The Government of England (Vol. I)

by A. Lawrence Lowell

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.