A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



301 



The plea appears to me to break down, or 

 rather to be inexact and inapplicable ; and the 

 immense reliance on it shown by two men so un- 

 usually trained in political experience and con- 

 versant with political philosophy may almost be 

 characterized as startling. I demur to the con- 

 clusions drawn from Mr. Button's appeal to the 

 experiments of the last sixty years, confidently 

 as it is made, because those experiments do not 

 embrace any, properly speaking, popular, or per- 

 haps I ought to say populace, electorates ; and I 

 object to Mr. Gladstone's apparent hopes from 

 the newest and rashest extension of the franchise, 

 because it has not yet really and fully come into 

 operation, and for another reason which I shall 

 come to presently. To exact reasoners the past 

 offers no safe augury for the future — the anal- 

 ogy being far too partial and imperfect. 



We have seen several reform bills framed on 

 different lines and directed to different issues 

 — essentially and fundamentally different. The 

 original plan, the great and beneficent one, was 

 designed to correct certain flagrant abuses and 

 anomalies in our representation, and to supply 

 certain still more undeniable omissions and de- 

 fects. It was framed (to speak broadly) with 

 the object of embracing within the electoral pale 

 as many as might be of the qualified classes — i.e., 

 of those possessing properly of whatever sort, 

 and education of suitable degree : in a word, that 

 enormous proportion of our population whose 

 claims were universally allowed to be, as a rule, 

 at least equal to the average of those already en- 

 dowed with the suffrage, and in many cases far 

 superior. So far was that act from giving votes 

 to the working-classes properly so called — those 

 who might be broadly described as habitually 

 uneducated and living mainly or exclusively on 

 wages — that it distinctly recognized their then 

 unfitness — I would rather say unripeness — by ul- 

 timately disfranchising all of this description who 

 at that period were on the electoral register, 

 namely, freemen and scot-and-lot voters. The 

 two subsequent measures brought forward by 

 Liberal Governments were, if I remember rightly, 

 framed on the same general lines, but with lower 

 suffrage qualifications, as justified by the progress 

 of the times. 



The last two Reform Bills — the Tory measure 

 of 1867, conferring the franchise on the house- 

 holders in boroughs, and the Liberal measure 

 proposing to extend the same privilege to the 

 county population — were entirely different, not to 

 say alien, in their principle, their object, and 

 their bearings. They admitted to the electoral 



register en masse, originally, all rate-payers, finally 

 all householders and lodgers even who preferred 

 their claim. They were designed to enfranchise 

 virtually nearly the whole class of operatives in 

 towns, and laborers in rural districts, with no 

 reference to either property or education. The 

 great distinction, then, between the two sets of 

 measures may be thus stated with substantial ac- 

 curacy : The first demanded a property qualifi- 

 cation for admission to the franchise ; so far from 

 lowering, it practically raised the educational 

 standard of the electoral body, and, while enor- 

 mously enlarging and liberalizing the basis of the 

 Parliamentary Register, it did not enable the new 

 voters to outnumber and to swamp the old ones. 

 The second pretty nearly reversed these features ; 

 made a vast stride in the direction of manhood 

 suffrage by requiring a merely residential in place 

 of a property qualification ; conferred the fran- 

 chise wholesale on the millions who live on week- 

 ly wages ; thus enabling these classes, whenever 

 they please, or as soon as their natural leaders or 

 designing agitators instruct them in the secret of 

 their strength, to outvote all the previous elec- 

 torate — putting it in their power, that is (for I am 

 anxious not to overstate the case), to acquire the 

 command of both the administrative and legisla- 

 tive functions, and to direct and control both our 

 foreign policy and the amount as well as the in- 

 cidence of our taxation, perhaps the two subjects 

 which can least safely be intrusted to their de- 

 cision. 



These are the enormous discrepancies between 

 the old Reform measures and the new ; and yet 

 Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Hutton deem themselves 

 logical and safe in arguing from the beneficent 

 operation of the one to the safety and the desira- 

 bleness of the other ; and our Liberals would 

 proceed with the cceur legcr of Emile Ollivier to 

 confer a gift which is not needed, which cannot 

 be resumed, and which may be so fatally abused. 



But is Mr. Gladstone, in sober earnest, as con- 

 fident about the salutary effects of our hitherto 

 reforms on the parliamentary institutions of to- 

 day as his sanguine temperament and his quiver- 

 ing popular sympathies have almost persuaded 

 himself? Is he in very truth satisfied with the 

 House of Commons such as reform bills — and es- 

 pecially the last one, the household suffrage of 

 1867, incomplete and inchoate as it yet is — have 

 made it? Does he think the "People's Cham- 

 ber" of 1878 in all the most essential character- 

 istics so indisputable an improvement on that of 

 1834 that it can be appealed to as undeniable 

 proof that all previous extensions of the franchise 



