[Sidenote: 1831—Lord John Russell and the Reform Bill]

Lord Grey's Cabinet would have nothing to do with the ballot. With this exception the draft scheme as submitted by Lord John Russell was accepted by Lord Grey and his colleagues. Then it was laid before the King, and the King, according to Lord John Russell, gave it his ready and cheerful sanction. There were indeed some observers at the time who believed that the King had cheerfully sanctioned the whole scheme of reform as proposed, because he still confidently believed that nothing but the wreck of the Ministry was to come of it. However that may have been, it is certain that the King did give his full sanction to the measure, and the Government prepared to introduce the first Reform Bill.

It was arranged that the conduct of the Bill in the House of Commons should be placed in the hands of Lord John Russell. This arrangement created, when the Bill was actually brought forward, a good deal of adverse criticism in the House and in the country. Some prominent members of the Opposition in the House of Commons persuaded themselves, and tried to persuade their listeners, that Lord Grey's Cabinet, by adopting such an arrangement, showed that there was no sincerity in the professed desire for reform. If the members of the Cabinet, it was argued, are such believers in the virtue of reform, why do they not select one of their own body to introduce the measure? Lord John Russell was only Paymaster of the Forces, and had not a seat in the Cabinet, and if he was taken out of his place and put into the most prominent position it could only be because no member of the Cabinet could be found who was willing to undertake the task. {133} The answer was very clear, even at the time, and it is obvious indeed to the generations that had an opportunity of knowing how eminently Lord John Russell was qualified for the work which had been entrusted to his hands. He was a member of one of the greatest aristocratic families in the land, and one of the practical dangers threatening the Reform Bill was the alarm that might spread among the wealthier classes at the thought of a wild democratic movement upsetting the whole principle of aristocratic predominance in the English constitutional system. Still more important was the fact that Lord John Russell, who had distinguished himself already as the most devoted promoter of constitutional reform, was a man peculiarly qualified by intellect and by his skill in exposition to pilot such a measure through the House of Commons.

Lord John Russell had not yet won reputation as a great Parliamentary orator; nor did he, during the whole of his long career, succeed in acquiring such a fame. But he was a master of the art which consists in making a perfectly clear statement of the most complicated case, and in defending his measure point by point with never-failing readiness and skill throughout the most perplexing series of debates. It was pointed out also, at the time, that if Lord John Russell was selected to introduce the Reform Bill, although he was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet, thus too had Edmund Burke been selected to introduce the East India Bill, although he, like Lord John Russell, was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet. Indeed, to us, who now look back on the events from a long distance of time, the impression would rather be that Lord Grey had little or no choice in the matter. He was not himself a member of the House of Commons, and therefore could not introduce the Bill there. Brougham had ceased to be a member of the House of Commons, and was therefore out of the question. Lord Althorp, who had not yet succeeded to the peerage, and had a seat in the representative chamber, was, as we have already said, the poorest of {134} speakers, and utterly unsuited for the difficult task of steering so important a measure through the troublous sea of Parliamentary debate. Lord Grey, of course, was thoroughly well acquainted with Russell's great abilities and his peculiar fitness for the task assigned to him, and could, under no circumstances, have made a better choice. But our only possible difficulty now would be to say what other choice, under the existing conditions, he could possibly have made.

[Sidenote: 1831—Need for secrecy about the Reform Bill]

Tuesday, March 1, 1831, was the day fixed for the introduction of the Reform Bill in the House of Commons. In the mean time, as we learn from all who can be considered authorities on the subject, the nature and the plan of the proposed reforms were kept a profound secret, not only from the public at large, but even from members of the House of Commons itself, with the exception of those who belonged to the Administration. Ministerial secrets, it is only fair to say, are generally well kept in England, but instances have undoubtedly occurred in which the nature of some approaching measure, which ought to have been held in the profoundest secrecy until the time came for its official revelation, has leaked out and become fully known to the public in advance. There is, of course, great difficulty in preventing some inkling of the truth getting prematurely out. Cabinet Ministers generally have wives, and there are stories of such wives having caught stray words from their husbands which put them on a track of discovery, and not having the grace to keep strictly to themselves the discovery when made. No such mischance, however, appears to have attended the preparation of the Reform Bill. It is said that there must have been more than thirty persons who had official knowledge of the Ministerial plans, and yet it does not appear that any definite idea as to their nature was obtained by the public.

It may perhaps be asked whether there was any solid reason for attaching so much importance to the keeping of a secret which on a certain fixed and near-approaching day must, as a matter of fact, be a secret no more. Of course the imperative necessity of secrecy would be obvious {135} in all cases where some policy was in preparation which might directly affect the interests of foreign States. In such a case it is clear that it might be of essential importance to a Government not to let its plans become known to the world before it had put itself into a condition to maintain its policy. In measures that had to do with commercial and financial interests it might often be of paramount importance that no false alarm or false expectations of any kind should be allowed to disturb the business of the country before the fitting time came for a full declaration. But in the case of such a measure as the Reform Bill it may be asked if any great advantage was to be gained by keeping the nature of the measure a complete secret until the hour came for its full and official explanation. With regard to this Reform Bill there were many good reasons for maintaining the profoundest possible secrecy. If any premature reports got out at all they would be sure to be imperfect reports, indiscreet or haphazard revelations of this or that particular part of the Bill, utterly wanting in balance, symmetry, and comprehensiveness. The whole thing was new to the country, and there would have been much danger in fixing public attention upon some one part of the proposed reform until the public could be in a position to judge the scheme as a complete measure.

Lord Grey's Government had to deal with two classes of men who were naturally and almost relentlessly opposed to each other—the more clamorous reformers and the enemies of all reform. It was of immense importance that the latter class should, if possible, be prevailed upon to see—at least the more intelligent and reasonable among them—that the Government had not gone so far in the direction of reform as to make it seem a threatened revolution. It was, on the other hand, of immense importance to prevail upon the former class to see that the Government had not so stunted and dwarfed its proposed reform as to render it incapable of anything like a political and constitutional revolution. Any sudden explosion of feeling on either side brought about by some premature {136} and imperfect revelation might have caused the most serious trouble in the country.

[Sidenote: 1831—Introduction of the Reform Bill]

Moreover, none of the ministers could possibly profess to be quite certain as to the genuine wishes and purposes of his Majesty King William the Fourth with regard to the Reform Bill. The King was not always in the same mood on the same subject for any two days in succession, or indeed for any two hours of the same day. If the opponents of all reform were to get a knowledge of the clauses in the Bill least favorable to their own ideas as to their interests, and were to make a commotion among the owners of the soil, the immediate effect might be to discourage the King altogether, to fill his mind with a strong desire for escape from the uncongenial part of a reformer and an overmastering anxiety to get rid of his reforming Ministry. If, on the other hand, the Peterloo men, the Chartists generally, and the populations of the northern towns were to get into their minds through some imperfect revelation that the Ministerial Bill was not intended to do half so much for them as they were demanding, and if in consequence there were to be a stormy agitation throughout the country, then it was quite possible that the King might take alarm and tell his ministers that it was hopeless to think of conciliating such agitators, and that the safety of the State, and especially of the monarchy, could only be provided for by postponing reform until some more favorable opportunity. For all these reasons, and many others, the leaders of the Government had their hearts set on keeping well their secret until the right hour should come for its official disclosure, and it is a fact of some historical interest, even to readers of the present day, that the secret was faithfully kept.

The 1st of March, 1831, was a day of intense excitement and even tumult in and around the House of Commons. We are told that never before in that generation had there been so great a crowd of persons struggling for seats in the galleries of the House of Commons. It is recorded, as an illustration of this intense eagerness on the part of the public, that every available seat in the House {137} was occupied for hours before the business of the day began. This, however, is not a statement that could fill with surprise any reader of the present day. We have been accustomed lately to read of occasions when not merely crowds of strangers anxious to obtain seats, but crowds of members positively entitled to get seats, have had to take their stand at the outer gates of the House of Commons hours before daybreak on the morning of the day when some great measure was to be introduced, that they might get a reasonable chance of a place, in order to hear a speech which could not possibly begin before four o'clock in the afternoon. Certainly the House of Commons did not then consist of nearly as many members as it has at present, and the reformed House of Commons has not even yet been so reformed as to impress it with the idea that there ought to be so many seats for so many members. However that may be, it is quite certain that there was intense interest manifested by the public on the day when the Reform Bill was to be introduced; that immense crowds of people made for the Parliament buildings, and that the approaches to the House of Commons were besieged by an excited and tumultuous crowd. There was, in fact, such a rush made to secure the seats in the galleries available for the public, so much noisy struggling and quarrelling for seats, that the Speaker was at last compelled to intervene and to declare that if quiet was not at once restored it would be his duty to have the House cleared of all strangers. Order was thus restored after a time, and at last the moment arrived for Lord John Russell to introduce the Reform Bill. That was indeed a moment of genuine historical interest.

The descriptions given at the time by listeners tell us that Russell began his speech in tones which were unusually quiet, low, and reserved even for him. It may be said at once that throughout his whole career in Parliament Russell's manner had been peculiarly quiet and repressed, and that his eloquence seldom had any fervor in it. That he was a man of deep feeling and warm emotions is certain, but both in public and private life there {138} was a coldness about him which often led strangers into the quite erroneous belief that he kept apart from the crowd because he was filled with a sense of his aristocratic position and wished to hold himself aloof from contact with ordinary mortals. As a Parliamentary debater he was singularly clear, concise, and unaffected. He was a great master of phrases, and some odd epigrammatic sentences of his still live in our common speech, and are quoted almost every day by persons who have not the least idea as to the source from which they come. His speech on the introduction of the Reform Bill was even for him peculiarly calm, deliberate, and restrained. It contained some passages which will always live in our history, and will illustrate to the reader, more effectively than a mass of statistics or political tracts might do, the nature and proportions of the absurd anomalies which Russell was endeavoring to abolish. It may be well to mention the fact that it was this speech which, for the first time, introduced and adopted the word "Reformer" as the title of the genuine Whig, and applied the term "Conservative," in no unfriendly sense, to the Tory party.

[Sidenote: 1831—Lord John Russell's speech]

Lord John Russell opened his speech by a vindication of the representative principle as the first condition of the English constitutional system. He made it clear that in the early days of our Parliaments this principle had been distinctly acknowledged, and, to a certain extent, had been carried out in practice. Then he showed how the principle had come to be less and less recognized in the arrangement of our constituencies and the allotment of representatives, until at last there had ceased to be any manner of proportion between representatives and population or any practical acknowledgment of the main purpose for which representatives were to be selected. Everything had tended, in the mean time, to make the owners of the soil also the owners and masters of the representation. Lord John Russell employed a series of illustrations, at once simple and striking, to impress upon his audience a due understanding of the extraordinary manner in which the whole principle of representation had been diverted. {139} from its original purpose. He assumed the case of some inquiring and intelligent foreigner, a stranger to our institutions but anxious to learn all about them, who had come to England for the purpose of obtaining information on the spot. The stranger has the nature and the purpose of our Parliamentary system explained to him, and he is assured that it rests on the representative principle. He is told that the House of Commons is assembled for the purpose of enabling the sovereign to collect the best advice that can be given to him as to the condition, the wants, and the wishes of his subjects.

The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know. Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his people. The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons. He is shown a stone wall with three niches in it, and he is informed that those three niches are privileged to contribute two members to the representative assembly. Lord John Russell described with force and masterly humor a variety of such sights which were pointed out to the stranger, each description being an accurate picture of some place which long since had lost all population, but still continued to have the privilege of sending representatives to Parliament. Then Lord John Russell changed his form of illustration. He took his stranger to some of the great manufacturing and commercial cities and towns of England, and described the admiration and the wonder with which the intelligent foreigner regarded these living evidences of the growth and the greatness of the nation. Here then, no doubt, the stranger begins at last to think that he can really understand the practical value of the representative principle. Thus far he has only been bewildered by what he has seen and heard of the empty stretches of land which are {140} endowed with a right to have representatives in the House of Commons, but now he begins to acknowledge to himself that a people with such great manufacturing communities can send up to London representatives enough from their own centres to constitute a Parliament capable of advising with any monarch. Then, to his utter amazement, the distracted foreigner learns that these great cities and towns have no right whatever to representation in the House of Commons, and have nothing whatever to do with the election of members.

[Sidenote: 1831—The proposed reforms]

The imaginary foreigner who knew nothing about the principle of the workings of our Constitution before his arrival in the country might well have been amazed and confounded, and might have fancied, if he had been a reader of English literature, that he had lost his way somehow, and instead of arriving in England had stumbled into the State of Laputa. He might well indeed be excused for such bewilderment, seeing that an English student of the present day finds it hard to realize in his mind the possibility and the reality of the condition of things which existed in this country within the lifetime of men still living. Lord John Russell then went on to describe the manner in which the Government proposed to deal with the existing defects of the whole Parliamentary system. He laid it down as the main principle of the reforms he was prepared to introduce that a free citizen should not be compelled to pay taxes in the imposition and levying of which he was allowed to have no voice. The vast majority of free citizens could in any case only express their opinions as to this or that financial impost through their representatives in the House of Commons. This principle had of late been allowed to fail so grossly and so widely in its application that the House of Commons had almost entirely ceased to represent the will of the people.

Lord John Russell explained that the chief evils with which the Government had to deal were three in number. The first was the nomination of members of Parliament by individual patrons. The second was the nomination of members by close corporations. The third was the {141} enormous expense of elections, which was principally caused by the open bribery and corruption which had almost become a recognized accompaniment of every contest. He proposed to deal with the first evil by abolishing altogether the representation of the nominal constituencies, the constituencies that had no resident inhabitant, the boroughs which at some distant time had had houses and inmates, but of which now only the faintest traces were visible to the eye of the traveller—like, for instance, the extinct communities of whose existence some faint memorial evidence might be traced on Salisbury Plain. The Census last taken, that of 1821, the Government had resolved to accept as a basis of operations, and Lord John Russell proposed that every borough which, at that date, had less than 3000 inhabitants should cease any longer to send a member to the House of Commons. All boroughs that had not more than 4000 inhabitants should send in future only one member each to Parliament. The principle of nomination by individuals or by corporations was to come to an end. The "fancy franchises" were to be got rid of altogether. In the boroughs every householder paying rates on houses of the yearly value of ten pounds and upwards was entitled to have a vote.

The Government, however, proposed to deal mercifully, so far as possible, with the existing interests of voters, although the process of extinction was summary and complete with regard to the so-called rights of patrons and of corporations. For instance, resident voters, under the old qualifications, were to be allowed to retain their right during their lives, but with the lapse of each life the qualification expired and the owner of such a vote could have no successor. When dealing with the counties Lord John Russell announced that copyholders to the value of ten pounds a year and leaseholders for not less than twenty-one years at an annual rent of fifty pounds and upwards were to have the franchise. The abolition of the small boroughs and the uninhabited constituencies would reduce the number of members in the House of Commons by 168, and Lord John Russell explained that the Government did not {142} propose to fill up all these vacancies, being of opinion that the House was already rather overflowing in its numbers and had a good deal too many members for the proper discharge of its business.

[Sidenote: 1831—The principles of the Reform Bill]

Some of the vacant seats were, however, to be assigned to the cities and towns which were then actually unrepresented in the House of Commons. Seven of these towns were to have two representatives each, and twenty smaller but still goodly towns were to have one representative each. Even at this day it may still come as a matter of surprise to some readers to learn that the seven towns which in 1831 were wholly unrepresented, and to which the Bill proposed to give two members each, were Manchester, which was to include Salford; Birmingham, Leeds, Greenwich, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, and Sunderland. The Government proposed to give eight additional members to the metropolis itself—that is to say, two members each to the Tower Hamlets, Holborn, Finsbury, and Lambeth. The three Ridings of Yorkshire were to have two members each, and twenty-six counties already represented, and in each of which there were more than 150,000 inhabitants, were each to have two additional members. It is not necessary to go more fully into the details of the scheme which Lord John Russell expounded elaborately to the House of Commons.

In Ireland and in Scotland there were some slight differences as to the scale of the qualification from those that were proposed for England; but in the three countries the principle was the same, and the right to vote was associated with a certain occupation of land or payment of household rating, and new constituencies were created where towns, unrepresented before, had grown up into recognized importance. By the changes that the Bill proposed to make no less than half a million of new voters were to be created throughout Great Britain and Ireland. For the purpose of diminishing the enormous expense of elections it was proposed that the poll should be taken at the same time in separate districts, so that no voter should have to travel more than fifteen miles in order to record his vote, and {143} that the time over which an election contest could be spread should be greatly reduced, and reduced in proportion to the size of the constituency. It is as well to say at once that that part of the Reform Bill which aimed at the due reduction of election expenses to their legitimate and necessary proportions proved an utter failure. No reduction in the amount of what may be called working expenses could have diminished, to any satisfactory degree, the evil from which the country was suffering at that time, and from which it continued to suffer for more than another generation. Bribery and corruption were the evils which had to be dealt with, and the Reform Bill of 1831 left these evils as it had found them. The Bill, however, did, in its other provisions, do much to establish a genuine principle of Parliamentary representation.

To begin with, it proclaimed the principle of representation as the legal basis of the whole Parliamentary system. It abolished the nomination of members, whether by individual persons or by corporations. It laid down as law that representation must bear some proportion to the numbers represented. It made actual, or at least occasional, residence a qualification for a voter. These were the main principles of the measure. The attention of readers will presently be drawn to the manner in which the Bill failed to answer some of the demands made upon the Government by the spreading intelligence of the country, and left these demands to be more adequately answered by the statesmen of a later generation. Enough to say that with all its defects the Bill, as Lord John Russell explained it, was, for its time, a bold and broad measure of reform, and that it laid down the lines along which, as far as human foresight can discern, the movement of progress in England's political history will make its way.



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CHAPTER LXXII.

THE GREAT DEBATE.

[Sidenote: 1831—Sir Robert Inglis and Reform]

The debate which followed Lord John Russell's motion for leave to bring in the Bill contained, as well might be expected, some very remarkable speeches. Three of these deserve the special attention of the student of history. The first illustrated the views of the extreme Tory of that day, and is indeed a political curiosity which ought never to be consigned to utter oblivion. This speech was made by Sir Robert Harry Inglis, who represented the University of Oxford. Sir Robert Inglis was a living embodiment of the spirit of old-world Toryism as it had come down to his day, Toryism which had in it little or nothing of the picturesque, half poetic sentiment belonging to the earlier wearers of the rebel rose, the flower symbolic of the Stuart dynasty. Sir Robert Inglis was a man of education, of intelligence, and of high principle. His sincerity was unquestioned, and his opinion would probably be well worth having on any question which was not concerned with the antagonism between Whig and Tory. Sir Robert argued boldly in his speech that the principle of representation had never been recognized by the Constitution as the Parliamentary system of England. He insisted that the sovereign had a perfect right to choose any representative he pleased from any constituency which it suited him to create. The King could delegate to any nobleman or gentleman his right of nominating a representative. Sir Robert scouted the idea that a large, prosperous, and populous town had any better claim to be represented in the House of Commons than the smallest village in the country. It was all a matter for the sovereign, and if the sovereign thought fit he had as good a right to invite any one he {145} pleased to represent an unpeopled plain as to represent Manchester, Leeds, or Sheffield. He denounced Russell's proposal to disfranchise the small nomination boroughs, and he used an argument which was employed in the same debate and by much wiser men than he in defence of the pocket boroughs and the whole system of nomination. Some of the most brilliant, gifted members of the House of Commons, he contended, had been sent into that House by the patrons and owners of such boroughs, and otherwise never could have got into Parliament at all, for they could not have borne the enormous expense of a county contest.

We have heard that argument over and over again in days much more recent. It would, of course, have been hard to dispose of it completely if it could be shown that there was no possible way by which the expenses of elections could be reduced to a reasonable amount; if it could be shown that there was any human system so bad as to have no compensating advantages whatever; and finally if it could be shown that with the spread of education and the growth of popular intelligence a man of great and commanding ability without money would not have a much better chance of election at the hands of a large constituency than by the mere favor of some discerning patron. Sir Robert Inglis also used an argument which is even still not unfamiliar in political debate, whether inside or outside Parliament. He contended not merely that the English population had no real grievances to complain of, but that none among the English population would have fancied that they were suffering from grievances if it had not been for the evil advice and turbulent agitation of mob orators. To these wicked persons, the mob orators, Sir Robert ascribed all the disturbances which were setting the country in commotion. If only these mob orators could be kept from spouting everything would go well and no subject of the sovereign would ever get it into his head that he was suffering from the slightest grievance.

This is an argument which had just been used with regard to Catholic Emancipation; which was afterwards to {146} be used with regard to free-trade and the introduction of the ballot and household suffrage; and which will probably be used again and again so long as any sort of reform is demanded. Of course it need hardly be said that when Sir Robert Inglis referred to mob orators he used the phrase as a term of contempt applying to all speakers who advocated principles which were not the principles represented by the Tory aristocracy. A Tory landlord spouting any kind of nonsense to the most ignorant crowd would not have been, according to this definition, a mob orator; he would have been a high-bred Englishman, instructing his humbler brethren as to the way they ought to go. Sir Robert also indulged in the most gloomy prophecies about the evils which must come upon England as the direct result of the Reform Bill if that Bill were to be passed into law. The influence of rank and property would suddenly and completely cease to prevail; education would lose its power to teach and to guide; the House of Commons would no longer be the place for men of rank, culture, and statesmanship, but would be occupied only by mob orators. Art after art would go out and all would be night, if we may adopt the famous line of Pope's which Sir Robert somehow failed to introduce.

[Sidenote: 1831—Peel's speech on the Reform Bill]

The second speech in the debate to which we may refer was that of Sir Robert Peel. It was a necessity of Peel's position just then, and of the stage of political development which his mind had reached, that he should oppose the Reform Bill. But in the work of opposition he had to undertake a task far more difficult to him in the artistic sense than the task which the destinies had appointed for Sir Robert Inglis to attempt. Inglis, although a man of ability and education, as collegiate education then went, was so thorough a Tory of the old school that the most extravagant arguments he used came as naturally and clearly to his mind as if they had been dictated to him by inspiration. But a man of Peel's high order of intellect, a man who had been gifted by nature with the mind of a statesman, must sometimes have found it hard indeed to convince himself that some of the arguments he used against reform {147} were arguments which the history of the future would be likely to maintain. Peel's genius, however, was not one which readily adopted conclusions, especially when these conclusions involved a change in the seeming order of things. We have seen already that he was quite capable of taking a bold decision and accepting its responsibilities when the movement of events seemed to satisfy him that a choice one way or the other could no longer be postponed.

The whole story of his subsequent career bears evidence of the same effect. His genius guided him rightly when the fateful moment arrived at which a decision had to be made, but when left to himself his inclinations always were to let things go on in their old way. He had not yet seen any necessity for a complete system of Parliamentary reform, nor was he likely, in any case, to have approved of some of the proposals contained in the Bill brought in by Lord John Russell. The speech he delivered appears, by all the accounts which reach us, to have been a genuine piece of Parliamentary eloquence. Peel did not, as may well be imagined, commit himself to some of the extravagances which were poured forth in absolute good faith by Sir Robert Inglis. But the very nature of his task compelled him sometimes to have recourse to arguments which, although put forward with more discretion and more dexterity than Inglis had shown, seemed nevertheless to belong to the same order of political reasoning.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that Peel should have found much to say for the existence of the small nomination boroughs, seeing that the same arguments were made use of a whole generation afterwards by no less a person than Mr. Gladstone. These arguments, we need hardly say, were founded on the familiar assumption that a Burke or a Sheridan, a Canning or a Plunket, would have no chance whatever of getting into the House of Commons if some appreciative patron did not generously put a borough at his disposal. In our own days we have seen, again and again, that a man of high political character and commanding eloquence, but having no money or other such influence to back him, would have a far better chance at {148} the hands of a great popular constituency than he would be likely to have in some small borough, where local interests might easily be brought to conspire against him. But at the time when Peel was making his speech against the Reform project the patronage system still prevailed in politics, if no longer in letters, and the unendowed child of genius would have little chance indeed if he were to try to get into Parliament on his own mere merits. On the whole, it must be owned that Sir Robert Peel made as good a case against the Bill as could have been made from the Conservative point of view, and it may be added that an equally ingenious case might have been made out by a man of his capacity against any change whatever in any system.

[Sidenote: 1831—The second reading of the Reform Bill]

The third speech to which we think it necessary to refer was that delivered by the Irish orator and agitator, Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell promised the Bill all the support in his power, but he took care to explain that he supported it only because he believed it was the best Bill he could obtain from any Government at that moment. He described clearly and impressively the faults which he found with Lord John Russell's measure; and it has to be noticed that the objections which he raised were absolutely confirmed by our subsequent political history. He found fault with the Bill because it did not go nearly as far as such a measure ought to go in the direction of manhood suffrage, or, at all events, of household suffrage. He contended that no Reform Bill could really fulfil the best purposes for which it was designed without the adoption of the ballot system in the voting at popular elections. He advocated shorter Parliaments and much more comprehensive and strenuous legislation for the prevention of bribery and corruption. In short, O'Connell made a speech which might have been spoken with perfect appropriateness by an English Radical of the highest political order at any time during some succeeding generations. O'Connell's opinions seem to have been at that time, save on one political question alone—the question of Repeal of the Union—exactly in accord with those of the Radical party down to the days of Cobden and Bright.

{149}

It may be mentioned, as a matter of some historical interest, that, vindicating the true theory of popular representation, he complained that successive English Governments had abandoned the constitutional position taken up by the glorious Revolution of 1688. Readers of the present day may be inclined to think, not without good reason for the thought, that statesmanship in the days of Lord Grey's first Reform Bill, and for many years after, might have had less trouble with Ireland if it had taken better account of the opinions and the influence of O'Connell.

The debate on the motion for leave to bring in the Bill lasted several days. In accordance, however, with the usual practice of the House of Commons, no division was taken and the Bill was read a first time. In the House of Commons it is not usual to have a long debate on the motion for leave to bring in a Bill, which amounts in substance to a motion that the Bill be read for the first time. When, however, a measure of great importance is introduced there is sometimes a lengthened and very often a discursive debate or conversation on the motion; but it is rarely so long and so earnest a discussion as that which took place when Lord John Russell brought in the Reform Bill. One result of the length of the debate which preceded the first reading was that when the motion for the second reading came on the leading members of the Opposition were found to have expressed fully their opinions already, and the discussion seemed little better than the retelling of an old story.

When the motion for the second reading came to be put to the vote it was found that the Opposition had got together a very full gathering of their numbers, and the second reading was only carried by a majority of one. The hearts of many of the reformers sank within them for the moment, and the hopes of the Tories were revived in an equal degree. Even already it seemed clear to all of Lord Grey's colleagues that a measure carried on its second reading by such a bare majority had not the slightest chance of forcing its way through the House of Lords, even if it should be fortunate enough to pass without serious {150} damage through the House of Commons. Lord Grey and his colleagues were already beginning to think that nothing worth accomplishing was likely to be achieved until a general election should have greatly strengthened the Reform party in Parliament. The movement for reform had of late been growing steadily in most parts of the country. Some of the more recent elections had shown that the reform spirit was obtaining the mastery in constituencies from which nothing of the kind had been expected a short time before, and it seemed to most of the Whig leaders that the existing Parliament was the last bulwark against the progress of reform. When the time came for the motion to enable the Bill to get into committee—that is, to be discussed point by point in all its clauses by the House, with full liberty to every member to speak as many times as he pleased—General Gascoigne, one of the representatives of Liverpool, proposed an amendment to the effect that it was not expedient, at such a time, to reduce the numbers of knights, citizens, and burgesses constituting the House of Commons, and this amendment was carried by a majority of eight. Now the carrying of this amendment could not possibly have been considered as the destruction of any vital part of the Bill.

[Sidenote: 1831—William the Fourth and Reform]

Lord John Russell had argued for the reduction of the numbers in the House as a matter of convenience and expediency; but he had not given it to be understood that the Government felt itself pledged to that particular proposition, and had made up his mind not to accept any modification in that part of the plan. The authors of the Reform Bill, however, read very wisely in the success of General Gascoigne's amendment the lesson that in the existing Parliament the Tories would be able to take the conduct of the measure out of the hands of the Government during its progress through committee, and to mar and mutilate it, so as to render it entirely unsuited to its original purposes. Therefore Lord Grey and the other members of his Cabinet made up their minds that the best course they could take would be to accept the vote of the House of Commons as a distinct defeat, and to make an {151} appeal to the decision of the constituencies by an instant dissolution of Parliament.

One important question had yet to be settled. Would the King give his assent to the dissolution? No one could have supposed that the King was really at heart a reformer, and the general conviction was that if William cared anything at all about the matter his personal inclination would be in favor of good old Toryism, or that, at the very least, his inclination would be for allowing things to go on in the old way. At that time the principle had not yet been set up as a part of our constitutional system that the sovereign was bound to submit his own will and pleasure to the advice of his ministers. It would have been quite in accordance with recognized precedents since the House of Hanover came to the throne if the King were to proclaim his determination to act upon his own judgment and let his ministers either put up with his decision or resign their offices.

For some time, indeed, it appeared as if the King was likely to assert his prerogative, according to the old fashion. The disagreeable and almost hazardous task of endeavoring to persuade the King into compliance with the desire of his Ministry was entrusted to Lord Brougham, who was supposed, as Lord Chancellor, to be keeper of the sovereign's conscience. Brougham was not a man who could be described as gifted with the bland powers of persuasion, but at all events he did not want courage for the task he had to undertake. William appears at first to have refused flatly his consent to the wishes of the Ministry, to have blustered a good deal in his usual unkingly, not to say ungainly, fashion, and to have replied to Brougham's intimation that the ministers might have to resign, with words to the effect that ministers, if they liked, might resign and be—ministers no more. The King, however, was at last prevailed upon to give his assent, but then a fresh trouble arose when he found that Lord Grey and Lord Brougham, presuming on his ultimate compliance, had already taken steps to make preparations for the ceremonials preceding dissolution. As the {152} Ministry thought it necessary that there should be no delay whatever in the steps required to dissolve Parliament, a message had been sent in order that the Life Guards should be ready, according to the usual custom when the King went to Westminster for such a purpose. William found in this act on the part of the Ministry a new reason for an outburst of wrath. He stormed at Brougham; he declared that it was an act of high-treason to call out the Life Guards without the express authority of the King, and he raged in a manner which seemed to imply that only the mercy of the sovereign could save Grey and Brougham from the axe on Tower Hill.

[Sidenote: 1831—The second Reform Bill]

Perhaps it was fortunate on the whole for the peaceful settlement of the controversy that the King should have found this new and unexpected stimulant to his anger; for when his wrath had completely exploded over it, and when Brougham had been able to explain, again and again, that no act of high-treason had been contemplated or committed, the royal fury had spent itself; the King's good-humor had returned; and in the reaction William had forgotten most of his objections to the original proposal. It was arranged, then, that the dissolution should take place at once. As a matter of fact, Sir Robert Peel, in the House of Commons, was actually declaiming, in his finest manner, and with a voice that Disraeli afterwards described as the best ever heard in the House, excepting indeed "the thrilling tones of O'Connell," against the whole scheme of reform, when the Usher of the Black Rod was heard knocking at the doors of the Chamber to summon its members to attend at the bar of the House of Lords, in order to receive the commands of his Majesty the King. The commands of his Majesty the King were in fact the announcement that Parliament was dissolved, and that an appeal to the country for the election of a new Parliament was to take place at once.

The news was received by Reformers all over the country with the most exuberant demonstrations of enthusiasm. In London most of the houses throughout the principal streets were illuminated, and many windows which showed {153} no lights were instantly broken by the exulting crowds that swarmed everywhere. The Duke of Wellington received marked tokens of the unpopularity which his uncompromising declaration against all manner of reform had brought upon him. Some of the windows at Apsley House, his town residence—the windows that looked into the Park—were broken by an impassioned mob, and for years afterwards these windows were always kept shuttered, as a sign—so at least the popular faith assumed it to be—that the Duke could not forgive or forget this evidence of public ingratitude to the conqueror of Waterloo. The King, on the other hand, had grown suddenly into immense popularity. The favorite title given to him at the time of his accession was that of the "Sailor King." Now he was hailed everywhere in the streets as the "Patriot King." Wherever his carriage made its public appearance it was sure to be followed by an admiring and acclaiming crowd. The elections came on at once, and it has to be noted that the amount of money spent on both sides was something astonishing even for those days of reckless expenditure in political contests. Neither side could make any boast of political purity, and indeed neither side seemed to have the slightest inclination to set up such a claim. The only rivalry was in the spending of money in unrestricted and shameless bribery and corruption. The more modern sense of revolt against the whole principle of bribery was little thought of in those days. There were men, indeed, on both sides of the political field who would never have stooped to offer a bribe if left to the impulses of their own honor and their own conscience. But the ordinary man of the world, and more especially of the political world, felt that if he himself did not give the bribe his rival would be certain to give it, and that nobody at his club or in society would think any the worse of him because it was understood that he had bought himself into the House of Commons. When the elections were over the prevalent opinion as to their result was almost everywhere that the numbers of the Reform party in the House of Commons would be much greater than it had been in the {154} House so lately dissolved. When the new Parliament was opened, Lord John Russell and Mr. Stanley appeared as members of the Cabinet. The new Parliament was opened by King William on June 21. If William really enjoyed the consciousness of popularity, as there is every reason to believe he did, he must have felt a very proud and popular sovereign that day. His carriage as he drove to the entrance of the House of Lords was surrounded and followed by an immense crowd, which cheered itself hoarse in its demonstrations of loyalty. On June 24 Lord John Russell introduced his second Reform Bill. It is not necessary to go through the details of the new measure. The second Reform Bill was in substance very much the same as its predecessor had been, but of course its principle was debated on the motion of the second reading with as much heat, although not at such great length, as in the case of the first Reform Bill a few weeks before. Nothing new came out in this second argument, and the debate on the second reading, which began on July 4, occupied only three nights, a fact which made some members of the Opposition think themselves entitled to the compliments of the country. The Parliamentary opponents of the Reform Bill were, however, soon to make it evident that they had more practical and more perplexing ways of delaying its progress through the House of Commons than by the delivery of long orations on the elementary principle of reform. The second reading of the Bill was carried by 367 votes in its favor and 231 votes against it—that is to say, by a majority of 136 for the Bill. Therefore everybody saw that, as far as the House of Commons in the new Parliament was concerned, there was a large majority in support of the measure brought forward by the Government.

[Sidenote: 1831—William Cobbett]

It was morning, and not very early morning, when the House divided, and the Attorney-General had not much time to spare for rest before setting off for one of the law courts to conduct a prosecution which the Government had thought it well to institute against a man who held a most prominent position in England at that time, and whose name, it is safe to say, will be remembered as long as good {155} English prose is studied. This man was William Cobbett, and he had just aroused the anger of the Government by a published article in which he vindicated the conduct of those who had set fire to hayricks and destroyed farm buildings in various parts of the country. William Cobbett had begun life as the son of a small farmer, who was himself the son of a day laborer. He had lived a strange and varied life. In his boyish days he had run away from a little farm in Surrey and had flung himself upon the world of London. He had found employment, for a while, in the humblest kind of drudgery as a junior copying clerk in an attorney's office, and then he had enlisted in a regiment of foot. He was quartered for a year at Chatham, and he devoted all his leisure moments to reading, for which he had a passion which lasted him all his lifetime. He is said to have exhausted the whole contents of a lending library in the neighborhood, for he preferred reading anything to reading nothing. He was especially fond of historical and scientific studies, but he had a love for literature of a less severe kind also, and he studied with intense eagerness the works of Swift, on whose style he seems to have moulded his own with much success and without any servile imitation. Then he was quartered with his regiment for some time in New Brunswick, and after various vicissitudes he made his way to Philadelphia. During his stay in New Brunswick he had studied French, and had many opportunities of conversing in it with French-Canadians, and when settled for a time in Philadelphia he occupied himself by teaching English to some refugees from France. Now and again he went backward and forward between America and England, but it was in Philadelphia that he was first known as a writer. Under the signature of Peter Porcupine he published the "Porcupine Papers," which were chiefly made up of sarcastic and vehement attacks upon public men. Cobbett had begun as a sort of Tory, or, at all events, as a professed enemy of all Radical agitators, but he gradually became a Radical agitator himself, and when he finally settled in England he soon began to be recognized as one of the most powerful {156} advocates of the Radical cause in or out of Parliament. He wrote a strong, simple Anglo-Saxon style, and indeed it is not too much to say that, after Swift himself, no man ever wrote clearer English prose than that of William Cobbett. He had tried to get into Parliament twice without success; but at last he succeeded in obtaining a seat as the representative of the borough of Oldham, a place which he represented until the time of his death, and which was represented by members of his family in the memory of the present generation. He had started a paper called The Weekly Political Register, and in this he championed the Radical cause with an energy and ability which made him one of the most conspicuous men of the time.

[Sidenote: 1831—The prosecution of Cobbett]

Lord Grey's Government was probably not very anxious to prosecute Cobbett, if a prosecution could have been avoided, but it was feared, perhaps, by the members of the Cabinet that some of his writings would be used by the opponents of reform as an illustration of the principles on which reform was founded, and the practices which it would encourage if the Government failed to take some decided action. It was therefore decided to institute the prosecution for the article which had been published in the previous December. The Guildhall, where the case was to be tried, was crowded to excess, and the prisoner was loudly applauded when he stood in the court. He was one of the heroes of the hour with large numbers of the people everywhere, and the court would have been crowded this day in any case; but additional interest was given to the sitting by the fact that Cobbett had summoned for witnesses for his defence Lord Grey, Lord Brougham, Lord Althorp, and Lord Durham. The summoning of these witnesses was one of Cobbett's original and audacious strokes of humor and of cleverness, and his object was, in fact, to make it out that the leading members of his Majesty's Government were just as much inclined to countenance violence as he was when such a piece of work might happen to suit their political purposes. The stroke, however, did not produce much effect in this case, for Lord Brougham's evidence, which in any case would have been {157} unimportant to the question at issue, would have been rather to the disadvantage than advantage of the prisoner if it had been fully gone into, and Cobbett relieved Brougham from further attendance; while Chief Justice Tenterden, the presiding judge, decided that the testimony which Cobbett said he intended to draw from the other noble witnesses had nothing to do with the case before the jury. The whole question, in fact, was as to the nature of the article in the Political Register. The jury could not agree upon their verdict, and after they had been locked up for fifteen hours, and there seemed no chance of their coming to an understanding, the jurors were discharged and there was an end of the case. When the result was announced Cobbett received tumultuous applause from a large number of the crowd in court and from throngs of people outside. He left the court even more of a popular hero than he had been when he entered it.

Now, in studying the article itself as a mere historical document, the reader who belongs to the present generation would probably be disposed to come to the conclusion that, while it was indeed something like a direct incentive to violence, it also pointed to evils and to dangers which the wisdom of statesmanship would then have done well to fear. For the main purpose of the article was to emphasize the fact that, in the existing conditions of things, nothing was ever likely to be done for the relief of the hungry sufferers from bad laws and bad social conditions, unless some deeds of violence were employed to startle the public into the knowledge that the sufferings existed and would not be endured in patience any longer. It is unfortunately only too true that, at all periods of history, even the most recent history of the most civilized countries, there are evils that legislation will not trouble itself to deal with until legislators have been made to know by some deeds of violence that if relief will not come, civil disturbance must come. The whole story of the reign of William the Fourth is the story of an age of reform, although no particular credit can be given to the monarch himself for that splendid fact. It is a melancholy truth {158} that not one of these reforms would have been effected at the time or for long after if those who suffered most cruelly from existing wrongs had always been content to suffer in law-abiding peacefulness, and to allow the justice of their cause to prove itself by patient argument addressed to the reason, the sympathy, and the conscience of the ruling orders.



{159}

CHAPTER LXXIII.

THE TRIUMPH OF REFORM.

[Sidenote: 1831—Obstructive tactics in the Commons]

The Reform Bill was, then, clearly on its way to success. It had passed its second reading in the House of Commons by a large, and what might well be called a triumphant, majority. Now, when a great measure reaches that stage in the modern history of our Constitution, we can all venture to forecast, with some certainty, its ultimate fate. We are speaking, it need hardly be said, of reform measures which are moved by a clear principle and have a strong and resolute band of followers. Such measures may be defeated once and again by the House of Lords, and may be delayed in either or both Houses for a considerable time; but it only needs perseverance to carry them in the end. Some of the more enlightened and intelligent Conservatives must have begun already to feel that the ultimate triumph of the reform measure was only a question of time; but then those who were opposed to every such reform were determined that, at all events, the triumph should be put off as long as possible. The House of Lords would, no doubt, throw out the Bill when it came for the first time within the range of their power; but it was resolved, meanwhile, to keep the Bill as long as possible in the House of Commons. Therefore there now set in a Parliamentary campaign of a kind which was almost quite new to those days, but has become familiar to our later times—a campaign of obstruction. After the second reading of the new Reform Bill there set in that first great systematic performance of obstruction which has been the inspiration, the lesson, and the model to all the obstructives of later years. The rules and the practices of the House of Commons offered in those times, and, {160} indeed, for long after, the most tempting opportunities to any body of members who were anxious to prolong debate for the mere purpose of preventing legislation. For example, it was understood until quite lately that any motion made in the House, even the most formal and technical, might be opposed, and, if opposed, might be debated for any length of time, without the Speaker having the power to intervene and cut short the most barren and meaningless discussion.

[Sidenote: 1831—Parliamentary procedure]

When the House goes into committee, according to the formal Parliamentary phrase, the temptation to obstruct becomes indefinitely multiplied, for in committee a member can speak as often as he thinks fit on the subject—or, at least, such was his privilege before the alterations adopted in very recent years. It may be well to explain to the general reader the meaning of what takes place when the House goes into committee. When a Bill has passed through its first and second reading it is understood that the main principles of the measure have been agreed upon, and that it only remains for the House to go into committee for the purpose of considering every clause and every minute detail of the Bill before it comes up to the House again for its third and final reading. Now the House, when it goes into committee, is still just the same House of Commons as before, except that the Speaker leaves the chair and the assembly is presided over by the Chairman of Committees, who sits not in the Speaker's throne-like chair, but in an ordinary seat at the table in front of it. There is, however, the important difference that, while in the House itself, presided over by the Speaker, a member can only speak once on each motion, in the committee he can speak as often as he thinks fit, and for the obvious reason that, where mere details are under consideration, it was not thought expedient to limit the number of practical suggestions which any member might desire to offer as the discussion of each clause suggested new possibilities of improvement. By the alterations effected recently in the rules of procedure the Speaker of the House, or the Chairman of Committees, obtains a {161} certain control over members who are evidently talking against time and for the sake of wilful obstruction; but in the days of Lord John Russell's Reform Bill no such authority had been given to the presiding officer.

The very motion—in ordinary times a purely formal motion—which had to be passed in order that the House might get into committee, gave to the opponents of reform their first opportunity of obstruction. The motion was that the Speaker do now leave the chair, and the moment that motion was put it was immediately met by an amendment. A Tory member raised the question that there was a mistake in one of the returns of population in the constituency which he represented, and he proposed that his constituent should be allowed to show cause in person or by counsel at the bar of the House for a rectification of the error. Lord John Russell admitted that there appeared to have been some mistake in the return, but he contended that the motion to enable the House to go into committee was not the proper time at which such a question could be raised. Every one in the House knew perfectly well the motive for raising the question just then, and after some time had been wasted in absolutely unnecessary discussion the obstructive amendment was defeated by a majority of 97. That, however, did not help matters very much, for the House had still to divide upon the question that the Speaker do now leave the chair. This was met by repeated motions for adjournment, and on every one of these motions a long discussion was kept up by some leading members of the Opposition and by their faithful followers. The reader will remember that until the motion had been carried for the Speaker to leave the chair it was still the House, and not the committee, that was sitting, and therefore no member could speak more than once on the same subject. But then this fact did not secure even that particular stage of the debate against obstruction, for there were several different forms in which the motion for adjournment might be made, and on each of these several proposals a member was entitled to speak even although he had already spoken on each motion previously proposed {162} to the same practical effect. Perhaps it may be as well to bring the condition of things more clearly and more practically within the understanding of the general reader, seeing that the Parliamentary obstruction which may be said to have begun with the Reform Bill became afterwards so important an instrument for good or for evil in our legislative system. The motion then is made that Mr. Speaker do now leave the chair. Thereupon Mr. Brown, Tory member, moves as an amendment that the House do now adjourn, and Mr. Brown sets forth in a lengthened speech his reasons for thinking that the House ought not to sit any longer that night. Some member of the Ministry rises and gives his reason for urging that the Speaker should be allowed to leave the chair at once, and that the House go into committee in order to consider the details of the measure. Thereupon several of Mr. Brown's friends arise, and one after another expound, at great length, their reason for supporting Mr. Brown. The ministers, by this time, have made up their minds that the best course they can follow is to let Mr. Brown's friends have all the talk to themselves, but some independent members on the side of the Government are sure to be provoked into making speeches denouncing the obstructives and thereby only helping to obstruct. At length, when all Mr. Brown's friends have had their say—and Mr. Brown, it will be remembered, cannot speak again on this particular question—a division is taken on his amendment, and the amendment is lost. Then the question is put once more for the Speaker to leave the chair, and instantly Mr. Jones, another Tory member, springs to his feet and moves as an amendment, not that the House do now adjourn, but that this debate be now adjourned, which, as every one must see, is quite a different proposition. On this new amendment Mr. Brown is quite entitled to speak, and he does speak accordingly, and so do all his friends, and at last a division is taken and the amendment of Mr. Jones has the same fate as the amendment of Mr. Brown, and is defeated by a large majority. Up comes the question once more about the Speaker leaving the chair, and up gets Mr. Robinson, {163} another Tory member, and moves that the House do now adjourn, which motion is strictly in order, for it is quite clear that the House might with perfect consistency refuse to adjourn at midnight and yet might be quite willing to adjourn at four o'clock in the morning. On the amendment of Mr. Robinson his friends Brown and Jones are of course entitled to speak, and so are all their colleagues in the previous discussions, and when this amendment too is defeated, then Mr. Smith, yet another Tory member, rises in his place, as the familiar Parliamentary phrase goes, and moves that this debate be now adjourned. This is really a fair summary of the events which took place in the House of Commons on this first grand opportunity of obstruction, the motion to enable the House to get into committee on the details of the Reform Bill.

[Sidenote: 1831—The Reform Bill in committee]

It was half-past seven in the morning when the out-wearied House consented to adjourn, and the story was told, at the time, that when Sir Charles Wetherell was leaving Westminster Hall with some of his Tory colleagues he observed that a heavy rain was pouring down, and he declared with a vigorous oath that if he had known of that in time he would have treated the Government to a few more divisions before giving them a chance of getting to their homes. The Bill, however, did get into committee at last, and then the work of obstruction began again and was carried on after the most systematic fashion. In committee the opportunities were ample, for the case of each constituency which it was proposed to disfranchise, or each constituency the number of whose members it was proposed to lessen, had to be discussed separately, and, of course, gave rise to an unlimited number of speeches. A committee was actually formed to prepare, organize, and apply the methods of obstruction, and of this committee no less a person than Sir Robert Peel, then one of England's most rising statesmen, afterwards to be one of her greatest statesmen, was the president. Sir Robert Peel was himself one of the most frequent speakers in the obstructive debates, and among his rivals were Sir Charles Wetherell and Mr. John Wilson Croker, a man who has {164} been consigned to a sort of immortality by a famous essay of Macaulay's and by Disraeli's satirical picture of him as Mr. Rigby in "Coningsby." The committee of Tory members which has been already mentioned arranged carefully, in advance, the obstruction that was to be carried on in the case of each particular constituency, and planned out in advance how each discussion was to be conducted and who were to take the leading parts in it.

[Sidenote: 1831—Determination to pass the Bill]

Meanwhile popular feeling was rising more and more strongly as each day of debate dragged on. Some of the largest constituencies were most active and energetic in their appeals to the Government to hold out to the very last and not yield an inch to the obstructionists. A fear began to spread abroad that Lord Grey and his colleagues might endeavor to save some of the main provisions of their Bill by surrendering other parts of it to the Opposition. This alarm found expression in the cry which soon began to be heard all over the country, and became in fact the battle-cry of Reformers everywhere—the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill. Great public meetings were held in all parts for the purpose of urging the Government to make no concessions to the political enemy. During the summer a meeting of the most influential supporters of the Government was held in the Foreign Office, and at that meeting Lord Althorp, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that Lord Grey and his colleagues were perfectly determined not to give way, and he declared that the Government were resolved to keep the House of Commons sitting until December, or, if necessary, until the following December, in order to pass the Bill before the rising of the House for its recess. Naturally this firm declaration had some effect on the obstructionists, especially on the rank and file of the obstructionists. Nothing discourages and disheartens obstruction so much, in the House of Commons, as a resolute announcement on the part of the Ministry that the House is to be kept together until the measure under debate, whatever it may be, is disposed of. It is a hard task, at any time, to keep the House of Commons together after the regular season for its {165} holiday has come on; and if the rank and file of Opposition can once be brought to believe that a certain measure is to be passed no matter what number of weeks or months it may occupy, the rank and file is very apt to make up its mind that there is no use in throwing good months after bad, and that it might be as well to get the thing done, since it has to be done, without unlimited sacrifice of personal comfort. Still, the leaders of the Tory Opposition were not deterred by Lord Althorp's proclamation from maintaining their work of obstruction for some time yet. The impatience and anger of the country rose higher and higher. A reforming member of the House was in an unlucky plight indeed if he happened to be caught by one of the amendments proposed from the benches of Opposition and, believing that it had something reasonable in it, allowed his too sensitive conscience to persuade him into supporting it by his vote. Into such a plight fell a worthy alderman of the City of London—who had been sent into the House of Commons as a Radical reformer. This well-meaning person had permitted himself to become satisfied that there was something to be said for one of the Opposition amendments, and in a moment of rash ingenuousness he voted for it. He was immediately afterwards formally censured by his constituents and by the body to which he officially belonged. He was informed by solemn resolutions that he had been sent into the House of Commons to help the Government in passing the Reform Bill, and it was more or less plainly intimated to him that he had no more right to the exercise of his independent opinion on any of the details of the measure than a private soldier on a battle-field would have to exercise his individual judgment as to the propriety of obeying or disobeying the order of his commanding officer. The poor man had to make the most fervid assurances that he had meant no harm in voting for the Opposition amendment, that he was thoroughly devoted to the cause of reform, and to the particular measure then before the House of Commons, and that never again was he to be induced by any arguments to give a vote against the Government on any {166} section or sentence or line of Lord John Russell's Bill. Then, and not until then, he was taken back into favor.

[Sidenote: 1831—The Reform Bill passes the Commons]

The Bill, however, did get through committee at last. The Government contrived by determined resistance and untiring patience to get their scheme of reform out of committee in substantially the condition they wished it to have. Then came the third reading. It was confidently assumed on both sides of the House that there would be a long debate on the motion that the Bill be now read a third time. In the House of Commons, however, it often happens that the assumption of a forthcoming debate as a certainty is itself the one cause which prevents the debates from being long. So it happened on this important occasion. Every Tory took it for granted that his brother Tories would keep the debate going for an indefinite time, and in this fond faith a good many Tories felt themselves in no hurry to get to the House, and were willing to leave the first hour or two at the disposal of their colleagues. When the sitting began, and, indeed, when the motion for the third reading came on, there were comparatively few Tories in the House, and the great leaders of Opposition were not present. There was confusion in the ranks of the Tories, and the crowded benches of the Reformers thundered with clamorous shouts of "Divide! Divide!" Now, it takes a very heroic orator indeed to continue declaiming for a long time when a great majority of the members present are bellowing at him and are drowning, by their united voices, the sounds of the words which he is trying to articulate. The members of Opposition in the House found this fact brought home to them, and, being further bewildered by the fortuitous absence of their leaders, soon gave up the struggle, and the debate collapsed, and the third reading was carried by a large majority before Sir Robert Peel, Sir Charles Wetherell, and others came in leisurely fashion into the House, filled with the assumption that there would be ample opportunity for them to carry on the debate. Even yet, however, all was not over. According to the procedure of the House, it was not enough that the motion for the third reading of the {167} Bill should be carried. It was still necessary to propose the motion that the Bill do now pass. The moment this motion was proposed the torrent of opposition, frozen up for a too-short interval, began to flow again in full volume. The nature of the formal motion gave opportunity for renewed attacks on the whole purpose of the Bill, and all the old, familiar, outworn arguments were repeated by orator after orator from the Tory benches. But this, too, had to come to an end. The House was no longer in committee, and each member could only speak once on this final motion. Of course, there could be motions for adjournment, and on each such motion, put as an amendment, there would be opportunity for a fresh debate; but the leaders of the Opposition were beginning to see that there was nothing of much account to be done any longer in the House of Commons, and that their hopes of resisting the progress of reform must turn to the House of Lords. So the Reform Bill passed at last through the House of Commons, and then all over the country was raised the cry, "What will the Lords do with it?"

Soon the temper of the more advanced Reformers throughout the country began to change its tone, and the question eagerly put was not so often what will the Lords do with the Bill? but what shall we do with the House of Lords? At every great popular meeting held throughout the constituencies an outcry was raised against the House of Lords as a part of the constitutional system, and no speaker was more welcome on a public platform than the orator who called for the abolition of the hereditary principle in the formation of legislators. One might have thought that the agitation which broke out all over the country, and the manner in which almost all Reformers seemed to have taken it for granted that the hereditary Chamber must be the enemy of all reform, might have put the peers on their guard and taught them the unwisdom of accepting the imputation against them, and thus proving that they had no sympathy with the cause of the people. But the great majority of the Tory peers of that day had not yet risen to the idea that there could be any {168} wisdom in any demand made by men who had no university education, who had not what was then described as a stake in the country. The voice of the people was simply regarded as the voice of the rabble, and the Tory peers had no notion of allowing themselves to be guided by any appeal coming from such a quarter.

[Sidenote: 1831—The Reform Bill in the Lords]

The agitation of which we are speaking had been going on during the long reign of obstruction in the Commons, and there was no time lost by the Government between the passing of the Bill in the representative Chamber and its introduction in the House of Lords. On the evening of the day when the Bill was passed by the Commons, September 23, 1831, it was formally brought into the House of Lords and read a first time. It has already been explained that, according to Parliamentary usage, the first reading of any Bill is taken in the House of Lords as a matter of right and without a division. The second reading of the Bill was taken on October 3. Lord Grey, who had charge of the measure in that House, delivered one of the most impressive and commanding speeches which had ever come from his eloquent lips, not merely in recommendation of the measure itself, but in solemn warning to the peers in general, and to the bishops and archbishops in particular, to pause and consider carefully all the possible consequences before committing themselves to the rejection of a demand which was made by the vast majority of the English people.

Lord Grey was a noble illustration of what may be described as the stately order of Parliamentary eloquence. He had not the fire and the passion of Fox; he had not the thrilling genius of Pitt; and, of course, his style of speech had none of the passionate and sometimes the extravagant declamation of which Brougham was a leading master. He had a dignified presence, a calm, clear, and penetrating voice, a style that was always exquisitely finished and nobly adapted to its purpose. It would not be too much to say for Earl Grey that he might have been the ideal orator for an ideal House of Lords, if we assume the ideal House of Lords to be an assembly in which appeal {169} was always made to high principle, to reason, and to justice, not to passion, to prejudice, or to party. Lord Grey, so far as we can judge from contemporary accounts, never spoke better than in the debate on the second reading of the Reform Bill, and it was evident that he spoke with all the sincere emotion of one whose mind and heart alike were filled with the cause for which he pleaded. But the House of Lords just then was not in a mood to be swayed greatly by argument or by eloquence. Lord Wharncliffe moved an amendment to the effect that the Bill be read a second time this day six months. This, at least, was the shape that the motion took after some discussion, because Lord Wharncliffe, in the first instance, had concluded his speech against the second reading by the blunt motion that the Bill be rejected; and it was only when it had been pressed upon his attention that such a method of disposing of the measure would be a downright insult to the Commons that he consented to modify his proposal into the formal and familiar amendment that the Bill be read a second time this day six months. The effect would be just the same in either case, for no Ministry would think of retaining office if the discussion of its most important measure were postponed in the House of Lords for a period of six months. During the debate which followed, the Duke of Wellington spoke strongly against the Bill. On the morning of October 8 the division was taken. There were 199 votes for the amendment and 158 against it, or, in other words, for the second reading of the Bill. The second reading was therefore rejected by a majority of 41. The whole work of legislation during all the previous part of the year had thus been reduced to nothing, and the House of Lords had shown what it would do with the Bill by contemptuously rejecting it, and thus bidding defiance to the demand unquestionably made by the vast majority of the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Parliament was at once prorogued, and the members who were in favor of reform hurried off to address great meetings of their constituents, and to denounce the action of the House of Lords. Popular enthusiasm was aroused {170} more than ever in favor of the Reform Bill, and popular passion was stirred in many places to positive fury against the principal opponents of the Bill. In London several public men who were conspicuous for their opposition to the Bill were surrounded in their carriages as they drove through the streets by suddenly collected crowds, who hooted and hissed them, and would have gone much further than hooting and hissing in their way of expressing condemnation but for the energetic intervention of the newly created police force. In some of the provincial towns, and here and there throughout the country, the most serious riots broke out. In Derby there were disturbances which lasted for several days, and consisted of attacks on unpopular persons and of fierce fights with the police. Nottingham was the centre of rioting even more serious. Nottingham Castle, the seat of the Duke of Newcastle, was attacked by a furious mob and actually burned to the ground. In the immediate neighborhood was the estate of Mr. Musters, which was invaded by an excited mob. The dwelling-house was set on fire, and, although the conflagration was not allowed to spread far, yet it ended in a tragedy which must always have a peculiar interest for the lovers of poetry and romance. The wife of Mr. Musters was the Mary Chaworth made famous by Lord Byron in his poem of the "Dream," and other poems as well—the Mary Chaworth who was his first love, and whom, at one time, he believed destined to be his last love also. Mary Chaworth does not seem to have taken the poet's adoration very seriously—at all events, she married Mr. Musters, a country gentleman of good position. Mrs. Musters was in her house on the night when it was attacked by the mob, and when the fire broke out she fled into the open park and sought shelter there among the trees. The mob was dispersed and Mrs. Musters, after a while, was able to return to her home; but she was in somewhat delicate health, the exposure to the cold night air of winter proved too much for her, and she became one of the most innocent victims to the popular passion aroused by the opposition to the Reform Bill.

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[Sidenote: 1831—The Reform riots]

Bristol was the scene of the most formidable riots during all that period of disturbance. Sir Charles Wetherell, who had made himself conspicuous as an opponent of reform, was the Recorder as well as the representative of Bristol, and his return to the city after the Lords had thrown out the Bill became the signal for an outbreak of popular fury. Houses were wrecked in various parts of the city; street fights took place between the mob and the military, day after day; the Mansion House, where Sir Charles Wetherell was supposed to have taken refuge, was besieged, attacked, and almost demolished, and Sir Charles Wetherell himself was rescued, more than once, with the utmost difficulty from hostile crowds who seemed thirsting for his blood. All these riots were atoned for dearly soon after by some who had taken part in them. The stroke of the law was heavy and sharp in those days, and many of the rioters in Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol, and other places expiated on the scaffold their offences against peace and order. Some of the cathedral cities became scenes of especial disturbance because of the part so many of the prelates who were members of the House of Lords had taken against the Reform Bill. The direct appeal which Earl Grey had made to the archbishops and bishops in the House of Lords to think long and well before opposing the Reform Bill was delivered with the highest and sincerest motive, with the desire that the Church should keep itself in harmony with the people; but the mere fact that the appeal was made, and made in vain, seems to have aroused in many parts of the country, and especially in the cathedral cities, a stronger conviction than ever that the prelates were, for the most part, the enemies of popular rights. Then, again, there was a more or less general impression that the King himself, in his heart, was not in favor of reform and would be glad to get rid of it if he could. Daniel O'Connell, addressing a great popular meeting at Charing Cross in London, pointed with his outstretched right arm towards Whitehall, and awakened a tremendous outburst of applause from the vast crowd by telling them that it was there Charles I. had lost his head {172} because he had submitted to the dictation of his foreign wife. There was a popular belief at the time that Queen Adelaide, the wife of King William, cherished a strong hatred against reform such as Lord Grey and his colleagues were pressing on, and that she was secretly influencing the mind of her husband her own way, and so it was that O'Connell's allusion got home to the feelings and the passions of the multitude who listened to his words. Never, in the nineteenth century, had England gone through such a period of internal storm. All over the Continent observers were beginning to ask themselves whether the monarchy in England was not on the verge of such a crisis as had just overtaken the monarchy in France.

[Sidenote: 1832—The third Reform Bill]

Lord Grey and his ministers still, however, held firmly to their purpose, and the King, much as he may have disliked the whole reform business, and gladly as he would have got rid of it, if it were to be got rid of by any possible means, had still wit enough to see that if he were to give his support to the House of Lords something even more than the House of Lords might be in danger. Parliament was therefore called together again in December, and the Royal Speech from the Throne commended to both Houses the urgent necessity of passing into law as quickly as possible the ministerial measure of reform. Lord John Russell brought in his third Reform Bill for England and Wales, a Bill that was, in purpose and in substance, much the same as the two measures that had preceded it, and this third Reform Bill passed by slow degrees through its several stages in the House of Commons. Then again came up the portentous question, "What will the Lords do with it?" There could not be the least doubt in the mind of anybody as to what the majority of the House of Lords would be glad to do with the Bill if they only felt sure that they could work their will upon it without danger to their own order. There, however, the serious difficulty arose. The more reasonable among the peers did not attempt to disguise from themselves that another rejection of the Bill might lead to the most serious disturbances, and even possibly to civil war, and they were not {173} prepared to indulge their hostility to reform at so reckless an expense. The greater number of the Tory peers, however, acted on the assumption, familiar at all times among certain parties of politicians, that the more loudly people demanded a reform the more resolutely the reform ought to be withheld from them, and that, if the people attempted to rise up, the only proper policy was to put the people down by force. The opinions and sentiments of the less headlong among the Conservative peers had led to the formation of a party, more or less loosely put together, who were called at that time the "Waverers," just as a political combination of an earlier day obtained the title of the "Trimmers." The Waverers were made up of the men who held that their best and most patriotic policy was to regard each portion of the Bill brought before them on its own merits, and not to resist out of hand any proposition which seemed harmless in itself simply because it formed part of the whole odious policy of reform. King William is believed, at one time, to have set hopes on the efforts of the Waverers, and to have cherished a gladsome belief that they might get him out of his difficulties about the Reform Bill; as indeed it will be seen they did in the end, though not quite in the way which he would have desired.