Part 12 (2/2)
The Duke of Wellington was at the head of the Tory Ministry in 1830; and though he declared in face of an Opposition that was headed by the Whig aristocrats, and included the middle-cla.s.s manufacturers and the great bulk of the working cla.s.s in the industrial districts of Lancas.h.i.+re, Yorks.h.i.+re and the Midlands, that ”no better system (of Parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man” than the unreformed House of Commons, and that he would never bring forward a reform measure himself, and should always feel it his duty to resist such measure when proposed by others, yet, in less than two years after this speech Wellington's resistance had ended, and the Reform Bill was carried into law.
What happened in those two years was this: At the general election in the summer of 1831, the popular cry was ”the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill.”
”The whole countless mult.i.tude of reformers had laid hold of the principle that the most secure and the shortest way of obtaining what they wanted was to obtain representation. The non-electors felt themselves called upon to put forth such power as they had as a means to obtaining the power which they claimed.” And the non-electors were enormously successful. For they ”combined their will, their knowledge, and their manifest force in political unions, whence they sent forth will, knowledge, and influence over wide districts of the land. And the electors, seeing the importance of the crisis--the unspeakable importance that it should be well conducted--joined these unions.”
The Reformers carried the day at the elections, and the new House of Commons pa.s.sed the second reading of the Bill on July 8th, by 136: 367-231.
On September 21st the third reading pa.s.sed by 345 to 236. Then on the 8th of October the House of Lords threw out the Bill by 199 to 158, and at once fierce riots broke out all over the country, in especial at Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol.
At Derby the jail was stormed. At Nottingham the castle was burned, and of nine men subsequently convicted of riot, three were hanged. At Bristol, the jail, the Mansion House, the Customs House, the Excise Office, and the Bishop's Palace were burned, and twelve lives were lost in three days.
The new session opened in December, and again the Bill was introduced, and this time the second reading had a majority of 162: 324-162. The House of Lords hesitated when the Bill came up to them at the end of March, 1832; allowed the second reading to pa.s.s by 184 to 175, and then in Committee struck out those clauses which disfranchised the ”rotten”
boroughs--uninhabited const.i.tuencies like Old Sarum. Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, at once resigned, and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to form a Tory anti-reform Ministry. But the task was beyond him, the temper of the country was impatient of any further postponement of the Bill. Pet.i.tions poured in urging Parliament to vote no supplies, and resolutions were pa.s.sed refusing to pay taxes till the Bill became law.
On Wellington's failure to make a Government, William IV. had to recall Grey, and the Whigs resumed office with an a.s.surance that, if necessary, the King would create sufficient peers favourable to reform, so that the Bill should pa.s.s.
The battle was over, the anti-Reformers retired, and on June 4th, 1832, the Reform Bill pa.s.sed the Lords by 106 to 22, receiving the Royal a.s.sent three days later.
The Whigs protested that the Reform Bill was _a final measure_, and Sir Francis Burdett, the veteran reformer, was content to vote with the Tories when the Act had become law. But there is no finality in politics, and the Reform Bill was only the removal of a barrier on the road to democracy. The Tories described the Bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the Act of 1832 neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its foes. What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since 1688, to the richer members of the middle cla.s.s--the big farmers in the country, the prosperous shopkeepers in the towns. The working cla.s.s was still voteless, and the old democratic franchise of Preston and Westminster was gone from those boroughs.
The first reformed Parliament met early in 1833, and the change in the character of the House of Commons was seen at once. Government accepted responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before.
The New Poor Law, 1834, and the new Munic.i.p.al Corporations Act, 1835, were the beginning of our present system of local government. Slavery was abolished in all British Colonies in 1833.
Greville, in his Memoirs, gives us an impression of the new regime in Parliament as it appeared to one who belonged to the old dethroned aristocracy.
”The first thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... There exists no _party_ but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the Tories, without a head, frightened, angry, and sulky.”
THE WORKING CLa.s.s STILL UNREPRESENTED
But the working cla.s.ses were the really disappointed people in the country.
They had worked for the reformers, and their energies--and their violence--had been the driving force that had carried the Bill into law. If their expectations were extravagant and their hopes over-heated, the more bitter was their distress at the failure of the Reform Act to accomplish the social improvements that had been predicted.
CHARTISM
So the working cla.s.s in despair of help from the Government, decided to get the franchise for themselves, and for twelve years, 1838-1850, Chartism was the great popular movement. The _Five Points of the People's Charter_ were proclaimed in 1838: (1) Universal Suffrage; (2) Vote by Ballot; (3) Annual Parliaments; (4) Abolition of Property Qualification for Members of Parliament; (5) Payment of Members. A Sixth Point--Equal Electoral Districts--was left out in the National Pet.i.tion.
Although the Chartist demands were political, it was the social misery of the time that drove men and women into the Chartist movement. The wretchedness of their lot--its hopeless outlook, and the horrible housing conditions in the big towns--these things seemed intolerable to the more intelligent of the working people, and thousands flocked to the monster Chartist demonstrations, and found comfort in the orations of Feargus O'Connor, Bronterre O'Brien, and Ernest Jones.
The Charter promised political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. So it seemed in the 'Forties--when one in every eleven of the industrial population was a pauper.
Stephens, a ”hot-headed” Chartist preacher, put the case as he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in 1839: ”The principle of the People's Charter is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness.
The question of universal suffrage is, after all, a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty.”[79]
The lot of the labourer and the artisan was found to be worse than it was in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, before the great Reform Act had been pa.s.sed.[80] And while the Anti-Corn Law League, the Socialist propaganda of Robert Owen, and the agitation for factory legislation, all promised help and attracted large numbers of workmen, the Chartist movement was by far the strongest and most revolutionary of all the post-reform popular agitations. Chartism went to pieces because the leaders could not work together, and were, in fact, greatly divided as to the methods and objects of the movement. By 1848 Bronterre O'Brien had retired from the Chartist ranks, Feargus O'Connor was M.P. for Nottingham--to be led away from the House of Commons hopelessly insane, to die in 1855--and Ernest Jones could only say when the Chartist Convention broke up in hopeless disagreement, ”amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee has been trampled out, and elements of our energy are scattered to the winds of heaven.”
In spite of its failure, Chartism kept alive for many years the desire for political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt in the labouring cla.s.ses. That desire never died out. Although Palmerston, the ”Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet”--so Disraeli accurately enough described him--was Prime Minister from 1855 to 1865 (with one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-cla.s.s enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Palmerston's very inactivity drove Liberals and the younger Conservatives to look to the working cla.s.ses for support for the measures that were planned. The middle cla.s.s was satisfied that the artisans could be admitted to the franchise without danger to the Const.i.tution. Palmerston's death in 1865 left the Liberal Party to Earl Russell's premiers.h.i.+p, with Gladstone as its leader in the Commons. Reform was now inevitable.
<script>