The Rise of the Democracy Part 12

There is no such absolute escape from the past for men or nations, and we can only build our new social and political order on the foundations of experience. But we may not be moved to build at all but for the prophet and the agitator, and therefore the instinct that makes governments slay or imprison the political agitator and suppress the writings of political prophets can be understood. For the existence of every government is threatened by prophets and agitators, and in self-defence it resists innovation. A healthy democracy will allow too many opportunities for popular expression to fear innovation; yet even under a democracy the prophets have been stoned--their sepulchres to be subsequently erected by public subscription and handsomely decorated.

Democracy owes too much to its prophets in the past not to rejoice at their presence in its midst. But it will prudently leave the direction of its public affairs to men who, less gifted it may be in finding new paths, are more experienced in making the roads that others have discovered fit for the heavy tread of mult.i.tudes.

CHAPTER VII

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM AND THE ENFRANCHIs.e.m.e.nT OF THE PEOPLE

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century changed the face of England and brought to the manufacturing cla.s.s wealth and prominence. The population of Lancas.h.i.+re was not more than 300,000 in 1760, the West Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re about 360,000, and the total population of England 6,000,000.

The inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, Crompton, Watt, and Cartwright revolutionised the cotton trade in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and increased enormously the production of woollen goods. England ceased to be mainly a nation of farmers and merchants; domestic manufacture gave way to the factory system; the labouring people, unable to make a living in the country, gathered into the towns. The long series of Enclosure Acts--1760-1843--turned seven million acres of common land into private property, and with this change in agrarian conditions and the growth of population England ceased to be a corn-exporting country, and became dependent on foreign nations for its food supply.

While these industrial and agrarian changes meant a striking increase in wealth and population, they were accompanied by untold misery to the common people.

"Instead of the small master working in his own home with his one or two apprentices and journeymen, the rich capitalist-employer with his army of factory hands grew up. Many of these masters were rough, illiterate and hard, though shrewd and far-seeing in business. The workmen were forced to work for long hours in dark, dirty and unwholesome workshops. The State did nothing to protect them; the masters only thought of their profits; the national conscience was dead, and unjust laws prevented them combining together in trade unions to help themselves. Women and children were made to work as long and as hard as the men. A regular system grew up of transporting pauper and dest.i.tute children to weary factory work. There was no care for their health. There were few churches and chapels, though the Methodists often did something to prevent the people from falling back into heathendom. The workmen were ignorant, brutal, poor and oppressed. There were no schools and plenty of public houses. In hard times distress was widespread, and the workmen naturally listened to agitators and fanatics, or took to violent means of avenging their wrongs, for they had no const.i.tutional means of redress. Even the masters had no votes, as the new towns sent no members to Parliament. The transfer of the balance of population and wealth from the south and east to the north and Midlands made Parliamentary reform necessary."[76]

With this transfer of the balance of economic power came a good deal of rivalry between the manufacturers and the landed gentry, the latter becoming more and more Tory, the former more and more Radical. As all political power, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman cla.s.s disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. These yeomen and small landowners had been the backbone of the Parliamentary Party in the days of the Stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to sell out and invest their property in other ways.

The story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth.

"A single farmer held as one farm the lands that once formed fourteen farms, bringing up respectably fourteen families. The capitalist farmer came in like the capitalist employer. His gangs of poor and ignorant labourers were the counterpart of the swarm of factory hands. The business of farming was worked more scientifically, with better tools and greater success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great ma.s.s of the rural population were mere labourers.... Pauperism became more and more a pressing evil, especially after 1782, when _Gilbert's Act_ abolished the workhouse test (which compelled all who received relief from the rates to go into the half-imprisonment of a poor-house), and the system of poor law doles in aid of wages was encouraged by the high prices at the end of the century. In 1803 one-seventh of the people was in receipt of poor law relief."[77]

But with all the considerable distress, in town and country alike amongst the working people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, swift progress was taking place in agriculture and in manufactures. Only, the acc.u.mulated wealth fell into fewer hands, and the fluctuations in the demand for goods, caused partly by the opening up of new markets, brought successions of good times and bad times. "The workmen shared but partially in the prosperity, and were the first to bear the brunt of hard times."[78]

THE NEED FOR PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

The point for us to note here is that the changed economic conditions made Parliamentary reform a necessity, and brought the question of popular enfranchis.e.m.e.nt within sight. It was useless for Burke to maintain the incomparable beauty of the British const.i.tution; English politicians might be indifferent to political theories of democracy, and heartily dislike any notion of radical change, but the abuses were too obvious to prevent reform.

Whatever the size of the county it returned two members elected by freeholders, and the cost of a county election was enormous. Some of the boroughs, especially in Cornwall, were tiny villages. Eighteen members were returned from such boroughs in that part of Cornwall which now returns one member for the Liskeard Division. The fields of Old Sarum belonged to seven electors and returned two members. As there was no habitation whatever in this "borough" of Old Sarum, a tent was put up for the convenience of the returning officer at election times. No general law decided the borough franchise. Local custom and various political and personal considerations settled who should vote for members of Parliament. Places like Westminster and Preston had practically manhood suffrage. In most of the "corporation boroughs" the franchise was restricted exclusively to freemen of the borough, and to the self-elected non-resident persons who composed the governing body before the Munic.i.p.al Corporation Act of 1835. A small number of rich and powerful men really worked nearly all the elections. Seats were openly bought and sold, and a candidate had either to find a patron who would provide him with a seat, or, failing a patron, to purchase a seat himself. Fox first entered Parliament for the pocket borough of Midhurst, and Sir George Trevelyan has described how it took place. Midhurst was selected by the father of Charles James Fox as "the most comfortable of const.i.tuencies from the point of view of a representative; for the right of election rested in a few small holdings, on which no human being resided, distinguished among the pastures and the stubble that surrounded them by a large stone set up on end in the middle of each portion. These burbage tenures, as they were called, had all been bought up by a single proprietor, Viscount Montagu, who when an election was in prospect, a.s.signed a few of them to his servants, with instructions to nominate the members and then make back the property to their employer. This ceremony was performed in March, 1768, and the steward of the estate, who acted as the returning officer, declared that Charles James Fox had been duly chosen as one of the burgesses for Midhurst, at a time when that young gentleman was still amusing himself in Italy."

Three years earlier Burke had entered Parliament as a nominee of Lord Rockingham's. Gibbon sat in the House for some years under patronage.

Gladstone first became a member by presentation to a pocket borough, and later spoke in praise of this method of bringing young men of promise into Parliament. John Wilson Croker estimated that of six hundred and fifty-eight members of the House of Commons at the end of the eighteenth century, two hundred and seventy-six were returned by patrons. Men of more independence of mind who could afford to buy seats did so, and many of the reformers--including Burdett, Romilly and Hume--thus sat in the House.

MANUFACTURING CENTRES UNREPRESENTED IN PARLIAMENT

It was not so much that the landowning aristocracy were over-represented in Parliament by their control of so many pocket boroughs, as that great manufacturing centres were entirely unrepresented. The middle-cla.s.s manufacturers had no means of making their influence felt in the unreformed House of Commons, for towns of such importance as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham sent no representatives to Parliament. This meant that Parliament was out of touch with all the industrial life of the nation, and that nothing was done till after the Reform Act in the way of serious industrial legislation.

35 const.i.tuencies with hardly any voters at all returned 75 members 46 const.i.tuencies with less than 50 voters in each returned 90 "

19 const.i.tuencies with less than 100 voters in each returned 37 "

26 const.i.tuencies with less than 200 voters in each returned 52 "

84 male electors in other const.i.tuencies returned 157 "

The Reform Act of 1832 changed all this. It disfranchised all boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants--fifty-six in all; allowed one member only to boroughs with between 2,000 and 4,000; gave representatives to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and to several other large manufacturing towns and London boroughs; extended the county franchise to leaseholders and 50 tenants at will; and settled the borough franchise on a uniform qualification of occupation in a house of 10 rateable value. It also fixed two days, instead of fifteen, as the limit for county elections, and one day for boroughs.

THE Pa.s.sAGE OF THE GREAT REFORM BILL

The Reform Bill was not carried without much rioting in the country, and some loss of life.

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.