Moreover, none of the ministers could possibly profess to be quite certain as to the genuine wishes and purposes of his Majesty King William the Fourth with regard to the Reform Bill. The King was not always in the same mood on the same subject for any two days in succession, or indeed for any two hours of the same day. If the opponents of all reform were to get a knowledge of the clauses in the Bill least favorable to their own ideas as to their interests, and were to make a commotion among the owners of the soil, the immediate effect might be to discourage the King altogether, to fill his mind with a strong desire for escape from the uncongenial part of a reformer and an overmastering anxiety to get rid of his reforming Ministry. If, on the other hand, the Peterloo men, the Chartists generally, and the populations of the northern towns were to get into their minds through some imperfect revelation that the Ministerial Bill was not intended to do half so much for them as they were demanding, and if in consequence there were to be a stormy agitation throughout the country, then it was quite possible that the King might take alarm and tell his ministers that it was hopeless to think of conciliating such agitators, and that the safety of the State, and especially of the monarchy, could only be provided for by postponing reform until some more favorable opportunity. For all these reasons, and many others, the leaders of the Government had their hearts set on keeping well their secret until the right hour should come for its official disclosure, and it is a fact of some historical interest, even to readers of the present day, that the secret was faithfully kept.
The 1st of March, 1831, was a day of intense excitement and even tumult in and around the House of Commons. We are told that never before in that generation had there been so great a crowd of persons struggling for seats in the galleries of the House of Commons. It is recorded, as an illustration of this intense eagerness on the part of the public, that every available seat in the House {137} was occupied for hours before the business of the day began. This, however, is not a statement that could fill with surprise any reader of the present day. We have been accustomed lately to read of occasions when not merely crowds of strangers anxious to obtain seats, but crowds of members positively entitled to get seats, have had to take their stand at the outer gates of the House of Commons hours before daybreak on the morning of the day when some great measure was to be introduced, that they might get a reasonable chance of a place, in order to hear a speech which could not possibly begin before four o'clock in the afternoon. Certainly the House of Commons did not then consist of nearly as many members as it has at present, and the reformed House of Commons has not even yet been so reformed as to impress it with the idea that there ought to be so many seats for so many members. However that may be, it is quite certain that there was intense interest manifested by the public on the day when the Reform Bill was to be introduced; that immense crowds of people made for the Parliament buildings, and that the approaches to the House of Commons were besieged by an excited and tumultuous crowd. There was, in fact, such a rush made to secure the seats in the galleries available for the public, so much noisy struggling and quarrelling for seats, that the Speaker was at last compelled to intervene and to declare that if quiet was not at once restored it would be his duty to have the House cleared of all strangers. Order was thus restored after a time, and at last the moment arrived for Lord John Russell to introduce the Reform Bill. That was indeed a moment of genuine historical interest.
The descriptions given at the time by listeners tell us that Russell began his speech in tones which were unusually quiet, low, and reserved even for him. It may be said at once that throughout his whole career in Parliament Russell's manner had been peculiarly quiet and repressed, and that his eloquence seldom had any fervor in it. That he was a man of deep feeling and warm emotions is certain, but both in public and private life there {138} was a coldness about him which often led strangers into the quite erroneous belief that he kept apart from the crowd because he was filled with a sense of his aristocratic position and wished to hold himself aloof from contact with ordinary mortals. As a Parliamentary debater he was singularly clear, concise, and unaffected. He was a great master of phrases, and some odd epigrammatic sentences of his still live in our common speech, and are quoted almost every day by persons who have not the least idea as to the source from which they come. His speech on the introduction of the Reform Bill was even for him peculiarly calm, deliberate, and restrained. It contained some passages which will always live in our history, and will illustrate to the reader, more effectively than a mass of statistics or political tracts might do, the nature and proportions of the absurd anomalies which Russell was endeavoring to abolish. It may be well to mention the fact that it was this speech which, for the first time, introduced and adopted the word "Reformer" as the title of the genuine Whig, and applied the term "Conservative," in no unfriendly sense, to the Tory party.
[Sidenote: 1831—Lord John Russell's speech]
Lord John Russell opened his speech by a vindication of the representative principle as the first condition of the English constitutional system. He made it clear that in the early days of our Parliaments this principle had been distinctly acknowledged, and, to a certain extent, had been carried out in practice. Then he showed how the principle had come to be less and less recognized in the arrangement of our constituencies and the allotment of representatives, until at last there had ceased to be any manner of proportion between representatives and population or any practical acknowledgment of the main purpose for which representatives were to be selected. Everything had tended, in the mean time, to make the owners of the soil also the owners and masters of the representation. Lord John Russell employed a series of illustrations, at once simple and striking, to impress upon his audience a due understanding of the extraordinary manner in which the whole principle of representation had been diverted. {139} from its original purpose. He assumed the case of some inquiring and intelligent foreigner, a stranger to our institutions but anxious to learn all about them, who had come to England for the purpose of obtaining information on the spot. The stranger has the nature and the purpose of our Parliamentary system explained to him, and he is assured that it rests on the representative principle. He is told that the House of Commons is assembled for the purpose of enabling the sovereign to collect the best advice that can be given to him as to the condition, the wants, and the wishes of his subjects.
The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know. Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his people. The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons. He is shown a stone wall with three niches in it, and he is informed that those three niches are privileged to contribute two members to the representative assembly. Lord John Russell described with force and masterly humor a variety of such sights which were pointed out to the stranger, each description being an accurate picture of some place which long since had lost all population, but still continued to have the privilege of sending representatives to Parliament. Then Lord John Russell changed his form of illustration. He took his stranger to some of the great manufacturing and commercial cities and towns of England, and described the admiration and the wonder with which the intelligent foreigner regarded these living evidences of the growth and the greatness of the nation. Here then, no doubt, the stranger begins at last to think that he can really understand the practical value of the representative principle. Thus far he has only been bewildered by what he has seen and heard of the empty stretches of land which are {140} endowed with a right to have representatives in the House of Commons, but now he begins to acknowledge to himself that a people with such great manufacturing communities can send up to London representatives enough from their own centres to constitute a Parliament capable of advising with any monarch. Then, to his utter amazement, the distracted foreigner learns that these great cities and towns have no right whatever to representation in the House of Commons, and have nothing whatever to do with the election of members.
[Sidenote: 1831—The proposed reforms]
The imaginary foreigner who knew nothing about the principle of the workings of our Constitution before his arrival in the country might well have been amazed and confounded, and might have fancied, if he had been a reader of English literature, that he had lost his way somehow, and instead of arriving in England had stumbled into the State of Laputa. He might well indeed be excused for such bewilderment, seeing that an English student of the present day finds it hard to realize in his mind the possibility and the reality of the condition of things which existed in this country within the lifetime of men still living. Lord John Russell then went on to describe the manner in which the Government proposed to deal with the existing defects of the whole Parliamentary system. He laid it down as the main principle of the reforms he was prepared to introduce that a free citizen should not be compelled to pay taxes in the imposition and levying of which he was allowed to have no voice. The vast majority of free citizens could in any case only express their opinions as to this or that financial impost through their representatives in the House of Commons. This principle had of late been allowed to fail so grossly and so widely in its application that the House of Commons had almost entirely ceased to represent the will of the people.
Lord John Russell explained that the chief evils with which the Government had to deal were three in number. The first was the nomination of members of Parliament by individual patrons. The second was the nomination of members by close corporations. The third was the {141} enormous expense of elections, which was principally caused by the open bribery and corruption which had almost become a recognized accompaniment of every contest. He proposed to deal with the first evil by abolishing altogether the representation of the nominal constituencies, the constituencies that had no resident inhabitant, the boroughs which at some distant time had had houses and inmates, but of which now only the faintest traces were visible to the eye of the traveller—like, for instance, the extinct communities of whose existence some faint memorial evidence might be traced on Salisbury Plain. The Census last taken, that of 1821, the Government had resolved to accept as a basis of operations, and Lord John Russell proposed that every borough which, at that date, had less than 3000 inhabitants should cease any longer to send a member to the House of Commons. All boroughs that had not more than 4000 inhabitants should send in future only one member each to Parliament. The principle of nomination by individuals or by corporations was to come to an end. The "fancy franchises" were to be got rid of altogether. In the boroughs every householder paying rates on houses of the yearly value of ten pounds and upwards was entitled to have a vote.
The Government, however, proposed to deal mercifully, so far as possible, with the existing interests of voters, although the process of extinction was summary and complete with regard to the so-called rights of patrons and of corporations. For instance, resident voters, under the old qualifications, were to be allowed to retain their right during their lives, but with the lapse of each life the qualification expired and the owner of such a vote could have no successor. When dealing with the counties Lord John Russell announced that copyholders to the value of ten pounds a year and leaseholders for not less than twenty-one years at an annual rent of fifty pounds and upwards were to have the franchise. The abolition of the small boroughs and the uninhabited constituencies would reduce the number of members in the House of Commons by 168, and Lord John Russell explained that the Government did not {142} propose to fill up all these vacancies, being of opinion that the House was already rather overflowing in its numbers and had a good deal too many members for the proper discharge of its business.