Mr. Gladstone, however, was not satisfied with the result of the tea-room cabal; for much of the discontent that had promoted it had been directed at the "hard and fast line" of the £5 rating franchise. It was resolved, therefore, to divide upon a different amendment—one which should relieve the compound householder from the disabling clauses of the Bill, but which should still keep to the original basis of household rating suffrage. Mr. Gladstone's amendment inserted in the restrictive clause the words "whether he in person, or his landlord, be rated to the relief of the poor;" and the arguments which, with his usual force, he urged upon the House in its support were, first, that the houses below £10 rental that compounded for their rates were two-thirds of the whole number of such houses, and that therefore a Bill that excluded compounding householders from the franchise was an illusion; and secondly, that the case standing so, the "settlement" for which Government were clamouring would not be attained unless the Bill were amended. The debate on Mr. Gladstone's amendment occupied two nights, and was chiefly valuable as showing the extraordinary difference of opinion that prevailed among the supporters of the Bill, and the equally different points of view from which members were found to oppose it. When the division came, however, Government triumphed. The numbers were found to be—For the amendment, 289; against, 310—majority for Government, 21. This was an important majority, and, as the division lists showed, it implied far more unanimity among the Conservatives (in spite of the defection of Sir W. Heathcote and Lord Cranborne) than among the Liberals. Twenty-five of the old "Adullamite" party voted with Mr. Disraeli—a fact sufficiently indicating the opinion which was held as to the tendency of the amendment. The Adullamites voted for the original Bill because they wanted the compound householder—the dangerous being who occupied a house below £10 annual rent—to be kept without his vote.
The immediate effect of this division was to draw from Mr. Gladstone an important statement of policy. He wrote a letter to Mr. R. W. Crawford, member for the City of London, to say that he felt it useless to proceed personally with the other amendments standing in his name. He was compelled to own that the Liberals who thought together on the question of Reform were not a majority, but a minority, "and they have not the power they were supposed to possess of limiting or directing the action of the Administration, or of shaping the provisions of the Reform Bill. Still," Mr. Gladstone went on, "having regard to the support which my proposal with respect to personal rating received from so large a number of Liberal members, I am not less willing than heretofore to remain at the service of the party to which they belong; and when any suitable occasion shall arise, if it shall be their wish, I shall be prepared again to attempt concerted action upon this or any other subject for the public good.... I shall not proceed with the amendments now on the paper in my name, nor give notice of other amendments such as I had contemplated; but I shall gladly accompany others in voting against any attempt, from whatever quarter, to limit still further the scanty modicum of enfranchisement proposed by the Government, or in improving, when it may be practicable, the provisions of the Bill." This letter showed that Mr. Gladstone was disheartened, but his discouragement only increased the zeal of the reforming party throughout the kingdom. The House broke up for the Easter holidays immediately after the vote; and during the recess meetings were held in every important town in England and Scotland, to express confidence in Mr. Gladstone and to encourage him and his followers in their attempts to liberalise the Bill. The number, enthusiasm, and unanimity of these meetings had, in all probability, much to do with Mr. Disraeli's later concessions.
When the House met again, the first important act of the committee was to accept Mr. Ayrton's amendment, substituting one year for two years as the period of residence necessary for borough voters. There seems to have been a general idea in the House that to require two years' residence in a borough before a man could be entitled to vote in an election of members of Parliament was vexatious; and in spite of the strenuous efforts of Government, Mr. Ayrton's amendment was carried by the large majority of 81. A majority as large as this is never, however, so much to be dreaded by a Government as one a fourth of its size. Accordingly Mr. Disraeli stated on the next day that he and his colleagues "deferred to the opinion of the House." Then came Mr. Hibbert's notice to amend the Bill, by allowing all compound householders who chose to pay personally to pay reduced rates—a proposal that became celebrated, from the conduct of the Government "whip" with regard to it. It came out in the course of the debate—Mr. Bernal Osborne revealed it—that the whip, Colonel Taylor, had undertaken, "as a gentleman and a man of honour, to press upon the Cabinet the desirability of adopting Mr. Hibbert's amendment;" and also that Colonel Taylor had stated to Mr. Dillwyn, a Liberal member, that "he believed Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli to be personally in favour of accepting it." That is to say, just before a division, the Government whip entered into negotiations with some of the enemy's forces, and endeavoured to win them over to his side by a statement—afterwards disavowed on authority—of the opinions of his chief. The episode afforded an interesting comment upon the manœuvres of party government.
The debate on Mr. Hibbert's motion turned on the question—Whether, supposing a compound householder wanted a vote (which, according to the Bill, would require him to pay his rates personally), he should be compelled to pay as much as other non-compounding householders, or whether the same amount should be accepted from him personally as had been accepted previously from his landlord on his account? Mr. Disraeli aimed not only at making him pay the full rate, but even at repealing a section of Sir William Clay's Act (14 and 15 Vict., c. 14) which had defined certain electoral rights of householders above £10. That Act had allowed non-rated occupiers—compounders above £10—to claim to be rated, in order to be put upon the register of voters, and had declared them liable only for the reduced or commuted rate. Under that Act, according to Mr. Bright, electoral rights were guaranteed to not less than 94,000 persons; and Mr. Disraeli's proposal, to say nothing of its immediate effect in excluding new voters, simply amounted to a proposal either to disfranchise these 94,000 altogether, or to make them pay higher rates than they had previously paid. We can understand the spirit in which Mr. Bright spoke of this as an "audacious proposal." Still, audacious or not, the proposal of Government for the time succeeded. The division was taken on the question, whether the borough voter should be rated as an "ordinary occupier," always and without exception, and Government had a very great majority with them, affirming that he should. The numbers were—Ayes, 322; Noes, 256—majority for Government, 66.
Eight days afterwards they had changed their minds. Another amendment was proposed in the meantime, and Mr. Gathorne Hardy, in the debate that followed, gave an artless explanation of what Government intended by their emphatic cry of "personal payment." He said—"The Government insisted upon the personal payment of rates. But the Bill had not the phrase, 'personal payment of rates.' That was a description rather of the Government's intention. The Bill required that a man should be responsible for his rates. It was necessary, in order to come within the provisions of the Bill, that a man should have his name upon the rate-book, and be personally responsible." But Mr. Hardy forgot, in stating this as the essential principle of the Bill, that he was only stating what was already law. He forgot that the Small Tenements Act provided that rates assessed upon the landlord are recoverable, not only by distraint upon the landlord's goods, but by distraint upon the occupier's, "in the same way as if the rates were assessed on such occupier." That is to say, the occupier was, and always had been, responsible for his rates. The compound householder was as much responsible as the non-compounding householder. Mr. Disraeli's Bill, if this was its foundation, was founded upon an illusion. This fact seems to have suddenly dawned upon the minds of the House of Commons between the 13th and the 17th of May. On the latter day, Mr. Hodgkinson, member for Newark, moved the insertion of the following words, which Mr. Disraeli afterwards calmly called, "not an amendment, but a proviso,"—"Provided always that, except as hereinafter provided, no person other than the occupier shall, after the passing of this Act, be rated to parochial rates in respect of premises occupied by him within the limits of a parliamentary borough, all Acts to the contrary notwithstanding."
This was to cut the Gordian knot at a stroke, by abolishing the compound householder altogether. Mr. Hodgkinson brought forward his amendment, the effect of which would be to make all occupiers of tenements personal ratepayers, and therefore, according to the Bill, voters. In other words, household suffrage pure and simple was offered to the acceptance of the House. Mr. Gladstone saw the importance of the moment; he saw that the question lay between "an extension of the franchise, limited, unequal, equivocal, and dangerous," accompanied with certain social and economical advantages, and "an extension of the franchise which was liberal, which was perfectly equal," without those social and economical advantages. As the leader of the Liberal party, he chose the "lesser evil," he preferred the liberal extension, and he was willing to sacrifice the convenience of compounding. That was only to be expected from the Liberal leader; but what was the amazement of the House when Mr. Disraeli, by a sudden coup de théâtre, rose to accept Mr. Hodgkinson's amendment likewise! Nay, he rose not only to accept the amendment, but to greet it with strong welcome and approval. It is true that, on the 9th of May, eight days before, Mr. Disraeli had declared that the advice of those who wished to supersede or repeal the Rating Acts was "rash counsel." It is true that, on the 13th, only four days before, Mr. Disraeli had branded with two names, which immediately became famous—"obsolete incendiaries," and "spouters of stale sedition"—a deputation of 360 gentlemen, headed by seventeen members of Parliament, which had waited on Mr. Gladstone, with a view to remove the disqualification laid by the Bill on the lower class of ratepayers. It is true that, on the morning of the 17th, the Government "whip" had sent a circular to the Conservatives, asking their attendance at the House, plainly with the intention of opposing Mr. Hodgkinson's amendment. These facts, however, were nothing to Mr. Disraeli. He was bent on a coup, and he made it. The Bill was entirely transformed in a single evening; and Government, through their Chancellor of the Exchequer, vowed that they had all along been meaning to produce the transformation scene themselves. To show the importance of the change, it is enough to say that the total number of new voters which the original Bill would have made was 118,400, and that the number of new voters added by the Bill, plus Mr. Hodgkinson's amendment, was 427,000. Nothing more is needed to show that the compound householder was a person of importance, and that it was only natural that his destiny should be a matter of interest to both sides of the House.
MEETING AT THE REFORMERS' TREE, HYDE PARK, LONDON. (See p. [454].)