The new Melbourne administration came in with unfavourable omens. Russell failed to secure his re-election in South Devon, but a seat was found for him at Stroud, and though the premier emphatically denied that he had made any bargain with O'Connell, the Irish people believed it. Accordingly, they received the whig lord-lieutenant, Mulgrave, with a tumultuous procession, as if his advent portended the repeal of the union and extinction of tithes. An attempt to solve the insoluble tithe question was, in fact, among the earliest efforts of the government, and Morpeth, as chief secretary, introduced a very reasonable measure, differing little, except in details, from that of his predecessor. Like other proposals for agrarian settlements in Ireland, it involved a certain sacrifice on the part of the tithe-owner for the sake of security, and a subsidy from the state to relieve of arrears the defaulting and rebellious tithe-payers. Peel stated his intention of supporting these provisions for commutation, if they could be separated from other provisions for "appropriation," coupled with them under the influence of political necessity rather than of sound policy. The proposals for appropriation were so moderate that little would have been lost by dropping or gained by carrying them, but, moderate as they were, they embodied a principle on which either party was resolved to stand or fall. The consequence might have been foreseen. The bill, as a whole, was passed in the house of commons, and even read a second time in the house of lords, after which the appropriation clauses were rejected in that assembly by a large majority. Thereupon Melbourne withdrew the scheme altogether. Thus a question of third-rate importance, having been the chronic difficulty of four Irish secretaries, was left to stand over for three years longer, and ultimately to be settled on the very basis which Stanley and Peel had accepted from the first. A greater waste of parliamentary time has perhaps never been recorded.
MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS BILL.
The session of 1835, however, was rendered memorable by the enactment of one beneficent measure of the first magnitude. This measure—the municipal corporations act—was preceded, like the new poor law, by a thorough and exhaustive inquiry. A committee of the house of commons, followed by a commission, had been appointed in 1833. The commission prosecuted careful researches into the local conditions of each municipality, and did not conclude its labours until 1835. Its report laid bare not merely grotesque anomalies, but the grossest abuses of election and administration in boroughs ruled by small, corrupt, and irresponsible oligarchies which then abounded in England, and, still more, in Scotland.[132] The reform act had paved the way for the purification of such urban communities, by disfranchising the smallest and most venal of them, by extending the boundaries of many others, by enfranchising great towns which had remained outside the pale of representation, and by conferring the suffrage, theretofore monopolised by freemen and other privileged classes, on the unprivileged mass of ten-pound householders.
The municipal corporations bill, in its ultimate form, rested on the same broad lines of policy. It imposed upon all boroughs, with the exception of the city of London and a few of minor importance, one constitutional form of government, identical in all its essential features with those which a few model boroughs already possessed. The governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, together forming a town council. The councillors were to be elected directly by ratepaying occupiers, with a saving for the prescriptive rights of existing freemen. They were to hold office for three years; the aldermen were to be elected by the councillors for six years, with a provision for retirement by rotation. The mayor was to be elected annually by the town council. The elementary powers of local government, such as the control of lighting and the constabulary force, were to be transferred (subject to certain exceptions) from the hands of committees into those of the one recognised and supreme municipal authority. Other clauses provided for a division of the larger boroughs into wards, for the abolition of exclusive trading privileges, for the public management of charity estates, and for the appointment, at the option of each borough, of a recorder, for the purposes of jurisdiction.
Such were the main outlines of the great measure introduced by Russell, to which Peel heartily gave his adhesion. It was a natural, and almost necessary, sequel of the reform act, which had already broken up many nests of jobbery, curtailed the lucrative exercise of the elective franchise by freemen, and undermined the influence of those self-elected rulers who, in the worst boroughs, had become gangs of public thieves. Supported by Peel, the bill was read a second time in the house of commons, on June 15, without a division. Several conservative amendments were defeated in committee by small majorities, and the bill was sent up to the lords on July 21. There its fate was far different. Though Wellington himself was not disposed to obstruct it, he entirely failed to check the obstructive tactics of Lyndhurst who, on this occasion, outdid himself in the deliberate mutilation of a bill approved by the late conservative premier. Lord Campbell, no partial judge of Brougham, has left on record his belief that, but for his faithful and vigorous support, the scheme of municipal reform must have been utterly wrecked.[133] It was allowed to be read a second time, but with the full concurrence of Eldon and all the ultra-tory peers, Lyndhurst succeeded in pulling it to pieces in committee. For instance, one of the amendments imported into it perpetuated proprietary rights which it was a chief object of the bill to abolish; another gave aldermen a life-tenure of their offices; a third retained a part of the old town councillors on the new town councils. Proud as he was of his destructive exploits, as a triumph of toryism over conservatism, Lyndhurst soon found that he could not so lightly override the wiser counsels of Peel. When the lords' amendments came to be considered in the commons, Russell prudently advised the acceptance of the less important, and the disallowance of those inconsistent with the principle of the bill. He was followed by Peel who, professing to uphold the independence of the upper house, declared against the more obnoxious amendments, and stickled only for points which the ministry was not unwilling to concede. His action proved decisive. The commons stood firm on the main issues, and the hostile party in the lords, who had vowed to mar this reform, flinched at the last moment. Many of them abstained from attendance. Wellington and even Lyndhurst recommended concession; conferences took place between the houses, at which Russell played the part of moderator, and on September 9 the corporation bill became law, not in its entirety, but in all its essential features.
In spite of this pacific compromise, popular feeling ran higher than ever against the house of lords which, under the evil influence of Lyndhurst, seemed bent on thwarting every liberal measure. John Roebuck, member for Bath, a prominent radical, who acted independently of party connexions, took a lead in denouncing their conduct, and went so far as to propose giving them a merely suspensory, instead of an absolute, veto on legislation. A sweeping reform in their constitution was loudly advocated in the press. O'Connell, exasperated by their wanton rejection of a Dublin police bill, spent a part of the parliamentary recess in a tour over the north of England and Scotland, exhausting the stores of his scurrilous invective in pouring contempt on the 170 tyrants who could dare to withstand the will of the people. But O'Connell's eloquence, marvellous as it was, never stirred British audiences as it stirred the Irish masses, and it happened that at this moment he was somewhat discredited by accusations of corruption afterwards proved to be false. The house of lords not only survived his attacks, but was instigated by Lyndhurst to further acts of obstruction in the following year.
COTTENHAM, LORD CHANCELLOR.
His most powerful opponent was about to disappear from the political scenes for the present, and in the future to be converted into an ally. When the great seal was entrusted to commissioners, Brougham had affected to regard the arrangement as a temporary makeshift to propitiate William IV., and hoped that he would inherit the reversion of the chancellorship. With this expectation he not only patronised but warmly supported the whig ministry in 1835. But his wayward and petulant egotism had set all his old colleagues against him, and Melbourne had made up his mind that "it was impossible to act with him". The interruption of legal business caused by the constant withdrawal of three judges from their proper duties, to act as commissioners, was severely criticised by the press, and Sir Edward Sugden, who had been lord chancellor of Ireland under Peel, published an effective pamphlet entitled, "What has become of the great seal?" It was thought necessary to appoint a new chancellor, and in January, 1836, Sir Charles Pepys, then master of the rolls, was raised to that dignity as Lord Cottenham. Foreseeing the implacable indignation of Brougham, the ministry decided to confer a peerage on Henry Bickersteth, the new master of the rolls, who became Lord Langdale, and who was supposed capable of confronting the ex-chancellor in debate. No expectation could have been more unfounded or delusive, but the sense of disappointment and desertion so preyed on the health and nerves of Brougham that he forsook the house of lords for a whole session. Campbell does not shrink from saying that he was "atrociously ill-used" on this occasion,[134] and assuredly he should not have been left to learn from a newspaper that he was thrust aside in favour of a man of vastly inferior gifts and services.
One other change was made in the cabinet during the recess. The Earl of Minto became first lord of the admiralty in succession to Auckland who had been appointed governor-general of India. When parliament met on February 4, 1836, the prospects of the whig government were more favourable than on their first accession to office. The factious conduct of the house of lords in the last session had disgusted the country, while the statesmanlike moderation of Peel secured them fair-play in the house of commons, though it was gradually building up a strong conservative party. Ireland again blocked the way for a while against useful legislation for Great Britain, and the first encounter of parties was on an amendment to the address condemning the anticipated reform of Irish corporations on the principles already adopted for England. This amendment, unwillingly moved by Peel, was defeated by a majority of forty-one, and the Irish municipal bill was introduced on the 16th. Like its English prototype, it was founded on the report of a commission which had disclosed the grossest possible abuses in Irish municipalities, chiefly dominated by protestant oligarchies. A similar measure substituting elective councils for these corrupt bodies had actually passed its third reading in the commons before the end of the last session, but the attempt to carry it further was then abandoned. The debates on the bill of 1836 for the same purpose inevitably turned on broad issues which continued to disturb Irish politics and to perplex English statesmen for the rest of the century. On the one hand, no one could justify "government by ascendency" in Ireland, or the shameful malpractices incident to an exercise of power under no sense of responsibility. On the other hand, no one acquainted with Irish history and Irish character could honestly regard the people as yet qualified for local self-government. In the social and some of the moral virtues they might be favourably compared with Englishmen and Scotchmen; in the political virtues, upon which civil institutions must rest, they were several generations behind their fellow-subjects in Great Britain.
IRISH BILLS.