This meagre and unsatisfactory measure, however, was short-lived; and the secret history of it, as it was afterwards told by various members of the Government, affords an amusing insight into the mysteries of Cabinet Councils. The fact was that before the beginning of the Session, and during the time that the thirteen resolutions were lying on the table of the House, two Reform schemes were under the consideration of Government, "one of which," said Lord Derby, "was more extensive than the other." When it was seen that the House would have nothing to say to the resolutions, and that a Bill must be brought in without delay, it became necessary to choose between these two schemes. At a Cabinet meeting on Saturday, February 23rd, the more extensive one, based upon household suffrage, guarded by various precautions, was, as it was supposed, unanimously adopted, and Mr. Disraeli was commissioned to explain it to the House of Commons on the following Monday, the 25th. The rest of the story may be told in Sir John Pakington's words. "You all know," he said, addressing his constituents at Droitwich, "that, on the 23rd of February, a Cabinet Council decided on the Reform Bill which was to be proposed to Parliament. On Monday, the 25th, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Lord Derby was to address the whole Conservative party in Downing Street. At half-past four in the afternoon of that day—I mention the hour because it is important—the Chancellor of the Exchequer was to explain the Reform Bill in the House of Commons. When the Cabinet Council rose on the previous Saturday, it was my belief that we were a unanimous Cabinet on the Reform Bill then determined upon. [Lord Derby, however, afterwards stated that General Peel, one of the three seceding Ministers, had some time before the Cabinet of the 23rd expressed his strong objections to the Reform Bill then adopted, but had consented to waive his objections for the sake of the unity of the Ministry.] As soon as the Council concluded, Lord Derby went to Windsor to communicate with her Majesty on the Reform Bill, and I heard no more of the subject till the Monday morning. On the Monday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, I received an urgent summons to attend Lord Derby's house at half-past twelve o'clock on important business. At that hour I reached Lord Derby's house, but found there only three or four members of the Cabinet. No such summons had been anticipated, and consequently some of the Ministers were at their private houses, some at their offices, and it was nearly half-past one before the members of the Cabinet could be brought together. As each dropped in, the question was put, 'What is the matter? Why are we convened?' and as they successively came in, they were informed that Lord Cranborne, Lord Carnarvon, and General Peel had seceded, objecting to the details of the Bill which we thought they had adopted on the Saturday. Imagine the difficulty and embarrassment in which the Ministry found themselves placed. It was then past two o'clock. Lord Derby was to address the Conservative party at half-past two; at half-past four Mr. Disraeli was to unfold the Reform scheme [adopted on the previous Saturday] before the House of Commons. Literally, we had not half an hour—we had not more than ten minutes—to make up our minds as to what course the Ministry were to adopt. The public knows the rest. We determined to propose, not the Bill agreed to on the Saturday, but an alternative measure, which we had contemplated in the event of our large and liberal scheme being rejected by the House of Commons. Whether, if the Ministry had had an hour for consideration, we should have taken that course was, perhaps, a question. But we had not that hour, and were driven to decide upon a line of definite action within the limits of little more than ten minutes."
In Lord Malmesbury's "Recollections" is to be found a letter from Lord John Manners, which corroborates this ingenuous confession. "I am truly sorry," he wrote on February 26th, "to hear of the cause of your absence from our distracted councils, and hope that you will soon be able to bring a better account of Lady Malmesbury. I really hardly know where we are, but yesterday we were suddenly brought together to hear that Cranborne and Carnarvon withdrew unless we gave up household suffrage and duality, upon which announcement Peel said that, although he had given up his opposition when he stood alone, now he must be added to the remonstrant Ministers. Stanley then proposed that to keep us together the £6 and £20 rating should be adopted, which, after much discussion, was agreed to. We have decided to abandon the Resolutions altogether, and to issue the Boundary Commission ourselves. We are in a very broken and disorganised condition."
It was soon felt, however, by the Ministry that this condition of things was unsound, and could not last. The measure explained on the 25th satisfied neither Conservatives nor Liberals. A large meeting of Liberals held at Mr. Gladstone's house decisively condemned it; while from their own friends and supporters Government received strong and numerous protests against it. What was to be done? Lord Derby once more called his Government together, and they agreed to retrace their steps, even at the cost of the three objecting Ministers. Upon the 4th of March Lord Derby, in the House of Lords, and Mr. Disraeli, in the Commons, announced the resignation of Lord Cranborne, Lord Carnarvon, and General Peel (who were replaced by the Dukes of Richmond and Marlborough and Mr. Corry), the withdrawal of the measure proposed on the 25th, and the adoption by Government of a far more liberal policy than that represented. Both in the House and in the country there were naturally some rather free criticisms passed upon a Government who, three weeks before the announcement of a Reform Bill brought forward by them, had not come to an agreement upon its most essential provisions, and upon a sudden emergency, and to keep their members together, adopted and introduced a makeshift measure, which their own sense of expediency, no less than public opinion, afterwards obliged them to withdraw. In these marchings and counter-marchings of Government much valuable time had been thrown away. "No less than six weeks of the Session," said Lord Grey, "have been wasted before any step whatever has been taken." The Conservative leaders, however, vehemently protested that it was no fault of theirs; and now that the confession had been made, and the three refractory colleagues got rid of, affairs did at length assume a businesslike aspect. "It is our business now," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "to bring forward, as soon as we possibly can, the measure of Parliamentary Reform which, after such difficulties and such sacrifices, it will be my duty to introduce to the House. Sir, the House need not fear that there will be any evasion, any equivocation, any vacillation, or any hesitation in that measure."
In the interval between these Ministerial explanations and the production of the real Reform Bill in Parliament meetings of their supporters were held by the lenders of both parties. At a meeting held in Downing Street on the 15th of March, Lord Derby explained to 195 members of the Conservative party the distinctive features of the proposed Bill. Startling as the contemplated changes in the franchise must have seemed to every Conservative present, only one dissenting voice was heard—that of Sir William Heathcote, who declared, in strong terms, that he wholly disapproved of the measure, and that he believed, if carried out, it would destroy the influence of rank, property, and education throughout the country by the mere force of numbers. The scheme, of which only a few fragments were as yet generally known, was given to the public on the 18th of March, when Mr. Disraeli described it at much length in the House. And although the measure at first proposed was so largely altered in its passage through Parliament that by the time it had become part of the law of England its original projectors must have had some difficulty in recognising it as theirs, it is worth while to take careful note of its various provisions as they were originally drawn up, that the action of the two great parties engaged throughout the subsequent struggle may be the more plainly understood.
LORD MALMESBURY.
(From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry, Baker Street, W.)
The first quarter of Mr. Disraeli's speech was taken up by a review of the past history of the question—an old and well-known story, somewhat impatiently listened to by the House. He picked the various Reform schemes of his predecessors to pieces, and finally declared that the principle at the bottom of them all—the principle of value, regulated whether by rental or rating—had been proved by long experience to be untenable and unpractical, and Government were now about to abandon it altogether. Nor was Mr. Disraeli slow to disclose his secret. The very next paragraph of his speech announced that, in the opinion of Government, any attempt to unite the principle of value with the principle of rating, any such solution as a £6 or £5 rating franchise, would be wholly unsatisfactory. In the boroughs of England and Wales, Mr. Disraeli went on to say, there were 1,367,000 male householders, of whom 644,000 were qualified to vote, leaving 723,000 unqualified. Now, if we examined these 723,000, we should find that 237,000 of them were rated to the poor and paid their rates. So that if the law were changed in such a manner as to make the borough franchise dependent upon the payment of rates only, unrestricted by any standard of value, these 237,000 would be at once qualified to vote, making, with the 644,000 already qualified, 881,000 persons in the English and Welsh boroughs in possession of the franchise. There would still remain 486,000, belonging mostly to the irregular and debatable class of compound householders—householders paying their rates, not personally, but through their landlords. Now, since Government thought that the franchise ought to be based upon a personal payment of rates, it became a great question as to what was to be done with these 486,000 compound householders. "Ought the compound householders to have a vote?" As a compound householder Government thought he ought not to have a vote. But he was not to be left altogether in the cold. Ample opportunities were to be afforded him for raising himself out of the anomalous position to which the Small Tenements Acts had consigned him. Let him only enter his name upon the rate-book, and claim to pay his rates personally; and having fulfilled the constitutional condition required, he would at once succeed to the constitutional privilege connected with it. It had been said that the working classes did not care enough about the suffrage to take so much trouble to obtain it. "That, however," said Mr. Disraeli, oracularly, "is not the opinion of her Majesty's Government." Thus 723,000 additional persons might, if they wished, obtain the franchise under the new Bill. To these were to be added all those who paid 20s. a year in direct taxes, whether compound householders or not; while, to prevent the working classes from swamping the constituencies and nullifying the influence of the middle and upper classes, Government brought forward the curious expedient of dual voting. "Every person," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer," who pays £1 direct taxation, and who enjoys the franchise which depends upon the payment of direct taxation, if he is also a householder and pays his rates, may exercise his suffrage in respect of both qualifications."
The dual vote, however, provoked such hot opposition that, as will shortly be seen, Government eventually withdrew it. The direct taxes qualification, Mr. Disraeli calculated, would add more than 200,000 to the constituency; and the three other "fancy franchises," as they were called—the education franchise, the funded property franchise, and the savings bank franchise—another 105,000. In all, Government held out the splendid promise of an addition of more than 1,000,000 voters to the borough constituency. In counties the franchise would be lowered to £15 rateable value—a reduction which would enfranchise about 171,000 additional voters; while the four lateral franchises mentioned above would bring the number of new county voters up to about 330,000. With regard to the redistribution of seats, Government had substantially the same proposals to make as those originally described to the House on the 25th of February. Mr. Disraeli, however, vigorously defended them from the charge of inadequacy which had been brought against them in the interval. Neither Government nor the country, he said, was prepared to go through the agitating labour of constructing a new electoral map of England; and this being the case, all that would be done would be to seize opportunities as they arose of remedying grievances and removing inequalities by some such moderate means as those proposed in the Bill.
Alas! for Mr. Disraeli's figures when they came to be handled by Mr. Gladstone. Instead of 237,000, it was stoutly maintained by Mr. Gladstone that scarcely 144,000 would be admitted to the franchise by extending it to all who personally paid their rates. And as to the facilities to be offered in such tempting profusion to the compound householder for obtaining a vote, they amounted to this—that he was to have the privilege of paying over again that which he had already paid. It was difficult to believe that he would ever avail himself of this privilege to any great extent. Practically, the Bill did nothing for the compound householder; so that, while it would introduce household suffrage—nay, universal suffrage—into villages and country towns where there was no system of compounding for rates, in large towns, like Leeds, with a population of a quarter of a million, where the majority of the inhabitants were compound householders, its effect would be little or nothing. In fact, the results of the Bill, had it been passed as it was originally drawn up, would have been almost grotesque. In Hull, for instance, where the Small Tenements Act was almost universally enforced, the number of personally rated occupiers under the £10 rental who would have been enfranchised by the Bill would have been 64 out of a population of 104,873; while in the small borough of Thirsk, where the system of compounding for rates was not in use, 684 would have obtained the franchise as personal ratepayers. In Brighton, where compound householders abounded, the Bill would have enfranchised 14 out of every 10,000 occupiers under the £10 line; while in York it would have enfranchised 100 out of every 1,000. The enfranchising effect of the Bill would have been between "six and seven times as great in the boroughs not under Rating Acts as in the others." It is more than probable that in framing their measure Government foresaw none of these anomalies, and that they were revealed to them and impressed upon them in the course of debate. There was, in fact, no adequate knowledge among them of the working of those complicated details of rating machinery upon which they made the whole effect of their Bill ultimately depend. With regard to the secondary franchises—the direct taxes franchise, the education franchise, etc.,—Mr. Gladstone contended that the figures quoted by Mr. Disraeli were wholly erroneous and visionary, and that the new voters it was supposed they would admit were no more substantial than Falstaff's men in buckram. For himself, he had no belief in the principle of rating as a bulwark of the Constitution; and to base the possession of the franchise upon the personal payment of rates, he thought fundamentally wrong. To the proposition of dual voting as a safeguard of household suffrage, he declared himself inflexibly opposed. It could only serve as a gigantic instrument of fraud, and was nothing less than a proclamation of a war of classes. And where was the lodger franchise, so highly praised by the Conservatives in 1859, which all the world had expected to find in the Bill? If that were added, and the so-called safeguards of dual voting and personal payment of rates done away with, the Liberal party would accept the Bill as a whole.