The Government of England (Vol. I)

by A. Lawrence Lowell

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]