CHAPTER IX
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
Constituencies and Voters
Electors and Constituencies Offer Distinct Problems.
The composition of any representative body involves two separate things; the electors and the constituencies. During the first part of the nineteenth century public attention outside of England was mainly concentrated upon the electors, or in other words upon the extension of the franchise. But now that something like universal suffrage has been introduced into most of the countries which have a popular element in their government, the franchise is little discussed, and much more is said about the constituencies, that is, the method of combining the voters into groups. The change is largely due to discontent with some of the results of democracy, a feeling which finds vent in widespread criticism of representative institutions.[195:1]
It was formerly assumed that the interests of the masses of the people were fundamentally identical; and hence the mode in which the electors were grouped was comparatively unimportant, the main question being the enlargement of the basis of representation. We have now learned that the formation of the constituencies offers a distinct problem with grave practical effects, and popular government not having brought the millennium that was foretold, men seek a remedy in different methods of combining the voters. We constantly see discussions of this subject. We hear of the relative advantage of scrutin d'arrondissement and scrutin de liste; that is, single electoral districts or large areas choosing a number of representatives apiece. We hear about the grouping of voters on the basis of their natural economic relations into urban and rural constituencies; or on the basis of wealth, as in the three-class system of Prussia. We hear suggestions of possible grouping on the basis of occupations;[196:1] and a vast amount of literature has been published to prove the advantage of a grouping on the basis of opinions, by some form of proportional representation.
How Treated in England.
In England the two questions of the electors and the constituencies, although usually considered, and made the subject of legislation, at the same time, have always been kept distinct. Each of the great series of measures of parliamentary reform has touched both subjects, but in unequal degree; and, in fact, it was really the state of the constituencies that forced both problems upon public attention.
The Reform Act of 1832 brought in a general franchise for boroughs in place of the multifarious, and on the whole highly exclusive, privileges which had existed before. It also changed, though in a less radical way, the franchise in the counties. But as a political measure its greatest importance lay in its effect upon the constituencies by the redistribution of seats. It took from small boroughs in various stages of decay and rottenness one hundred and forty-three seats, and gave them to the counties, and to new large towns hitherto unrepresented. The Act of 1867, on the other hand, while transferring seats to some extent, was mainly a measure for extending greatly the borough franchise. In 1884 and 1885 both subjects were dealt with radically. By the Act of 1884 the franchise for counties was much enlarged; and by that of 1885 the distribution of seats was reorganised upon a basis closely akin to equal electoral districts.
The Constituencies.
The constituencies for the English Parliament are of three kinds; counties, boroughs and universities. The last are quite different from the others in nature and franchise, and a word may be said about them here.
Universities.
Oxford and Cambridge were given two seats apiece by James I. The University of Dublin, which had already one seat, obtained another by the Reform Act of 1832; and, finally, the Act of 1868 gave one member to London University, one to Glasgow and Aberdeen combined, and another to Edinburgh and St. Andrews. The franchise for the universities belongs in general to the registered graduates.[197:1]
The Reform Act of 1832.
Until 1832 each county, and each borough that had the privilege of being represented, elected, as a rule, two members of Parliament. This, however, was not true of the Scotch boroughs, which were, with few exceptions, grouped into districts returning a single member apiece; a system that has been maintained to the present day. Some of the English boroughs had been given the right of electing members by the Tudors and the early Stuarts, not because they were places of importance, but, on the contrary, because they were not populous, and their members could be easily controlled by the Crown—the electoral rights being commonly vested in the governing council, which was a close corporation. Other boroughs that had once been places of consequence had, in the course of time, fallen into decay. So that by the beginning of the nineteenth century many members of the House represented no substantial communities, and were really appointed either by small self-perpetuating bodies, or by patrons, who, owning the land, controlled the votes of the few electors in the constituency. This condition of things was made scandalous by the open practice of selling elections to Parliament for cash; and the demand for reform, which had been checked by the long struggle with France, began again after the peace, culminating finally in the Reform Act of 1832.[197:2] The object of this measure was to remove a manifest abuse, rather than to reorganise the representation of the country on a new basis, and it applied to the conditions a somewhat rough and inexact remedy. The boroughs with less than two thousand population by the census of 1821 were disfranchised altogether, those with more than two thousand and less than four thousand lost one member, and the seats thus obtained were divided about equally between the counties and the new large towns that had hitherto been unrepresented.[198:1] But the constituencies still remained very uneven in population—and, indeed, the framers of the act had no desire for equal electoral districts.
The Reform Act of 1867.
The same process was continued by the Act of 1867, which again took members from little towns and gave them to larger ones and to the counties. While there was no general attempt to make the number of representatives proportional to the size of a constituency, a few of the largest provincial towns were given three members; and in that connection an interesting experiment was tried. With the object of providing for minority representation, the electors in the boroughs returning three members—the so-called three-cornered constituencies—were allowed to vote for only two candidates apiece. This resulted in diminishing the real representation of the borough, as compared with the rest of the country. If Manchester, for example, was Liberal, she would probably be represented by two Liberals and one Conservative. But in a party division the Conservative would neutralise one of the Liberals, so that Manchester would count for only one vote, and would, therefore, have only half as much weight as a much smaller borough with two members both belonging to the same party. The experiment gave so little satisfaction that it was afterward abandoned; and it is chiefly interesting to-day because the effort to organise a large party majority so as to compass the election of all three members gave rise to the Birmingham Caucus, whose birth and whose progeny will be described in a subsequent chapter. Except for the few three-member constituencies, and a much larger number of boroughs having only a single seat, the constituencies still returned two members apiece; and this continued to be the rule until the third and last of the great measures of parliamentary reform.
The Reform Act of 1885.
The Redistribution Act of 1885, although, like all English measures of reform, to some extent a compromise between the old ideas and the new, rested upon the principle of equal electoral districts each returning a single member. The proportion of one seat for every 54,000 people was roughly taken as the basis of representation; and in order to adapt the principle to the existing system with the least possible change, boroughs with less than 15,000 inhabitants were disfranchised altogether, and became, for electoral purposes, simply a part of the county in which they were situated. Boroughs with more than 15,000 and less than 50,000 people were allowed to retain, or if hitherto unrepresented were given, one member; those with more than 50,000 and less than 165,000, two members; those above 165,000 three members, with an additional member for every 50,000 people more. The same general principle was followed in the counties.[199:1]
The boroughs that had hitherto elected two members, and were entitled to the same number under the new scheme, remained single constituencies for the election of those two members. Of these boroughs there are twenty-three,[199:2] which, with the City of London, and the three universities (Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin), makes in all twenty-seven cases where two members are elected together. All the other constituencies are single-member districts, a result which was brought about by a partition of the counties, of boroughs with more than two members, and of the new boroughs with only two members, into separate electoral divisions, each with its own distinctive name.
It may be interesting to note that the Reforms of 1832 and 1867 did not change the total number of members of the House, but merely redistributed the existing 658 seats. By the disfranchisement, after 1867, for corrupt practices, of four boroughs returning six members, the number was reduced to 652; and the Reform Act of 1885 increased it to 670, where it has since remained.
Inequalities in Representation.
The distribution of seats under the Act of 1885 was only a rough approximation to equal electoral districts; and in time it has become far less close, until to-day the difference in the size of the constituencies is very great. The smallest is the borough of Newry in Ireland, which had at the census of 1901 a population of only 13,137; or, if we leave Ireland aside on account of its peculiar conditions, the smallest in Great Britain is the city of Durham with a population of 14,935; while the largest is the southern division of the County of Essex, with 217,030 inhabitants; so that the largest constituency to-day is nearly fifteen times as populous as the smallest.[200:1] Nor are the inequalities confined to extreme cases; for they exist in lesser degree throughout the electoral body, many of the constituencies being two or three times as large as many others.
But unless one assumes that the exact equivalence of all votes is a fundamental principle of political justice, differences of this kind are of little consequence, provided one part of the community, or rather one set of opinions or interests, is not distinctly over-represented at the expense of another. Now, in Parliament an over-representation of this kind does exist; not, indeed, in regard to the different social classes or economic interests in the nation—for inequalities of that sort are not marked enough to be important—but between the different parts of the country.
Over-Representation of Ireland.
Some parts of Great Britain have grown very rapidly, while the population of Ireland has actually diminished during the last half century; and the result is that whereas in the United Kingdom as a whole there is now, on the average, one member of Parliament for every 62,703 people, England has only one for every 66,971; and Ireland one for every 44,147. If a redistribution of seats were to be made in strict proportion to population, Ireland would therefore lose thirty members, and England would gain about as many, while Scotland would gain one seat, and Wales would lose three.
The question of the proportional representation of England and Ireland is a burning one, because the parliamentary system cannot work well unless one party has a majority which can give to the ministry a stable support. But eighty of the Irish members are Nationalists, who do not belong to either of the great parties, and may at any general election acquire a balance of power, and cause confusion in politics, as they did after the election of 1885. The loss of twenty-five seats, which they would suffer by a reduction of the Irish representation, would materially lessen that danger. The Conservative government was constantly urged by its supporters to make the transfer of seats from Ireland to England, and was actually preparing to do so at the time it resigned in 1905. On behalf of Ireland it was argued that this would be a violation of the Act of Union, which was in the nature of a treaty, and allotted to Ireland one hundred members in the House of Commons.[201:1] On the other hand the advocates of the policy replied that the terms of the Act of Union cannot be forever binding under a change of circumstances; they referred to the fact that in 1868 the Church of England was disestablished in Ireland, notwithstanding the provision in the Act for its perpetual establishment there;[201:2] and they said that conditions had so changed as to justify a redistribution of seats. The Irish, however, claim that the great bulk of their people wanted disestablishment, and that Ireland could waive provisions made in her behalf; but it may be urged that the provision about the Church was made for the benefit not of Ireland, or its people, but of a minority there.
The formation in England of new constituencies for the seats transferred would raise great practical difficulties. Even if it did not involve a general redistribution bill, it would necessitate changing many of the districts. Quite apart from the danger of incurring a charge of gerrymandering for party purposes, there would be a host of personal interests of members of Parliament to be considered. Each member affected would be anxious that the change should not make his seat less secure than before; and claims of this sort have peculiar weight in a country where, as in England, the sitting member has almost a prescriptive right to renomination by his party.
Effect of the English Method of Distributing Seats.
The English practice of rearranging the constituencies, and apportioning the representatives among them, only at long intervals, of treating a bill for the purpose as an exceptional measure of great political importance, instead of the natural result of each new census, has the advantage of preventing frequent temptations to gerrymander. But, on the other hand, it raises the matter of electoral districts to the height of a constitutional, and almost a revolutionary, question, preceded sometimes by long and serious agitation, and always fought over on party grounds. This is a perpetual difficulty, for the shifting of population, which must always be changing the ratio of representation, will from time to time make a redistribution of seats inevitable.
The Franchise.
The extension of the franchise was long a grave constitutional question also, but it has now been so nearly worked out that it can hardly be regarded in that light in future. Before the Reform Act of 1832 the franchise in the counties depended entirely upon the ownership of land, an old statute of 1429,[202:1] having confined the right of voting to forty-shilling freeholders; that is, to men who owned an estate of inheritance, or at least a life estate, in land of the annual value of forty shillings.[203:1]
In the boroughs the franchise was based upon no uniform principle, but varied according to the custom or charter of the borough. Sometimes it depended upon the tenure of land; and, since residence was by no means always necessary, it might happen that the voters did not live in the place, and there were even cases where members were returned to Parliament by boroughs that had no longer a single inhabitant. Sometimes the right belonged to the governing body of the town; sometimes to all the freemen; sometimes to all householders who paid local taxes; and in one place, at least, it extended to all the inhabitants. In these last cases the franchise was actually wider before the Reform Act of 1832 than it was afterward, so that although the act enlarged the electorate very much on the whole, and preserved the rights of all existing voters, it narrowed the franchise seriously for the future in a few places.[203:2]
Reform Act of 1832.
Counties.
In the counties the Act of 1832 continued to treat the right to vote as dependent upon the tenure of land, although in some ways restricting and in others much more largely extending it. In order to prevent the manufacture of forty-shilling freeholders for electoral purposes, the act provided that a voter must have been in possession of his land for six months, unless it came to him by descent, devise, marriage or promotion to an office;[203:3] and, also, that if he held only a life estate he must either have acquired it by one of these methods, or must be in actual occupation, unless again it was of the clear yearly value of ten pounds.[203:4] On the other hand the act extended the right of voting in counties to persons entitled to copyholds, and leaseholds for sixty years, of the annual value of ten pounds; to leaseholds for twenty years of the value of fifty pounds; and to leaseholds of fifty pounds annual value without regard to the length of the term, if the tenant was in actual occupation of the land.[204:1]
Boroughs.
In the boroughs the Reform Act wrought a complete change. Except that it preserved the personal rights of living voters,[204:2] and retained the privileges of freemen in towns where they existed,[204:3] it swept away all the old qualifications,[204:4] and replaced them by a single new franchise based exclusively upon the tenure, or rather the occupation, of land. The new qualification was uniform throughout England, and included every man who occupied, as owner or tenant, a house, shop, or other building, worth, with the land, ten pounds a year. But while the franchise in the boroughs was thus based, like that in the counties, upon land, the effect was entirely different, and was intended to be so. It has been said that the framers of the act meant the county members to represent property, and the borough members to represent numbers. The boroughs, as will appear later, did not really stand for numbers, but the counties did certainly represent property, and that in spite of the Chandos Clause which admitted fifty-pound leaseholders and was resisted by the authors of the bill. The electorate in the counties consisted of the landholders with a few large farmers, while in the towns it comprised the great middle class.
Later in the same session acts of a similar nature were passed for Scotland[204:5] and Ireland;[204:6] and in fact it was the practice until 1884 to deal with the franchise in the three kingdoms by separate statutes.
Effect of the Act of 1832.
As the practice of keeping a register of persons entitled to vote at parliamentary elections did not begin until this time, it is impossible to say precisely how much the Act of 1832 increased the size of the electorate. But from returns made just prior to the passage of the Act,[205:1] it would appear that the number of borough electors in England and Wales was then about 180,000; whereas immediately after the Act had gone into effect it was 282,398.[205:2] The total increase in the borough electorate, which was the one chiefly affected, was therefore about 100,000, and a great part of this increase consisted of the voters in the large towns that had been given seats for the first time by the Act.
The new system was in no sense either democratic or proportionate to population. The average ratio of electors to population for the whole United Kingdom was about one in thirty; but the variation in different constituencies and different parts of the kingdom was very great. In the English and Welsh counties the ratio ran all the way from one in five in Westmoreland, to one in thirty-seven in Lancashire, one in thirty-nine in Middlesex, and one in sixty in Merioneth. In the English and Welsh boroughs it ran from nearly one in four in Bedford and Aylesbury, where practically all adult males were voters, to one in forty-five in the manufacturing towns. In Scotland even a smaller part of the population enjoyed the franchise. In the counties the ratio ran from one in twenty-four in Selkirk, to one in ninety-seven in Sutherland; and in boroughs or districts, from one in twenty in the Elgin district, to one in forty in that of Linlithgow. In the Irish counties it ran from one in fifty-eight in Carlow, to one in two hundred and sixty-one in Tyrone; and in the boroughs from one in nine in Carrickfergus and Waterford, to one in fifty-three in Tralee.
The proportion of members of Parliament to population was far more uneven still. As reformers at a later date were constantly pointing out, one half of the borough population of England was contained in sixteen boroughs, and elected only thirty-four members; the other half, numbering less than two and a half millions, still returning two hundred and ninety-three members; while the counties with eight millions of people returned one hundred and forty-four members. Thus it happened that less than one fifth of the population in England elected nearly one half of the representatives; and as these came from the boroughs it can hardly be said that the borough members represented numbers.[206:1]
Later Reform Bills.
Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, in his "Development of Parliament during the Nineteenth Century,"[206:2] has pointed out that while the framers of the Act of 1832 had not the least intention of introducing democracy, the measure itself could not have furnished a permanent settlement of the franchise, and was destined inevitably to lead to further steps in the direction of universal suffrage. The first step was a slight reduction, in 1850, of the amounts required for the qualification of voters in Ireland.[206:3] This was followed by a series of moderate English reform bills, which failed to pass the House of Commons.[206:4]
The Act of 1867.
In 1867 Disraeli, who had educated his reluctant party until it accepted the political need of extending the franchise, brought in a bill with elaborate safeguards against the predominance of the masses. Under the existing law a small fraction of the working classes had votes in the boroughs;[206:5] and it was Disraeli's intention to admit a larger number of the more prosperous workingmen without giving them an overwhelming weight in the electorate. But the parliamentary situation was peculiar. The Conservative government, which had come into power only through the quarrels of its opponents, had not a majority in the House of Commons, and could not insist upon its own policy; while the Liberals were not under the sense of responsibility that comes with office. The result was that the bill was transformed by amendments, the safeguards proposed by the cabinet were swept away, and a far longer stride toward universal suffrage was taken than any one had expected.
In the counties the Act of 1867[207:1] reduced the ten-pound qualification for owners and long leaseholders to five pounds, and created a new twelve-pound occupation franchise. But a far greater extension was made in the boroughs, where two new franchises were introduced. The most important of these was that of the "householder," whereby a vote was given to every man who occupied, as owner or tenant for twelve months, a dwelling-house, or any part of a house used as a separate dwelling, without regard to its value.[207:2] The other franchise admitted lodgers who occupied for the same period lodgings of the clear value, unfurnished, of ten pounds a year.[208:1] In the course of the next session acts, in general similar, were passed for Scotland and Ireland.[208:2]
Its Effects.
From 1832 to 1862, in spite of the general gain in wealth, the electors had increased very little faster than the population; in England and Wales, indeed, the voters remained about one twentieth of the people,[208:3] while in Scotland they had risen only from one thirty seventh to one thirtieth.[208:4] But the Acts of 1867 and 1868 almost doubled the electorate. In the counties the voters, who numbered 768,705 just before those acts, were, by 1871, 1,055,467; while the borough voters increased from 602,088 to 1,470,956.[208:5]
The Act of 1884.
It was evident that the qualifications for voting could not long remain far wider in one class of constituencies than in another; that the franchise of the boroughs must, in time, be extended to the counties. This was done in 1884,[208:6] and the change more than doubled the county electorate. The franchise, therefore, is now substantially uniform throughout the United Kingdom, except that certain owners and leaseholders have a right to vote in counties, and that in some old towns the freemen still possess the suffrage. Inasmuch as most of the boroughs are included in counties, the occupier, householder, or lodger would be entitled on the same qualifying property to vote in both; and hence a man in a borough would have two votes at an election, while another man with the same qualification outside of the borough would have only one. To avoid this result it is provided that a man shall not be entitled to vote at an election for a county in respect of the occupation of a dwelling-house, lodging, land or tenement in a borough;[209:1] but he may vote in the county on account of the ownership of land in a borough which he does not occupy, or on account of land which he both owns and occupies if he occupies other land in the borough sufficient to qualify him there.[209:2]
The Existing Qualifications.
Although the franchise is now substantially uniform, it is not exactly the same for the different parts of the United Kingdom; nor is it by any means simple. The latest acts have not codified the law. It must still be sought in many statutes, whose provisions are so complicated, and often obscure, that they can be understood only by studying the interpretation put upon them by the courts. The reader who wishes to ascertain the law on a special point must refer to treatises upon the subject, such as Rogers on "Elections." It will be enough for our purpose to summarise the various franchises as they exist to-day.
Property.
There are two qualifications which are not universal. One of these, relating to property rights in land, applies only to counties, and to some extent to boroughs which are counties in themselves.[209:3] It confers the right to vote on owners of land[210:1] of forty shillings yearly value, who hold an estate of inheritance; or who hold an estate for life, and are in actual occupation of the land, or have acquired it by some means other than purchase, or whose land is of five pounds clear yearly value.[210:2] Under this franchise come, also, the leaseholders of land of five pounds yearly value if the original term was not less than sixty years, and fifty pounds value if the term was not less than twenty years.[210:3] The corresponding qualifications for Scotland and Ireland are slightly different in their conditions and in the values required.
Freemen.
The other franchise which is not universal is that of freemen in those towns where they had a right to vote before 1832. The privilege still exists in a number of old boroughs, but, except in the City of London, is confined to freemen who have become such by birth or apprenticeship.
Occupiers, Householders, and Lodgers.
The three remaining franchises are universal, though not precisely uniform. They are those of the ten-pound occupiers, the householders, and the lodgers. The first of these gives the right to vote to a man who occupies, as owner or tenant, any land or tenement of the clear yearly value of ten pounds. The second confers the right on a man who occupies, as owner or tenant, any dwelling-house, or part of a house used as a separate dwelling, without regard to its value. The qualification extends also to men who are not owners or tenants, but who occupy by virtue of an office, service, or employment, a dwelling-house in which the employer does not himself reside. The third of these franchises confers the right to vote upon a man who occupies lodgings of the value, unfurnished, of ten pounds a year.
The application of these franchises to particular cases has given rise to a great amount of litigation, and in particular the courts have found it almost impossible to distinguish between a householder and a lodger. For the general reader, who is concerned with the study of the English government, and not with the effort to get the largest possible number of party members registered, such questions have little interest; but there are two or three matters that ought to be noted, because they have an important bearing on the actual size of the electorate.
Period of Occupation.
One matter of political consequence relates to the period of occupation required. Owners of land in counties, who have acquired it by descent, marriage, promotion to an office, etc., are not required to have owned it for any period. All other owners must have held the title for six calendar months before the 15th of July preceding the registration; and all other voters, except freemen, must have been in occupation of the qualifying premises, or some other premises within the same constituency, for one year preceding the 15th of July.[211:1] This, of course, has the effect of disqualifying entirely persons whose occupation has not been continuous for the whole of that year, and as the register does not take effect until the 1st of January following, and then remains in effect a whole year, voters who have moved to another part of the country within eighteen months after their year of occupation can vote only by a journey back to their former place of abode.
Residence.
A second matter that must be noticed is the question of residence. Before the Reform Act of 1832 the qualification for counties was based upon ownership; that for boroughs varied very much; but in those places where the franchise was broad it was based mainly upon residence. This distinction has, to some extent, persisted. In general it may be said that for English and Scotch counties, and in Ireland for both boroughs and counties, residence is not required, except so far as the occupation of a dwelling-house or lodging may involve residence and this is not necessarily the case.[211:2]
In English boroughs a voter must have resided for six calendar months previous to the 15th of July in the borough, or within seven miles thereof;[212:1] and in Scotland he must have resided there for a whole year.
The requirement of residence does not, however, imply quite so much as might appear, because, according to English law, the possession of a chamber in which a man occasionally sleeps, and to which he can return at any time, is enough to constitute residence; and, hence, he may have a residence in more than one place.[212:2] In the counties, therefore, residence is unnecessary, and even in the boroughs the requirement of residence does not limit a man to voting in a single constituency. The importance of this will shortly be pointed out.
Payment of Rates.
The third matter to be noticed is the question of rating. We have already observed that at one time the personal payment of rates by the voter was much discussed, and was regarded as an important guarantee of character.[212:3] In England poor rates are assessed upon the occupiers, not the owners, of the property, and it is still provided that all voters whose qualification depends upon the occupation of land (except lodgers, who are not from the legal point of view occupiers) must have been rated and must have paid their rates.[212:4] But this means only that the rates must have been paid on their behalf; and the practice of compounding by the landlord for small tenements is so universal that practically the landlord pays the rates in almost all cases where the occupiers would be likely to fail to do so. In England, therefore, the requirement that the rates must have been paid has little or no effect on the electorate. In Scotland, on the other hand, this is not the case. There the rates are divided between the owner and the occupier, and the practice of compounding does not exist. The result is that many occupiers are omitted from the parliamentary register every year on account of their failure to pay rates. For the whole of Scotland the number reaches fifty thousand.[213:1]
Actual Extent of the Suffrage.
A comparison of the number of electors on the register with the total population shows that England is not very far to-day from manhood suffrage. The ratio is about one in six,[213:2] whereas the normal proportion of males above the age of twenty-one years (making no allowance for paupers, criminals, and other persons disqualified by the laws of all countries), is somewhat less than one in four. The only classes excluded from the franchise are domestic servants, bachelors living with their parents and occupying no premises on their own account, and persons whose change of abode deprives them of a vote. Now, these are not necessarily the worst political elements in the community. No doubt the provision requiring twelve months' occupation excludes vagrants, but it also excludes excellent artisans who migrate with changes of trade, and other persons whose calling compels them to move from place to place. In 1902 a school-teacher, in a plaintive letter to The Times,[213:3] described how he had never been able to vote at a general election. He had graduated with honours from his university, was nearly forty years old, married, and prosperous; but his very success in his profession, by involving changes of residence, had always cost him the right to vote. It is a common saying that many respectable people are disfranchised from this cause, although the slums, which move little, are not.
The present condition of the franchise is, indeed, historical rather than rational. It is complicated, uncertain, expensive in the machinery required, and excludes a certain number of people whom there is no reason for excluding, while it admits many people who ought not to be admitted if any one is to be debarred. But the hardship or injustice affects individuals alone. No considerable class in the community is aggrieved, and neither political party is now anxious to extend the franchise. The Conservatives are not by tradition in favour of such a course, and leading Liberals have come to realise that any further extension would be likely to benefit their opponents.
Plural Voting.
Although there is no urgent demand for a closer approach to manhood suffrage, there has long been a strong desire to restrict each man to a single vote. That a man should have a vote in two different constituencies is as clearly a breach of political equality as if he had two votes in the same place; and for this reason, as well as from the fact that most of the men who have more than one vote are Conservatives, a demand for the abolition of plural voting has been for many years an article in the Liberal programme. So far as the franchise is not dependent upon residence there is nothing to prevent a man from voting in every constituency where he possesses a qualification.[214:1] Now for the counties and the universities residence is not necessary; and even in the boroughs, where it is required, plural voting is restrained only in part, because a man may have more than one residence, and because residence within seven miles of the borough is enough, so that the men who carry on their business in the town and live in the suburbs are qualified in the borough by reason of their offices or workshops, and in a suburban borough or the county by reason of their dwellings.
It is not easy to determine how many persons are entitled to vote in more than one constituency, or how much they affect the result of elections. In a return of resident and non-resident voters made to Parliament in 1888,[214:2] it appeared, as was natural, that the proportion of the latter was greatest among the freeholders in the counties, nearly one quarter of whom were non-residents. In all there were about two hundred thousand non-resident voters in England and Wales. This is between four and five per cent. of the total electorate, which does not seem an important fraction; but it fails to express the full effect of plural voting, because it does not include the persons who have more than one residence, or who live outside the limits of a borough but within seven miles of it, or those again who reside in a borough that forms part of a county and are qualified to vote in both. Moreover, the men with more than one vote, although a small proportion of the whole electorate of the kingdom, are quite numerous enough to turn the scale in a close constituency.
One of the first acts of the new Liberal ministry in the session of 1906, was to bring in a bill to abolish plural voting altogether. This could not be done simply by making residence a condition of the franchise, because in England a man may have more than one residence. The measure provided, therefore, that the voter must elect in which of the places where he possessed a qualification he would be registered, and forbade him to vote anywhere else. The bill was passed by the House of Commons, but rejected forthwith by the Lords.
Number of Electors by Classes.
It is interesting to observe the number of voters registered under the different franchises. In 1906 the figures for the United Kingdom were as follows:—
| Owners | 579,827 |
| Occupiers | 6,357,817 |
| Lodgers | 226,191 |
| Freemen, etc. | 57,728 |
| Univs. | 45,150 |
| ———— | |
| Total | 7,266,706 |
By far the greater part of the voters are registered as occupiers, a class which includes both the householders and the ten-pound occupiers. The table contains a surprisingly small number of lodgers; and this is due to the fact that whereas the lists of owners and freemen are virtually permanent, and the list of occupiers is made up by the overseers of the poor from the rate-book,[216:1] a lodger alone must make every year a personal application to be registered.[216:2] The result is that no one seeks to be enrolled as a lodger if he has any other franchise; and no doubt many lodgers, who have no other qualification, neglect to register at all.
Disqualifications for Voting.
A characteristic, although not in itself a very important peculiarity of the English electoral law, is the rule depriving peers of the right to vote;[216:3] and in fact the Commons still profess to be highly jealous of any part taken in electoral campaigns by members of the House of Lords.[216:4] In other respects the disqualifications for voting in England are now much the same as in other countries. There are the usual rules excluding aliens, infants, idiots, paupers, convicts, and persons who have been guilty of corrupt practices at elections. Formerly there were also provisions excluding large classes of public officers, but these have been repealed, except in the case of the Irish police, of certain officers directly concerned in the conduct of elections, and of persons employed and paid by the candidates.
Women cannot vote for members of Parliament, although they possess the franchise for almost all local elections. This question has of late aroused much interest. Although both of the political parties have at times adopted resolutions in favour of woman suffrage, the leading men in both are divided about it, and the Labour Party may be said to be the only political organisation of men in England that want it heartily. But many women are agitating for it very vigorously, and the most enthusiastic of them have sought martyrdom by refusing to pay taxes, by creating a disturbance in the ladies' gallery of the House of Commons, and by getting arrested for speech-making in the Palace Yard. They are known as Suffragettes, and evidently have faith in the old adage that Parliament never redresses grievances until they are brought forcibly to its notice. Women will no doubt ultimately obtain the suffrage if they are substantially united in wanting it, and the principle is certainly making great headway among them in England to-day.
Registration.
It is not enough that a man possesses the requisite qualifications for the franchise. His name must also be upon the register of voters for the constituency, and the process of compiling the register is cumbrous and expensive. This is due in part to the complicated nature of the various franchises, which may involve intricate questions of law and of fact, and partly to the practice of leaving the duty of proving claims and objections mainly in the hands of private individuals. The lists are made up in the first instance by the overseers of the poor in each parish; but any person whose name is omitted may claim to have it inserted, and any person whose name is on the lists may file an objection to any other name which he thinks ought not to have been included. These claims and objections are heard in September by the Revising Barrister—a barrister of not less than seven years' standing, appointed for the purpose by the judge in whose circuit the constituency lies, and paid by the Treasury. It is his duty to revise the register by adding the names of persons who prove their claims, and by striking off names improperly inserted. In doing this he is not limited to names against which objections have been filed, for he has a right to make inquiries and summon witnesses on his own motion.[217:1] In practice, however, the cases are prepared beforehand, and argued before him, by the local agents of the two political parties, whose object is to get the names of their partisans on to the register and keep off those of their opponents.
The process is repeated every year, and the work and cost involved are considerable, the money being provided by the candidate for Parliament, or by means of subscriptions to the party funds. This is one of the things that makes elections expensive; and it helps to explain the desire of each party in a constituency to have a candidate at all times, even when an election is not impending. In Scotland registration is far less of a burden upon the parties, and costs the candidate very little, because the qualifications of all the voters, except the lodgers, are investigated by a public officer, called the assessor, and a corps of assistants, with the result that there are few claims or objections for the political agents to contest. There seems to be no self-evident reason why this should not be done everywhere, and for every class of voter.
FOOTNOTES:
[195:1] This feeling was forcibly expressed by Godkin in his essay on "The Decline of Legislatures."
[196:1] This is elaborately discussed by Charles Benoist, La Crise de l'État Moderne.
[197:1] For "keeping one's name on the books" the university sometimes requires a fee which diminishes seriously the number of graduates entitled to vote either for Parliament or on academic questions. In Cambridge, for example, the electors are only about one half the graduates.
[197:2] For England, 2 Will. IV., c. 45. For Scotland, 2-3 Will. IV., c. 65. For Ireland 2-3 Will. IV., c. 88.
[198:1] Scotland obtained eight additional members, and Ireland five.
[199:1] In several cases small Scotch counties are combined in pairs for the election of a single member, but this antedated the Act of 1885.
[199:2] Whereof twenty are in England, and one each in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
[200:1] This is not because the county constituencies are essentially larger or smaller than those of the boroughs. The Borough of Wandsworth, for example, had, in 1901, a population of 179,877. These figures are taken from single-member constituencies; for it so happens that the two-member boroughs, when their population is divided by two, are neither among the largest or the smallest. Com. Papers, 1905, LXII., 333 et seq.
[201:1] 39-40 Geo. III., c. 67, Art. 4.
[201:2] Ibid., Art. 5.
[202:1] 8 Hen. VI., c. 7.
[203:1] In Scotland the value of the land, if not of "old extent," had to be £400 a year. In Ireland an Act of 1829 had raised the limit of annual value to £10, to restrain the practice of manufacturing fagot voters on the eve of an election.
[203:2] In Ireland the borough franchise was multifarious as in England. In Scotland it was wholly in the hands of the councils of the royal burghs.
[203:3] 2-3 Will. IV., c. 45, § 26.
[203:4] Ibid., § 18.
[204:1] 2-3 Will. IV., c. 45, §§ 19, 20. The last provision was added during the passage of the bill, and is known from its proposer as the Chandos Clause.
[204:2] Ibid., § 33.
[204:3] Ibid., § 32; but freemen thereafter admitted could vote only if made such by birth or servitude.
[204:4] Ibid., § 33. By § 31, 40s. freeholders retained the franchise in boroughs that are counties by themselves.
[204:5] 2-3 Will. IV., c. 65.
[204:6] Ibid., c. 88.
[205:1] Com. Papers, 1831-1832, XXXVI., 489.
[205:2] It is interesting to observe that of these, 108,219, or nearly two fifths were freemen, scot and lot voters, potwallopers and other persons whose ancient rights had been preserved. They belonged, of course, only to the old boroughs. Election Returns (Boroughs and Counties), Com. Papers, 1866, LVII., 215, p. 8.
[206:1] These figures, about the proportion of electors and members to population, are taken from a Report on Electoral Expenses, Com. Papers, 1834, IX., 263, App. A.
[206:2] Pp. 47 et seq.
[206:3] 13-14 Vic., c. 69.
[206:4] In reading the debates on these bills a foreigner is often puzzled by the distinction between ratable value and clear yearly value. The latter is what is called gross estimated rental in the Rate Book, while the ratable value is supposed to be the net yearly value, and it is obtained by making a reduction from the gross, which varies from place to place, but is on the average about ten per cent.
[206:5] Of the borough electors in England and Wales 26.3 per cent belonged to the working classes; Com. Papers, 1866, LVII., 47, p. 5. In Scotland the proportion was 18.3 per cent. Ibid., 805, p. 12.
[207:1] 30-31 Vic., c. 102.
[207:2] One of the safeguards in the bill was the provision that householders must be separately rated for the relief of the poor, and must have paid their rates; and in order to insure personal payment by the householder, the Act forbade the common practice of rating the owner of dwellings in lieu of the occupier. But the practice saved the local authorities much trouble. It enabled them to receive the rates in a single payment from the owner of a number of houses, instead of collecting small sums from many tenants; and they were in the habit of allowing a commission or rebate to owners who paid in this way.
The convenience of the old practice was so great that in 1869 it was again permitted; and the Act (32-33 Vic., c. 41) also provided that such a payment by the owner should be deemed a payment by the occupier for the purpose of the franchise, thus sweeping away the safeguard of personal payment of rates.
The practice is called compounding for rates, and the tenant whose rates were paid by the landlord was the subject of fierce discussion under the name of "compound householder," although it was in fact the rate, and not the house or the holder thereof, that was compounded.
[208:1] It will be observed that the £10 occupier differed from the householder in the fact that he might occupy any shop, warehouse, or other building, whereas the householder was qualified only by a dwelling-house. On the other hand, the premises occupied by a £10 occupier must be of the clear yearly value of £10, whereas the householder was qualified without regard to the value of the house.
By the Act of 1867 the householder might occupy any part of a house used as a separate dwelling; while the £10 occupier must occupy a whole building. This difference was, however, done away with in 1878 by an act (41-42 Vic., c. 26, § 5), which provided that the occupation might be of any separate part of the building, if that part were of the yearly value of £10.
[208:2] 31-32 Vic., cc. 48, 49.
[208:3] They ran from a little less than one in twenty-one to a little more than one in twenty. Cf. Com. Papers, 1866, LVII., 215, 569.
[208:4] Ibid., 643. The extension of the franchise in Ireland in 1850 nearly trebled the number of county voters there, in spite of the falling off in population.
It may be observed that the growth in registered voters is not an exact measure of the increase in the number of persons qualified for the franchise, because with the organisation of the political parties there has been a greater and greater effort to make every man register who is entitled to do so.
[208:5] Com. Papers, 1872, XLVII., 395.
[208:6] 48-49 Vic., c. 3. The Act also extended the household qualification—both for counties and boroughs—to men who occupy a dwelling-house not as owners or tenants, but by virtue of their office or employment, provided the employer does not also occupy the house, the object of that proviso being to exclude domestic servants. This qualification is known as the "service franchise."
[209:1] 48-49 Vic., c. 3, 6; and see also 2-3 Will. IV., c. 45, § 24, and 30-31 Vic., c. 102, § 59.
[209:2] Rogers on Elections, I., 64-66. The references to Rogers are to the 16th Ed. of Vol. I., to the 17th Ed. of Vol. II.
[209:3] The amount required for the qualification of freeholders in boroughs which are counties is not exactly the same as in counties; and the leasehold qualifications do not extend to them. In England there are now only four boroughs which retain these rights: Bristol, Exeter, Norwich, and Nottingham. Rogers on "Elections," I., 160 et seq.
[210:1] Rent charges, whether arising from the commutation of tithes or otherwise, are realty, and qualify a voter as land.
[210:2] If the land is copyhold or other tenure, it must in any case be of the yearly value of £5.
[210:3] The £50 leaseholders admitted by the Chandos Clause in the Act of 1832 were required to occupy the land, and are now included in the £10 occupation franchise.
[211:1] Rogers, I., 61-63, 125.
[211:2] Ibid., 27, 66.
[212:1] Rogers, I., 148-49, 162. In the City of London he may reside within twenty-five miles.
[212:2] Ibid., 149-50.
[212:3] Page [207, note 2], supra.
[212:4] Rogers, I., 27, 30, 126 et seq., 142 et seq.
[213:1] Com. Papers, 1898, LXXX., 755.
[213:2] It is slightly less in Scotland than in England and Ireland.
[213:3] Aug. 30.
[214:1] A man cannot vote in more than one division of the same borough. 48-49 Vic., c. 23, § 8. But there is no such limitation in the case of divisions of a county. Ibid., § 9. Metropolitan London is not a single borough, but a collection of boroughs, several of which contain more than one division, and hence the effect of this provision is quite irrational there.
[214:2] Com. Papers, 1888, LXXIX., 907.
[216:1] Where the landlord compounds for the rates he is required to give to the overseers a list of the actual occupiers. Rogers, I., 130.
[216:2] Rogers, I., 265, 266, 268.
[216:3] An Irish peer actually sitting for a constituency in Great Britain can vote.
[216:4] They adopt every year a sessional order that for a peer "to concern himself in the election of members" is "a high infringement of the liberties and privileges of the Commons."
[217:1] For the duties of the Revising Barrister, see Rogers, I., 297-336. From the decision of the Revising Barrister an appeal lies on questions of law to the King's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice.
