element is 292;
and, if we add the Public School men, who have not
been to the University, the number is about 430 alto-
gether. Yet the list is necessarily incomplete.

So much for the Schools and Universities. It seems
curious, but the total number of Dissenters in the House
does not appear to exceed 84. It comprises 13 Inde-
pendents, 1 Baptist, 1 Wesleyan, 12 Unitarians, 1 English
Presbyterian, 3 United Presbyterians, 2 Free Churchmen,
4 Quakers, 5 Jews, 2 English Catholics, and 40 Irish
Catholies,—a total of 84, which seems incredibly small.
But even making it 100 in the dark, that would leave
over 550 Anglicans,—a number which tallies curiously
with the number of Public School and University men,
and the estimated number of landowners.

Again, there are 100 barristers in the House, of whom
24 are Queen’s Councillors. 175 Members are magis-
trates, 235 deputy-lieutenants, and 28 are or have been
high-sheriffs.

The Conservative clubs have 249 Members in the
House of Commons; the Liberal Clubs, 221; the Uni-
versity Clubs, 82; and the Army and Navy Clubs, 52;
or, including the Guards Club, 71. No wonder if the
Working Man thinks a good deal of the Clubs.

That the House of Commons comprises several authors
among its Members is well known, but few persons
would be prepared for the fact that there are in the
House no less than some eighty authors and journalists,
who have treated of almost every subject that can be
written about, from poetry to statistics, from anatomy to
volcanoes.

Such then is the House of Commons returned under
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 181

the present system, a House of peers and landowners, of
merchants and manufacturers, of churchmen, lawyers and
officers, of University men and authors—a House than
which a more aristocratic assembly, in the true poli-
tical and technical sense of the word, probably never
existed. No Englishman need quarrel with Mr. Lowe
for lavishing his admiration on a body of men, which,
take it all in all, is one of the greatest marvels in
history. But there our agreement stops. Mr. Lowe says,
“Touch it, and it will perish.” ‘With all deference to so
great an authority, I venture to say, “It is imperishable,
so long as the country lasts.” It is so strong, that it
will bear any improvement, and in many respects so
admirable, that English statesmen might well be con-
sumed with the desire to make it more admirable still.
The main conclusion at which I am able to arrive,
from all the facts and considerations which, I am very sen-
sible, I have most imperfectly stated, is this, that in this
country if you had manhood suffrage, with womanhood
suffrage thrown into the bargain, you would not and
could not have a democracy, for democracy in this
country, in Mr. Lowe’s sense of democracy, is politically
impossible. The arguments drawn even from France
are wholly inapplicable to England. The storm which
blew over France in 1789, blew down every tree and
every bush. It passed over England, and scarcely bush
or tree bowed its head. But if arguments from France
are inapplicable to English affairs, how much more
is this true of Australia and America! The Aus-
tralians and Americans started, one yesterday, the other
the day before yesterday, in the political race. All
their units started on a dead level, like drops of quick-
182 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

silver on a mahogany table, and for the most part there
they are still, on the same dead level. Our political
fabric is the living and slow growth of little less than
a thousand years. We have passed through the pre-
liminary fire of several conquests; we have been sub-
jected to century upon century of political vicissitudes ;
our political frame has been slowly tempered and tuned
and tried until the whole has settled down into an
edifice whose faults are over-massiveness of structure,
over-strength, and an over-tenacity so wonderful, that it
takes as many years to move a pebble in it, as it takes
weeks in the winds and tides to nibble at a rock. The
hurricane which blew down the neighbouring pile left
our pile erect. Looking at the state of England and
its history, its Parliaments present and past, looking at
the past and present condition and temper of all classes
in the realm, not even overlooking Fenianism and the
Fenians, it is difficult to repress a humble amaze-
ment when distinguished politicians condescend to com-
pare such a pile with Australia,—Westminster Abbey
with a few wooden huts,—and then proceed with a
great flourish of elbows to square a Constitution abso-
lutely unique by De Tocqueville’s little rules. To say
that there is an irresistible tendency towards democracy
in every nation, under all circumstances, and in every
country, is like the fallacy exploded by Mr. Mill, that
truth must always prevail. He took an argumentum ad
homines to answer it, and addressing himself to the
Evangelical party, who held the Waldensian Creed to be
truth, he said, “Look at the Waldenses. They were
stamped out. Therefore it is idle to say, truth must
prevail.” And so in politics. You can stamp out an
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 183

opinion, or undermine it, or deaden it, or paralyse it, or
choke it, or stereotype it. Only you must bring the
exact means to bear. And no doubt it might take all
the statesmen in a hundred years to find out by what
means, exactly, a particular opinion could be stereo-
typed, or choked down, or paralysed, or stamped out.
But nature is cleverer than statesmanship. And natural
causes will do this, and all this, for any opinions and
systems, and for the most contrary opinions and systems
under the sun. Natural causes will erect an aristocracy,
then undermine it, or establish it for ever. Natural
causes will create a democracy, then stamp it out, or
leave it to run on. No two nations, no two countries,
will arrive at the same results politically at the end of
ten centuries, or even one. Of two nations who start
from apparently the same antecedents it is quite possible,
and quite likely, that one will end as a nation of fervent
flunkeys, the other as a nation of jealous levellers. It all
depends on how the natural weights and scales are ad-
justed during the formation of the national character and
the growth of the national institutions. The adjustment
may lead the national ideas to gravitate upwards, just as
well as downwards.

Take the English, as a nation, at home. They are
devoured with the idea of “bettering themselves,” and
that idea with them means “rising in the social scale.”
“ Respectability ” is consequently their idol. There are
men who say it were better if half the wealth of the
country were thrown into the sea. But the men
who say so belong to the small class of philanthropic
idiots who brought about the French Revolution. The
great bulk of the English masses have no such feeling.
184 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

No preaching would give it them. They look up to the
higher classes as a sort of divine Olympus, beautiful,
sacred, above all things intelligible, just near enough to
be perhaps not quite unattainable by their children,
just far enough to lend enchantment to the view. So
far from these men being levellers, or potential levellers,
if you could dive into their hearts (for what they exactly
say with their lips is not the test) you would find what
every unconscious indication reveals—that to deprive
them of their Olympus would be to deprive them of their
earthly heaven and ultimate aspiration. To offer to pull
it down for them would fill them with horror, grief, and
concern, by offering to deprive them of their only earthly
ideal. And these are the men whom you are afraid of
admitting to the Constitution, to tell you in your own
House, in their own words, where the shoe pinches
them, and what they want. And these men, who fought
for you in the Spanish Armada, and stood by you at
Waterloo, who every morning gather your wealth for
you, who would be horrified if you were injured, lest
their ideal should be hurt, you accuse of drunkenness
and venality, because they want to come up and speak
to you themselves, when, ‘as you perfectly well know,
thirty years ago you fell drunk under your own tables,
night after night, and thought it the proper thing too.
But dismissing the “swamping argument,” as in its
vaguer form inadmissible, there is one objection which is
formidable, but which, I believe, can be met. “ Granted,”
it is said, “that no Reform Bill will democratise the
Constitution. Let us put democracy aside. We do not
fear that. We do not fear lest the classes at present
in political power should cease to be politically powerful.
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 185

But if you give the working classes sufficient power at
the polling-booth to overcome the obstacles to their being
heard in the House of Commons as a class,—

(1) Will you not in a few years have given them a
practical majority in all the boroughs ?

(2) Will not that imply the supremacy of their class
in Parliament ?

(3) Will you have improved Parliament indoors—that
is, the House of Commons 2

(4) Will you have improved Parliament out-of-doors—
that is, the constituencies 4

And first, it is asked, whether, if the working classes
have a swamping majority at the polling-booth, they will
not ultimately monopolize the boroughs? To this I
answer: Yes, probably. But otherwise they will not
be heard at all, in Parliament. Now it is admitted
on all hands that they ought to be heard in Parliament.
Therefore, if it is necessary for that purpose that they
should have the boroughs, give them the boroughs.

Secondly, it is asked whether, if they have the boroughs,
they will not be politically supreme, and rule the roast.
I answer: Certainly not, as far as facts will help one to
a conclusion. If their only road to power is the polling-
booth; if they have none of the thousand and one
means of being heard in Parliament which other interests
possess ; if, as may be inferred from the experience of the
Reform Act of 1832, the same classes will remain the
national spokesmen, however you distribute your power
or extend the suffrage ; then, I say, if the working classes
had all the boroughs in the country, they would not have
more members, it may be doubted if they would have
nearly so many, as the merchants, manufacturers, and
186 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

“new men” got by the Reform Act of 1832. Yet the
Reform Act, as we see, has given trade not more than
130 members. And these are already gradually falling
into the ranks of the landowners. The danger then, as I
have laboured to show, is not, under such a constitu-
tion as ours, lest the working classes should have too
much power, but lest they should not have enough to
ensure a due regard to their interests.

But, thirdly, will it improve Parliament indoors ?

There is a perpetual zgnoratio elenchi about Mr.
Lowe’s treatment of this part of the subject which is
fatiguing. He admits certain evils. But, says he, “there
will be evils under any system, and how will a reformed
Parliament cure them?” Would not similar arguments
have been conclusive against the Reform Bill of 1832 ?
But as Sir E. Buller asked last year, could Mr. Lowe
have told us in 1832 how the usury laws would cease,
how taxation would be improved, how the corn laws
would be repealed, how slavery would be abolished in
consequence of Reform? Yet unquestionably these re-
sults followed the Reform Bill of 1832 post hoc and
propter hoc. Mr. Lowe knows all this infinitely better
than I do. I should be very grateful if he would write
the page for me. A constitutional House is improved,
when those who ought to be admitted are admitted.
And the working men, if admitted to power, will most
certainly do for their class what the middle classes have
done for themselves since 1832.

However, Mr. Lowe denies the more general charge,
and therefore one question only remains—

4. Will the constetwencies be improved by the ad-
mission of the working classes to Parliament? This
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 187

is no doubt the knotty question. That the large con-
stituencies will be improved there is every reason to
believe. That the small constituencies will, in every
case, be improved at first is more doubtful. One thing
is certain. No invidious distinctions will now be tole-
rated. Even if it were true that the working man is
drunken and venal, he has as much right to be heard
in the House as the drunken and venal squire, the
drunken and venal peer, of thirty years ago. Public
opinion has reformed the squire and the peer, not ex-
clusion from Parliamentary power, and public opinion
may be left to reform those working men who may
happen to be drunken now. As to their venality, after
the recent revelations of the venality of clergymen, and
lawyers, and doctors, the less said about that the better.
The admission or exclusion of the working classes from
Parliament is a question of constitutional right, not of
paternal despotism. If a man is drunk in the streets,
hand him over to the policeman ; if he is venal, punish
him if you can; but do not pocket his political power
by gaslight under pretence of political justice.

Those who believe, as all sincere Reformers believe,
that the admission of the working classes to Parlia-
ment will lead to the great acceleration of national
education, cannot doubt that, if education does not
absolutely destroy venality, it will not increase it, and
they may be allowed to hope that it will, to a great
extent, diminish it. In Scotland, where education pre-
vails, bribery is almost unknown, at least in the gross
and filthy English form. And for my part, I am just
as much disposed to argue from Scotland to England,
as Mr. Lowe is disposed to argue to England from
188 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay VII.

Australia. One argument is at least as good as the other,
and I flatter myself my pebble is, in this case, a match
for his armour.

To conclude :—

1. The English Parliament is a Parliament of Em-
ployers.

2. Employers get there, partly because they like to get
there, partly because they have the best means of getting
there, partly because the people like to send them there.

3. Employers are represented; they represent them-
selves, in Parliament, in a thousand ways independent of
the Polling-booth.

4. The Employed have as good a constitutional right
to be represented in Parliament as the Employers.

5. They are not represented there at all. They have
no indirect tendencies to get represented there. Their
only direct road to Representation lies through the
Polling-booth.

6. The Railways, with no votes at the Polling-booth,
have 179 representatives in the House of Commons. The
Working Classes, with 130,000 votes at the Polling-
booth, have 2 votes in the House of Commons.

7. To them that have politically is given politically.
From them that have not is taken away even that which
they seem to have.

8. A “swamping share” of votes at the Polling-booth
is not in this country synonymous with a swamping share
of votes in Parliament.

9. To confound voting power at the Polling-booth
with voting power inside the House of Commons is, in
this country, political ignorance, or political, knavery, or
political cowardice, or all three.
Cracrort.] ANALYSIS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 189

10. If labour is not to be swamped in Parliament, it
must have a swamping share at the Polling-booth.

11. At the Polling-booth Land, Trade, are swamped
already by Numbers. In Parliament, they are supreme.

12. Numbers, which swamp Land and Trade at the
Polling-booth, have no voice in Parliament. Witness
the Marriage with Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, which
a majority of 20 men defeated indoors against the
wishes of a majority of 70,000 electors out-of-doors.
Witness the Flogging Bill.

13. The House of Commons is not in any danger, at
any time, in any way, by any means, of being swamped
by Numbers in general or by Labour in particular.

14. In this country, Numbers in general and Labour
in particular are in serious danger of remaining swamped
in Parliament, as they now are, for ever.

15. It is a subject of doubt, whether any extension of
the franchise that could be conceded, any redistribution
of seats that could be devised, would give Numbers and
Labour that share in the Representation of the House of
Commons which, in a constitutional point of view, would
for the nation at large be politically just and politically
expedient.

16. It may be as difficult in one country to represent
“a Million” as it is in another country to represent
“Ten thousand.”

17. De Tocqueville’s theories may apply to the coun-
tries from which he got them. They do not apply to
England.

18. It is not true to say, that there is a general and
universal law in mankind tending to Democracy.

19. It is not true of man and man. One man likes
190 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VII.

to govern. One man likes to worship. One man will
neither worship nor govern.

20. It is not true of nations. Nations differ as indi-
viduals. In one, circumstances make democracy final—
for practical purposes; in another, aristocracy ; in another,
a mixed system, in which one element or another finally
prevails.

21. In the physical frame any one muscle or organ
may overgrow itself, Another starve.

22. The Democratic element in the body politic may
finally starve and never recover itself. As well as the
aristocratic.

23. Consider the everlasting Indian castes, and their
one anxiety, to remain everlasting. Consider the Pariahs.

24. A concurrence of causes has rendered Democracy
in this country impossible.

25. If those whose political bugbear is now Democracy,
could awake to long for it, as now they dread it, they
would find their most ardent wishes all in vain. In this
country.

26. The mountains and valleys and watercourses of
the British Constitution have found their level.

27. Do anything you will, you will not dig down the
mountains—they are too high, and too broad, and too
tough, and there are too many of them.

28. The only remaining question is, how to deepen the
watercourses, how to cultivate the valleys.

29. The slopes of the hills you attended to in 1832.

30. What you did for the slopes in 1832, remains to
be done for the valleys in 1867. You may do too little,
and see your labour lost. You cannot do too much.
The dangers are all on the other side.
VII.

ON THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN
INSTITUTIONS.

BY C. H. PEARSON.

THERE is a prevalent idea that the great prosperity of
the Australian colonies is due to the accident of the gold
fields and the circumstances of a new country, and is
only retarded by their self-government under institutions
that may be called Democratic. The opinion prevails to
such a degree that it notoriously influences the sale of
colonial bonds, and is advanced fearlessly at public
meetings and in the Press. It is not easy always to
decide what is meant by a vague accusation of mis-
government; but in the case of any colony, we may,
perhaps, assume it to mean one or more of these charges :
that its government wants stability; that the best men
are not put into office ; that electors are timid, or venal,
or careless of their trust; that the character of the
judges is deteriorating ; that the press is licentious ; that
public credit is low; that religion and education are
neglected ; that the ratio of crime is increasing ; that no
legislative results have been achieved ; or, more generally,
192 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

that there is a want of cohesion in society, and that class
is at feud with class, or the colony itself with the Mother
Country. Two or three at least of these charges are
often brought against Australia by old colonists, and are
the more readily accepted because there is a prevalent
impression that society has been inverted in the Anti-
podes, so that what is low here is high there, and that
institutions have been Americanized. Even well-informed
Englishmen are apt to believe that the highest circles of
Australian society have been largely recruited from suc-
cessful diggers, the refuse of California, and the dregs
of our own penal settlements.

The different colonies of Australia have been founded
under very different auspices. The first population of
New South Wales was in a large degree convict. When
the pastoral interest was created, its success attracted
visitors of a more respectable character, but certainly
not above the average of the population at home in the
years succeeding the French war, when education was at
its lowest ebb. The Swan River settlement, now Western
Australia, was more aristocratic in its beginnings, and
failed ; very much because land was tied up in the hands
of a squirearchy without a tenantry. South Australia,
designed to combine the presence of large landowners
with an abundant labour-market, passed irresistibly into
the hands of an industrious yeomanry, settled on small
holdings. The colony has never been a penal settlement,
but a large proportion of its settlers, especially the Ger-
mans and Irish, have been brought out at the expense of
private capitalists or of the State. The proportion of
emigrants who paid their own passage is largest in Vic-
toria, where the gold attracted them in tens of thousands.
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 193

Queensland, a natural offshoot from New South Wales,
has attracted colonists, by a system of land bounties,
and may be regarded as now comparatively free from
the convict taint. In fact, convicts are no longer a
visible evil in any part of Australia. They have died
without founding families, or have been killed off, or
are filling the State prisons in Victoria and New South
Wales. Still it cannot be doubted that they have
lowered the moral tone and the standard of education
in many districts, and it must be remembered in fair-
ness to New South Wales, that bush-ranging and the
sympathy that makes it possible, are a legacy from
English government.

Probably three-fourths of the present adult population
of the Australian group went out in the twenty years
between 1839 and 1859. They carried with them the
ideas of the English middle classes at home; a strong
feeling for an extended suffrage, a desire for cheap land
on a simple tenure, and a determination not to repeat
the experiment of a State Church. Intending in all
other respects to reproduce England in their new home,
they were yet forced by circumstances into one other
point of difference. A House of Peers in the English
sense was impossible. There were no peers to begin
with ; there was no class out of whom they could be
manufactured ; and the feeling of the settlers generally
was opposed to Pitt’s theory of giving a hereditary title
and share in the Government to every man with £10,000
a year. Still there was a certain feeling in favour of the
government py two Chambers as a safeguard against
hasty legislation, and as affording a more mixed re-
presentation. Accordingly, while the suffrage for the

o
194 BSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

Legislative Assembly is open to almost every man not
a pauper, a vagrant, or a criminal, a second House, or
Legislative Council was constituted, to which only men
of some property elect. The constitution of this House
differs in the different colonies. In Queensland its mem-
bers are, or were till lately, nominated by the Governor.
In South Australia a fourth of the members go out by
rotation every four years. But generally its chief features
are, that it cannot be dissolved by the Governor, that its
tenure of office is comparatively long, and that it is sup-
posed to deal with questions of law rather than with
money-bills. Its members are often of higher social
position and wider culture than the members of the
House of Assembly, whose best men not unfrequently
transfer themselves to it when they desire rest." How
fearlessly they can act on occasion, has been shown during
the recent crisis in Victoria, when the Legislative Council
triumphed over the illegal tactics of the Ministry in spite
of the Governor, in spite of an overwhelming majority in
the other House against them, in spite of the general
feeling of the colony, and in spite, I am ashamed to say,
of a part of the Liberal press at home.

Ministries, it is true, have short tenures of office ; but
this results from the circumstances of the colonies rather
than from any instability of public opinion. In countries
which have no foreign policy, no Church questions, and,
as yet, no difficult social problems to solve, the lines of
opinion cannot be as sharply drawn as in England.
Where the public will is irresistible, tactics lose the im-

1 The members of the Legislative Council in Victoria consist of the follow-
ing professions :—Lawyers, 3; Physicians, 2; Brewer, 1; Bankers, 3;
Merchants, 10 ; Rentiers, 6 ; Landowners and Squatters, 5.—See a letter to
the Spectator of March 17, 1866, by R. Murray Smith, Esq. of Melbourne.
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 195

portance which they have at home. Accordingly as there
is no particular reason why one Ministry should be in
power rather than another, electors look on with indif-
ference at the scramble for office. Again, causes unknown
in Europe operate in a young country. A late Premier
of South Australia threw up place that he might visit
England ; and one of the most active Ministers in Vic-
toria, was lately reported to be migrating to the New
Zealand bar. After all, we have had three Ministries
during the last eighteen months in England, and may
easily have another before Easter. But if the public
policy of the colonies be regarded, it will be found per-
fectly consistent. There are no changes, in any real
sense of the word, from a free-soil to a squatter policy,
from protection to free trade, or on any subject connected
with religion or education. Until the colonies were really
freed, there was constant irritation and frequent attempts
to change the system of government. Since then there
have been little adjustments of unimportant points ; but
a proposal for sweeping changes is sure to fail, though a
Ministry propose it.

Old Australians are a little apt to think that there is a
steady process of deterioration in the character of the
men elected to the several Parliaments. The times they
really regret are those when the colonies were adminis-
tered by little official and social cliques, presided over by
the Governors. Nor is this a mere sentiment. As long
as the country at large was not represented, the pastoral
interest was supreme in the Government, and the great
ideal of the squatters was to cover the continent with
sheepwalks. Their aspirations for a capital city did not
go beyond a good hotel or a club. It was in the interest

02
196 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

of this policy that the Government of New South Wales
tried to suppress the knowledge of an auriferous tract,
and it is this class who have striven for years to lock up
the waste lands of the colonies. Nor is their policy
unnatural. Although the discovery of gold raised the
squatters, as a class, from bankruptcy to fortune, the
growth of population is steadily adverse to the pre-
dominance of the sheep-farming interest. Their lands
are taken from them and sold by auction, or their rents
are raised, perhaps tenfold ; or they find their runs fringed
with the small farms of a yeomanry who invade their
commonage, put up their lands to sale, and bid against
them in the labour market. Moreover the accident that
made the squatters exceptionally prosperous for a time,
has made them the objects of special jealousy. The runs
which they farmed at nominal rents, when more than
nominal rents could not have been paid, came to repre-
sent fabulous values through no labour of the occupiers,
but simply because wool had risen, and there was now a
market for stock in the colonies. Men naturally ask
why large tracts of arable land should be let below their
value to rich absentees ? Supported by the banks, which
were deeply interested in their success, the squatters
have fought hard everywhere to obtain, if possible,
copyhold tenures for their runs; and, except for the
ballot, it is quite possible they would have triumphed.
But as the struggle has been long and exciting, it has
created a class of popular politicians, and the sheep-
farmer, the aristocrat of Australia, finds himself supplanted
in the two Houses by merchants, lawyers, and tradesmen.
Probably, if household suffrage existed in England, very
few country gentlemen would have been returned to
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 197

Parliament during the great Corn Law struggle. But
the feeling in Australia is against a policy rather than
against a class; and a sheep-farmer who espouses the
popular side, has as good a chance of election as any other
citizen. My experience is that in all the colonies the
leading barristers and merchants are invariably in one of
the Houses, or only out through special circumstances, or
by their own fault. That another class should also be
admitted does not seem to me in itself an unmixed evil.
As, whatever theorists may say, the ballot works
simply and effectively in Australia, there is no bribery
at elections, and as the voting is by papers, there is no
treating and no intimidation. The real blemish in pre-
sent arrangements is a defective registration, the result of
which is, that in South Australia many country electors
are practically disfranchised, while in New South Wales
there have been, it is said, cases of personation. The
first framers of our colonial institutions were evidently
afraid of an “ugly rush” from the democracy, and sur-
rounded the act of voting with difficulties which prac-
tically keep out many hundreds at every election. As
this operates in the pastoral much more than in the
settled districts, it certainly does not favour the wealthy
classes ; and as the fear of democracy is subsiding among
all except the chiefs of a beaten Opposition, there is
every prospect that the faulty statutes will before
long be reframed. A carelessness about voting cannot
be corrected by laws. There will always be many
men who will not trouble their heads about politics, so
long as there is no exceptional crisis, just as there
are men who neglect church-going, education, or
healthy exercise. From an abstract point of view this
198 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

is no doubt to be regretted, but practically it does not
much matter whether the same man is returned by 1000
or by 500 votes. In times of excitement the electoral
rolls are as well swept as in England.

It is so short a time since the colonies have been freed,
that it is impossible to pronounce definitely how far the
character of the judicature has been affected. But all
presumptions at present are in favour of self-govern-
ment. As long as the colonies were governed from
Downing Street, there was an unhappy tendency to give
men of damaged character a chance in a new society.
Governor Bligh, in the early days of New South Wales,
reported thus of his Judge-Advocate: “He has been
accustomed to inebriety; he has been the ridicule of
the community ; sentence of death has been pronounced
in moments of intoxication; .... his knowledge of the
law is insignificant, and subject to inclination.” Nor
was the practice of later years much happier. When
the framers of the constitution in one of our Australian
colonies were debating whether it would not be better
to have the judges appointed from England, that
they might secure the independence of the judicature,
a paper was passed round reminding them that a
judge actually so appointed to the colony was gazetted
a bankrupt at the time he went out. The recollection
proved conclusive. I quote old cases purposely, though
more recent scandals are to hand. It may safely be said
that such promotions are no longer possible in Australia,
and that the judges nominated since the beginning of
self-government are at least equal as a body to their
colleagues sent out from England. In Victoria they were
involved in the late struggle with the Government, and
Pearsoy.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTI ONS. 199

their judgments were, I believe, reputed free from the
smallest taint of partisanship.

Tt is difficult to discuss the character of the Press
without quoting in illustration of its spirit, and such
quotations would easily be suspected of partiality. I
will only say, that I know no newspapers in the world
more honourably free from invective, or personal attacks,
or low scandal, than the Australian. Even during the
late fierce struggle in Victoria, though the Protectionist
Age was sometimes rather unscrupulous, and the Liberal
Spectator unduly virulent in its tone, there were not
often any violations of professional etiquette, as it is
understood in England. Any one who cares to look up
a few files of the Sydney Herald, the Melbourne Arqus,
or the South Australian Register, will soon see that
their tone is as quiet and dignified as that of the most
respectable English or French newspapers. I cannot
ascribe this to the tradition of bureaucratic government ;
for not to mention that the inferior Indian papers used
to be distinguished for savage personalities, the present
aspect of Australian literature is the work of the last
few years. In 1843, the editor of an Australian Satirist
was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for a publica-
tion dangerous to public morals. In Victoria, the Argus
in old times used to insult the Governor with childish
nick-names, and the Melbourne Punch, a little later,
diverted its readers with jokes on the hospitality of
Government House. I observe, too, that books on
colonial politics have changed precisely as the papers
have changed. Two of the ablest writers of the uncon-
stitutional period, Dr. Lang and Mr. Sidney, appear to
find language too weak for their feelings, whenever it
200 ESSAYS ON REFORM, {Essay VIII.

becomes a question to discuss an opponent. Taking
three of the last works on Australia, Mr. Flanagan’s
“History of New South Wales,’ Mr. Westgarth’s “ Vic-
toria,” and Mr. Forster’s ‘South Australia,” I think I
might challenge criticism to detect a violent or offensive
passage in any of them. All the writers I have instanced
are fair instances of their respective societies, having
been, in three instances out of the five, directly connected
with the colonial press, and also in three out of the five
having been members of the colonial parliament.

Public credit may be said to rest on several supports :
the power and willingness of the people to bear taxation ;
their economy in the management of revenue; and the
certainty that they will never repudiate a debt. Now, the
amount of revenue raised per head in Australia varies from
4l. 10s. in New South Wales, and 52. in Victoria to 62. in
South Australia, against about 2/. 6s, 8d. in England. It
is true that a large portion of the Australian revenue is
derived from the sale and rent of land, which, it may be
said, are not properly taxation, though they are perhaps
as much so as Crown Lands or the Post-office in England.
Deducting these, however, the receipts from other sources,
such as customs, assessments, and excise duties, are still
higher than in England, being from 32. to 4/. the head
in New South Wales and South Australia, and about 41.
in Victoria. These figures do not indicate “an ignorant
impatience of taxation.” As regards economy, it may be
partly measured by the State debts. The debt of Queens-
land is said to be about 301. per head ;! the debt of New

1 T cannot procure accurate returns for Queensland, and these numbers
generally must be regarded as only approximative for countries where popu-
lation and revenue are exposed to great fluctuations,
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 20]

South Wales in 1864 was about 151. ; the debt of Victoria
about the same; and in South Australia, which has the
most democratic constitution, the debt is only 51. 6s.
a head. These liabilities have been incurred for ex-
penditure on reproductive works, such as railways. The
debt of Great Britain is 271. a head. In their admini-
stration the colonies differ among themselves. New
South Wales is said to be wastefully managed ; Victoria
began on a large scale, and is retrenching; while in
South Australia economy is pushed to shabbiness. There
have only been two instances in colonial history of
anything like repudiation. One was in 1841, when
Lord John Russell, then Secretary of State, informed
Sir George Gipps that Her Majesty’s Government dis-
claimed “any obligation to ratify the engagements of
the Colonial Government.” Happily on this occasion
there was no financial collapse. South Australia was
less fortunate. Colonel Gawler’s bills upon the Home
Government were dishonoured in 1840, to the tem-
porary ruin of the colony. The action of the Home
Government may easily be justified in either of these
cases, and I only quote them to show that irre-
sponsible government is not necessarily advantageous to
public credit. At present the colonies, except Queens-
land, borrow on better terms than any foreign States,
except France and Prussia ; and in the case of France, this
difference is, no doubt, partly due to the forced invest-
ments in the French Rentes, which the Imperial Govern-
ment promotes. The past six months have shown that
neither railways nor companies, however recommended,
can raise money as easily as the republican Houses of
Assembly in Australia. Yet I believe there is no doubt
202 ‘ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essar VIII.

that their debentures are still depreciated by a dread of
democracy in the English investing class.

There is complete equality of sects in Australia, except
that the Churches of England and Scotland have re-
tained here and there an anomalous privilege or payment
which will soon be discontinued, without heart-burning
even to the sufferer. This equality is undoubtedly the
achievement of the Colonial Parliaments, and at present
works so well that I never heard an opinion against it
even from the Anglican or Scotch clergy. In Australia,
as in England, from various causes, the last twenty years
have been a great time for church building, and it would
not be fair to set down the whole contrast between recent
doings and the apathy of former times to the advantage
of constitutional government. But we may fairly point
to the success of the voluntary system as a proof that
religion has not lost its hold on the colonies. In
England where more than 4,000 churches had been built
eight hundred years ago, we have now about 15,000,
and perhaps 22,000 dissenting chapels, or at the rate of
about one building to every 650 of the population. New
South Wales in 1864, had 717 places of worship to a
population of 378,936, or about 1 to every 520. South
Australia in 1863 had 431 places of worship to a popu-
lation of 140,416, or about 1 to every 330. Victoria
comes between the two, and Queensland, as the newest,
is the worst provided. Some deduction must be made
from the apparent significance of these returns, as the
average size of the buildings is naturally smaller than
in England, where population is denser. The accom-
modation in New South Wales was for one-third, and
in South Australia for three-fifths, while in England
Pzarson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 203

and Wales it is roughly for one-half. Still the results
obtained are very remarkable. The Anglican clergy are
the worst off in Australia, being unendowed, and not
yet thoroughly trained to the voluntary system. Their
incomes probably average from 300/. to 6001. a year, a
curate graduating almost instantly as an incumbent.
As provisions are cheaper and habits simpler than in
England, these incomes represent rather larger amounts
than they would do at home.

In education, fair but not adequate results have been
obtained. The foundation of a University in Sydney
was one of the last acts of the oligarchical council, which
suddenly awoke to the conviction that in sixty-two years
of bureaucratic government no place of education had
been founded where anything more than the mere rudi-
ments of learning could be acquired. Since then two
colleges and a grammar-school have been founded in
Sydney, and a university and a public library in Mel-
bourne. Both in Sydney and in Melbourne excellent
Professors have been attracted from England; and the
average of results obtained is, I was told, rather above
the level of Oxford, though the highest Oxford mark is
not reached. Schools and tutors of the highest class are
rapidly multiplying. The grant for education in Victoria
in 1863, was 192,245/., or about 1-15th of the public
revenue. In South Australia, during the same year, it
was 16,9741. or about 1-37th, a grossly inadequate sum,
though here, as in Victoria, the State aid is of course
supplemented by local subscriptions and fees. The
amount voted last year for Great Britain and Ireland
was about 1-65th of the national revenue. The aggre-
gate attendance in schools of all classes in South
204 ESSAYS ON REFORM, [Essay VIII.

Australia, was 1 to every 7.7 of the population in 1863,
In Great Britain it was 1 to every 22 in 1865. Even
South Australia, therefore, achieves much more in propor-
tion to her population and her means than Great Britain.
I think it may be said too, that all classes are increas-
ingly alive to the importance of the subject. I have
known a bullock-driver pay 50/.a year for the board
and education of his two children. On the runs board-
ing-schools are gradually being introduced for the chil-
dren of the shepherds, and though they cannot be made
self-supporting, the parents are found willing to defray
the expenses of board. The misfortune is that these
institutions are partial and easily ruined, so that in large
districts a generation of children is growing up in primi-
tive ignorance. The problem of educating the children
of forty families, scattered perhaps over 1,500 square
miles, is no doubt difficult, but must be grappled with if
Australia is to overcome the disadvantage of her isolation
from the world.

The intricate subject of the statistics of crime, has been
dealt with by Mr. Westgarth in a paper read before the
Statistical Society. His results tend to show that the
crime of Australia varies pretty much in proportion to
the convict element. In South Australia, not a convict
colony, the ratio of commitments was, in 1862, 1 in 628,
and in 1863, 1 in 706, against 1 in 668, the ratio in
England and Wales between 1851 and 1855.1. The few
convicts who have filtered through into South Australia,
notwithstanding all pains taken to exclude them, con-
tribute to my own knowledge a fair proportion of the

1 It is impossible to compare later results in England in consequence of the
powers of summary conviction now given to magistrates. ,
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 205

crime. But the offences generally are of a slight cha-
racter. Out of 680 convictions between 1853 and 1863,
only 102 were for felonious offences against the person,
and only three whites suffered the extreme penalty of
the law. Queensland is said to present even better
results. In Victoria, during 1853, no fewer than 554
old convicts were sentenced for fresh offences in the
colony, which then numbered only 200,000. So large
an element of imported crime baffles all calculation as to
the amount of what is really indigenous. But it may be
fairly said that rapid improvement is taking place in these
respects. In New South Wales the ratio of convictions in
1839 was as 1 to 126 of the population, while in 1862
it was only as 1 to 715. I ascribe this improvement,
which is paralleled in every part of the continent and in
Tasmania, almost solely to the discontinuance of trans-
portation. It is, therefore, indirectly the result of the
liberal element in the colonies. For the movement against
convict labour was commenced and carried out by the
colonists against the influence of the Home Government,
against the opinion of the Governors, and with many
honourable exceptions, against the feelings and interests
of the upper classes of society. The Home Government,
under Earl Grey, continued transportation to New South
Wales till the colony was prepared for forcible resistance,
and even the aristocratic council sent home a decisive
protest. The Home Government at a later date refused
to discontinue transportation to Western Australia,
though it was proved that several hundred expirees had
escaped from that settlement to the single colony of
Southern Australia. The Governor of New South Wales
refused in 1849 to forward a protest against transporta-
206 ESSAYS ON REFORM. Essay VIII.

tion. When the other colonies were unanimous against
it, the squatters of Western Australia petitioned for it as
a benefit, continued it till the criminal class outnumbered
the free among them, and still resent the enforced dis-
continuance as an injustice and an injury.

Among the positive results which colonial legislation
has attained, the possession of cheap land on a simple
tenure must be reckoned. The result was not one easy to
compass. Though a new country, Australia is not in
any large sense a fertile one, and the arable lands mostly
lie in strips near the coast. It is thought that all the
land available for agriculture in South Australia will
have been bought up in seven or eight years, yet South
Australia has more than six times the area of England
and Wales, and only 125th of their population. On the
other hand, there is so much accumulated wealth in the
colonies, that the squatters, backed by the banks, are
able to bid freely against intending purchasers. Each
colony has solved the problem of creating a yeomanry
in its own fashion. In New South Wales the principle
of free selection is adopted, by which a farmer may
choose his land anywhere on public property, and call on
Government to survey it and put it up to auction. In
Victoria, land has been put up for sale in all parts, and
in such quantities as to swamp the banks, and lots are
drawn to determine priority of choice. In South Aus-
tralia the blocks nearest to the capital are put up in
rotation, and the sales proceed till the market appears
to be glutted. Perhaps none of these systems is
faultless, and that of New South Wales is notoriously
unjust to the squatter, who is liable to see all the water
on his run put up to auction, or the run cut up by small
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 207

settlers, often men of bad character, who plunder his
flocks or herds. But the difficulties are so great that
I have never seen a good solution for them propounded.
Meanwhile the yeomanry has been called into ex-
istence. The results of the last harvest in Victoria
and South Australia have been estimated at over ten
million bushels, or more than a quarter and a half
for every head of the population. We in England are
said to produce from two-thirds to three-quarters of
a quarter, and our average from scientific farming
is three times as much to the acre as the colonist
gets. But the material results are as nothing com-
pared with the moral. From the moment a man buys
land in Australia, he becomes sober, hard-working, and
trustworthy, as one who has a stake in the country anda
position to maintain. The German and Irish immigrants,
who come over often half barbarous, are gradually rising
above the English of their own class, simply because the
Germans and the Irishmen put their money into land,
and the Englishman turns his money into drink for him-
self and dress for his wife. Much, too, has been done to
cheapen the conveyance and registration of titles, by the
so-called Torrens Act. This law has achieved its im-
mediate object with so much temporary success, that it is
the one Australian measure which English land-owners
have been disposed to copy. But I am not sure that it
has effected anything which could not be better done in
England by giving a parliamentary title to all tenants
in fee, so that the rehearsal of prior titles should be
economised.

Of course comparatively cheap land and large produc-
tion may co-exist with depression in some branches of
208 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay VIII.

trade. The Australian artisans complain generally that
they have changed for the worse. Employment is not
constant ; wages are only from 2. 8s. to 3l. a week ; and
though meat is at half English prices, and bread no
dearer than at home, there are certain offsets in the cost
of vegetables and the low quality of the manufactured.
goods imported. They are accordingly crying out to stop
assisted immigration, and impose protective duties on all
articles that can be made in the colonies. As regards
immigration, I have no doubt they are right. To import
labour for the capitalist is unfair to the working class,
and does not even achieve its end, as it takes long-
continued glutting before rates are lowered in a market
where the labourer can afford to bide his time. Prac-
tically, if a hundred fresh carpenters are added to nine
hundred already in the field, the weekly wage-rate
remains the same; but the old hands lose, we will
say, ten per cent. of their employment. ‘The operation
of this principle in economy has often been pointed
out in England, where the labourer, however docile
generally, will starve, break windows, or go to the work-
house, sooner than live on rye-bread or potatoes. Now,
the Australian minimum of comfort, even for the shep-
herd, is fixed at about eighty pounds a year (rations
being allowed for), or as two and a half to one compared
with the English peasant. In the face of this, it can
hardly be said that the lowest class in the colonies is
no better off than at home, though I have no doubt that
the skilled labourer gains nothing or little by leaving the
great centre of trade. Transplanted to the colonies, he is
in the position of a man who remains as he was
while all beneath him are moving up. But I know
Psarson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 209

of no remedy which legislation can devise for un-
developed manufactures. The real cure will ultimately
be found, not in protective tariffs, but in that lower
wage-rate to which the Australian artisan must submit,
if he is to compete with the Englishman and the
Belgian. He is discontented at present because he com-
pares his position with the exceptionally good one of
the unskilled labourer and the yeoman, but I know not
that any class of men have a right as citizens of the
world to more than the cosmopolitan level of profit.
So long as they get that, their labour laws at best are
not unsound.

Still it may be said that even these statements,
assuming all to be proved, do not demonstrate a healthy
condition of society. If there is a tendency in the colo-
nies to obliterate the distinctions of classes, to destroy
the influence of capital, or to take away the enjoyment
of property, thinkers of a certain class will assume
that the educated minority who in spite of all their
shortcomings are indispensable to progress will gradually
give up their interest in politics, and perhaps transfer
themselves to England if it is still unreformed. I
believe ideas of this sort are the real key to the English
dread of Australian politics, and I will endeavour to
explain to what extent they are really justified. First
then as to class distinctions, my own experience is that
allowing for the difference of an old and a new country,
and for the most fortunate difference that it is easier for
a poor man to make money in Australia than in England,
the distinctions of position are pretty much the same in
the one country as in the other. The Australian clubs,
like the English, are confined to men of liberal education

P
210 -ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

and easy means. The Australian railways have their
three classes. Sleeping as I have often done in Bush
Inns, I was never expected to share my room with a
bullock-driver or a shepherd. Touching the hat to any
stranger in broad-cloth is not fashionable in Australia, as
it used to be the distinguishing mark of a convict, and
I confess I wish to see it disused in England. But if
there is less servility there is also less brutality among
the lower orders. The Staffordshire “heave half a brick at
him” has no parallel anywhere. It once happened to me
to find myself with my horse and trap in a mountain
gap where I could neither go backwards nor forwards
without assistance. My companion went for assistance,
and the first working man found walked two miles in a
hot wind to help me, and positively refused to accept
money. On another occasion a farmer, a perfect stranger
to both myself and my companion, walked a mile with
us to show us a difficult bush track. I could multiply
cases of this kind to any extent. As for hospitality, it is
the virtue of high and low, and is even carried to excess,
as it encourages a class of vagrants to subsist on the
food and shelter that are freely given them everywhere.
The relations of master and servant are a little more
difficult than in England. In the absence of any feudal
relation between classes, employers are at once. less
absolute and less indulgent, and there is no doubt a ten-
dency to look upon all engagements as contracts for so
much labour at a stated price. Servants too expect more
liberty than at home. I cannot say whether the English
caricature of the maid-of-all-work going out to ride was
founded on any actual fact, but it might happen any-
where in Australia where a shepherd or ploughman often
Prarsoy.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 211

keeps his horse ; and assuming that the household work
was done, I cannot see that it was more improper to
take a ride than a walk. Employers who once realize
the fact that their servants are willing to give work,
but not to shut themselves out from the society of
their equals, get on in Australia pretty much as in
England. Nor is there any feeling against liveries, such
as is said to exist in the United States, and a man
may array his servants in all the colours of the rain-
bow, if he and they are agreed. There is, however, a
growing disinclination in colonial families to put their
daughters to service in houses where they will not
be treated as equals. Readers of Pepys will remember
that something of this sort was usual in our own
country not two centuries ago; and no one can blame
parents who desire to secure the best circumstances for
their children. But if the practice be good for the
moral tone of society, it is no doubt inconvenient for
the upper class. At present, however, there is an abun-
dant supply of domestic servants from England and
Ireland, and the feeling only operates in obliging persons
of small income to put up with rather raw specimens
from the labour-market. Englishmen will probably
think that it is no great hardship to be reduced to the
service of those who have been trained to it at home.
But colonial experience does not bear this out, and there
is a general dislike to fresh immigrants as intractable,
easily discontented, and shiftless. It takes a few years
to make them good members of a free society.

But if the position of servants is somewhat freer than
at home, it must not be supposed that this liberty
extends to the neglect of their duties. Regulations are

P2
212 BSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

enforced in the pastoral districts, which could scarcely
be paralleled among ourselves. It is usual, for instance,
to forbid shepherds to keep any fermented liquor in their
huts. A man who violates this rule has no redress,
though he be instantly dismissed at a distance perhaps of
200 miles from a township, and in a part of the country
where there are neither mail-coaches nor roads. I could
point out several pastoral districts of 20,000 square
miles in which not a single public house is licensed. I
have seen a man sentenced to two months’ imprisonment
for refusing to take his master’s dray to its destination.’
Public feeling is in favour of these regulations because
they are necessary, because the contracts are voluntary,
because employers are relatively more numerous than in
England, and because every man expects to be one day
an employer. An Australian whom I] met in India was
rash enough to suppose that labour could be as easily
controlled in a bureaucratic province as in a free colony.
He tried sheep-farming on the Nilgherry hills, and found
that his shepherds invariably ran under cover when a
shower of rain came on, leaving their flocks to wander
off into the jungle or be devoured by cheetahs. The
magistrate to whom he applied for redress told him that
he might dismiss his servants, but that the law would not
punish them. Of course the experiment had to be given
up. I could easily multiply parallels of this kind for
the two countries , but I only desire to point out that the
present legislation of Australia, which sits so easily that
it has never even been murmured at, is in no way
opposed to the legitimate interests of the capitalist.

1 Of course this was an application of a stringent English Act, 4 George
TV. c. 34.
Prarson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 2]3

The enjoyment of property is supposed by the English
upper classes to depend very much on the liberty of
bequest, the fulness of possession, and the right to pre-
serve game. As regards the liberty of bequest, the Aus-
tralian laws and the English are identical; but as there
are no lands in Australia with special tenures, such as
Borough-English, or gavel-kind, the power of the free-
holder is really greater than at home. In one respect
there isno doubt a slight difference. If a man die intestate
in England, the law supposes that he meant to bequeath
his realty to his eldest son. This distinction between
real and personal property has been, or will be, abolished
throughout Australia. Leaving abstract reasons out of
sight, it is inexpedient in a new country, where so much
land is held by small owners with no funded property,
that the younger children would be a charge upon the
public if they were not entitled to a share in their father’s
estate. It must be remembered that although a part of
the Colonial revenues is applied to the relief of distress,
nothing like our English Poor Laws has yet been organized,
and the State cannot afford to take needless burdens
upon itself. In fulness of possession the Australian is at
least equal to the Englishman. There are no dormant
rights of way, or immemorial practices of cutting turf
or felling timber, which a sharp attorney may raise
to the damage and annoyance of the occupant. There
are even laws for the preservation of game, to punish
those who kill it during certain months of the year, and
those who kill it on their neighbour’s property. The
latter is in fact a stringent law of trespass, and works
easily,

Why then, it may be asked, do a certain class of
214 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay VIII.

Australians steadily disparage colonial institutions? The
answer has been partly given. Men.will always dislike
the system under which their rents are raised, or their
land taken from them. A class that has once been
dominant will always think the country in danger if its
supremacy is contested. I am far from saying, too, that
in the long struggle between the squatters and the people
in different colonies, all justice was on one side, or all
wrong on the other; and I quite admit that the Aus-
tralian sheep-farmers have some real as well as many
fanciful grievances. The wonder to my mind is, that an
agrarian struggle, involving such enormous interests,
should have been conducted so quietly, and have left so
little mark on society. The whole has been fought out
and settled, while tenant-right in Ireland is still as much
matter of dispute as when it was first put forward. But,
beside these practical reasons why the squatter should
not feel very tenderly towards Australian democracy, it
must be remembered that there are other causes tending
to alienate the richest and most successful colonists
from colonial life. A new country cannot compete with
an old in those enjoyments which are the especial
privilege of wealth. The society of Melbourne and
Sydney is, I think, superior in variety and refinement to
that of any English country town, but it is not and
cannot be equal to that of London or of Paris. Schiller’s
feeling that “the beggar at the gates of St. Angelo lives
more gloriously than we in our North, for he sees the
eternal, only Rome,” expresses another side of the same
fact. The eye positively hungers, after a time, for some-
thing better than the builder’s Gothic or bastard Pal-
ladian of our colonial structures. It is evident that the
Pearson.] THE WORKING OF AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTIONS. 215

country in which society and art are best enjoyed, and for
which, as for England, the European markets are swept,
must long continue to attract the class who are rich
enough to live where they will. Nor is it difficult to
understand why those who have deliberately preferred
England, should catch the tone of its society, and imbibe or
profess a distaste for republican institutions. But against
this revolt of mere wealth, we may fairly set the attach-
ment of educated men. Among the clergy, the barristers
and doctors, the military and naval men who visit or live
in Australia, men of all characters and all opinions, I
never met, and I never heard of, one who found that
breeding and education unfitted him for the colonies.
My Oxford friends in particular were as good citizens as
if they were native to the soil.

I am far from thinking Australian institutions perfect,
or Australian statesmen wiser than our rulers in England.
I think the electoral system introduced by the English
Cabinet into the colonies, does not provide duly for
the representation of minorities. I think the protective
system, which began by importing labour for the capi-
talist, and is proceeding to secure the labourer from com-
petition, has already retarded the development of the
country, and will weight it seriously in the struggle for
wealth. I think the two crying wants of the country,
schools and railroads, are too languidly promoted ; and I
ascribe the inaction in these respects to the influence of
small constituencies getting money for local jobs, and to
the interests of employers who are afraid of railway con-
tractors coming into the market. But allowing for these
and other such blemishes, I do not see that they are
conclusive against liberal institutions. Minorities are
216 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay VIII.

not yet represented among ourselves. Our country gentle-
men are still Protectionists at heart; and their old argu-
ment that we must keep England independent of foreign
supplies, is not a whit more public-spirited than the
Australian desire to diversify industrial life with all
varieties of employment. National education in England
is the achievement of a Reformed Parliament, and our
system is not supposed to be an example of perfect
wisdom. In these and other matters what I really dread
for Australia is much more the conservative apathy of
men partially shut out from the world, and coming to
believe that the trodden way is the best, than any re-
volutionary fervour for sudden and great changes. Large
constituencies of yeomen, influenced by the clergyman and
the lawyer, are never likely to commit themselves to
abstract declarations of rights or democratic crusades.
But I cannot predict the future, and I am slow to
believe prophecies from others. My object has been to
show that no charge of misgovernment can fairly be
sustained at present against the Australian colonies,
and that they have done better in all respects since
they were set free, than under Government from home.
If my facts are true, it will be no argument against
them to say that failure ought to have been, or will
ultimately be, the result of Republican Government. We
can deal positively with the past, but the future is in
other hands than ours.
LX.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN
COMMONWEALTH.

BY GOLDWIN SMITH.

In one of the Reform debates, a great opponent of
extended suffrage, alluding to America, said, “I always
knew that Democracy could do great things in war, but
I want to see it do something in peace.” This being
interpreted means: “ For five years I have been predict-
ing that the Republic would fail in the war; that the
armies of Irish mercenaries with which she was compelled
to fight in consequence of the disaffection of her own
citizens, would be annihilated by the Southern cavaliers ;
that her finances would collapse; that the vices of
Democracy, its want of cohesion, and its insubordination,
would become fatally manifest; that the people would
refuse to support the Government; that anarchy and
then military despotism would ensue. My predictions
have all been utterly falsified, as those whom I have
helped to draw into the Confederate Loan know to their
cost. But I still cling to the hope of Repudiation, and of
a failure in Reconstruction.”
218 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

The hope of Repudiation has been more than dis-
appointed. With the difficulties of Reconstruction,—a
tremendous task no doubt,—the American nation is still
grappling. They have been immensely increased by the
loss of Lincoln and the character of his accidental suc-
cessor. But the nation still faces them resolutely, and
with assurance of success.

That Equality has created in America a nation great
both in peace and war, wealthy, intelligent, united,
capable of producing statesmen and soldiers, yet itself
superior to its ablest men; at least as loyal to the prin-
ciple on which it is founded as any nation ever was to
an hereditary sovereign or an oligarchy ; and able to meet
and surmount difficulties which all its enemies hoped,
and most of its friends feared, were insurmountable,—is
an established fact, which the existence of a great
amount of political evil of various kinds in the United
States does not overthrow. It perhaps requires more
sympathetic eyes than we can reckon on in our readers to
see that, on the whole, a step, though but a step, has
been made towards the realization of that ideal com-
munity, ordered and bound together by affection instead
of force, the desire of which is, in fact, the spring of
human progress, though the worshippers of intellectual
oligarchy may be unconscious of the existence of such an
ideal in the mind of man.

But does the success of Equality in America afford
any hope to us? In America there is land for all; and
the explosive forces can always find an outlet in emigra-
tion to the West. Undoubtedly this is a fact of the
greatest importance, and one on which the Governments
of old countries, when they are taxed with the prevalence
Smiru.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 2\9

of pauperism and with their repressive policy, are always
entitled to insist. On the other hand, the harvests of
America are partly the result of good government: land
equally rich lies waste under Austrian or Turkish despo-
tism. The wealth is not only agricultural, but com-
mercial : as many outlets and safety valves are supplied
by new inventions and by the opening up of new lines of
commerce as by the West; and all this betokens an
activity of mind among the people, of which their insti-
tutions, stimulating intelligence and offering all the prizes
of life to energy, are in part the source, as well as laws
good enough and sufficiently well administered to make
the possession of wealth secure. If America has an
outlet to the West, England has outlets in her Colonies,
and if she will only be kind to her own kin, in America
itself.

Moreover, American Democracy aids Nature in the
equal diffusion of wealth, by substituting the rule of
equity for that of primogeniture in the succession to
property, and by forbidding, or at least effectually dis-
countenancing entails. Not only is the number of the
holders of property thus increased, but fortunes are
kept moderate, simplicity of life is fostered, the number
of seductive examples of splendid idleness is diminished,
and the contrast between wealth and poverty is rendered
less striking and less dangerous.

That the abundance of land is a circumstance greatly
in favour of Democracy in America is true; that this
alone keeps the Americans from shooting at each other
from behind hedges, like Irish agrarians, is the sort of
stuff which people are ready to believe about America,
but about no other Christian and civilized community in
220 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

the world. It is closely connected, or rather identical
with, the notion that the only reason for which the
people of this country desire political power is, that they
‘may divide among them the property of the rich. It
does not strike these genial philosophers that the people
have physical power already, and might begin universal
pillage to-morrow if they pleased.

If free institutions in America have been tried under
great advantages, they have also been tried under great
disadvantages. Emigration brings population, labour,
wealth ; but it also brings from Ireland, and South
Germany especially, an annual crowd of strangers, igno-
rant, or at best ill-educated, untrained to political
action, and full of anarchic passions excited by resistance
to repression under the governments of the old world.
The Irish are politically in a state of barbarism. Their
only political idea, if the name is not too dignified, is
still that of the clan; and the most worthless dema-
gogues take the place of the clan chiefs. English notions
of American politics are derived mainly from New York,
where the correspondents of our newspapers live. The
corruption, mob-rule, demagogism of New York, can
hardly be exaggerated, though even in New York you
have a good supply of water, outwardly decent streets,
good public schools, and enough of law and police at all
events to guard the growth of immense commercial
wealth. But. New York is politically an Insh and
German city. The State outvotes it; the State, now
that the Irish are deprived of their slave-owning allies,
will very probably control it with a firmer hand. Morrissey,
the prizefighter, was elected to Congress not by the
Americans, but by the Irish. His election caused as
Suitu.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 221

much scandal in America as it did here, where, since the
time of Mr. Gulley, only the patrons of prizefighters
have sat in Parliament. The same thing which is true
of New York is true in some measure of the other great
seaboard cities, where the emigrants land, and where
the Irish especially, from their want of intelligence and
enterprise, linger aud form low quarters. Were it not
for the public schools, these wanderers would seriously
endanger the civilization into which they are received.
This Ivish and German America is the America which
Englishmen know: the America of yeomen, tradesmen,
and artisans which contends successfully with the Irish
and German difficulty is to Englishmen almost unknown.
Again, America being still but half settled, and emi-
gration still going on, not only from Europe, but
internally from East to West, the texture of society is
still loose and shifting: the conservative and organizing
forces of local attachment, personal and family influcnce,
do not yet act as they do here. For the same reason
the power of party organizations is disproportionately
strong; there is nothing to withstand them: there is
no other mode of selecting candidates than that which
they supply; and the selection of candidates, not the
choice between candidates when selected, is, after all,
the grand difficulty of representative institutions.
America further labours politically, as well as in
other respects, under the general disadvantages of new
countries: the want of culture, the want of a past.
American legislators are not wilfully chosen by a de-
praved Democracy for their roughness of manners : they
come from a rough people. Lincoln was not made
President because, to use the language of our aristocratic
222 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

Press, he was “a brutal boor;” but because in Illinois
there were only “brutal boors” to be had. It is the
same with our Colonies, though they enjoy the advantage
of a connexion with the British Crown. The general
want of taste and refinement in politics as in other
spheres, is in a word not Democratic but Colonial. A
hundred years hence, commerce will have ceased to be
so absorbing as to take the American youth from college
at a very early age. Education will be higher, and its in-
fluence will be more felt in public life. The want of a past
and of historical ideals, again, cannot fail to detract both
from the steadiness and the dignity of public character.
The rapid development of commerce, too, incident to
a new country with great resources, unquestionably
engenders for the time, together with the grasping desire
of growing suddenly rich, a looseness of commercial
morality which affects the integrity of public men. It
was so here during the Railway mania. It is so in the
British Colonies. It is so in the United States. And in
the British Colonies and the United States, society being
less settled than in the mother country, the censorship
of opinion, whether in commercial or in political life, is
less penetrating and less strict.

The grand disadvantage, however, under which
Democracy has laboured in the United States, is of
course the existence of Slavery, a thing so little con-
nected with Democracy, that it has received the ardent
sympathy of the reactionary party in this country, as
the most rampant denial of the principles of equality
and justice on which Democracy is based. For thirty
years previous to the Civil War, with the nominal
interruption of General Harrison’s brief Presidency, the
Smitu.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 223

Republic had been in the hands not of Republicans, but
of the Slave-owning Aristocracy, supported by the Irish
mob of the North, and by a number of northern poli-
ticians, especially among the rich, who are renegades
in their hearts from the true Republican faith. With
this domination, which dates from the great develop-
ment of the slave interest consequent on the discovery
of the cotton-gin, came in the tide of evil. The slave-
owner reigned in the Legislature. His temper produced
scenes such as the assault of Brooks on Mr. Sumner.
His spirit predominated in the foreign policy of the
Republic, and led to the Mexican War, against which
the true Republicans protested, the Ostend Manifesto, and
the designs against Cuba, as it had in fact produced the
War of 1810, against which, again, the true Republicans
protested. The patronage of the State was used to fee
the demagogues, his allies. General Jackson was the
author of the accursed maxim, “To the victors belong
the spoil,’ and of the system of changing every place-
man down to the postmasters, which is the bane of
American politics and administration. Not only were
the men of the Republic corrupted, but its principles
were undermined. There was a social as well as a
political ascendency of the  slave-owner’s spirit. A
terrible party tyranny was established. Disgust and
despair drove good men from public life. The other
party was tainted by the conflict. When the Republicans
preferred “ Old Tippecanoe” to Mr. Clay as a candidate
for the Presidency, it was not from gratuitous depravity
of taste, but because they found it necessary to counter-
mine the tactics which had brought forward General
Jackson. The military mania, which rendered those
224 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

tactics successful, had been produced by the Southern
Democrat’s War of 1810.

This all-important fact has been somewhat obscured
by the name “Democratic,” usurped by a slave-owning
oligarchy and its dependent rabble. Nevertheless, the
oligarchical party on this side of the water did not fail
to recognise its friends, and the assumption by the Anti-
republicans in America of the name “Conservative”
obviates misapprehension for the future.

Slavery, by its mortal antagonism to Republican
principles, produced the Civil War which is held up so
logically as a warning against Republicanism ; and the
present political difficulties are only the sequel of the
Civil War. They have been aggravated and prolonged
not only by the murder of Lincoln, a truly Southern act,
but by the conduct of President Johnson, a Southern
politician, and an old slave-owner and Democrat though
a Unionist, whose faults, in the estimation of the most
discerning Americans, arise mainly from his want of
familiarity with free institutions and of the correspond-
ing habits of political thought.

We have not yet seen how the Republicans will
govern, for we have not yet arrived at normal times.
The great struggle between Slavery and Freedom has
not been brought to its close, and the line taken by the
President renders the contest one of extraordinary acri-
mony and fierceness. We must compare the temper of the
American Legislature at the present juncture with that
of the Long Parliament and other assemblies in times
of revolution. Two things, however, are certain: that
the American people, restored to their sovereignty by
the overthrow of the oligarchy, have shown unprece-
Smitu.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 225

dented clemency in dealing with the vanquished rebels,
and that they have shown a moderation equally unpre-
cedented in at once dishanding their veteran and
victorious army ; and this, although, in addition to the
ordinary temptations, they had angry questions open
with this country, their feelings were greatly excited
against us, and Canada lay open to invasion.

Democracy is not answerable for any special defects,
or for the consequences of any special defects, in the
machinery of the American Constitution. Hamilton had
in his mind the pattern of a European monarchy, of
which he produced a Democratic counterpart, with an
elective President for a king, and a Senate for a House of
Lords. The elective Presidency with its patronage has
always been the grand incentive of faction, intrigue, and
corruption ; and the hope of obtaining it, which never
leaves the breast of an American politician, has been the
greatest cause of obliquity in the courses of public men,
of which the tragic end of Daniel Webster's carcer is the
most signal instance ; while the division of the sovereign
power between the President and the Congress has led
to a struggle something like that which the division of
sovereign power between the King and the Parliament
produced in this country in the time of the Stuarts, and
which was ended, after a civil war and a deposition, by
the reduction of the monarchy to its “Constitutional ”
state. Perhaps the institution of the elective Presidency
was a mistake. Perhaps again it was a mistake to leave
undecided, or at least not to decide beyond the possibility
of dispute, the question between national sovereignty and
States’ rights, which is now being solved by civil war and
political convulsions. And so, again, the arrangement by

Q
226 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

which the Vice-President, a wholly unimportant officer,
and therefore liable to be rather thoughtlessly elected,
steps into the place of the President on the death of the
latter, was certainly improvident, and has twice led to
disaster. It is not impossible that after the revelation of
these defects in the machinery by the present complica-
tions, the Constitution will be altered. But Democracy,
social and political, will remain as it was before.

The payment of representatives, again, is an institution
quite separable from an extension of the suffrage. It is
obviously calculated to make politics a trade into which
low adventurers are drawn. Perhaps it may be said, on
the other side, that the professional politicians are more
industrious and understand the business of the country
better than the amateur politicians of our Parliament.

In ordinary times there is very little for the central
legislature of America to do, the most important work
being done by the legislatures of the several States, or
rather by the still more local institutions. This has con-
tributed, with the coarseness and violence of the Demo-
cratic party, hitherto dominant, to repel such cultivated
intellect as there is in America from public life. Highly
cultivated intellect in England does not seek to take part
in the petty business of the Town Councils. But it would
be a great mistake to think that intellect, which is the
social peerage of America, is politically an object of
aversion. All parties are proud of bringing forward and
employing their literary men, of which Bancroft and
Motley are not the only instances ; and we will venture
to say that such an appeal to the dislike of superior
intelligence as was made by the member who said that
Mr. Mill was too clever for the House, would meet with
Smira.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 227

less response in the American legislature. The American
politician has more faith in intellect, though the works
of intellect may be more abundant in the Tory squire.
In the late war almost all the intellectual eminence of
America was enthusiastic on the side of the country and
its institutions.

The rich again, who in America are, generally speak-
ing, still connected with some mercantile concern, are
naturally disinclined to go to a mere political city, with-
out society, like Washington, and to spend half the year
in such business as that of Congress in ordinary times.
But we never could learn that rich men were system-
atically excluded from the representation, or that they
were otherwise politically maltreated. The question
whether mere wealth is honoured enough in the Republic,
depends upon the further question, What amount of
honour is due to wealth unconnected with personal
merit, and useless, perhaps even noxious, to the public ?
A noble and beneficent use of wealth, to which such of
the wealthy men in America as desire a high position
are driven by the absence of peerages and baronetcies to
resort, certainly does not fail to gain a reasonable mecd
of consideration. America has sybarites, who come
whimpering to the sybarites of Europe against the
country which furnishes the means of their Parisian
pleasures; and these men played an unpatriotic and
ignoble part in the war; but General Wadsworth was
very far from being the only case of a wealthy man who
sealed with his blood his attachment to the institutions.
under which wealth is supposed to be oppressed.

We are apt to be greatly misled by fixing our attention
too much on the central Government of America and

Q 2
228 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

the politicians. The central Government in common
times is comparatively unimportant, and therefore draws
into it comparatively little of that which is highest and
really most influential in the nation. The country is not
governed by the politicians; it is administered by the
politicians, but it is governed by the people, who take
all really great questions into their own hands.

An opponent of Reform charges American Democracy
with Protectionism, while he compliments his Tory sup-
porters on their glorious freedom from any tendency of the
kind. But Protectionism is the vice not of Democracy,
and much less of American Democracy, but of ignorance.
It has prevailed under every form of government till
the light of economical science had become diffused.
The Free-traders of the Western States are Republicans
in every sense as well as the Protectionists of New
England. Our Colonies are Protectionist like America,
because in the Colonies, as in America, economical science
has been little studied. The taxation hitherto has been
so light, that questions of tariffs have not been much
pressed on the attention of the nation. With the mass
of the American people the fallacy is rather patriotic
than economical; they fancy, as the most enlightened
Englishmen did less than half a century ago, that it is
desirable artificially to encourage every kind of pro-
duction in order to foster all the various elements of
national character, and make the nation self-supporting in
case of war. Upon this notion the manufacturers of New
England and the ironmasters of Pennsylvania have been
up to the present time playing with fatal success. But
there are indications, in the shape of calls for moderation
from a part of the Protectionist Press, that the system
Smita.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 229

has been carried to a pitch of absurdity which is render-
ing its unsoundness palpable to the practical intelligence
of the American people. And when once public opinion
turns, Protection will go by the board. There is no
power like that of our landed interest, with its nomi-
nation counties and pocket boroughs, to make head in
defence of monopoly against the national conviction.
With France we have a commercial treaty, which, as its
chief negociator told the writer of this paper, was made
by the French Government more from diplomatic motives
than from love of Free-trade, while in America we en-
counter a highly Protectionist tariff. Pass ten years,
with France we shall still have the Commercial Treaty,
with America we shall have Free-trade.

Tyranny of opinion is another charge constantly made
against American Democracy. Party government, which
prevails, and not only prevails, but is consecrated, in
this country as well as in America, necessarily implies,
wherever it exists, a certain tyranny of opinion, and an
extinction, to a great extent, of the independence of
individual members of the party. Sir Robert Peel was
not only deposed, but morally assassinated, for having, as
it was alleged, apostatized from his party, though under
the pressure of the most overwhelming necessity, and in
conjunction with the most eminent of his followers. Of
course, in such a crisis as that which at present exists in
America, the issues being of the most vital kind, and the
passions of civil war still glowing, party spirit runs very
high, and desertion of the party standard is bitterly
resented. Even on this subject, however, very exagge-
rated things are said. Mr. Stevens, under whose lash
the majority are described as being, has been more than
230 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

once abandoned by a portion of his party, and defeated
on important questions : and his policy is discussed with
great freedom and discrimination by journals of Repub-
lican opinions. The correspondent of the Times com-
plains that, in an election, a candidate who has not
obtained the regular nomination has lost the day before
it is begun: as though under the system of party
government in England, or in any other country, it were
not equally true, that a candidate to be successful must
be nominated by his party, and that the choice of the
elector is virtually limited to the candidate whom his
party brings forward. If by tyranny of opinion it is
meant that the majority in America, now that the
violent domination of the slaveowner is at an end,
prevent the minority from expressing their sentiments or
from acting as they please in support of their principles,
nothing can be less true. The Presidential election
which took place in the middle of the Civil War was a
most trying occasion. Yet at that election the M‘Clellan-
ite minority in Massachusetts, where they were at once
weakest and most odious, expressed their sentiments both
on the platform and in the press, held their meetings,
demonstrations, and torch-light processions, and hung
out their party banners across the public streets, without
the slightest hindrance from the majority. To this the
writer can testify as an eye-witness: and he can also
testify to the fact that even reputed renegades, whose
names stank in the nostrils of the party which they had
left, were treated by leading members of that party
with perfect social courtesy and even friendliness at the
time of the election.

Demagogism, again, is no doubt a great curse of
Smirn.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 23)

America. We have noticed some special circumstances,
quite separable from the essence of Democracy, by which
it is aggravated ; the payment of representatives, and the
absence in a new country of those settled superiorities by
which in old countries (in France, for example) candidates
are designated, and for want of which needy or ambitious
adventurers have too clear a field. But demagogism is
an inherent vice of representative institutions, and one
against which, under all representative institutions, good
citizens have constantly to contend. It is not cured, nor
essentially mitigated, by narrowing the basis of repre-
sentation. The demagogism which panders to the passions
of a small mob of Tory squires by vilifying and slandering
Sir Robert Peel, may be less coarse than that which
panders to the passions of a great mob in New York, but
it is just as noxious and just as vile.

If the possession of power by the working classes neces-
sarily leads to socialistic legislation, we cannot fail to find
that result in the United States. Opponents of Reform
feel this so strongly, that they erect the wirepullers, as
the electioneering managers of parties are called, into the
leaders of Trades Unions, with which they have about as
much to do as the bishops. The fact is, that no organi-
zation of the working classes so compact and so hostile
to the employer class as our Trades Unions, exists on
the other side of the Atlantic. Before the Legal Tender
Act strikes were very rare. The derangement of prices
caused by the Legal Tender Act, among other bad effects,
rendered strikes more frequent. But such a combination
of class against class as that with which we are afflicted,
would be an absurdity when all alike are in possession of
political power, and at liberty to promote and defend their
232 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

own interests by Constitutional means. There are difh-
culties of contract, of course, between workmen and
employers in America, but there is very little antagonism
of class. We are not aware that American legislation,
as a matter of fact, presents any traces of socialism.
The taxation—heavy, and therefore stimulating to
socialistic tendencies as it now is—is distributed, as
between the different classes, in pretty much the same
way there as it is here. The American Income-tax is
not more socialistic than that of Pitt. As regards local
taxation, the rich are, we believe, treated in the assess-
ment of rates with rather exceptional lenity, from a
desire of retaining them in the district. Wild socialistic
and communistic theories have, it is true, from time to
time sprung up, among the other rank growths of the
virgin soil ; but they have as rapidly perished.

An attempt has, however, been recently made by
certain political adventurers to get up a workmen’s party.
The attempt came to a head the other day in the State
elections of Massachusetts; and this is the account
which the Boston Advertiser of November, 1866, gives
of the result :—

“ Our State election has proved to the satisfaction of
most people the truth of what we asserted last month—
that the working men utterly repudiate the ‘working
men’s party. The cry of the demagogue has fallen
unheeded on their ears; they have refused to believe
that they were persecuted and wronged, and they have
turned away from the insidious voice of the broker in
votes,

“Take, for example, the representative vote in the
Boston wards. When the ‘working men’s’ candidates
Smitu.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 233

were left to stand upon their own merits, as actually
happened in three or four nominations, with one exception
they each received less than a hundred votes. When a
single Republican or Democratic candidate was endorsed
by the ‘working men,’ he ran ahead of his ticket only
from thirty to fifty votes. In the Fourth Congressional
District Mr. Wightman was held up as a model working
man, and working men were invited, exhorted—entreated
to rally round him. Instead of rallying round him, they
rallied in the other direction, and the result was that
Mr. Hooper’s plurality over the Democratic candidate
was relatively larger in the proportion of almost three to
two than in 1864, when the eight-hour question was
not yet agitated. In the Third Congressional District,
General Guiney was put up to draw votes from Ginery
Twichell, and the returns show that Mr. Twichell’s
majority over all the candidates was considerably greater,
taking into consideration the whole number of votes cast,
than Mr. Rice’s plurality over Mr. Sleeper in 1864. There
were rumours that Guiney’s friends ‘sold out’ early in
the day; at all events, his vote in the district was 436
out of a total of 9064.

“We believe these to be figures which do not lic. It
is true that in the congressional districts it was generally
understood that the issue was national and not restricted
to the narrow limit of any local or collateral question.
But in the State representative districts this was not the
case ; everybody understood that he was at liberty to
vote without regard to party restrictions if he saw fit,
and the fact that neither the Democrats nor the Repub-
licans did turn aside from the regular nominations is a
fact full of significance.
234 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

“Tn the coming municipal election it is hardly worth
while to continue this farce of a working man’s ticket.
The votes of the clique have ceased to have any market-
able value ; and if the nominations are made indepen-
dently, the candidates will be made to appear in a very
ridiculous light by the smallness of their votes. The
mechanics of this city understand very well that their
interests have not suffered in past years, and they see
very clearly that all this assumed solicitude for the rights
of working men amounts to just nothing at all. The
Democratic leaders will do well to consider this matter
before they strike hands with this feeble faction, which
without their countenance must fade away on the instant.
Let the Democrats consider how much they were bene-
fited by their collusion with the ‘working men’ in the
election of Tuesday, and judge who gains the most by
such an alliance. We can hardly hope that the men who
engineer this ‘working men’s movement,’ and whose
claim to a reputation for industry is, we suspect, mainly
based on their activity Just before an election—we can
hardly hope that these men will give up their amusing
and exciting—we will not say profitable occupation—
until they are forced ; but if their candidates are ignored
by both parties next month, we suspect that their weak-
ness will be so apparent, that they will have to seek some
less congenial labour.”

If the absence of socialistic tyranny over the other
classes on the part of the enfranchised working men of
America is surprising, so also to all who have never
studied the working man’s real character, is their readiness
to use political authority for the purpose of placing moral
restraints upon themselves. The closing of public-
Smiru.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 235

houses on election days is a piece of moral legislation
which it would be almost hopeless to attempt in this
country. And the Maine Liquor Law, be it in itself
judicious or injudicious, is at least an indication that the
“drunken” classes will, if admitted to political rights,
consent to measures for their own reformation. General
education and Free Churches may be classed among the
advantages which Democracy enjoys in America, and
which it would not enjoy here. General education is, of
course, the pillar of the American State. It is not only
received in the schools, which indeed vary very much in
their excellence in different districts, but constantly
imbibed from the atmosphere of an active-minded com-
munity, full of political interest and intelligence, and in
which self-education is stimulated by the feeling that
everything is open to exertion. The Free Churches not
only extend the social and political influence of religion
over classes which, under our system, religion entirely
fails to reach, but being necessarily pretty Democratic in
their Constitution, as the purse is in the hands of the
laity, they elevate and purify the spirit of Democracy
through Church elections and legislation; while the
Churches themselves are being gradually divested of
their darker and more arbitrary dogmatism by the element
of political and social equity in which they are placed.
These, we say, may be counted among the advantageous
circumstances under which an extended suffrage is tried
in America, and which would be wanting here. They
would not long be wanting here. From really popular
institutions religious liberty is inseparable; it is almost
inconceivable that a popular Government should either
be able, or desire, to tax the whole community for the
236 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay IX.

support of a particular creed. General education is a
vital necessity of Commonwealths ; they are not only led
to it by their philanthropic tendencies, and their regard for
all the members of the body politic, but driven to it by
the instinct of self-preservation. When the masses have
political power in their hands, you can no more afford to
leave them in ignorance than you can afford to leave
them in the sanitary condition which breeds pestilence.
It is very probable that the Irish children who live at
New York would be left to welter in their barbarism,
instead of being put to school, were it not that they
are the destined possessors of a power which they
must use either for the good of the State or for its
subversion.

There is one objection to American Democracy which
we had almost forgotten—its alleged barrenness of
eminent men. One of the most admired passages in the
speeches of Mr. Lowe warned us against being drawn to
that arid waste of Democracy, in which every mole-hill
is a mountain. In his judgment, apparently, historic
eminence is to be found, not in Athens, or the Italian
Republics, but in Bceotia and the Feudal Monarchies.
Many people think Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman eminent
men, to say nothing of Mr. Stanton, whose superhuman
energy bore the burden of administering the war. But
the fact is that individual eminence, so far as it consists in
the superiority of a single man to his fellows, necessarily
declines as general intelligence advances, and has declined
most where general intelligence is at the highest point.
Hero-worship may have a place in the age and country
of Odin, perhaps in those of Luther; in the latest
development of humanity, the American Commonwealth,
Surru.] EXPERIENCE OF THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. 237

it has none, There, instead of individual greatness, you
have the greatness of a nation; instead of a king and
his subjects, you have a community ; instead of loyalty,
patriotism and attachment to the common good. It

may be a great degradation, but such, apparently, is the
ordinance of fate.
a

THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY.
BY JAMES BRYCE.

“WueEn I compare,” says De Tocqueville, “the Greek and
Roman republics with the American States, the manu-
script libraries of the former and their rude population
with the innumerable journals and the enlightened people
of the latter ; when I remember all the attempts which are
made to judge the modern republics by the assistance of
those of antiquity, and to infer what will happen in our
time from what took place two thousand years ago, I am
tempted to burn my books, in order to apply none but
novel ideas to so novel a condition of society.” These
words of the founder of modern political science express
the principle upon which that science may be said to
rest, a principle which he was never wearied of expound-
ing and illustrating, that a political system or form of
government by itself is nothing, and acquires a meaning
only when it is regarded as the result and efflux of
national life. Historical study has within the last cen-
tury undergone a great change, by the distinct recogni-
tion of the truth that it is a historian’s business not
240 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

merely to record public events, wars and treaties, in-
trigues and seditions, but to investigate, and strive so far
as he may to reproduce, in its entirety that portion of the
past whereof he treats. The province of history, as every
one is now willing to admit, is primarily the religious and
intellectual life of nations, the phenomena of their society,
the economical conditions under which they have lived.
It is not until these have been grasped and understood
that their political institutions can be fairly estimated ;
it is only when viewed in the light of these, and con-
stantly explained by them, that an historical narrative can
have any value beyond that of a romance or a series of
entertaining biographies. If in thus enlarging her scope
History seems to have removed the past further from us,
by bringing into relief the differences between the life of
man in other times and countries and in our own, she
has in another sense brought it nearer to us, by giving
to the past a sense of reality which was wanting to those
dignified historians who talked only of kings and par-
liaments. But the change has been chiefly important in
this, that it has abolished those broad and sweeping
generalizations which it was formerly the fashion to draw
from a few facts taken at random. In becoming more of
a sclence—more delicate, more complex, more minutely
analytic—History has not ceased to be of practical value
to the politician, but she has become valuable in a different
way. She gives him more principles, and sounder ones,
than heretofore ; but she makes it no easier to apply
them, and she leaves the difficulty of prediction where
it was. We are taught by her to understand better the
springs of human action—especially of collective human
action ; to observe the laws by which social phenomena
Bryce. | THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 241

act and react upon political ; to know what method and
what signs must be used to determine the direction in
which the current of events is at any moment setting.
But we are forbidden to argue loosely and hastily from
the circumstances of one state or nation to those of
another, or from those of a nation at one period of its
growth to the same nation at some other period. We
are warned against confounding names with things, and
essentials with accidentals ; against supposing, when we
find in different ages and countries two institutions bear-
ing a certain external resemblance to one another, that
they are necessarily the same, and that the results which
flowed from the one may be expected to flow also from
the other.

For these reasons, it has become a maxim among
writers who, like De Tocqueville, have treated history
scientifically, that there is nothing so misleading as an
historical analogy ; not that some historical analogies
are not true, but because the human mind, supposing (as
Bacon says) a greater uniformity in things than it sees, is
apt to state them without those limitations which qualify
and explain their value. And if misleading even to the
student, much more do they become dangerous when
employed as arguments in discussions on practical poli-
tics. Being addressed to a public which has not the
leisure or the special knowledge to test their correctness,
being put forward with a more or less conscious sup-
pression of all that can tell against the conclusion it is
desired to establish, they import the passions of the
moment into questions which should be handled with
scientific calmness ; and, while they throw no true light
upon the problems of the present, they narrow and

R
242 EBSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

distort our views of the past. In spite, however, of
these obvious dangers, the so-called argument from his-
tory has been very rife among us of late years, and
has been unsparingly employed by public writers and
speakers to discredit, not democracy alone, but in reality
all free institutions. It must be owned that the oppo-
nents of Reform have handled their weapon very skil-
fully. They have appealed so confidently to history and
to the opinions of philosophers, that the world has sup-
posed history and philosophy must be on their side.
They have gathered together all the vices of democratic
governments in all ages—the instability of Athens, the
corruption of Rome, the ferocity of the French Revolu-
tion, the lobbyists, caucuses, and wire-pullers of America ;
and out of these, all combined in one, they have con-
structed a monster like the Chimeera of the Iliad, terrible
in every part, “a lion in front and a dragon behind,
breathing forth the dreadful might of quenchless fire.”
And this they have named Democracy. It is true that
the systems of Athens, and Rome, and America, have
all had faults enough, but they have not been the same
faults; they have been often faults of so opposite a
nature that they could not possibly co-exist in the same
subject.

When the adversaries of an extended franchise have
condescended to draw their arguments not from all States
at once, but from some single example, it has been most
frequently to the republics of ancient Greece that they
have pointed as exhibiting the dangers and evils of popu-
lar government. They have argued somewhat in this
fashion: “In Athens, Syracuse, Mitylene, and certain
other cities, we see democracy. In Athens, Syracuse,
Bryce. ] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY 243

Mitylene, and the same other cities, we see grave poli-
tical evils. Therefore, wherever we find democracy, we
shall find grave political evils.” _ This is as much as if
we were to say, “England, Spain, Italy, and Russia are
monarchies. In England, Spain, Italy, and Russia, the
lowest class are grossly ignorant. Therefore monarchy
is the cause of popular ignorance.” To make their
arguments against democracy cogent as respects modern
England, they were bound to show either that it was to
democracy alone, and not to other co-existing causes,
that the evils of the Greek republics were due ; or else
that the same circumstances and conditions—moral,
social, and economical—which accompanied democracy
in the Greek states, would be found along with it if
it were now established in England. They have not
tried to prove the former of these alternatives, because
the least inquiry into the history of Greece shows that
its institutions were inseparably interwoven with the
physical and social peculiarities of the country and the
nation. Still less have they attempted the latter, be-
cause it is evident that the circumstances of ancient
Greece and modern England, so far from being similar,
are in every respect singularly contrasted with one
another. It may be well to illustrate this contrast in
some of its more obvious points.

I. The first and most striking difference is in the
respective size of the States between which the com-
parison is made. Within an area less than one-third that
of England there were at the time of the Peloponnesian
war from one to two hundred small city-states, almost
all of them republics, some federally connected with or
accustomed to look up to others, but all legally sovereign

R2
244 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

and independent. The territories of many stretched only
a mile or two from the walls of the city, whilst those
of the greatest did not interpose a day’s march between
the frontier and the capital. Athens and Syracuse—pro-
bably the greatest of all—had in their most flourishing
days a population not exceeding 500,000; and of these
only some 30,000 enjoyed civic rights. Hence the
governing assemblies or parliaments of these States were
not representative but immediate, or, as the French say,
primary. If the constitution was oligarchic, those few
persons in whose hands birth or wealth placed the
government administered it in their own persons. If it
was democratic, the sovereign power resided in the
general assembly of the adult male citizens, a body which
(at Athens) met regularly once every ten days, and as
much oftener as the occasion might require, heard pro-
posals and speeches from any member who chose to address
it, elected magistrates, gave audience to ambassadors, and
decided by its vote on every question. The so-called
Senate was a mere standing committee, chosen by lot, and
charged only with the preparation of questions for debate
in the assembly and the despatch of formal business ; the
magistrates and office-bearers, civil, military, and judicial,
had little or no power of independent action, and no veto
whatever: Demos himself, to use the forcible expression
of Aristotle, was king—a king into whose hands were
gathered all the powers of the State. To describe the
phenomenon in the language of English politics, every
citizen was not only a Member of Parliament, but a
part of the Executive Government; not checked, like
the Members of Parliament and the Executive in modern
times, by the sense of responsibility to others, but
Bryce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 245

passing, in the heat of debate, stirred by the intoxicating
sympathy of numbers, a final and irreversible decision
upon questions of the gravest moment. The natural
consequence of such a system was, that any feeling or
belief which arose among the citizens spread rapidly and
acted powerfully. Oscillations of opinion were sudden
and violent, for the people, although not fickle, were
eminently mobile, susceptible from their very excess of
acuteness to every transient impression. And, as the
smallness of the community and the frequent meetings
of the assembly made it easy to give expression to
every impulse and discuss every scheme, many things
were done hastily, and some foolishly.

In these city-communities, moreover, the passions of
political life were habitually more intense than they
can be, even on the most exciting occasions, in a country
like England. The interests of a private citizen became
entangled with those of his party ; its champions were
his own friends, its opponents were hated as personal
enemies. Hence principles were easily lost sight of, and
men struggled to gratify their passions, or, it might even
be, to seize an adversary’s property ; compromises and
mutual concessions became impossible; and bitterness,
justified as the necessary virtue of a party man, soon
passed into ferocity, In particular, the vice of personal
ambition attamed a portentous height. In countries
like our own, the vastness of the field, while it checks
and moderates vanity and the lust of power by re-
minding the individual of his insignificance, prevents
him from acquiring a personal influence which can im-
peril the Constitution. In the Greek cities those very
conditions which produced so many versatile and brilliant
246 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

politicians made them unable to support prosperity ; and
an orator or a general was no sooner useful to his country,
than he became its most dangerous enemy.’ Nor was
the passion for power confined to the leaders; it per-
vaded the whole people, and made them, not content
with guiding the administration of affairs, insist upon
actually conducting it. In many States, and notably in
Athens, it was the custom for the Senate, the judges, and
the magistrates, all except those whom it was absolutely
necessary to choose on the ground of fitness, to be ap-
pointed by lot, in order that every citizen of every
degree might have a chance of sharing in the govern-
ment of the State.

Of the faults to which this system of city-republics
gave rise—faults not unmixed with great merits—some
are attributable solely to the smallness of these States ;
others to the smallness of the State taken in conjunction
with its popular government. But since all belong not
to democracies but to small democracies, it follows that
we have no reason to expect them in a great State,
whatever its form of government. The immediate and
sovereign assembly of adult males is as peculiar to the
republic of twenty or thirty thousand citizens, and as
natural there, with all its results for good and ill, as the
representative Chamber of Deputies is in the kingdom or
federation of thirty millions. That unstable policy with
which Athens is so often charged, the want of checks
and balances in the constitution, the violence of faction,
the tendency of personal interests and passions to prevail
over devotion to the public good, the rude assertion of its

* Tnstances of pure-minded patriotism, like that of Timoleon or Lydiadas,
are mentioned with an evident wonder, which is the best proof of their rarity.
Bryce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 247

power by the party for the moment dominant, the perilous
height to which the ambition of leaders mounts—these
are not the results of democracy, for they were at least
as conspicuous among the oligarchical as among the
democratic States of Greece; they are evils from most
of which no community is free, but to all of which
small communities are more peculiarly exposed. If we
seek a modern parallel to the city life of Greece, it will
be found, not in the imperial politics of Britain, but in
the contests of a vigorous municipality, or of what a
municipality would be if it were emancipated from the
control of the rest of England, and if its town-council or
its vestries had to decide, not on matters of paving and
lighting, the management of the local police, or the
imposition of a church-rate, but on questions of peace and
war with its neighbours, the enactment of laws, the
division of the public lands, the banishment of persons
dangerous to the commonwealth.

If there was any institution which the Greeks con-
sidered peculiarly characteristic of a democracy, it was
the institution of the Lot (mentioned a few lines above) ;
the custom of letting chance decide what persons should
compose the Senate and fill the public magistracies. No
custom seems to us more strange or more pernicious ; but
there is none which puts in a clearer light the contrast
between States whose size made it possible that every
citizen should participate directly in the government, and
acountry in which the most that is asked for the citizen
is that he should be permitted, once in four or five years,
to record his vote for the candidate whose abilities and
opinions he approves.

II. The Greek republics were all of them Slave States,
248 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

—that is to say, they were not democracies at all, but
oligarchies of free and privileged citizens, placed among
a vastly greater population of slaves and unenfranchised
strangers. At Athens the adult male citizens never
exceeded thirty thousand ; whereas the slaves numbered
about four hundred thousand, and the pérovkos, or resi-
dent aliens, about forty thousand.’ “If this be so,”
some one may answer, “so much the worse for demo-
eracy. If it was dangerous when it admitted only a few
to share in power, when there was a slave population
by whom the more degrading sorts of labour were dis-
charged, so that even the humbler class of freemen were
left in comparative leisure, must it not be much more
dangerous in a free State?” Whatever plausibility such
a view may seem to possess will disappear when we
bethink ourselves of the incidental results of slavery, and
all the social phenomena which its existence involves—
phenomena most unlike those of our own country. When
there are comparatively few ruling citizens among a large
subject population, those evils which have been ascribed to
small States are intensified. The area of the governing body
is so limited that it becomes too easily and too quickly
permeated by a single feeling or idea. Hence time was
not taken for reflection ; the people were soon persuaded,
when they were persuaded they voted, and what they
had voted was executed on the spur of the moment. The
handicrafts being in great measure left to slaves, many
even of the poorest citizens made politics their business.
The process of governing amused, the consciousness of
power excited, them; the constant habit of listening to

1 The adult male pérocxoe numbered about 10,000 at the time of the census
under Demetrius Phalereus, B.c. 309.
Bryce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 249

arguments in the assembly and the law-courts gave
wonderful keenness to their intellects. But they wanted
that stability of mind and sense of responsibility which
the pursuit of some regular occupation, though it be only
a manual one, is found to give. A poor class which does
not work, is always a dangerous class; and in a Slave
State work is held to degrade the freeman.’ Nor is this
all. Slavery has even a worse lesson in store than the
contempt for labour—the contempt for human life and
human suffering. In Greece slavery had justifications
which no modern slave-owner could appeal to; yet in
Greece, as elsewhere, it corrupted morality, and, by pre-
venting the growth of respect for man as man, accustomed
men to cruelty and bloodshed.

Hence arose a licence of speech and action common to
all the Greek States, whatever their constitution, but to
which, since the extinction of slavery in the Southern
States of America, modern society supplies no parallel.
Assassination was the frequent resource of an angry

2

faction, especially of the oligarchical faction ;? a street

brawl soon turned to a sedition—a sedition to a revolu-
tion. Pride, insolence, violence, ambition, are the cha-
racteristic vices, not of democracy—whose tendency
rather is to depress the individual and make him a mere
unit in the mass—but of oligarchy; and it is just because
the Greek republics were not truly democracies, but

1 It was one of the merits of democratic Athens that free labour was held
in more respect and the slave more kindly treated there than in any other
State of Greece. :

2 Political assassinations were, both in Greece and Rome, almost always
the work of the oligarchical party, The murder of Ephialtes, and the
ferocious terrorism of the Athenian oligarchs recorded in the eighth book of

Thucydides, the murder of tribune Genucius at Rome, and the deeds of
Keeso Quinctius and his associates, are only a few among many instances.
250 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

oligarchies more or less narrow—oligarchies of a few free
citizens in the midst of a host of slaves and subjects—that
their peace was so often troubled, and the lustre of their
patriotism so dimmed and sullied, by these oligarchic
vices.

IIL. Slavery, although the most conspicuous, was but
one among the many differences in social and economical
condition which place the ancient republics at an infinite
distance from ourselves. With us, for example, the
business of war has long ago been committed to a stand-
ing army, in the management of which Parliament
scarcely interferes; among the Greeks the army was a
national militia, in whose ranks, or else in the national
fleet, every citizen was bound to serve. Our domestic
politics are but little affected by those of foreign coun-
tries ; whereas the constitution of every Greek city was
constantly threatened by the hostility of powerful neigh-
bours, who maintained intimate relations with the mal-
contents within its walls. Even in the greatest of the
Greek democracies—States like Athens or Syracuse—the
elements of the governing population were few, and its com-
position simple, when compared with that of the peoples
of modern Europe. There were but two classes, the rich
and the poor ; each class homogeneous: there was wanting
that complexity which the presence of so many religious
sects, each with its own organization, the existence of
a vast variety of interests, manufacturing, commercial,
agricultural and capitalist, the strength of local feeling in
different parts of a wide territory—one may even add
the diversity of races which still preserve their pecu-
liar manners and habits of thought—have created and
seem long destined to maintain in modern England. We
Bryce.) THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 251

should vainly seek in Greece for any institutions com-
parable to those great learned professions which give so
much stability to English society and English politics ;
bodies enjoying vast power, highly conservative, and
highly tenacious of their privileges.

IV. There is yet another difference between ancient
and modern communities, more profound than any of those
mentioned above, although its workings are too subtle
and too manifold to be traced out in detail. This is the
difference of religion. That belief in the unity of man-
kind which Christianity created in proclaiming the unity
of God—that feeling of a human brotherhood which the
Gospel of love brought with it, a brotherhood that tran-
scends every distinction of race or colour, of estate or
privilege—was to the Greeks unknown. Among them the
man was nothing, the citizen was everything. War was
held to be the natural condition of States towards one
another ; peace the exception : a stranger was everywhere
what the language of the Romans expressly entitled him,
—an enemy : out of his own State no man had any rights,
and might thank the contemptuous clemency of the city
in which he found himself if it suffered him to dwell
unmolested. Hence the moral and spiritual bond which
now links men together was wholly wanting ; and in its
place there stood only the sentiment—intense, yet far
more shallow—of a local patriotism, the tradition of a
common ancestry, the gratification of personal pride in
the greatness of the city. These feelings were strong ;
but just as there are no enmities so bitter as the enmities
of relatives, so when two factions, pent within the com-
pass of one city wall, were struggling for the mastery,
the scorn and violence of the rich, the envious hatred of
252 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

the poor, found no such check as is imposed upon Chris-
tian communities by the belief in the equality of all
mankind before God, and the reverence for a humanity
which is sacred, because created in the Divine image.
The influence of these primary beliefs, or the absence
of them, in determining the character and conduct of a
nation, appears most clearly when we turn from the
actual politics of Greece to the speculations of her phi-
losophers. It is the fashion to call Plato and Aristotle
as witnesses against democracy. It would be well if
those who quote Plato were also to let their audience
know that Plato proposed to exclude from political power
all but a very few choice spirits who had been subjected
to a long and laborious course of intellectual training.
When they appeal to Aristotle’s low estimate of the
artisan class, they might add that Aristotle held slavery
to be a natural and necessary institution, grounded on the
worthlessness of the great mass of mankind;' and that he
declared manual labour to be ipso facto a disqualifica-
tion for civic rights, and wished to see every working
man a slave.” It is no reproach to the greatest minds

1 Aristotle’s argument for slavery is in substance the same as that whereby
the enemies of Reform justify the exclusion of the English working class.
He holds the mass of mankind to be so degraded that the best thing for
them is to be subject to the will of a master. They assert that the poor are
so degraded that they must continue to be ruled by the rich. Neither he nor
they seem to see that this degradation which they allege as the cause of
slavery in the one case, of exclusion in the other, is also the necessary result
thereof. Aristotle’s view was natural enough. But it might have been
expected that those who paint in such dark colours the condition of the
English working man would at least exert themselves to better it, and would
hold out to him the distant hope of enfranchisement. They have shown no
disposition to do either.

2 Not only the handicraftsmen but the whole agricultural population :
Tovs yeopyyoorras pahiora pev, ef Sei kar’ edyny, Sovdous civar dvdykn, ... ,
Sevrepov S¢ PBapBdpouvs meptoixovs mapamAncious rois elpnucvors rv pow.
—Polit. vii. 10.
Bryce. | THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 253

of their age—perhaps of any age—to have adopted prin-
ciples for which the state of the world, as it then stood,
seemed to furnish good grounds. But it was from such
principles that their condemnation of the government of
the many was derived ; and he who conceals because he
dare not avow their premisses, has no right to appeal to
their conclusions. Nor is it true that the censures of
Aristotle and Plato were in any special manner levelled
against democracy. They denounce the government of
wealth quite as earnestly as that of numbers; for they
hold both of them to be tainted by the same faults—that
the government is not for the sake of all, but of the
ruling power, and that it is not conducted by the wisest
citizens. What they desired, and what Plato—more
sanguine, or at least more imaginative, than his great
disciple—seems to have hoped through an elaborate
system of institutions to realize, was an Aristocracy—a
government of the wisest, justest, and most pure-minded
men—hbased not upon force, but on the respect and
willing obedience of their fellow-citizens. To Aristocracy,
in this its true and original sense, no system can be more
directly opposed than the plutocratic oligarchy which is
openly or covertly advocated by the enemies of Reform.
And Aristotle is so far from favouring this or any other
similar oligarchy, that he more than once distinctly
declares it to be worse than democracy—more selfish,
more unjust, and more liable to provoke sedition.’

There is another line of argument which I have not

1 Arist. Pol. iv. 11. at Sypoxpatiar dogadéorepar ray oOAtyapxtay eiot Kal
modvxpovarepat did trols pecous, mrelous Te ydp eioe Kal paddoy peréxovor
tay tiynay év rais Snuoxparias } év rais dAvyapxias. Cf. vi. 12, al wAcovegiat

TGv mrovalay droddvover paAAov Thy wodtrelav } al rod Stpou. And cf. Thue.
viii. 48, 49.
254 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

thought it necessary to follow out—that of examining
the oligarchical and monarchical governments of Greece,
to see how far they deserved better of the world than
her popular republics. It would be no more difficult
to make out a bill of indictment against oligarchy in
England, or monarchy in Prussia, from the history of
oligarchic Thebes or Corinth, of Cyrene under the house
of Battus, or of Syracuse under Dionysius and his son,
than it is to enumerate the sins of the Athenian popu-
lace, and lay them at the door of the English working
class. But it would be no less unjust, for oligarchy in a
small State differs as much from oligarchy in a large one,
as does democracy. It is fair, however, and not only
fair but necessary, to require those who judge the Greek
democracies to judge them in relation to the circum-
stances of their own time, not of ours; and to weigh
their faults and merits against those of the oligarchies
and the great monarchies which surrounded them. It
needs no long deliberation to strike the balance. In
Greece, the government of the few had vices greater
than those of the government of the many, and lacked
its redeeming virtues. In those oligarchic States of
which Sparta and Thebes are types, we find secrecy,
perfidy, suspicion ; a policy consistent indeed, but con-
sistent in its meanness and its selfishness; a system of
repression, which denied free speech to the citizen, and
never scrupled at assassination or massacre to maintain
its ascendency. The Athenian people were hasty and
excitable, but they were faithful to their engagements ;
they respected and upheld the constitution under which
they lived; they were accessible to generous impulses,
and capable, on occasion, of rare and noble magnanimity ;
Bryce. ] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT: OF DEMOCRACY. 255

they were lenient to slaves and subjects ; they gave to the
rich and well-born more than their full share of the offices
of State, and required from them only what they were least
willing to render—an honest obedience to the laws, a frank
acceptance of social and political equality. When Athens
fell, after two centuries of glorious life, she fell not from
intestine commotions, but because neither she nor any
single Greek state could resist the military strength
of the Macedonian kings. And after her decline, the
torch of liberty was taken up by the Federal Democracy
of Achaia, founded on a broader basis, and therefore
more secure from foreign enemies as well as domestic
plots. Avoiding many of the faults of the Athenian
constitution, this Federation showed that democracy,
even among the vivacious Greeks, was not inconsistent
with a wise and stable government. It secured a
century and a half of freedom and prosperity to Pelo-
ponnesus, and it only yielded, when all the world was
yielding, to the overmastering power of Rome.

The history of Rome is sometimes appealed to as
an instance of that alleged law, according to which
democracy is followed by despotism. Between England
and Rome there is, no doubt, a truer analogy, both as re-
spects size and political character, than between England
and the States of Greece. But Rome proves even
less against popular government, for Rome was never,
in any sense of the word, a democracy. There was a
democratic element in her constitution—the assembles
of the centuries and of the tribes, by which magistrates
were appointed and laws enacted. But the adminis-
trative government and the real substance of power was,
at all times, in the hands of the oligarchy—a body of
256 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essay X,

nobles marked off from the rest of the community in
the earlier centuries of the city by their birth, and in
the later ones by official rank, itself the prize of wealth.
From the time of the Punic wars onwards, the oligarchy
was virtually a plutocracy. The powers which in theory
belonged to the whole people were in practice wielded
by the Senate, and by the great magistrates, socially
members of the oligarchy, and usually its creatures and
partisans. Hence it was only occasionally and spasmo-
dically, in moments of extraordinary excitement, that the
democratic spirit asserted itself, and forced its leaders into
a position which they wanted the experience to use wisely.
For the most part it remained a mere Opposition, justly
disaffected, but unable to do more than mutter threats
of future vengeance. The result of this system was the
gradual separation of rich and poor into two hostile
camps. The oligarchy, like all oligarchies, was selfish ; the
spoils of Sicily and Africa and the East had enriched it
beyond measure, and enabled it to draw all the land into
its own hands. Thus the race of hardy yeomen, who had
formed the strength of the Roman Commonwealth, was
suffered to die out (just as it is dying out in England) with
the growth of large properties, till at last the people came
to consist of the idle and dissolute mob of the capital.
Meantime the progress of Roman conquest had made
the great magistracies—involving as they did the rule of
a province for several years—so lucrative that no price
was too high to be paid for them. This price was paid
in bribes to the mob—a, traftic which degraded the giver
as well as the receiver; public morality became a jest;
and, since there was no longer a true Roman Common-
wealth, there was an end also of that patriotic devotion
Bryce. ] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 257

to the glory of the city which had tempered the contests
of an earlier age. When the oligarchy had destroyed,
in the persons of the Gracchi, the last hope of con-
stitutional reform, legal means of redress were aban-
doned: when a party-triumph was marked by a massacre,
and revolution succeeded revolution, it was plain that
the end could not be far off. Had there been any
powerful rival to assail her, had there been a Pyrrhus or
a Hannibal in Italy, Rome might have fallen. But as
her foreign conquests had outrun her internal decay, and
she found herself sole mistress of a prostrate world, events
took a different turn. The first and greatest necessity of
the time was the establishment of an efficient provincial
administration. The oligarchy, corrupted by luxury and
self-indulgence, had no longer the intellectual or moral
vigour that could organize a system of government for
the provinces ; the democratic party was only a fitful
opposition, and could do it even less ; no course remained.
but to throw vast powers into the hands of general after
general, until at last one of them used his unequalled
genius to destroy what was left of the old constitution,
and erect upon its ruins an absolute monarchy.

That the Roman republic decayed and died was due
to the canker of slavery, to the separation of her citizens
into millionaires and beggars, to a moral corruption
which increased with every increase in wealth and
civilization. That in dying the republic gave birth to
a military despotism was caused partly by her imperial
position, as mistress of a world whose first need was
union, and which only force gathered in a single hand
could keep together; but still more by the neglect of
her rulers to widen and develop old institutions to

8
258 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay X.

meet the new conditions of her growth and territorial
extension. Therefore Imperialism was the child, not of
democracy, but of an oligarchy whose selfish incapacity
had made other forms of government impossible.

‘“ France, however,” the opponents of Reform may be
heard to say, “France at least shows what democracy
brings you to sooner or later.” France is a memorable
and terrible example of political ruin. But the moral
which her history teaches is, as De Tocqueville has so
convincingly proved, not the evils of democracy, but
the evils of a democratic state of society without a demo-
cratic government ; the danger of permitting changes to
pass upon the thoughts and feelings and social condi-
tion of a nation without introducing such corresponding
changes in its institutions as may make them conform-
able to its character, a faithful expression of its life and
growth. In the thirteenth century, France, like the other
countries of Western Europe, was a feudal monarchy,
whose government was practically in the hands of the
nobles. The course of events from that time on gradually
withdrew authority from them and transferred it to the
king, so that, in the time of Louis the Sixteenth, the
aristocracy had only a number of offensive and oppressive
privileges ; the people had no political rights whatever ;
and the whole powers of the State were exercised by the
sovereign through a highly centralized and highly despotic
administration. In the eighteenth century, literary men
and philosophers (so-called) began to discuss political
questions, and found in the existing arrangements nothing
but absurdity and injustice. The aristocracy had lost all
intellectual influence, and the bulk of the nation, suffering
from grievous misgovernment, were glad to be told that
Bryce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 259

they might despise what they already hated. All classes
and parties, knowing nothing of the difficulties of actual
politics, believed a radical change to be not only desirable,
but easy and simple. Then the Revolution came. The old
monarchy collapsed in a moment; and men rejoiced to
see it gone, and the ground clear for that new Temple
of Liberty which they hoped to erect. Unfortunately
the ground was only too clear. The people, who had
for many centuries been accustomed to be governed,
found themselves unable to govern, or even to choose their
governors. The want of local institutions had left them
without the power of organizing or combining, without
trust in one another, without the means of knowing
who were the wisest and the worthiest among them.
Distinctions of birth had been so abused that they made
their possessors odious ; literary distinction was no war-
rant of political capacity. Thus the Revolution advanced
in a wild, furious way ; and the government, so far from
being democratic, fell into the hands of a knot of enthu-
siasts, whose violent counsels had won for them the con-
fidence of the Parisian mob, and who ruled, by means
of emissaries sent throughout the provinces, over a dis-
traught and helpless nation. At length the destructive
impulse spent itself; and when the flood began to return
from off the earth, the first object which appeared above
the receding waters was the administrative system of
the old monarchy, still centralized, still fitted to become
what Napoleon made it, a tremendous engine of despotism
in the hands of a military autocrat. By this system
France has since then been ruled. Thrice the dynasty has
been changed, once by foreign intervention, twice by a
popular outbreak. But the effect of each convulsion has

83
260 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essar X.

been only momentary. The want of free local institutions
has, on every occasion, restored to the central authority
that overwhelming power which the dethroned ruler had
abused and forfeited ; the people have gained no practical
knowledge of politics ; and whether under king, republic,
or emperor, the country has never ruled itself, but always
been ruled by its centralized adminis tration.

That the present government of France is not only a
tyranny, but a tyranny of military force, is not to be
charged on democracy, but on the crimes of the old
monarchy. The reign of Louis the Fourteenth gave the
nation a taste for war and aggression which has never left
it and which was revived in full force by the victories of
the first Napoleon. In a.p. 1851 the President of the
Republic was trusted—madly trusted, as one can see after
the event—with the command of an enormous army,
which looked on him as the heir of the hero it worships.
Relying on its support, he overthrew the constitution,
imprisoned the leaders of the Assembly, and struck
terror into the Parisians by an unprovoked massacre.
When this was done, resistance was at an end, for
there were no local bodies to organize a struggle for
liberty. And the middle classes of the provinces, who
still shudder at the recollections of the first Revolution,
preferred tyranny and order to a civil war.

Throughout these eighty years that have passed since
the fall of her ancient monarchy, France has been but
reaping the fruits of the three centuries that preceded.
Not freedom, but the want of it; not democracy, but
the absence of local democratic institutions, and of the
capacity to create and work them ; not the over-activity
of the people, but their passivity which throws everything
Brrce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 261

into the hands of the Government, and their seeming
willingness to sacrifice free speech and a free press for the
sake of “glory” and a commanding position in Europe—
these are the causes which keep France at once unsettled
and enslaved—unable to retain liberty, unable to support
the want of it.

There remain several other historical examples of demo-
cracy which are sometimes appealed to in our political
discussions, and notably those of the Italian republics and
of Switzerland. It would be easy to show, as regards the
former, that they were never in theory, and very imper-
fectly even in practice, free and sovereign States; that
their organization by trade-guilds was of a municipal
rather than a political character ; that it was not truly
democratic, inasmuch as the labouring class was excluded
from power; and that the presence of a turbulent
nobility within and without the city-walls made it im-
possible to establish a well-balanced constitutional govern-
ment, since it threw powers dangerously large into the
hands of the magistrate. The Swiss Confederation is
not only the sole true and pure democracy of modern
Europe ; it is a signal example of the value of demo-
cratic institutions among a people capable of using them.
In most of its cantons, the most perfect social equality
and the fullest development of individual liberty is
combined with a strong and stable Government, under
which the wealthy and well-born receive their full share
of power and influence, while the mass of the population
has risen to a point of prosperity and intelligence incom-
parably superior to that of their neighbours who live
under the despotism of France or the paternal monarchies
of Southern Germany. Switzerland, no doubt, enjoys
962 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

certain advantages for the working of popular institutions
which England does not possess. Butit might be shown
—if the limits allotted to this Essay did not make it
impossible to pursue the subject further—that in esta-
blishing her present constitution she also has had difti-
culties to surmount and has successfully surmounted
them—difficulties at least as great as any that can be
in store for England.’

1 An eminent historian, whose studies and travels have made him familiar
with the practical working of Swiss politics (Mr. E. A. Freeman), writes to
me as follows :—“ From all that I can hear, the rich in Switzerland—not that
there are many people whom we should count rich—have no real grievances.
Wherever, as at Zurich, the old aristocracy have frankly accepted the new
state of things, and have taken their chance along with other folk, they have
got their share like other folk. At Bern, for a long time they were sulky and
held aloof ; more fools they, as in many parts of the Canton they were dis-
tinctly popular, and would have been preferred to other candidates. * * At
Neuchatel I stayed with the Baron de ——, a member of the old aristocracy,
whose only grievance, so far as I could make out, was, that he had been com-
pelled to sell some tithes. He seemed to be in exactly the position of an
English squire, people capping him and calling him ‘M. le Baron.’ He was,
by election, President of the Communal Council, and his son was a member of
the Legislature of the Canton. So I really did not see that his hardships were
very great. * * In the establishment of democracy in the Confederation,
and in many of the Cantons, there were difficulties which we have not here
in England. Here no class, no district, is actually the subject of any other
class or district ; a man has only to acquire the requisite property, and his
full political rights cannot be denied him. But under the old League the
greater part of the country had no political rights at all; cities ruled over
districts and over other cities, and the cities, again, were often themselves
ruled by hereditary oligarchies. And burghership and patricianship being
hereditary, a man could not rise to a higher political rank, except by special
grant. * * To sweep away all these hereditary distinctions was a much
stronger measure than any possible extension of the franchise would be here.
Yet it has answered completely. Then people are constantly saying, that
in a democracy any stable government is impossible, that Australian ministries
change every week, and so forth. The Times said that no democracy ever
did or could allow its Executive to remain in office a whole year. This sounded
strange to me when I read it just after being at the Landesgemeinde of
Outer-Appenzell, where the old Landamman fairly ran away as his only
chance of escaping re-election. But it is stranger still when we think of
Bryce. ] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 263

The chief purpose of the foregoing remarks has been to
show that the differences between the circumstances of
England and of those other States, ancient and modern, in
which democracy has, or is supposed to have, prevailed,
are such that no arguments drawn from their expe-
rience are of any value as enabling us to predict its
possible results here. The Greek republics were small ;
their internal politics were constantly disturbed by those
of their neighbours and enemies; their assembles were
immediate, not representative ; the structure of their
society was simple, and wanted those elements of
stability and resistance which exist in ours. They
were, moreover, Slave States, and therefore not truly
democratic; they despised labour, and set but little
value upon human life. Being polytheists, the Greeks
had a low conception of the Divinity, and therefore
a low one of humanity likewise: their religion, graceful
and beautiful as were its forms, was to the mass of the
people a superstition, to some few an amusement, to none
either the moral basis of life or a bond of spiritual union

these facts. The Federal Executive of Switzerland is the Bundesrath, a
council of seven. Every three years, at the beginning of each new Diet, they
come to an end, but are open to re-election. This has gone on since 1848,
giving six elections since, at any of which the whole Bundesrath might have
been turned out of office. Instead of this (though, of course, several changes
have taken place through death and retirement), only twice has a member of
the Council who sought for re-election failed to obtain it. At the election
last year, one member retired, two were opposed, but they were elected never-
theless. Against the other four did not a dog move his tongue. Can any
monarchy show anything so stable? What ministry in England, or elsewhere,
has kept in for nineteen years? I have not seen enough of Cantonal politics
to say whether the Cantonal Executives are equally stable. But the Legis-
latures are, I believe, invariably chosen by universal suffrage (unless where
Jews have been shut out, and such like), and the general complaint seems
to be that they are too conservative.”
264 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X

with their fellows. Rome was an oligarchy, first of birth,
then of wealth and office, ruling over, yet tempered by, a
democracy of yeomen, which to her own ruin and theirs
she turned at last into a profligate city mob. While she
strove for existence and for victory, patriotism and the
excitement of the struggle kept these discordant elements
together. When the world lay prostrate at her feet, the
chasm between rich and poor had grown too wide to be
bridged over ; the oligarchy, in losing virtue and public
spirit, had lost wisdom and self-control; and nothing
remained but a despotism which could merge the Roman
republic in the empire of the world. The medieval
republics were rather municipalities than sovereign
States: they partook of the violence and the exclusive-
ness of the feudal society out of which they rose, and
were too much absorbed in striving to maintain them-
selves against it to have time to frame any regular
constitutions. Florence alone has a free history ; and
Florence, like Athens, perished in defending herself, with
true republican heroism, against overwhelming force. It
would not be hard to show that in each of these cases,
and notably in those of Athens and Florence, the Free
States, when tried by the standard of their own age,
appear nobler and happier than any other. If then we
are entitled to draw any inference from the records of
their life, it is an inference favourable to the extension
of political privilege to those classes of our countrymen
which do not now enjoy it. But this line of argument,
although interesting in a speculative point of view, has,
for the reasons already given, too little practical value to
be worth following out in detail. For it is the purpose
of this Essay not so much to state the merits which may
Bryce.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 265

be claimed for democracy as to show the unfairness of the
common arguments against it. People say, “How can
any one wish to give democracy in England? Demo-
cracy has often been tried, and wherever it has been tried
it has failed.” Such a statement is doubly false. In its
proper sense—the only sense which can be assigned to it
in English political discussions—democracy has never yet
been tried, except in Switzerland and in America—one
may perhaps add, in Norway. In that looser sense
wherein it is taken to denote a more popular as opposed
to a more exclusive constitution, it has uniformly pro-
duced greater energy, higher virtues, a more generally
diffused happiness, and more brilliant achievements in
literature and art than any of the other forms of
government which have in past times existed alongside
of it. The so-called democratic republics of antiquity
and of the Middle Ages do not prove much in favour of
democracy in England. But they certainly prove nothing
against it.

It may however be asked, “Are then the conclusions of
history all negative, and does she do nothing more for those
who interrogate her than proclaim her impotence to help
them? If history is in any sense a science, must there not
be certain truths which experience has placed beyond
doubt, and which, be they never so wide and general, have
some direct application to the circumstances of all states
and societies?” That there are such truths all students
of history would probably agree in holding. But as to
what they are, and still more as to the manner of stating
and attempting to apply them, great differences of opinion
exist among the highest authorities ; differences which
may expose to the charge of presumption any one who
266 ESSAYS ON REFORM. (Essay X.

ventures to touch upon so vast and so intricate a subject.
It is therefore with the greatest diffidence, and with a
disagreeable consciousness of having to state abruptly
propositions many of which need explanation as well as
proof, that I shall attempt to note and call attention to
some points in which history seems to throw light on
the political situation of England.

Upon one thing at least all are agreed. History holds
no form of government to be absolutely the best, for to
her all things are relative. She recognises, as distinctly
as any utilitarian or constitutionalist could wish, that
every proposal of political change is a question to be
discussed not on abstract grounds, but with reference
to the particular States and nations in question; not
because abstract principles are untrue or unimportant,
but because they are applicable under such a variety of
restrictions and modifications that their establishment
carries us but a very little way towards the solution
of any practical problem. Nevertheless, History does
indicate a certain progress of the race in political
matters; she declares some systems to belong to the
past, and others to the future; she sets before us the
excellences and defects which are found to characterise
each type of constitution, and explains the relation
which each bears to the character and circumstances of
the nation among whom it prevails.

I. Thus it is undeniable that democracy—the par-
ticipation of the whole nation in the direction of its
own affairs—has a stimulating power such as belongs
to no other form of government. By giving the sense
of a common interest and purpose it gives unity and
strength to the whole State ; it rouses the rich and
Bryce] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 267

powerful by obliging them to retain their influence not
by privilege so much as by energy and_ intellectual
eminence ; it elevates the humbler classes by enlarging
their scope of vision and their sense of responsibility.
Corruption and a direct interest in politics seem in the
case of the poor to be in inverse ratio to one another.
The Roman populace at the end of the republic was
corrupt, because, although it had political rights, it
lacked any motive to guide it in using them. Being a
pauper mob, with nothing to gain for itself except corn
to feed and pageants to amuse it, it did not care whom
its votes sent to rule in Spain and Asia, and therefore
sold those votes to the highest bidder. The Athenian
Demos was not corrupt, because it was interested in the
goodness of the officers it chose and the success of the
measures it sanctioned. So too, it may be argued, the
corruption of English voters arises in great part from
their want of interest in or conception of the nature
of the functions they are called to exercise, and will
diminish the more their class feels itself to have a share
in the government of the country.'

II. Again, experience shows that the less a State
mingles in international politics, and, in particular, the
less she involves herself in foreign wars, so much the more
pressing do questions respecting the internal distribution
of privileges tend to become. When the existence of a
nation is imperilled from without, and the war spirit is
fairly kindled, national feeling rises so high that even
oppressive Governments are acquiesced in. The course

1 Some, of course, hold that they will remain indifferent, and therefore
corrupt. But those who argue thus are at least precluded from terrifying
us with the prospect of a working class which shall tyrannize over all others.
268 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

of events in Prussia during the last few months, is a
signal instance. Now it cannot be doubted that national
feeling—in the old exclusive sense—has been constantly
diminishing in England, and is, under a policy of non-
intervention, not likely to be revived by war. The
cohesion which external pressure used to give—as con-
spicuously during the great wars with Spain and France
—hbeing thus withdrawn, the need of internal reconcile-
ment becomes all the greater.

ITI. The experience of all times and countries condemns
class government as inherently bad, because inherently
selfish. One form of it—a form which the arguments
used to defend it in England would go far to justify—
is the rule of freemen over slaves, and we know what that
ends in. But in any form the thing can never be good
unless it is unavoidable. It can never be proper for one
class to tell another that for their own sake they must be
governed and kept under. If the subject population are
so degraded that the statement is true, then it is need-
less. If they are sufficiently advanced to understand
and care about it, they will not believe and will most
certainly resent it. Where greatly superior intelligence
and elevation of character coincide with superior power,
the upper class must and legitimately. may govern, for its
rule will rest not on material strength merely, but upon
the respect and reverence of the subjects. In this lay
the justification of the sway of the feudal aristocracy
during the Middle Ages, and of the heroic aristocracy of
primitive Greece: their political ascendency was the
necessary result of that veneration for birth which is
proper to half-civilized man, and of the aptitude for
command which the habit of command cultivates. An
Bryce. ] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 269

oligarchy of wealth’ is supported by no such feeling on
the part of those who do not belong to it, and can claim

1 How completely English society and politics appeared, to a singularly
unprejudiced observer, to be pervaded and governed by the influence of
wealth, may be seen from the following extract from the volume of De
Tocqueville’s posthumous works, entitled “Notes et Voyages :”—

“Tl faut étre riche pour étre ministre, puisque la représentation 4 laquelle
les meeurs obligent les ministres leur fait dépenser beaucoup plus d’argent
quils n’en recoivent de l’Etat, et cela se congoit sans peine, puisqu’un
ministre en Angleterre est forcé de vivre au milieu d’un monde politique
tout plein de splendeur.

“Tl faut étre riche pour étre juge de paix, lord lieutenant, haut shériff,
maire, overseer of the poor, puisque ces places ne sont point rétribuées,

“Tl faut étre riche pour étre avocat et juge, puisque l'éducation qui méne &
ces deux professions est extrémement chére.

“Tl faut étre riche pour étre ecclésiastique, puisqu’il faut aussi, pour le
devenir, s’étre procuré une éducation dispendieuse.

“Tl faut étre riche pour étre plaideur, car celui qui ne peut donner caution
doit aller en prison. Il n’y a pas de pays dans le monde oti la justice, ce
premier besoin du peuple, soit plus le privilége des riches. Au-dela du juge
de paix, il n’existe pas de tribunaux pour le pauvre.

“Enfin, pour acquérir cette richesse, qui est la clef de tout le reste, le
riche a encore des grands priviléges, puisqw’il trouve plus fucilement des
capitaux ou des situations qui leur permettent de s’enrichir encore lui-méme
ou d’enrichir ses parents.

“Comment s’étonner du culte de ce peuple pour l’argent? L’argent n’est
pas seulement le signe représentatif de la richesse, mais du pouvoir, mais de
la considération, mais de la gloire. Aussi, tandis que le Frangais dit: un tel
a cent mille francs de rente, VAnglais dit: wn tel vaut cent mille livres de rente
(he is worth four thousand pounds a year).

“Les moeurs vont plus loin encore dans ce sens que les lois ; ou plutét les
lois ont modelé les mceurs sur elles.

“ Lesprit, la vertu méme, paraissent peu de chose sans argent. L’argent se
méle A tous les mérites, et s’y incorpore en quelque sorte. I] comble tous les vides
qui peuvent se trouver entre les hommes, mais rien ne saurait les’suppléer.

“Tes Anglais n’ont laissé au pauvre que deux droits: celui d’étre soumis 4
la méme législation que les riches et de s’égaler & eux en acquérant une
richesse égale. Encore ces deux droits ne sont-ils pas plus apparents que
réels, puisque c’est le riche qui fait la loi et qui crée & son profit, ou a celui
de ses enfants, les principaux moyens d’acquérir la richesse.”—Notes et
Voyages, pp. 345—347. (Paris, 1865.)

It will be seen that this passage is not perfectly correct in all its details,
and that changes in the land made since 1835 (the date at which it was written)
have diminished the force of one of its illustrations. But in the main itis quite
ag true and as forcible now as it was then—possibly more so. -
270 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay X,

their obedience upon no ground except one, which the
instinct of every citizen ought to reject—the ground that
a State is a trading company, a man’s interest in which
is proportioned to the capital he has embarked in it.
The assumption of all oligarchies that they are also
aristocracies has some truth in the case of oligarchies
of bith. If an hereditary nobility is preserved by no
higher feeling, it is preserved at any rate by honour. In
its members we may look for a dignity and elevation of
mind, sometimes even for a spirit of self-sacrifice, which
their very origin forbids to oligarchies of wealth. Birth
will always have a charm for the imagination, wealth
can have none; for there is nothing to make the rich
man wiser, or juster, or more high-souled than his neigh~
bours ; and there are some things to make him seem less
so. He may inspire fear, or a hatred that wears the mask
of flattery ; he will not inspire respect. History does not
contain one instance of a plutocracy which has governed
for the public good, and which has not perished either
by its own luxury and corruption, or by the hatred of its
subjects.

If the history of Greece and Rome teaches anything, it
teaches us that it is not democracy but the interested
government of an upper class which naturally and in-
evitably produces the worst type of demagogue. This
being, who is painted in such dark colours as the de-
stroyer of national peace, is not a wanton manifestation
of human wickedness ; he is the legitimate consequence of
a system which abandons the idea of an undivided Com-
monwealth, in whose prosperity all citizens are to share,
and which substitutes for this conception that of a State
composed of different classes with discordant interests, in
Bryce.) THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 271

which whatever is given to one must be taken from some
other, and where the most that can be hoped for is a sort
of armed neutrality of naturally hostile powers.

When the rich declare their own interests to be incom-
patible with those of the rest of the nation, and resolve
upon this ground to keep the government, or the chief
share in it, to themselves, they give a formal challenge to
the poorer part of the community, and oblige it—unless
it be wholly helpless—to assert its rights by agitation.
Abnegating their own function of leadership for the
common good—a function which the poor, when fairly
treated, have always been found willing to concede to
them—they throw the humbler class into the hands of
men who come forward as its advocates and their assail-
ants. Such men may do thew work better or worse.
They may ally themselves with the more liberal members
of the ruling class, and seek to improve and widen
the Constitution without destroying its ancient features.
Or they may—as happened in Greece and Rome, and
might happen even in England were agitation to be
long protracted—they may appeal to the lower passions
of our nature, and proclaim a war of the poor against the
rich. But in either case it is primarily on the mistaken
policy of those who rule the State that such agitation
must be charged, for experience shows that the working
class, unless under the pressure of the severest physical
misery, is in a large country’ comparatively indifferent
to political, power, and does not clamour for it until irri-
tated by a long course of scornful refusal.

1 In the small republics of antiquity it was otherwise; and this is one
point in which the advantages enjoyed by England appear clearly. Politica?
power was loved there because it could be constantly exercised upon every
sort of question,
272 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

It is possible to play the part of demagogue to a ruling
as well as to a subject class, and he who demands that
the voice of the poor should be heard in the councils of
the State, is not so dangerous to the public peace as he
who flatters the insolence of wealth, and bids it maintain
a system which secures its own ascendency.

IV. The tendency of the last seven centuries of Euro-
pean history has been to an equalization of the conditions
of men—an equalization not so much (in England at least)
of wealth as of physical force, of manners, and of intel-
ligence. The feeling of subordination—that reverence
of the lower classes for the upper, which was at once
the cause and the justification of the feudal polity—has
disappeared ; political equality has become a passion in
some countries, legal or civil equality is admitted to be
necessary in all.* Exclusive systems of government
are therefore out of date. In enforcing this principle,
De Tocqueville is not, what he has sometimes been repre-
sented as being, a fatalist who predicts the universal sway
of democratic institutions. Applying his argument to
England, it would rather seem to be on this wise. Those
things which are the bases of political power—knowledge,
self-respect, and the capacity for combined action—having
formerly been possessed by the few only, are now possessed
by the many, and among them by persons who do not
enjoy civic privileges, though they feel themselves in
every other respect the equals of those who do. Or, in
other words, the social progress of democracy has outrun
its political progress. This is dangerous, “because it
makes the organs of our political life no longer an ade-
quate expression of the national will; and because there

1 Speaking, of course, of civilized communities only.
Bryrcer.] THE HISTORICAL ASPHCT OF DEMOCRACY. 273

is nothing more dangerous than a democratic society
without democratic institutions. The possessors of power
ought therefore to admit others to share it, lest a worse
thing befal them—lest class hatreds and jealousies arise,
lest the people be alienated from their old institutions ;
and lest power be at last suddenly and violently seized
by hands untrained to use it. The force of this view,
which, like all those of its author, is an eminently prac-
tical one, founded on a careful observation of the pheno-
mena of his own and other countries, seems to lie in this,
that it suggests no vague and random extension of the
franchise, but the inclusion of those persons only who are
already powerful—powerful not by mere numbers, but
also by their intelligence and organization. Once received
within the pale of the Constitution, such persons will
learn to give their wishes a legitimate expression through
its ancient organs: and they will themselves become its
defenders if it should ever be threatened by the ignorance
or turbulence of that lowest class to whom it is not now
possible to entrust electoral rights.

V. The republics of antiquity, as has been said above,
were oligarchies of masters among a multitude of slaves.
Democracy in its true sense is the product of Chris-
tianity, whose principle, asserted from the first and as-
serted until now, has been the spiritual equality of all
men before God. The apostles preached a kingdom which
was not of this world; they enjoined submission to the
most terrible of despotisms. But their preaching was not
therefore the less revolutionary. For the more that any
man’s mind is penetrated by the Christian spirit, so much
the more hateful do class-distinctions and class-exclusions
become to him; so much the more faith does he cherish

T
274 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

in the possibility of eventually raising the mass of man-
kind from their degradation, and making them the par-
takers of rational freedom. Hence the ideal of a Chris-
tian State is a Democracy ; a Commonwealth in which
wealth is no honour, nor labour any degradation ; all
whose members are worthy of equal regard, although there
be among them a diversity of gifts, and government be
assigned to the most gifted; wherein there is no strife
of classes, because no divergence of interests, nor any
need of coercion, because the law is the expression of their
common will, and their will is to seek not their own
good, but the good of all. Such a commonwealth, held
together not by self-interest, but by the bond of love
and the sense of human fellowship, is something higher,
something less worldly, than that ideal republic of which
Plato dreamt: it is a moral and spiritual rather than a
political ideal : it is out of the sphere of politics altogether.
But the principles which it embodies are not therefore
without their bearing on affairs of civil government.
They enter into and tincture all men’s views, the views
even of those who—like the Socialists of France—least
acknowledge the source from whence they come. They
supply a standard by which the mind of Europe inclines
to try every political scheme, approving or condemning a
change according as it seems more or less likely to lead
towards this ultimate and confessedly unattainable ideal.
Any measure which tends to raise and ennoble the humbler
part of the community, which causes the government to be
conducted more distinctly in the interests of the country
at large, and not of its rulers, which weakens the feeling
of class separation, and creates in its place the feeling
of a united commonwealth, does in so far satisfy aspira-
Brycs.] THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 275

tions which are the groundwork of the political faith
of modern nations, and gives the State whose constitu-
tion is so reformed a firmer hold upon the people, a
conscious sense of progress and harmony. To deny
the influence of such feelings, or to push them aside as
“abstract,” is to be blind to what is passing under our
own eyes, as well as fatally to misread the history of the
last three centuries.

It is not necessary, for the sake of trying to give an
apparent completeness to an argument against oligarchy,
to go minutely through the history of those States
wherein democracy (or something like democracy) and
oligarchy have respectively prevailed, showing, what it
would be easy to show, that the broader the basis on
which free institutions have rested, so much the more
stable have they been ; whereas the more that any nation
has fallen under the control of a dominant class, so much
the feebler and duller has its life become. For the object
of the foregoing pages has been to present a negative
rather than a positive line of reasoning; not to exalt
democracy, but to show that the common arguments
against it drawn from the experience of other countries
are wholly baseless, founded upon fallacies which the
slightest knowledge of history is sufficient to dispel. The
problems which each nation is given to solve are new
problems; and they are problems of the utmost in-
tricacy : their solution is but rendered more difficult by
that random historical empiricism in which the opponents
of Reform have been wont to indulge. To use the words
of a great living historian,’ “It is true that the history of
past centuries ought to be the instructress of the present,

1 Theodor Mommsen, Romische Geschichte, vol. iii,

T2
276 ESSAYS ON REFORM. {Essay X.

but not in the vulgar sense, as if we could by merely
turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the
present in the records of the past ; collecting from them
the symptoms for a political diagnosis and the specifies
for a prescription. It is instructive only so far as the
observation of earlier forms of culture reveals the organic
conditions of civilization generally; the fundamental
forces everywhere alike, the mode of their combination
everywhere different ; and leads and encourages men not
to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduc-
tion.” It is for this reason—it is because Nature is so rich
and so bountiful, never repeating herself, but permitting
each nation to develop its institutions in a manner con-
formable to its peculiar character and genius, that one
argument drawn from the previous history of a State is
worth many arguments drawn from the circumstances of
other States, whether past or present. It is, therefore, to
the teachings of English history that we have mainly to
look; and the teachings of English history cannot be mis-
taken. Our history is that of a State which suffered no
privileged class or person to acquire a dangerous predomi-
nance, which reduced the power of the feudal aristocracy
by the aid of the Crown, and broke the power of the
Crown by the union of the upper and the middle class ;
to whose citizens, even in times of strife and passion, the
greatness of their common country has been dearer than
the triumph of their party ; whose constitution, free from
the first, because based on the civil equality of all
citizens, has never ceased to renew and expand itself from
age to age. Has that process of development--a deve-
lopment often slow yet always progressive—at length,
after so many centuries, reached its final limit? Have
Bryce] LHE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF DEMOCRACY. 277

we overthrown the power of the Crown and the power
of the feudal nobility, only to fall under the rule of
wealth? Is the oligarchy in England, like the oligarchy
at Rome in the days of the Gracchi, resolved to hold fast
all the power it enjoys, and declare the interests of its
class to be the interests of the State? And if so re-
solved, does it find in the sequel of Roman history much
to encourage hopes of an easy victory and a long con-
tinued reign 2

If there be anything which history declares to be
dangerous, it is the failure to recognise a new phase of
political growth, the neglect to meet evils which are for
ever changing their form by institutions capable of
grappling with them. The real danger to England now
is not from the working class, for no working class in
any country was ever more peaceably disposed than ours
is, but from the isolation of classes, caused by the extinc-
tion of the yeomanry and the growth of a manufacturing
population, and from the alarming increase in the poli-
tical, and still more in the social, power of wealth. This
danger is not to be met by treating classes as hostile
bodies, and playing off one against another ; still less by
maintaining the present oligarchic system, and allowing
the rich to engross the administration of the State, and
make its laws subserve their interests. Government by a
class is always government for a class ; a Commonwealth
therefore knows nothing of classes, and, while it leaves to
the possessors of rank and wealth all the advantages that
naturally belong to them, it entrenches them behind no
rampart of privilege. If those advantages and all that
they imply do not enable them to lead a free nation, they
cannot be worthy to lead it: if by pride or selfish indif-
278 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay X.

ference to improvement they have lost the confidence of
the people, the fault is their own, and theirs the punish-
ment. That confidence has more than once been shaken ;
it has not yet been lost beyond hope of recall. But it can
be preserved only by a broad and hearty measure of
reform, one not contrived to defeat itself by crafty sub-
terfuges, one which will not merely whet the appetite it
professes to satisfy. Such a reform will be in the spirit
of the Constitution, for it will add one more to that long
list of timely concessions and wise expansions of old forms
to suit new needs, which have kept our Constitution until
now enshrined in the reverence of the nation. And it will
be made in obedience to the idea which lies at the root of
the Constitution, that the State is not an aggregation of
classes, but a society of individual men, the good of each
of whose members is the good of all. To this idea
England strove, in the days of Cromwell and Milton, to
give visible form—strove prematurely, indeed, yet with a
purity and loftiness of spirit to which history supplies no
parallel. And in this idea—one which the people will
not forsake unless the rich shall have taught them to for-
sake it—is to be found the simplest and the most potent
safeguard against an unjust exercise of power by rich or
poor, for it is the idea of a true Commonwealth—it is at
once the condition and the pledge of national unity.
XI,

OPPORTUNITIES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF
GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND.

BY A. O. RUTSON.

ENGLISHMEN regard Parliamentary Government with an
admiration that is merited. They justly observe that it
produces or encourages among the enfranchised classes
an excellent understanding of each other, common
sympathies, a habit of co-operation, and mutual confi-
dence ; and that, by means of it, such expression is
given to the public opinion of those classes, that, as a
general rule, all their well-considered wishes and plans
speedily become laws.

Few of us, however, sufficiently bear in mind how
great have been the shortcomings of our Parliamentary
government, even when compared with the achievements
of governments which, according to English ideas, are
of far inferior efficacy. And the close connexion is little
noticed that exists between the shortcomings of Parlia-
ment and the political character of the class whose
position gives it the largest opportunities, and lays it
under the heaviest responsibilities. Moreover, we are
280 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

apt altogether to lose sight of the fact that not only is
our own the only nation in the world that possesses
Parliamentary institutions, but that the whole course
of our history, and the social and other circumstances
which have descended to us, are exceptional, and ex-
ceptionally favourable to progress. They are such that,
irrespectively of our Parliamentary institutions, we ought
to bring our own political performance to the test of a
standard far higher than those by which we should
estimate the performance of other nations. And if,
under such circumstances, we have fallen short ; if some
of the most pressing political and social questions have
been neglected, and their solution indefinitely postponed ;
if evils within the reach of legislative remedies have
been suffered to gather strength unheeded, there is good
ground for thinking that some great but not incurable
defects derange the working of the institutions we
have inherited.

It will not be denied that England is the only country
in which the government has permanently taken the
Parliamentary form—if by Parliamentary government
is meant the choice of legislators by a greater or smaller
number of citizens giving their votes freely, and the
responsibility to the legislators so elected of the Execu-
tive. In Italy Parliamentary government is a recent
experiment; in France it has had a very brief and
scarcely a fair trial; the Sovereign and the Peoples of
Austria and Hungary are at this moment only approach-
ing an agreement to adopt it; Prussia has a freely-
elected Legislature, but not Ministerial Responsibility ;
and, notwithstanding the exceptions to be found in some
of the smaller States, Government by a representative
Rursoy.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 931

body may be said to be as untried in Germany as it is
in Russia and in Spain. Only in the United States? has
a form of government at all similar to our own had a
fair trial. But Parliamentary government does not exist
in a country in which the Executive is changed at fixed
intervals, and derives no authority from, and owes no
responsibility to, the Legislature.

Our own long-continued possession of Parliamentary
government, however, is not the only, nor indeed the
most important, fact with reference to which English
statesmanship is tobe judged. Over and above our
Parliamentary government, we enjoy the no less peculiar
and no less momentous advantage of being able to look
back upon an unbroken history. The greatest revolu-
tions in political and religious ideas have been effected
in England without any social convulsion. Our annals
record no abrupt changes, no long period of unnatural
repression ending in anarchy. There has been a con-
tinuous growth and a steady development. The spirit
of the nation has never been degraded by a willing or
by an enforced submission to any tyranny. Misgovern-
ment, such as has frequently existed for generations in
all continental countries, has in England been always un-
known. Not only the prolonged dominion of foreigners,
but temporary conquest, and even the presence on our
soil of a foreign army, has for six centuries been equally
unknown. Far different has been the fortune of other
countries. National life in Italy was sacrificed, in the
first instance, to her splendid and powerful municipali-
ties ; subsequently, and until within a few years from

1 National life in Switzerland is on too small a scale for comparison with
England, except in a few particulars,
282 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

the present time, to the despotism of strangers or of her
own princes. In Germany the divisions of feudalism
were confirmed and perpetuated by the weakness of the
Empire ; and she did not recover for generations from
the Thirty Years’ War, and from the destruction of
wealth, the ruin of cities, the dissolution of society, and
the long depression of intellect that followed it. France
was the victim, first of English invasions, afterwards
of religious wars, later still of absolute monarchy in its
worst form. All these calamities, while they lasted, made
social progress impossible. Nor did they cease without
leaving behind them obstacles to progress scarcely less
formidable in the national temper they had fostered or
created.

From all such calamities as these our ancestors were
free. And thus we are free from the curse of social
distrust, and political instability, that such calamities
commonly leave for the generations to come. When
nations and governments are compared with reference
to that which is at once the purpose and the test of
political institutions—namely, their progress towards the
attainment of a happier lot for the whole of society—the
advantages and the obstacles with which each has been
favoured or impeded should always be borne in mind.
But English politicians are too ready to look upon
the favourable circumstances that are mainly the result
of our insular position, not as a means of progress,
but as themselves the crowning result of our virtue
or our energy; as the fruit of Parliamentary institu-
tions, not as concurring with Parliamentary institutions
to form a surer basis than other nations possess for
social progress.
Rurtson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 983

Nothing, for instance, is more common than to hear
the history of our country, since 1815, compared with
that of France during the same period ; and the freedom
we have enjoyed from change and from Imperialism is
attributed to the superiority of our institutions, and even
to the present limitations of the franchise, and the way
in which representatives are allotted to constituencies.
But, in truth, the existence of Imperialism in France is
due to two causes, from both of which England is free.
In the first place, the violent convulsion of 1789-93,
which was itself the result of prolonged neglect to
accommodate institutions to an altered state of opinion
and an altered distribution of social forces, bequeathed
to France one lasting obstacle to freedom and progress.
To the Revolution France owes a deeply-rooted and
wide-spread distrust of the spontaneous action of society.
This distrust still lives in the minds of the middle class
—that is to say, of that portion of the French nation
which is neither educated enough, like a part of the
upper classes, to know that the circumstances of 1789
cannot return, nor aspiring enough, like a part of the
working class, to desire progress at the risk of some
temporary shock to society. It was, therefore, not the
political temper that is called “Democracy,” nor was it
the absence of any English institution, that brought
about the catastrophe of 1851. It was the middle class
of France—rural and urban — impelled by memories
exclusively French, that yielded to a panic-fear of a
return of 1789; and, recklessly abandoning itself to a
so-called “ Saviour of Society,” combined with the priests
and the population under their influence to sanction
the overthrow of the Republic. Thanks to our history,
284 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

the middle class of England has no such memories ; and
because it has no such memories, it is liable to no such
panic-fear.

The other cause which contributed to the restoration
of Imperialism, is also to be found in the course of
French history; and from this, too, England, with her
insular history, is free. Two centuries ago, France was
the only consolidated State on the European continent,
and grouped around her were divided or enslaved
nations. Her monarchical government was thus tempted
to enter upon schemes of conquest and territorial aggran-
dizement, and to become what England has never been,
a military power. The victories of Louis XIV. created
in the French nation a passion for military glory, which
has been kept alive by the wars and the memory of
Napoleon ; and, fifteen years ago, the army and the
name of the Emperor contributed largely to the destruc-
tion of liberty.

The same spirit of exaggerated self-satisfaction finds
expression in constant references to the accidental cir-
cumstances which have been favourable to the progress
of the United States, while the circumstances that are
unfavourable to their progress are overlooked. It is
seldom noticed, for instance, that the least happy
countries of the Old World are constantly pouring into
the United States a multitude, unfamiliar with their
institutions, and unaccustomed to any form of political
freedom : that this immigrant multitude are the children,
often, of degraded parents, and almost always uneducated :
that the immense material resources of a new country
have bad as well as good effects upon political and social
progress : that the temptation to subdue the wilderness,
Rutson. ] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 285

to open mines, to take a part in the immense traffic that
carries the produce of the New World to the factories and
the markets of the Old, has immense power over men
nurtured in traditions of poverty, and the offspring of
ancestors trained in the ‘labour of the hand, and not of
the brain; and so turns the mind of the nation unduly
from intellectual labour to material occupations, to the
lower rather than to the higher side of social life : that
amidst the din and the hurry which attend the building
up of a new society, and the feverish haste to seize new
opportunities of wealth, the wonder rather is that so
many live their lives withdrawn from the turmoil, and
that so much is done in America to further the work
of thought and science, on which the progress of the
world depends.

In England there is the reverse of this. The history
and the present condition of English society not only
afford sure ground and manifold helps for progress ;
they render the danger—if danger there be—of the
enfranchisement of the working class smaller here than
in any other country in the world. English society
is compactly knit. Its accumulated wealth is vast. Much
of it, it is true, is in a few hands; but an immense
middle class, growing every day in numbers and in re-
sources, including the most thrifty and intelligent of the
artisans, and thence extending upwards to the verge of
the aristocracy, divides among hundreds of thousands
of families by far the larger part of this accumulated
wealth. And these families, by their sense of a common
interest, by their intelligence, and the excellent under-
standing that prevails among them, are capable of most
powerful co-operation. In newer countries labour is
286 LSSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

almost supreme; in England the power of capital is so
ereat, that labour obtains its bare rights with difficulty.
Moreover, many families have for generations kept aloof
from material business and commercial rivalry, either con-
tent with a moderate fortune, or the possessors of great
inherited estates. We have a splendid literature, and each
generation produces works not altogether unworthy of its
predecessors. We are especially distinguished in history
and in political economy, the sciences most directly helpful
to government. The power of men who think is a great
social power ; in this, compared with newer countries, the
men who think are many. The power of men of wealth
is a great social power ; here it is fortified by the tradi-
tions and the habits of many generations. Men of wealth,
and especially of territorial wealth, have long been ac-
customed to take the lead; and the recognition of their
authority has served to confirm it, while the habit of
leading has generated the qualities that make it easy to
accept their leadership.

The stability and the power of such a society can
scarcely be exaggerated. Compared with other societies
it is strong, not merely in the character of its political
institutions, but in its comparative freedom from the
illusions and the passions which, in past times, have led
astray other nations and dominant classes in our own,
and which even now have not everywhere ceased to
operate. When it is said that we have (in respect of its
control over the Executive) a fully developed representa-
tive government, and no passion for military glory ; that
we have an unbroken history and a social order inhe-
rently strong ; that we have a large class devoted to in-
tellectual pursuits, and innumerable personal and local
Rutsov. ] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 287

centres for political action,—we name advantages, some
of which we share with other nations, but in the posses-
sion of the whole of which we stand alone.

Nor have they been wholly barren of results, From
the abolition of most religious tests, the Municipal Reform
Act, the reform of the Tariff, the repeal of the Corn Law,
the Factories’ Acts, the Acts favouring the formation of
joint-stock companies, the repeal of the taxes on know-
ledge, the French Treaty—there has resulted a great
increase in the national wealth, some amelioration of the
condition of the poor, much softening of the distinctions
and the animosities of class and creed.

But to those, at least, who bear in mind the immense
opportunities of our country, and how our history has
fashioned us for legislative achievements and social pro-
gress, it will seem more instructive to dwell on what has
not been achieved. The joyless lives of the cultivators
of the soil, the scantiness of popular education, the
neglect of the Universities and of the higher education,'
the misery of Ireland,’ the overcrowding of our great towns,

1 The beneficent legislation of Parliament in 1854, with respect to the
University of Oxford, is not forgotten. But the waste in sinecure offices of
revenues needed for learning, and the inability of the University and its
colleges at once to elevate and to satisfy the requirements of the nation, is
a matter which still urgently needs the attention of Parliament.

2 The statesmanship of no country is under a darker cloud than that which
has fallen on our own through the misgovernment of Ireland. The Government
of St. Petersburg obstructs the development of Poland ; but it does this,
because for dynastic and imperial purposes it has resolved to crush the
national life of Poland, and to make her people Russians. The resolution
may be a crime, but the destruction of everything national in Poland, and the
extinction of her upper and middle classes, being the only means available for
that criminal purpose, are, however wicked we may think them, no blot on
Russian statesmanship. The Government of Vienna, again, for many years,
disregarded the interest and the wishes of Hungary, and placed the education
of its other best provinces under the control of the Jesuits. But that Govern-
288 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

the nurture of families in ignorance and crime, large
tracts of legislation unopened,—these things startle foreign
statesmen. But when we compare our own opportunities
and resources with theirs; when we remember that, not-
withstanding all our extraordinary advantages, it is only
in the South and Centre of Italy, in parts of the Austrian
dominions, in Spain, and in Russia, that we can find
anything worse, and in no other European country any-
thing so bad, we are compelled to ask how it is that so
little has been accomplished.

In the first place, it is important to remark that the
reforms which have been accomplished have been mainly
the work of the large towns. Individual members of
the Territorial Aristocracy have indeed rendered valuable
assistance. But as a class, the Territorial Aristocracy
have employed their vast political power to oppose the
reforms that have been accomplished, and to uphold the
abuses that have been suffered to continue. It would

ment was a Government which had shut itself out from enlightenment ; and its
Hungarian policy was not so much a blunder in statesmanship, as a part of
the tactics adopted for the attainment of a purpose which, no doubt, was not
less unjust than it has proved impracticable. But the misgovernment of
Ireland is a case different in all respects from these. There is no Englishman
who wishes Irishmen to be less Irish, or who does not in all respects wish
Treland well. In Ireland there are probably not 1,000 educated men who do
not accept the rule of Queen Victoria and the authority of the Imperial
Parliament. But, in obedience to the prejudices of the smallest but most
powerful class in English society, and through the culpable carelessness of the
zest of the enfranchised classes, the State-Church has been maintained, and
has served to keep alive in Ireland bitter memories of conquest and national
degradation. And, through the operation of the same causes—supposed
interest or prejudice on the one hand, and indifference on the other, no effort
has been made—at least, till last year no serious effort had been made—to
give the Irish the benefit of, those legislative enactments which Edmund
Spenser 300 years ago declared, and which since the time of Adam Smith
have been universally acknowledged, to be necessary, if you would change
a restless and idle into an industrious, thrifty, and contented people.
Rurson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 289

seem that, but for the Parliamentary influence of the
great towns, no progress at all (except such as is inde-
pendent of legislation) might have been made in England
during the present century. And this great service has
been rendered to the Nation by the upper class in the
large towns, notwithstanding their busy lives and the
drawback of a most imperfect education. Their class
has been for centuries excluded or estranged from the
national Universities. And the State has done nothing
to supply them with worthy schools nearer home. Yet
hitherto they have done more for England than the pos-
sessors of inherited influence, and the monopolists of the
higher education. Even the middle class of the large
towns, notwithstanding the narrowness of sympathy and
unintelligence with which it is charged, co-operated in
these reforms: without its aid they could not have been
accomplished.

But undue reliance must not be placed on the urban
middle class. No doubt life in cities, at least when it is
accompanied by circumstances in any degree favourable,
is an admirable school. Intercourse and experience, the
collision of mind with mind and class with class, bear
fruit in an open-mindedness and width of sympathy un-
known in a less active society ; and these enable men to
pass sometimes beyond the sphere of their immediate
circumstances, and to give their minds to questions in-
volving principles of justice or of policy ; although such
questions may not directly or obviously affect themselves.
But then it must be remembered how great are the
special drawbacks to the political capacity of the urban
middle class; how the State has hitherto left them to
find as they may a mean and narrow education ; how

U
290 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

small under any circumstances would be their oppor-
tunities of culture; how (unlike the working classes)
they are forced into an extreme isolation and an exagge-
rated self-reliance, by the intensity of the competition for
fresh customers and new openings, and for wealth as a
means of ‘rising in the world”—in which their lives are
spent. All the education that political franchises and
urban life afford cannot give full compensation for these
drawbacks.

And the fact is that the enactments which alone have
saved Parliamentary government from the appearance
of failure, have not only had their origin in the great
towns; they also have a common character. With
scarcely an exception, they have dealt with questions
that very closely touched either the interests or the sen-
timents of the urban middle class. Other important
changes have no doubt been made by Parliament: but
these have been invariably made under some pressing
necessity or some accidental impulse. The Mutiny, for
instance, brought about a reform in the government of
India ; the Crimean war a reform in the army ; the acci-
dental discovery of some cases of terrible neglect is now
compelling a reform in a part of the Poor Law. Even
the question of encouraging industry, thrift, and con-
tentment in Iveland may now receive attention in the
presence of a fresh outbreak of the old disorder. The
Prussian victories have made further reforms in the army
seem possible ; and the desire to answer arguments for
Reform, has caused many questions which were neglected
before, to be declared pressing questions now. All these,
however, were, or will be, the enactments of necessity,
not the results of well-considered policy and foreseeing
Rurson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 291

statesmanship. All the Acts of the latter character—the
reforms that have been first conceived, then popularized,
and ultimately carried as partial applications of well-
understood principles of government—are the work of
the great towns; but then they have also for the most
part involved changes either in our financial or in our
commercial legislation, or otherwise in that part of the
domain of politics which immediately affects the well-to-do
inhabitants of towns. That the representatives of large
towns would support all statesmanlike plans for further-
ing the general progress of the empire is not here denied.
But it would be too sanguine to expect from the busy
employers and the ill-educated middle class of the towns,
that they will not only initiate such plans, but carry
them through Parliament, so long as the county con-
stituencies and the rural boroughs remain as they are
at present.

The chief obstacle to progress is the political power of
the Territorial Aristocracy. Their wealth and inherited
influence, even apart from the nobler traditions that have
descended on many of them, ought to place them above
the narrow interests of a class, and make them the
leaders of the nation. And this might be so, but for the
irresponsible power given them by the present state of
more than half the constituencies—a power which is fatal
at once to popular sympathies and to statesmanship.
Only the most generous natures or the happiest circum-
stances are proof against its influence. And so long as
it continues, Parliamentary government will not have
shown what it is able to accomplish.

The great want of the country is a House of Com-
mons that will give a fair field to statesmanship. A wells

US
292 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

administered despotism would have failed to do many
admirable things we owe to our Parliamentary govern-
ment. But no well-administered despotism would long
tolerate the evils our Parliamentary government has over-
looked. Yet a Parliamentary government is in theory the
best of all governments ; it is the just boast ofits advocates
that it can bring into co-operation for the furtherance of
the progress of society all the intellectual gifts, the free
energies, the generous aspirations, the administrative
faculties, and the social forces of a nation. Our country,
as well from its present circumstances as from its past
history, is more than any other fitted for such a govern-
ment. Here, at least, practice might approach the
excellence of the theory.

It is not that men of statesmanlike mind are wanting
in Parliament. It is not that in Parliament the subjects
congenial to the feelings and views of the House of
Commons, and in which the constituencies take a strong
interest, are not dealt with in a statesmanlike manner.
But the Minister of a Parliamentary government must
breathe the spirit of the assembly in which he sits. The
instincts of an orator control him : and an orator must
be in sympathy with his hearers. Therefore, not of
course without possessing a certain latitude, the mind of
a Parliamentary statesman must conform to the mind of
Parliament ; the limits of his vision, and the range of his
statesmanship, must, for practical purposes, be the same
as those of Parliament. An English minister may lead
the House of Commons wisely; he may achieve great
things for his country ; within the limits fixed by the
public opinion of the House of Commons he may accom-
plish what before seemed impossible : but his course must
Rursoy.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 293

in the main be determined by that public opinion, and,
before anything else, he must be the Minister of the House
of Commons. It is this that makes the character of the
House of Commons of such supreme importance. The
House of Commons does not merely accept or reject the
proposals of the Minister, it practically determines what
the character of those proposals must be.

Industry, integrity, and capacity for business, are
among the acknowledged characteristics of the House of
Commons. The following would seem to be among the
defects which unfit it to adopt on the most important
questions a timely, comprehensive, and _statesman-like
policy :—an imperfect sense of the duty of social progress:
an undue satisfaction with the present: an exaggerated
concern for the maintenance of customs and institutions,
which may be harmless or even good, but which cannot
be essential to the national welfare: and the perversion
to the service of a class, of those who ought to be the
foremost supporters of a national policy.

And the character of the House of Commons is
determined ‘by the character of its constituencies. To
the constituencies, therefore, we must chiefly look for
an explanation of the shortcomings of the House of
Commons.

IL The cause of its imperfect sense of the duty of pro-
gress is to be found in the fact that the middle class is
predominant, while the working class is for practical pur-
poses altogether excluded. The working class possesses,
far more completely than any other class, that strong
desire for a better future, without which social progress is
a matter of chance and accident. It may almost be said
that, though individuals in other conditions of life may
294 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

share it, no class can share it with them ; because the life
of all other classes is too busy or too prosperous, and the
individual is too much isolated for the conception of
social progress to be more than a passing thought of rare
moments. But the working man, especially in large
towns, is constantly reminded that he is one of a great
multitude, whose prosperity or adversity he must share.
The consciousness of mutual dependence makes the work-
ing class generous; while the sense of untrained powers
and of undeveloped faculties gives them aspirations,
which are not the least powerful of the social forces
to be made available for the national service by a
Parliamentary government.

For working men the need of social progress is a
matter of every day’s experience. They could not be
largely represented in the House of Commons, with-
out the statesmen in it feeling that a new force had
arisen which would support them in difficult under-
takings: that a demand had been created for exertions
on their part in paths almost untrodden before. No
Englishman should speak without respect of the middle
class in the large towns, to whose co-operation during
the last thirty-five years so much is owing. But in fact,
as has been already urged, both they and their wealthier
and better educated neighbours and leaders are too
busy to make an effective demand for reforms that are
necessary, but not specially necessary for themselves ; or
even to welcome them with alacrity. They have long
known, for instance, that legislation would go far to
make the Irish loyal and contented, but nothing short of
some imminent peril could rouse them to insist that such
legislation shall be no longer delayed.
Rurtson. ] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 295

II. Undue satisfaction with the present is another
aspect of the imperfect sense of the duty of social
progress. It is not unjust to the House of Commons
to say that it shows little indication either of a reso-
lution, that the condition of all classes of the people of
England shall be far better thirty-five years hence than
it is now; or of a consciousness that, if this hope be
vain, a most dreary and degraded life is prepared for
millions. Nor can it well be otherwise, so long as only
the busy and prosperous, or the wealthy, or those who
are struggling to be wealthy or prosperous, are repre-
sented in Parliament. The constituencies, in which such
classes predominate, think, or act as if they were think-
ing, that misery and crime are the inevitable lot of the
majority of our race; not because they are selfish, but
because they do not give their minds to the matter at all.

ITI. One element of great importance in the character
of the House of Commons is the nature of English con-
servatism. The natural conservatism of a country is the
conservatism of its middle class. This class is con-
servative, because it combines moderate means with
honesty of purpose, steadiness rather than activity of
mind, and indifference to everything that is not obvious
or immediate. It is slowly persuaded to alter anything
that exists; it dislikes change because it is change ; in
those countries where it is happily powerful, it compels
innovators to give good reasons for their innovations ;
coalescing first with one interest and then with another,
it makes hasty innovations impossible ; if a crisis or a
social convulsion is apprehended, it stands conscious of
its own strength and convinced of the truth of prin-
ciples it has never doubted: and wise people, however
296 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

little they may have been in the habit of acting with it,
know that it is a real safeguard of the public welfare.
Such a class is very numerous and very powerful in our
own country. It is powerful also in some other European
countries. In the United States it was this class, con-
sisting mainly of the farmers of the Free States, that
freely sacrificed its wealth and its blood for the main-
tenance of the Union and of freedom, when both were
assailed by the men who had resolved to found a military
oligarchy on the basis of slavery.

But although England possesses this great conservative
class, conservatism, as it appears in Parliament, is some-
thing different. It is not the middle class which appears
by its representatives in Parliament: the middle class of
the large towns is represented there; but the urban
middle class has hitherto, at all events, supported the
party of progress.) But the rural middle class—the
tenant-farmers and freeholders—take no part in politics.
In most counties it would be untrue to say that they are
not permitted to vote as they please. The truth rather
is, that, dazzled and discouraged by the wealth and social
eminence of the great proprietors who live among them,
sometimes no doubt admiring their public spirit and
grateful for acts of real generosity, but influenced always
by an inevitable subserviency to a class whose power is
so overshadowing—the freeholders of moderate estate, no
less than the tenant-farmers, have long since ceased to
be active members of the constituencies to which they
nominally belong; and the real constituent body in the
counties has come to be the limited class of great
proprietors.

To this it must be added that the rural boroughs are
Rurson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 297

for the most part an appendage to the county consti-
tuencies, t.¢. an addition to the representative power of the
country gentlemen. The fatal defect of these boroughs,
which wholly unfits them to return members to Parlia-
ment, is that they are without character. They have
neither the activity of mind and the zeal for improve-
ment which belong to urban constituencies; nor have
they the sturdy faith and reverent loyalty to everything
hallowed by custom and long association, which make an
agricultural middle class wholesomely and powerfully
conservative. With no convictions and no public opinion
of their own, and with no means of forming any, the
small colony of agricultural labourers, the few artisans
isolated from the common life and common enterprises
and common hopes of their order, the petty shopkeeper
competing for the patronage of the neighbouring farmers,
and the beerhouse keepers, who, with a few gentlefolk
and professional men, constitute the population of such
boroughs, are quite unable to keep the attention of their
members fixed, as the attention of members of Parliament
ought to be fixed, upon the great business of legislation
and government. Who their members may be is a
matter of accident. Good fortune has placed a few
of the rural boroughs under the direction of a single
intelligent and responsible will. For the rest, they fall
to the first comer—the most industrious and seductive
canvasser, the most unscrupulous plutocrat, or one of
several influential neighbours. But the majority fall, as
the counties for the most part fall, to the conservative
majority of the class of large proprietors.

The consequence of the political bondage in which
the counties are held and of the political apathy of the
298 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XT,

rural boroughs is, that a very large body of landowners
sit in the House of Commons, not primarily as the repre-
sentatives of the conservative clement of society, but
secondarily only representing that element, and primarily
representing what, relatively to the whole nation, is a
very small social class. It would be contrary to the
nature of men, if the members of a small class, owing
great political power to the confidence, not of the general
body of their countrymen, but of their class, did not
look upon themselves as members of a privileged order.
A conservative middle class and its representatives would
be opposed to change; but then they would also be
strong in the consciousness of a power firmly rooted in
the national character and of an unassailable position. A
privileged order may and generally does resist change,
at least for a time; but it has all the weakness, the
timidity, and the liability to groundless alarms, which
are born of privilege. The representatives of a privileged
order think most of their power. The representatives of
genuine conservatives think most of the maintenance of
the institutions to which they are attached.

The evil consequences of this anomaly are many.
One .or two, however, are conspicuous. It is a great
misfortune for a nation that its rural middle class should
be extruded from political life and deprived of its
educating influences. It is an obstacle to the efficiency
as well as to the honour of Parliamentary government
that for the conservative element in the State there
should be substituted a political faction, which, according
to the nature of political factions, is for ever wantonly
obstructing legislation and causing perilous delays, and
sacrificing its principles to the maintenance or the acqui-
Rutson. ] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 299

sition of power. But the injury to the State is most
clearly seen, when it is remembered that the class of
men who are turned into a faction through the political
selfishness engendered by their anomalous control over
half the constituencies of the Empire, ought, by virtue
of their birth, their opportunities of culture, and their
leisure, to be the leaders and the foremost servants of
the nation.

A yet more pernicious consequence of the system which
substitutes a privileged order for the natural conservatism
of the country, is that everything that seems to be con-
nected, however remotely, with their privileges, gains in
their eyes a factitious importance. With a privileged order,
every question that may possibly affect their privilege is a
“dangerous” question. The privilege itself takes a place
in their minds to which everything else is subordinated.
It becomes either the Constitution or the main bulwark
of the Constitution. Thus, in the eyes of the territorial
class, every attempt to change the character of the
county constituencies is an attempt at revolution ; the
rural boroughs, because they are a principal support of
privilege, are essential to the efficiency of Parliament ;
nay, they are the single characteristic of our Government,
which distinguishes it for good from all others. The
principle of a State Church, not only in this country,
where it has a strong hold on the affection of large
classes, but in Ireland, where it is a mark of conquest—
and the state of the law which encourages primogeniture
and permits the settlement of land—are not only good
in themselves; because they contribute to the main-
tenance of the artificial system of political privilege, they
are guarded with extravagant solicitude, while the con-
300 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI,

dition of Ireland and the education of the people are
practically forgotten.

IV. But the direct and irresponsible power of the
Territorial Aristocracy is the cause of the fourth charac-
teristic defect of the House of Commons—viz. the iden-
tification of the wealthiest class of the community with
the opponents of progress.

If it is to the working classes we must look for the
motive power necessary for progress, it 1s to the pos-
sessors of hereditary wealth, more than to any others,
that we have a right to look for the guidance of our
country to a happier future. So long as wealth and
social prestige descend from father to son, those on
whom they descend will have great social power. It
is the part of such men in a free community to bring to
bear on legislation and government all the enlightenment
that leisure, and all the dispassionateness that an assured
position, can give—and, lifted far above the passions of a
class, to be the supporters of a policy really national.

The story of the failure of the Territorial Aristocracy
to take advantage of its splendid opportunity, has been
told so often, in such bitter words, and with such an ap-
pearance of class prejudice, that there is some danger of
its being forgotten how true it is. Every’ great legisla-

1 There is one very famous exception. The Factories’ Act has been, to that
great majority of the Territorial Aristocracy which has usurped the name and
misused the power of “ Conservatives,” what his single speech was to William
Gerard Hamilton. It is needless to say, that the measures cannot be charac-
terised as exceptions, which, in this session and in other sessions during
which they have been in office, the “Conservative” party have introduced ;
after they had consistently obstructed the same measures, while in opposition,
either by open hostility, or by the captious criticism of determined ill-wishers.
The Roman Catholic Relief Bill and the Repeal of the Corn Law were each
carried under the pressure of a great crisis, by “Conservative” statesmen ;
Rurson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 301

tive change, of which we are now enjoying the results, has
either been opposed by the great majority of the possessors
of hereditary wealth, or has been carried without help
from them, or any sign of their sympathy. But they
should be judged not only by what has been done without
their aid, or in spite of their opposition ; they are mainly
responsible for what has been left undone. For good,
at all events, the power in France of Napoleon III. has
not been greater than theirs in England. No scheme of
beneficent legislation that they might have devised would
have failed to obtain the willing support of the great
urban constituencies. Their power and their leisure had
laid upon them great responsibilities. It was out of their
class that statesmen should have arisen ; it was for them
to form and support a vigorous and far-sighted public
opinion. It was for them to grapple with the questions
which the overworked and untrained minds of the dwel-
lers in towns might well overlook. But they have passed
them by, scarcely recognising their existence, except in
order to oppose some suggested expedient, or denounce as
full of innumerable perils, the first approach of generous
legislation or comprehensive Reform. Divided between an
exaggerated admiration for that part of the Parliamentary
system on which the power of their class depends, and
the most groundless fears for the safety of property and
the preservation of order, the men whose birth and
circumstances had made them the natural leaders of the
people, have hitherto crowded the benches on one side of

but by “Conservative ” statesmen acting alone against the opposition, and
amidst the most dismal forebodings, of their followers. Sir Robert Peel, it is
true, had previously initiated our commercial legislation. But Sir Robert
Peel drew his inspiration from his descent, not from his political connexion.
302 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

Parliament, hardly contributing anything to the advance-
ment of any national interest, to the solution of any
social question, or to the fair fame of Parliamentary
government.

The causes of this are not far to seek. To the removal
of one cause it is to be hoped that a reformed Parliament
will soon contribute all the aid that legislation can give.
The education that is given by a life spent among fellow-
citizens in a great city is good; but it falls short of the
higher education which is within the reach of men of
hereditary wealth. But Parliament has permitted the
higher education to be trifled with in the places where
men profess to seek it. The colleges at our old Univer-
sities are, for the most part, little more than pleasant
clubs, where a few years are idly spent. No adequate
provision is made for teachers; and the training of the
youth of England is left to the generosity of public-
spirited students, or to the care of men who have pur-
poses in life not often consistent with their bemg good
educators. The choice of systems of education is left to
custom, which the Universities are so constituted that
they cannot adequately direct; while the authority of
their names forbids the trial of any system but their
own. From schools, where years are spent in a mode of
training useless for all but a few, and from colleges which
fall far short of what they might be, the majority of the
possessors of hereditary wealth pass, by the will of their
order, into the national Parliament; and there surround
the path of statesmen with distrust and difficulty, avoid-
ing, as insoluble or dangerous, the questions that stand
most in need of wise legislation, and leaving the honour
of such wise legislation as is accomplished to men who
Rorson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 303

have learnt a higher, yet not the highest, wisdom in the
great school of urban life,

But the best education schools and colleges can give
is insufficient to make a good member of Parliament.
The most highly educated man is not competent to judge
of matters to which his mind is not attentively directed ;
and, on the other hand, nature gives most men a rough
good-sense, which, if it be assisted by a very little
training, will lead them to right conclusions on subjects
to which they apply themselves. It is therefore to
public life that we must principally look for the educa-
tion of statesmen. And, above all, we must look to the
constituencies. If nature or education has given a man
open-mindedness, the constituencies must give him prac-
tical aims. It is for them to state the political problem,
and to insist that it shall receive attention. It is for the
Representative to solve it.

The rural boroughs can neither give such instruction,
nor can they exact responsibility. The counties offer
political education to any one who wishes to find it; but
the responsibility of a county member is due only to a
class. Anything that tends to restore political life to
the county constituencies, contributes to their educating
power, and therefore to the increase of statesmen. With
the rural boroughs would pass away the chief source of
political indifference, and with political indifference one
great obstacle to the efficiency of Parliament.

The cause of nearly all the shortcomings of our Repre-
sentative System is the want of responsibility. The
circumstances in which the lives of members of Parlia-
ment are spent are such as they may well think no
change can improve 3 and they are naturally reluctant
304 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

to alter anything in a world that for them seems so
nearly perfect. Hence the vital importance of bringing
them face to face with large constituencies, and making
them familiar with the wants and wishes of the poor.
Hitherto the time of Parliament has been unduly oc-
cupied with details; while great evils have been allowed
to gather strength, till the difficulty of dealing with them
has become almost insuperable. The skirts only of Irish
and Educational questions are touched, from a fear lest
the one may lead to the discussion of the Land-laws, or
of the State Church; and the discussion of the other to
an increase of the power of the State. A Parliament
whose industry responsibility had quickened into states-
manship, would long ago have dealt effectually and
fearlessly with the want of education and with the
misery of Ireland: convinced that if the English Land-
laws and the existence in England of a State Church are
good, the adoption of a just policy towards Ireland will
not make them less good. Robbed, by their uncontrolled
predominance in counties and rural boroughs, of the
wholesome guidance of a sense of responsibility, a ma-
jority of the members of the House of Commons have
acted for years under a sense of perpetual anxiety, not
for great and national, but for comparatively small and
almost personal interests; with this result: that Ireland
has come again to the verge of anarchy; and, with
the growth of our great towns, ignorance has become an
immense peril ; while the discussions, that were averted
at such a cost, are only postponed.

The most powerful argument in favour of the reduc-
tion of the franchise in counties and in large towns, and
of the transfer of seats to large towns or populous and
Rurtson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 305

busy counties from rural boroughs, is to be found in the
effect of those changes on members of Parliament. The
men who sit in the House of Commons will be nearly the
same men, but their knowledge will be greater, and their
policy more statesman-like. Political life will no longer
consist in sitting irresponsibly for counties in which poli-
tical life is suspended, or for boroughs from which it has
passed away ; but in helping forward the work of English
statesmen. There will be not less culture in Parliament,
and not less reverence for what is worthy of reverence.
But the mind of a member of Parliament will be more
open; he will have more knowledge, and far more
wisdom. He will have learnt that, if a man can find
out what is the interest of the Nation, he will have
studied at the same time his own interest and that of his
order; while the opposite process leads only to disastrous
blunders and irreparable waste of power. Half the life
of England will no longer be a sealed book to him. He
will be less dazzled by the mere increase of national
wealth ; less distrustful of “world bettering ;’ less satis-
fied that things shall remain as they are. He will have
come to know something of the wants and the difficulties,
and also of the worth, of the great industrial majority
of the English nation; of the longing of those among
them who are educated, that the vice and misery which
ignorance produces among their neighbours and around
their homes shall cease. Such changes will not only give
England more statesmen, but—what is of equal import-
ance—more men able to appreciate statesmanship.

Life has hitherto been, for the great majority of men,
a life of squalor and gloom ; or of toil unrelieved, at the

x
306 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

best, by more than one or two of the very many things
that give charm to the lives of a few of us. To the
complacent, or indolent, or selfish school of politicians,
who bid us let society alone, and insist that the indi-
vidual is master of his destiny, it is a sufficient answer
to point on the one hand to the immense and abiding
misery that mistaken legislation and bad governments
have brought upon the world; and, on the other hand,
to the great benefits that wise legislation has in our time
spread among the people. Millions of every class, but
especially among the poor, do in fact begin, and often
complete, their lives under a weight of inherited vices
and social difficulties, for the existence of which society
is responsible, and for the mitigation of which all that
can be done by legislation should be done as speedily as
possible. The power of society to alter the conditions
under which the lives of individuals are spent has been
but recently recognised : the hope of what may be achieved
has but lately dawned; the effort to accomplish it has
scarcely yet commenced. Until the discovery began of
the processes by which wealth is increased without any
increase of human labour, it might have seemed in vain
to hope for any material alleviation of the general lot of
man. But those discoveries have now placed legislators
under a new responsibility, because they have established
a surer ground of hope for the future of society. For
two or three generations the recognition of the duty of
social progress, and of the possibility of furthering it
by legislation, has been the basis of politics. And the
test of a good constituency is that it can impress this
lesson upon its representatives.
Rurson.] GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND. 307

To those who say that Parliament, as at present con-
stituted, is worthy of trust in this matter, there are two
answers. First, considering its opportunities, Parliament
has, in fact, done little ; and with the most pressing of all
questions it has trifled. Secondly, what has been done,
has been done, so to speak, by subalterns—by the men
on whom the chief burden of legislation should not
have fallen. If any one thinks that much has been
accomplished, let him consider how much more might
have been accomplished, if the persistent opposition of
the most powerful class in the community had been
changed for intelligent help. If political activity can
be restored to the counties, and the incumbrance of the
rural boroughs removed from the constituent body, much
will have been done towards the accomplishment of
this change. Parliamentary Government will, then, for
the first time in the history of any nation, receive a fair
trial.

In the seventeenth century it required all the energy of
Representative Institutions, then less perfectly developed
than now, but much more completely national, to subdue
the power of the Crown. In the eighteenth, Parliament,
while still representative in form, had become little more
than the instrument of an oligarchy or of the Crown.
The change that was accomplished in 1832 enfranchised
the middle classes ; and has led the way to all the reforms
which have placed on a firm basis the material prosperity
of England. The purpose of the changes now at hand is
to make our government national; and with a national
government it may be hoped the blots will disappear that
now disgrace our policy :—that the Irishman will develop

x2
808 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

in Ireland the virtues he now shows everywhere but at
home, that education will spread rapidly among the
people, and that every year a larger measure of comfort
and enlightenment will reach the homes of the poor.
But whether these results are attained swiftly or slowly

must still largely depend on the part that is taken by the
Territorial Aristocracy.
XII.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833.
BY SIR GEORGE YOUNG.

Most of us have heard some political veteran of the
times of the Reform Bill dilating upon the subsequent
perils of the country, and the extraordinary combination
of circumstances that averted its ruin. “At that time,”
he will say, “party spirit ran higher than at present ;
politics occupied more of our thoughts and conversation ;
the destiny of the country hung upon the turning of
a feather ; statesmen lost their heads, and parties their
principles; the Revolution was upon us, and it was
by no merit of our rulers that we were saved from the
calamities of anarchy. But what followed was a sur-
prise to us, and a still greater surprise to the revolu-
tionary party. In the House of Commons which met in
1833, the constitutional element was virtually annihilated.
The Church, the Lords, the very fabric of property was
threatened. In the ranks of the majority the most
violent and the most ignorant seemed to rule. But the
good sense of the country re-asserted itself; the Whig
leaders betrayed their Radical following ; the intrepidity
310 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

of the Conservative remnant opposed a constant barrier
to the tide ; the fanaticism of the Irish Catholics aroused
the spirit of Englishmen, and the force of the movement
spent itself in clouds of turbid oratory. Before long the
Government, unable to keep pace with its popular sup-
porters, was reduced to rely on the forbearance of the
Opposition. Disunion eventually overthrew it ; and the
reaction obtained a brief triumph in three years, and
a permanent superiority in only eight, measured from
the day when we almost despaired of the republic.
Notwithstanding the subsequent break-up of the Pro-
tectionist Ministry, the progress of revolution had been
effectually arrested ; and the Reform Bill era became matter
of history, to serve as a warning indeed to the next
generation, but not yet to involve, at least by its imme-
diate consequences, the total ruin of our social and
political system.”?

It is not surprising that a hasty judgment, founded
partly on the records of debates, and partly on the smart
things that were said and sung of them, should make
a byword of the first reformed Parliament for confusion,
verbosity, and emptiness. It was, however, in truth
an epoch of fivefold importance in Parliamentary history.
To it belongs, in commerce, the opening of Oriental
trade ; in social polity, the new Poor Law and the first
Factory Act; in ecclesiastical matters, the rescue of the
Irish Church, by the hand of the State, from ruin, and
the consequent re-assertion of the principle, which time
had obscured, that the temporalities of a State Church
are under the control of the State. In Law there was
the abolition of several systems of intolerable formule,

1 See especially Alison’s History of Europe, New Series, ch. xxxi.
Youna.] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833. 311

which encumbered the transfer of landed property and
the procedure of the superior courts. Lastly, there was
the first initiation of the Legislature into the work of
National Education. With all these, the House of
Commons found time to abolish slavery in the West
Indies, and to subdue Ireland with a Coercion bill;
to give the Bank a new Charter and the metropolis a
new criminal court; and to discuss, sometimes abor-
tively, sometimes with advantage, all the various
crotchets (then so deemed) of the new Radical members,
including Free Trade, Civil disabilities, Bribery preven-
tion, Municipal Corporation Reform, Criminal Law Re-
form, University Reform, Church Rate abolition, Tithe
abolition, Triennial Parliaments, and the Ballot. There
is hardly a question which has exercised the wisdom of
legislators and the talents of debaters since, of which the
history does not begin from, or in some degree turn upon,
its treatment by that astonishing Parliament.

Nor was the impetus to legislative action arrested
immediately by the dissolution. The Ministry of Sir
Robert Peel left one important legacy to the country
in the project for an Ecclesiastical Commission. In the
succeeding years the great measure of Municipal Reform
was carried, triumphantly in Scotland, decisively in
England, tardily and with much compromise for Ireland.
The restored Ministers profited by the designs of their
predecessors to pass a Tithe Commutation Act, and
to relieve Dissenters from some of the more scandalous
of the disabilities under which they laboured. The
work of Law Reform made some progress; some of the
beneficial provisions of the preceding sessions were ex-
tended in operation, and the foul stains of blood were
312 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

removed from our penal code. The honourable history
of the Whig Ministry was concluded by two reforms
of widely differing import, but alike remarkable for
their boldness, and for a certain far-sighted sagacity
which time has since justified. Canada, by the union
of its two provinces under a system of complete self-
government, was restored to order and loyalty ; and, at
the cost of an alarming sacrifice of revenue, a cheap
postage, with all its attendant benefits, was purchased
for the poor.

- This brief enumeration of salutary reforms may be
an old tale, but it should never be a wearisome one
to Englishmen. Though it be impossible to claim for
all these measures the praise due to a complete and
satisfactory enactment, yet it may at least be said of
them that they were the work not so much of a class, or
of a legislature, as of the nation; and that he who
refuses honour to their general wisdom, or assent to the
principles on which they were founded, cuts himself off
less from the triumphs of a political party than from
the history of his country.

We cannot, however, regard the years which followed
the Reform Bill as a complete era of successful inno-
vation, with a prelude, a climax, and a decline. On the
contrary, the high-water mark of innovating energy
must be placed at the passing of the Reform Bill itself.
It needed but three years from that time to bring the
champions of Reform to the avowal that the success
of one or two measures was all that could be hoped for
in a session, and that even this might be seriously
endangered by the attempt to accomplish more. A time
of compromise and almost of indifference succeeded ; and
Youne.] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833. 313

a state of equal balance between parties, a condition of
things unfavourable to legislative energy, has lasted with
little variation to the present time. Success has alter-
nated between rival leaders; in some departments
changes have been effected, and in others successfully
resisted. But on the whole we may accept the state-
ment of our respected monitor, that the “Revolution”
was arrested in its progress). We must add, however,
that the history of the Reformed Parliament of itself
proves the essential limitation of a movement such as
then resulted in creating it; and that the prophets,
who foretold an accelerated precipitation down a slope
ending in some terrible abyss of anarchy, were as un-
reasonable in their expectations as the event has shown
them to be wrong. The supposed popular madness,
which is often quoted for the terror and instruction
of ourselves, is seen to have been, not the threatening
prelude of a revolution, but the expression of angry
impatience by a people, sensible of suffering, and with-
out sufficient means of political articulation, who had
set their hearts on the attainment of a definite object,
and were ready to sit down, somewhat too contentedly,
when they had attained it.

If, then, we cannot accept the theory of a fever and
a reaction, of a people’s madness created by agitators, and
arrested by the interposition of some Genius of “ good
sense,” how are we to characterise the historical result ?
It seems to be assumed somewhat hastily by the de-
fenders of one Reform Bill, and no more, that the work
of those years left little in legislation that was con-
spicuous or splendid to be done. It is said that abuses
had accumulated, while men waited for a Reform Bill;
314 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XI.

the new Parliament swept them away boldly, and, if
succeeding Parliaments had not the same glory, the
fault was in the nature of things. The abuses which re-
mained were of course the most difficult of removal : dead
wood in the structure cannot be pruned or lopped away
like the excrescences which come first under the knife.
Discontent with the slow process of Reform in the second
stage is an “ignorant impatience.” Besides, the first
Reformers had the glory of passing measures which had
been matured through long contest and frequent defeat ;
their successors had not the same felicity.

This is true, but not the whole truth. The list above
given includes the removal of some abuses, some few
constructions of administrative organizations, and some
commencements, chiefly valuable for the principles they
declared. Other examples might be given under each
of these heads. But though what remained for removal
might need time to remove, there is no excuse for a
failure to continue what had been commenced, or for
neglect to emulate what had been accomplished. The
complaint is not unreasonable, when we compare age
with age, and commencement with sequel, that the
House of Commons has been slow to remove abuses that
were indefensible, and has shown a growing disincli-
nation to deal with legislation in the mass. The boast of
laborious industry by individual members is unavailing,
if their common tasks are not effectively performed ; and
the freedom with which all opinions may be mooted and
all questions sifted on the floor, is small matter for satis-
faction, if the means are deficient of arriving at and
enforcing a conclusion. Above all things, however tardy
its movements, the House of Commons might long have
Young. | THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833. 315

retained the confidence of the nation, if it had not prac-
tically begun to lose confidence in itself. One or two
examples of this irresolution will suffice.

Compared with the former enthusiasm, it is amazing
to see how little interest the House of Commons takes in
Education. In the last generation there was a belief
expressed by societies and cheap publications innu-
merable, that the time had come for effecting, by the
diffusion and improvement of knowledge, a general
improvement in the condition of the poor. The societies
survive, and the cheap literature holds its ground; but
the House and its constituency have not buckled to the
work, A temporary expedient of annual grants, never
intended by its inventors to become a permanent system,
has been patched into something that “ will hold water ;”
that is, will not break down from its extravagance of
expenditure ; but this machinery will never cope with
ignorance and paganism. The experience of thirty years,
with all their Commissions and debates, has left us vacil-
lating without system or purpose. Between State super-
vision and voluntary effort the House has adopted a com-
promise which, like compromises generally, does not fit the
necessity. The religious bodies, Church and Chapel alike,
have done a good deal ; the State has done something ;
but the result of their united efforts is inadequate to the
wants of the nation. Meanwhile, in the place of a belief
in education, and a corresponding determination to make
it universal, the cause is hindered by an indolent resig-
nation to the economical necessity of ignorance.

That the children of agricultural labourers must begin
work at ten years old ; that men cannot be made virtuous
by Act of Parliament; that no learning is useful unless
316 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

seasoned with divinity; that State aid cannot be given
without creating a vested interest; that the central
power is an alien enemy, to be thwarted and opposed :
these are the fallacies accepted or tolerated, when the
mind of the nation is directed, through its present repre-
sentatives, to the greatest labour of the time. They are
always ready to discuss the discipline of the Education
Office, the dignity of the Inspectors, the trivialities of
examination papers; men of all opinions unite to depre-
cate expenditure; but the civilizing organization has
been neglected or deferred. Can we pride ourselves on the
paltry seven or eight millions that have been spent, and
the annual thousands that are being spent, as the out-
come of thirty years’ discussion? Has not a generation
grown up since 1834, destitute of the soberness of thought
and breadth of view which might have been imparted
by culture? We hear daily of the incompetence for
polities, of the vanity and narrowness of those who lead
the working class ; but what if leaders and followers had
had the means of self-improvement which a civilized
and Christian country should have placed within their
reach? It was well said by Mr. Carlyle in 1843:
“Supposing the Corn Laws abolished, and from ten to
twenty years of new possibility to live and find wages
conceded us in consequence ; if the whole English people
during these twenty years of respite be not educated
with at least schoolmaster’s educating, a tremendous
responsibility will rest somewhere!” Now that this
responsibility meets us in the grave question of granting
or refusing representation to the people, is the House of
Commons clear of blame, which owes to its own neglect
its best pretext for refusal ?
Youne.] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833. 317

If we take another great question on the list, that of
the Municipal Reform Acts, we shall again find zeal and
sagacity in the outset, inefficiency and timidity in the
sequel. To the popular municipal bodies thus created,
we owe nearly all the political training of the shop-
keeping class which has for one generation governed
England. That Parliamentary elections do express in
a rough way the good sense and intelligence of the
classes who elect, and that one important lesson has
sunk deeply into their minds—the lesson of political
compromise—is due mainly to these schools of local self-
government which the Reformed Parliament created.
But where has been the central power that should have
urged torpid municipalities into activity and emulation?
How has the House of Commons dealt with the metro-
polis, then reserved for separate treatment, but which
in fact has never been municipally organized at all?
Without pattern, where they should have found one, in
the metropolis ; without efficient impulse or guidance
from the administrative centre ; without the public spirit
fostered by a government of all for the good of all, and
with all the timidity natural to the small commercial
class dominant in them, the municipal bodies of the
provincial towns—notwithstanding the great benefits
their institution has conferred on the nation—have often
fallen short of the duties required of them, and have
failed to attract so much as they ought to have attracted,
of the local talent available for administration.

Again, in the various complicated questions included
under the title of Law Reform, we notice this at the outset:
the work of the first Reformed Parliament was necessarily
destructive. The method adopted, perhaps the best
318 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

possible under the circumstances, was to group as many
abuses as might be, in a single measure of abolition, and
to substitute a simpler expedient, where necessary, for
effecting the legitimate purpose of the Acts repealed.
The reforms were mostly of procedure ; some few only
of substantive law. The additions thus made to juris-
prudence are, in the most English of senses, practical.
But since Law is a science, as well as an instrument
for conducing to the business of life, these practical
expedients have not fitted well into the structure. They
have in many cases added to its complexity, and in all
to its bulk. The first element of a science, an accurate
definition of its terms, is still absent or deficient in
modern English law. Legal phraseology is therefore
still hopelessly at variance with the language of the
people. But a popular representative body can never
properly reform, it can only make incongruous additions
to its legislation, when those who enact and those who
have to obey the law are alike ignorant of the language
of the law. Hence the bulk of our jurisprudence is be-
coming portentous ; it is fast overwhelming its professors :
it has long outstripped the comprehension of its creators.

Cheap justice, the most conspicuous of the numerous
ways in which people may be made happy and virtuous
by Act of Parliament, was the avowed object of these
legal reforms. Yet even so, it took till 1845 to establish
so necessary—and let us say, so mild—a palliative for
the costliness of litigation as the County Courts ; and the
County Courts existed for twenty years without juris-
diction in equity, to the scandal of justice, and to the
detriment of the poor. When capital punishment was
finally abolished for offences against property, the prin-
Youne.] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN 1833. 319

ciple was established that penalties for crime should be
measured hy the public conscience, not by the opinion
legislators might form of what was most likely to deter.
The establishment of this principle cleared the way for
the formation of a Criminal Code; for the public con-
science constantly tends to the consistent enforcement
of a logical system, that of scientific morals ; while scat-
tered edicts of repression are only defensible when viewed
separately. Yet the Acts for the consolidation of the
Statute criminal law, imperfect even as a digest, by
reason of the whole body of Common Law maxims which
are still retained, were only passed in 1861; having
actually been long prejudiced and delayed by the unsus-
pected and unheeded anomalies which they revealed.
One grand purpose of all Law Reform is to enable the
people, without more special training than may be given
to every citizen, to understand the law under which
they live, and under which their business is transacted.
Liberals believe that it is both possible and expedient to
do so. Our representatives at all events must know the
laws that exist, or at least must be able to understand
them when they are read, if they are to do justice to
their task. The steps necessary for this purpose are,
first, to digest, secondly, to simplify, the existing law ;
without ceasing to remove abuses when they gall, or to
provide new regulations as they are required by the
developments of business. The third and crowning work
will be to systematize the whole, by alteration, where
alteration is necessary, as well as by arrangement. The
House of Commons has made but a few tentative experi-
ments in the first department; it exhibits no power to
begin the second, no wish to grapple with the third.
320 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

The mere unreasoning prejudice against innovation no
longer has so much influence, or is so openly appealed to,
as formerly. But there are other forms, perhaps equally
effective, in which indolence and timidity may combine
with selfishness in resisting beneficial change. Such is
eminently the so-called English aversion to things perfect,
or which seem perfect, on paper. Because a plausible
theory is more common than a true one, people talk as if
“theory ” was something pernicious and opposed to prac-
tice ; and such loose talk is not without bad influence on
legislation. It certainly contributes to that disinclination
to deal with masses of law at once which we have placed
among our subjects of complaint. Another evil is the
instinctive attitude of opposition which is assumed as a
matter of course by the members of one party, on the
first mention of a proposal supported by the other. Too
great indulgence in the stimulants of party government
has made in turn most of our domestic, and some
imperial questions, the battle-field of Ministries. And
many matters are reluctantly entertained by the House
of Commons, solely from the way in which individuals
have fettered themselves by pledges and Governments
by programmes. Another consists in the jealousy of
delegating to fitter hands the subjects most interesting
to the members of the House. This jealousy it is which
overwhelms the machinery of Parliament with adminis-
trative detail concerning the transactions of landowners
and public companies. Another weakness of the House
of Commons, which is aggravated by the unnecessary
burdens it imposes on itself, is its disinclination to
undertake legislative work proper for the public service,
especially for the benefit of the unrepresented classes,
Youne.] THE HOUSE OF COMMONS LN 1833. 321

under cover of the sufficiency of economical laws ; while
these, perhaps, are neutralized or qualified in operation
by the special circumstances of the case. Lastly, there
is a tendency to inaction, proceeding from a latent dis-
belief in the progress of nations ; and the notion of some-
thing cyclic or oscillatory in events, which may hereafter
give resistance to change a retrospective justification,
when the theory which has been disposed of shall turn
out to be true, and when the epoch which has departed
shall recur.

It may be said of the House of Commons, not merely
that in this or that matter it has not acted; we must
add, that in some matters it seems uncertain how to act,
and uncertain how to relieve itself of uncertainty. This
reproach is not peculiar to a party or a session: Parlia-
ments meet and are dissolved, but the new one is soon
hampered by the traditions of the old ; Commissions and
Committees sit, but often with little zeal in the investi-
gation, and little readiness to act upon such results as
may be obtained.

If, then, we find one Parliamentary epoch, the results
of which can be regarded with satisfaction, succeeded by
a gradual relapse—not, indeed, into the state of things,
but into the rate of progress, which was found inadequate
before—it may follow that a repetition of the same pro-
cess is desirable. A measure of further enfranchisement,
considered merely with reference to legislation, promises
to give fresh vigour to the minds and energies of states-
men: it would bring some fresh sympathies into Parlia-
ment, some new notions into the Committee rooms ; some
idlers might vanish from the lobbies, and some prejudice
from the debates. After much declamation against the

.
322 ESSAYS ON REFORM. [Essay XII.

mischievous effects of the change, and a good many
metaphors drawn from the inclined plane, it would be
discovered that a reaction had set in; and no doubt the
Conservative party would soon rally round the Consti-
tution. In process of time, the Reform Bill of 186—
would become, like its prototype, a monument of the
vanity of agitators and the good sense of the community.
We should then have the satisfaction of counting the
valuable measures which had slipped through somehow,
in the intervals of anarchy: we should find new matter of
congratulation in the achievements of the past. If energy
like that of the first Reformed Parliament were all that
we could hope for as the result of passing another, it
might be worth while to pass it.

This is our answer to the limited vision which sees
nothing but the mischiefs of organic change. False
analogies with European revolution have led some to
speak of constitutional reform in language fitted rather
to a pronunciamento or a coup d’état. This English
movement has nothing in common with revolution. The
one is a healthful legislative stimulus; the other an
intermittent fever. It may formerly have been believed
that any lowering of the suffrage would tend with fresh
impetus towards further change ; that all useful business
would begin to give place to agitation, and all fixity of
institutions would be lost for ever. If history ever
taught mankind a lesson, the sequel of 1832 has shown
the vanity of these terrors. That movement was strictly
limited in scope to the expression of prevailing national
convictions. If the movement of the present day be
not wholly dissimilar, its results will also be bounded by
the prevalent convictions of the nation. We recognise
Youna. | THE HOUSE OF COMMONS LN 1833. 323

and admit no such dissimilarity. To us the unity of the
nation and of the national history seems in this point
clear and indisputable. The same motives which then
urged the enfranchisement of some, now urge the en-
franchisement of others; the same historical tendency
towards freedom which then carried a Reform Bill, will
sooner or later carry another; and the same sagacity
which has guided the fortunes of England, in the hands
of all her children who have been called hitherto to her
counsels, will not cease to guide them still in the increased
multitude of her counsellors,

Y 2
APPENDIX.

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

UNITED KINGDOM.

 

 

 

Sy g Sa
oe) 5 58
2 a 22
ge # a Es
zB Ee Za
Boroughs, &e. with popula-
tion under twenty thou- >| 145 = 215
sand each . Raa
Above twenty thousand . | 109 _ 181
Counties, &c. under one
hundred and oe thou- >| 100 _ 168
sand .
Counties, &c. over one
hundred and ey thou- 44 _ 88
sand .
254 _ 396 | Borough Members.
TORT: 3 Ere - 144 — 256 | County Members.
University Members . . _— _ 6
Boroughs with population Vea 8
under five thousand . ° nN 43,705 | 17 |) Conservatives 9
Boroughs with over two § Liberals . .15
hundred thousand ° 9 | e26082") 28 { Conservatives 3
Boroughs with less than Liberals . . 9
ten thousand . 19 70,020 | 20 |) Conservatives 11
Boroughs with more than Liberals . .20
one hundred thousand . hn Be jee ee oe | Coe 1

 

 

 

 

 

 
326 APPENDIX.
ANALYTICAL TABLE, continued—

UNITED KINGDOM, continued—

 

 

H 3 a

Bo) 38 |:

ge £5 aie

za at Zz
Boroughs less than ten Liberals . .14
itonnand Poet Na aes ue 107,481 | 32 |) Conservatives 18
Boroughs with more than ) ‘ Liberals . . 21
fifty thousand cle, eet 16 | 1,180,304 | 31 |) Conservatives 10

Boroughs with less than }
ten thousand population |

37 221,206 69 Conservatives 38

Majority C. 7

Boroughs with population
over fifty thousand,
under seven hundred

Liberals . .56

35 | 5,857,352 70 Conservatives 14

| iberals . .31
:
:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

thousand Majority L. 42
-REPRESENTATION OF PROPERTY.
Number Payment to
of Income Tax in | Members.
Boroughs.
£
Total Counties, United Kingdom} . _— 4,475,474 256
Total Boroughs, United Kingdom . — 5,615,817 396
Boroughs with less than ten thousand 67 2,071,341 106
Boroughs with more than two :
hundred thousand . 9 | 24,376,627 18
B h i ‘
Token Te Bem frente} as | aeraes | a
Boroughs with over twenty thousand 109 5,248,894 181

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Thus a population of 221,206 returns 69 Members with a majority of 7 Conse: tives, eve!
seat but one or two being under landed influence. On the aie tone. 35 DOROURLE |

population of 5,857,352, only return 70 Members, with a majority of 42 Liberals.
+ The wealth of the Counties is greatly increased by the addition of th 1 districts whi
Mr. Disraeli would include within the borough houndaries, hang -urpancdistaets which
APPENDIX.

ANALYTICAL TABLE, contiwucd—

ARISTOCRATIU ELEMENT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.*

 

 

Conservatives . . . . . . 175
Liberals . . . es ae, SRE
Total Aristocratic . . . . 326
Analysis -—
Baronets . . i Hee Gas) ah
Elder Sons of Baronets sore oe Ml
Younger Sons of Baronets . . . 19
Grandsons of Baronets . ... 8
Baronetage . . . . . . . Total — 109
Elder Sons of Peers . . . . . 387
Younger Sons of Peers . . . . 64
Grandsons of Peers . .. . . 15
Peerage. . . . . . . .) Total — 116

Commoners connected by anes
or Descent. . . . 100
Aristocratic. . 6... Total -_——

Another view :—

Alliances

(1) Between Baronet and Baronet. 23

(2) Between Baronet and Peer. . 53

(3) Between Peer and Peer. . . 79
Alliances. . . 2. . . . . Total — 155

Another view :—
Members representing One Peerage

by Marriage or Descent . . . 117
Members representing Two Peer-
ages by Marriage or Descent. . 67

Members representing Three Peer-
ages by Marriage or Descent. . 18

Armyand Navy... .... . 271

Officers exclusive of Guardsmen. . . 54
Guardsmen. . . . . . . 58
IMM: pee ide yids, HR a 48
Yeomanry . . ...... 56
Volunteers . . . . . 1 we 44
Naval tae ogscs a 8, Ae re ae AS 11

326

 

 

* This table is compiled exclusively from Dod’s ‘‘ New Parliament ;” it does not include those
squires and owners of landed property whose connexion with the Peerage does not appear

there.
328 APPENDIX.
ANALYTICAL TABLE, continued—

UNIVERSITIES, SCHOOLS, PROFESSIONS, BUSINESS, src.

 

Public Schools and Universities :—
Oxford . . Hoe eek a Ge AAG

Christchurch : eo) wdiplescle) Gaette os 76

Balliol sg ¥- wo a we 9

Ge. Aird Garb des aah Gee Go &e.
Cambridge. . . ........ «+2110

SU TUOIGY ee ak dae sh nce a eden Set, coe 88

Sti John’s. 4s @ 2 we oe ¥ & 12

Gs Ce Sime Mase Aa be “ae ae Ss &e.
London University . . . 1... .. 7

Dublin a. oe: 8 eee i ee ee ORT
Edinburgh . 1... we 9
Glasgow. 6. 6s Foe ee eS 3

Public Schools :—

GOI 2g? ay 2a ae a a a a a cae oe TO:
Harrow ......... .. 52
Rugby a ¢ 2 2 & © ee a a ew) 628
Westminster . Brace aha a

Winchester
Charterhouse
Shrewsbury
Sandhurst .
Woolwich .

e
Bm OVO sT OO ST

HonourMen. . ......... + £45
First Class Men. . 2... 1 we ew we ee 19
Double Firstess 0 goa gow ee ge a we!) 3
Double Seconds . . . 2... we ee 8
Other Classes. 2. 2. 1 1. 2 ee ee 4
Passmen . . . . 1... ww ws «the rest.

ANUTHORS 0 ty fas 45 Se God oR A See oR 78
Diawyers: as be Ke Sa ew ee we 100
Queen’s Councillors . . . . 1... 24

Magistrates. 2. 2. 2 1. 1 ww we 178
Deputy Lieutenants . . . 1. 2. 1. 285
High Sheriffs 4 ke a ee RB

Railway Directors . . 1. 1. 1. 2. ww.) «179
Insurance Office Directors . . ..... 53
‘Bankers: - ce ole! o de. Sew Se ce Sa 78
Brewers) 49 9 oe WR Woe a 12
IDISSENLETS: am ae hk SR. aby A PRK 84

 

 

 
APPENDIX.

ANALYTICAL TABLE, continued—

CLUBS, TRADE, DISSENT.

329

 

Clubs :-—

Conservative Clubs
Liberal Clubs

Travellers’ ‘
University Clubs .
Atheneum : ‘
Army and a Clubs |
Guards’ . -
Boodle’s .

White’s

249
221
88
82

52
19
45
42

 

Trade :—

Ship Owners . a

East India Merchants .

Iron Masters .

Cotton Merchants and Calico Printers
Worsted and Carpet Manufacturers
Silk Manufacturers . hrs
Miscellaneous

Total

far
SIp aso rpst

oO

 

e
bo
bo

 

 

Dissent :*—
Independents
Baptists .
Wesleyan
Unitarians .
English Presbyterians
United Presbyterians
Free Churchmen .
Quakers .
Jews . .
English Roman “Catholics
Trish Roman Catholics .

CONTR NW WH OHH Ww

pe

General Total

wo
RSG

 

(Supposed)

(Supposed)

 

 

* We owe this table to the favour of Mr. Carvell Williams.
330 APPENDIX.

TABLE OF LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE MEMBERS.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

| Liberal Conservative
‘ Members. Members.
English Boroughs . . . . 197 123
Welsh Boroughs. . . . . 12 2
Scotch Burghs . . . . . 23 0
Tnish Boroughs . . . . 25 14
Total Boroughs, U.K. . . . 257 139
English Counties . . . . 50 97
Welsh Counties . . . . . 7 8
Scotch Counties. . . . . 19 ll
Trish Counties . . . 31 33
Total Counties .-. 2... 107 149
University Members . . . 0 6
General Total, U. K. :--
Liberal Members . . . . | 364 294
Conservative Members . . 294
Liberal Majority. . . . . 70
ABSTRACT

Of the Distribution of the Working Classes throughout the Constituenctes of
England and Wales.

 

Total Electors on Register . | 514026

ae Working Classes on 128603
egister

Men Electors to other 26°3

Electors

38 Boroughs ¢ eng 73 3
Wienibers alaorh 89282 | Working Men Electors.
The remaining 162 English

~ General Average of ee}
and Welsh Boroughs have "

{ Working Men Electors left
Bowel ) or say 230 piece.

 

 

 

 

L

* The object of this table is not to show how many Liberals or how many Conservatives are
in Parliament, but, taking any Parliament elected under the Reform Bill of 1832, to show how
the different constituencies have a tendency to vote.

t+ In only 8 of these 38 Boroughs have the Working Men an aciual majority. A complete list
of these § ‘Boroughs i is given on page 332.

 
APPENDIX. 331

TABLE

Showing the Members returned by 32 Boroughs, which absorb 82,948 out of the
Total Working Men on Register, viz. 128,603.

 

 

to
g = ae Members returned at last
2 gs £ General Election.
B |ise
Metropolitan Districts :
Finsbury . . . . | 25491 | 16:4 | Torrens, Lusk.
Lambeth . . . . | 27754 | 342 | Hughes, Doulton.
: Goschen, Crawford, Laurence,
London. . . . . | 17534| 89 { Roiheck’ : ,
Marylebone . . . | 23888 | 21°6 | Lewis, Chambers.
Southwark. . . . | 11646 | 47°4 | Laird, Locke.
Tower Hamlets . . | 34115 | 23°8 | Ayrton, Butler.
Westminster . . . | 12817 | 11:9 | Grosvenor, Mill.
* Greenwich. . . . | 9813 | 52°7 | Salomons, Bright (Sir C.)
Average . . si 27°0
Fifteen Seaport Towns :
Bristol . . . . . | 14324 | 35°8 | Berkeley, Peto.
Liverpool . . . . | 21839 | 13:0 | Horsfall, Graves.
Southampton . . . | 4230 | 49°7 | Gurney, Moffatt.
Birkenhead. . . .| 4563 | 45°3 | Laird.
Brighton , : . .| 6352 | 33:1 | White, Fawcett.
Devonport. . . .| 2860 | 49°5 | Flemming, Ferrand.
Portsmouth . . .| 4671 | 27:1 | Stone, Gaselee.
Chatham . . . .| 2111 | 46:1 | Otway.
Hull. . . . . . | 6498 | 16°5 | Clay, Norwood.
Dover . . . . . | 2414 | 36°5 | Freshfield, Dixon.
Hastings . . . . | 1941 | 43:1 | Waldegrave-Leslie, Robertson.
* Pembroke . . . .| 1479 | 54:2 | Sir J. Owen.
Cardiff . . . . .| 2123 | 37-4 | Crichton-Stewart.
Sunderland. . . .| 3468! 17°5 | Fenwick, Hartley.
Scarborough . . .| 1446 | 41:2 | Johnstone, Dent.
Average ‘ a 37°5
Manchester. . . . . | 22792 | 27:0 | James, Bazley.
Birmingham . . . . | 15497 | 19°2 | Bright, Scholefield.
Nottingham . . . .j} 6921 | 394 | Morley, Clifton.
Sheffield. . . . . «| 9136 | 26:0 | Roebuck, Hadfield.
Leicester. . . . . .| 5488 | 39°9 | Harris, Taylor.
Norwich. 2. .... 5682 | 33°0 | Russell, Warner.
York. . . . . . . | 4724 | 344 | Lowther, Leeman.
Oxford . . . . . «| 8113 | 44:0 | Neate, Cardwell.
Wolverhampton . . . | 4891 | 25°8 | Villiers, Weguelin.
Total Boroughs . . 32 Totul Members . . 62.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* These are two of the 8 Boroughs (see next page) in which Working Meu are a majority of the
Electors,
332 APPENDIX.

TABLE =

Of the Eight Boroughs, returning Fourteen Members, in which, according to
the latest returns, the Working Men have an actual majority, and whom
they returned at the last General Election.

Taken from the “ Electoral Statistics ” for 1866, No. 170.

 

 

2 [es
F S83 | eg
Parliamentary City or Suge 2 wg Members returned at the last
Borough. 3 Bes Be 2 General Election.
2Ha2 |AES
3 Eaton, H. W. (Conservative).
Coventry . . . . .{| 4967 | 69°8 Troharne, Morgan (Cons.).
: Bass, M. Ar. (Liberal).
URE 6. <5 ae SRORO Bet Meller, W. (Conservative).
; Sandford, G. M. W. (Tory).
ee Soo | See Bele R. A. (Conservative).
4 3 ‘ Allen, W. 8. (Liberal).
Neweastle-under-Lyne . 1077 | 547 \Buckley E. (Conservative).
Pembroke . . . . .]| 1483 | 54:2] Owen, Sir Hugh (Liberal).
: Edwards, H. (Conservative).
Beverley. . . » « «| 1289 | 53:4 ' Sykes, C. (Conservative).
‘ f Salomons, Ald. (Liberal).
a ' Bright, Sir Charles (Liberal).
St.Ives. 2... 486 | 51:0| Paul, H. (Conservative).

 

 

 

 

Conservative Members . . . ...... 9
Liberal Members. . . . . . ee ee BD

Total: ow al Se ay a TA

 

 

 
APPENDIX. 333

TABLE OF BOROUGHS, SHOWING THEIR POPULATION AND
THEIR REPRESENTATIVES.

Eleven Boroughs with less than 5,000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S oj
Z 2 Members. Influence.
AA
1 | Arundel . l. 2,498 | Howard, Lord E. | Duke of Norfolk.
1 | Ashburton L 3,062 Jardine Lord Clinton. -
1 | Dartmouth . c. 4,444 Hardy Seale of Mt. Boone.
2 | Evesham . le 4,680 | Bourne, Holland | LordNorthwick,Rudge
2| Honiton . le 3,301 } Beller Coduens Viscount Courtnay.
1 | Lyme Regis . c. 3,215 Treby Attwood.
2 | Marlborough Lc. 4,893 | Bruce, Baring Ailesbury.
1 | Northallerton c. 4,755 ills Harewood.
2 | Thetford . C. C 4,208 | Harvey, Baring | Grafton, Ashburton.
2 | Totnes lo. 4,001 | Pender, Seymour | Cleveland, Somerset.
2 | Wells . lc. 4,648 | Joliffe, Hayter | Dean and Chapter.
17 Total 81. | 43,705
Ie.
Nine Boroughs with over 200,000.
z ¢ Members, Influence.
Az
2 | Birmingham . 1. 1. | 296,076 | Scholefield, Bright
2 | Finsbury . 1. 1.| 387,278| Torrens, Lusk
2 | Lambeth . 11.) 294,888 | Hughes, Doulton
2| Leeds. . l.c.| 207,165 | Beecroft, Baines
2 | Liverpool . c.c.| 443,938 | Horsfall, Graves
2 | Manchester . 1.1.) 357,979 | Bazley, James
2 | Marylebone . 1.1. | 436,252 | Lewis, Chambers
2 | Tower Hamlets. |. J.| 647,845) Ayrton, Butler
2| Westminster ./1.1.| 254,623] Grosvenor, Mill
18 Total 15 1.|3,326,039
3c. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
334 APPENDIA.

TABLE OF BorouGus, SHOWING THEIR POPULATION AND THEIR
REPRESENTATIVES—continued.

Ten Boroughs with less than 10,000.

|
1
:
\
|
|

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ie mm
2 3 Members. Influence.
5
Aa

2 | Andover . 1. ¢. 5,430 | Fortescue, Humph. | Iellowes, Pollen.
2} Bodmin . . LU. 6,381 Gower, Wyld

2) Bridgenorth . le. 7,699 | Pritchard, Acton | Whitmore.

2) Bridport . ld. 7,719 | Mitchell, Hodson

2 | Buckingham. lie. 7,626 | Verney, Hubbard | Buckingham.

2 | Chichester le. 8,059 Lennox, Abel Smith} Duke of Richmond.
2 | Chippenham GC. 7,075 | Neeld, Gouldeney | Neeld.

2 | Cirencester . C. C 6,336 | Bathurst, Dutton | Bathurst, Cripps.
2 | Cockermouth le. 7,057 Steele, Naas

2 | Devizes c. C 6,638 | Bateson, D. Griffith | Sotheron Estcourt.
20 91 70,020

Total fhe
Len Boroughs with more than 100,000.

© a

3 3 | Members. Influence.
£3

Az |
Hdl — ls bee

2| Bradford. . . 10.) 106,218; Wickham, Foster

2| Bristol . . .jLL) 154,093) Barclay, Peto

2| Greenwich .  |1. 0) 139,436 go ae

LI |( Goschen, Craw- |
4| London. . . |7 | 112,063 |< ford, Laurence, > |
ia ‘(Rothschild } |

2 | Neweastle-on-T. |/. 1. | 109,108 "Cowen, Headlam

1} Salford . . .) 2 | 102,449; Cheetham

2 | Sheffield . 1.1.| 185,172 | Roebuck, Hadfield |

2| Stoke. . . |Le.| 101,207} Hope, Grenfell ©

2| Southwark . . /l.2.| 193,593 | Locke, Layard

2 | Wolverhampton. jl. /.| 147,670 | Villiers, Weguelin

21 Total } - 7.1,351,009 |

¢.

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX. 335
TABLE OF BorouGHS, SHOWING THEIR POPULATION AND THEIR
REPRESENTATIVES—continued.
Sixteen Boroughs with less than 10,000.
ee
a2 Members. Tnflnence,
aa
2 | Dorchester lc. 6,823 | Sturt, Sheridan | Shaftesbury, Williams.
2 | Harwich . Cc. C. 5,070 Jervis, Kelk Attwood,
2| Huntingdon. . je. 6,254 Peel, Baring Sandwich.
2 | Knaresborough . | J. c. 5,402 | Woodd, Holden | Devonshire, Slingsby.
2 | Lewes. . {hd 9,716 | Brand, Pelham
2 | Lichfield . l. ¢. 6,893 | Anson, Dyott Sutherland, Anglesea.
2 | Ludlow C. t. 6,033 | Clive, Severne | Powis.
2 | Lymington le. 5,179 |Mackinnon, Lennox! Burrard.
2 | Maldon c.¢. 6,261 | Peacock, Earle | Strutt.
2 | Malton i 1. 8,072 |Fitzwilliam, Browne! Fitzwilliam.
2 | Hertford . L. 6,769 | Cowper, Farquhar | Salisbury, Cowper.
2 | Leominster . CG. C. 5,686 | Walsh, Hardy Arkwright.
2 | Marlow c. ¢. 6,496 ) Williams, Knox | PeersWilliams,Clayton
2 | Newport . lc. 7,934 | Martin, Kennard
2] Poole . ae 9,759 | Seymour, Waring | De Mauley, Guest.
2 | Richmond 1. 5,134 | Palmer, Dundas | Zetland.
32 Total i 107,481
Sixteen Boroughs with more than 50,000, and less than 100,000.
© a
2 2 Members. Influence,
az
2) Bath... Le} 52,528 Tite, Hogg
1 | Birkenhead . C. 51,649 Laird
2 | Blackburn C. 6 63,126 Hornby, Feilden
2 | Bolton lec} 70,395 Gray, Barnes
2 | Brighton . I. 1.| 87,317 | White, Fawcett
2 |) Devonport c.c.| 64,783 | Flemming, Ferrand
2} Hull lu. 97,661 Clay, N orwood
2 | Leicester . 1.1.| 68,056| Harris, Taylor
2 | Norwich . 1.1} 74,891} Russell, Warner
2 | Nottingham . Lu, 74,693 | Morley, Clifton
2 | Oldham 1.1.) 94,844| Hibbert, Platt
2 | Plymouth 1.1.| 62,599 | Collier, Morrison
2 | Portsmouth . i.1.| 94,799 Stone, Gaselee
seer (te) Sn | aaah ay
tockpor' 2b a mi
2 | Sunderland . lc. 85,797 Fenwick, Hartley
31 Total a 1. {1,180,304
C.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
336 APPENDIX.

FLOGGING BILL.* Marcu 10, 1864.

GENERAL SUMMARY.

 

Total Members who voted, 90 Electoral Weight, 261,428

For . .. . 46 Against . . . . 175,984
Against . . . 44 For «ww ww 85 ddd
Majority For . 2 Majority Against . 90,540

 

DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER BILL. Marcu 2, 1866.

GENERAL SUMMARY.

 

Total Members who voted, 332 Electoral Weight, 657,448
For Second Reading 156 For . . . . 362,733
Against . . . . 176 Against . . . 294,715
Majority Against . 20 Majority For . 68,018

ANALYSIS OF AYES AND Nogs.

SUMMARY.
Ayes. Noes.

County Members . « AZ 84
Borough Members with less than 7 000 "Blectors. . 46 48
Borough Members with more than 1 3000 Electors . 63 38

University Members .
Total . . . . . . 156 176

 

 

* This table is taken from Acland’s ‘‘ Imperial Poll Book.”
o

R CLAY, SUN, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, LONDON,

4

i