The political crisis was over now. When once the royal authority had been given for the unlimited creation of new peers there was an end of all the trouble. Of course, there was no necessity to manufacture any new batches of peers. As the Reform Bill was to be carried one way or the other, whether with the aid of new peers or without it, the Tory members of the House of Lords could not see any possible advantage in taking steps which must only end in filling their crimson benches with new men who might outvote them on all future occasions. The Reform Bill passed through all its stages in the House of Lords, not without some angry and vehement discussions, during which personal recriminations were made that would have been considered disorderly at the meeting of a parish vestry. One noble lord denounced the conduct of Lord Grey as atrocious, and even the stately Lord Grey was roused to so much anger by this expression that he forgot his habitual self-control and dignity and replied that he flung back the noble lord's atrocious words with the utmost scorn and contempt.
The Bill passed its third reading in the House of Lords on June 4, 1832, and received the royal assent on June 7. The royal assent, however, was somewhat ungraciously given. King William declined to give his assent in person, a performance which, at the time, seemed to be expected from him, and it was signified only by the medium of a formal committee. The Bill, however, was passed, the third Reform Bill that had been introduced since Lord Grey had come into office. The Reform Bills for Ireland and Scotland which had gone through their stages in the House of Commons immediately after the Bills relating to England and Wales were then carried through the House of Lords. The great triumph was accomplished.
It is not without historical interest to notice the fact that a long discussion sprang up at this time and was revived again and again, during many successive years, with regard to certain words used by Lord John Russell in expressing his satisfaction at the passing of the Reform Bill. He was endeavoring to calm the apprehensions of timid {182} people throughout the country who feared that the whole time of Parliament would thenceforward be taken up with the passing of new and newer Reform Bills, and he declared that the Government of which he was a member had no intention but that the Reform Act should be a final measure. It might have seemed clear to any reasonable mind that Lord John had no idea of proclaiming his faith in the absolute finality of any measure passed, or to be passed, by human statesmanship, but was merely expressing the confident belief of his colleagues and himself that the Bill they had passed would satisfy the needs and the demands of the existing generation. At the time, however, a storm of remonstrance from the more advanced Liberals broke around Lord John Russell's head, and he was charged with having declared that the Reform Act was meant to be a measure for all times, and that he and his colleagues would never more set their hands to any measure intended to broaden or deepen its influence. There were indeed popular caricatures of Lord John to be seen in which he was exhibited with the title of "Finality Jack." Lord John's public career proved many times, in later days, how completely his meaning had been misunderstood by some of those whose cause he had been espousing, for all through his honored life he continued to be a leader of reform. But the common misunderstanding of the phrase was in itself significant, for it seemed to foretell the fact that the Bill, with all the great changes it had introduced and the new foundations it had laid for the future system of constitutional government, was in itself indeed far from being a final measure. The authors of the Reform Bill had left what might now be called "the masses" almost altogether out of their calculations. The rate at which the franchise was fixed for town and country rendered it practically impossible that the artisan in the town or the laborer in the country could have any chance whatever of obtaining a vote.
[Sidenote: 1832—Some defects in the Reform Bill]
This was the one great defect of the Reform Bill introduced by Lord Grey and Lord John Russell. Perhaps it would not have been prudent for these statesmen, at that {183} time, to enter on the introduction of a more comprehensive measure. Perhaps Lord Grey and Lord John Russell would have preferred of their own judgment not to introduce too comprehensive a reform measure all at once, and to allow the franchise to broaden slowly down. But it is certain that almost immediately after the passing of the Reform Bill a profound feeling of disappointment began to grow and spread among the classes who found themselves excluded from any of its benefits, and who believed, with good reason, that they had rendered much practical service in the carrying of the measure. The feeling prevailed especially among the artisans in the cities and towns. In some of the towns the Reform Bill had distinctly operated as a measure of disfranchisement rather than of enfranchisement. In Preston, for instance, there had been so large a number of what we have called, adopting a more modern phrase, "fancy franchises" that something not very far removed from universal suffrage was attainable by the male population. These fancy franchises could not be justified on any principle commending itself to rational minds, and it was, moreover, an obvious absurdity to have one system of voting prevailing in this constituency and a totally different system prevailing in another. Therefore Lord Grey and Lord John Russell cannot be censured for their resolve to abolish the fancy franchises altogether. They were introducing an entirely new constitutional system, and it was evident that in the new system there must be some uniform principle as to the franchise. But it is none the less certain that the men who were disfranchised by an Act professedly brought in to extend the suffrage must have felt that they had good reason to complain of its direct effect upon themselves and upon what they believed to be their rights. Nearly forty years of agitation had yet to be gone through before the principal deficiencies in the Reform Act of 1833 were supplied by Liberal and Tory legislation.
Before closing this chapter of history it is fitting to take notice of the fact that the debates on the Reform Bill gave opportunity for the public opening of a great career in {184} politics and in literature—the career of Lord Macaulay. [Sidenote: 1832—Thomas Babington Macaulay] Thomas Babington Macaulay was a new member of the House of Commons when the first Reform Bill was introduced by Lord John Russell. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, who was famous in his day, and will always be remembered as the high-minded philanthropist and the energetic and consistent opponent of slavery and the slave trade. Macaulay the son had, from his earliest years, given evidence of precocious and extraordinary intelligence and versatility. When he entered Parliament he found that his fame had gone before him, but his friends were not quite certain whether he was to be poet, essayist, historian, or political orator. As years went on, he proved that he could write brilliant and captivating poems; that he could turn out essays which had a greater fascination for the public than many of the cleverest novels; that he could write history which set critics disputing, but which everybody had to read; and that he could deliver political speeches in the House of Commons which, when correctly reproduced from the newspapers, appeared to belong to the highest class of Parliamentary eloquence. It may well be questioned whether any man could possibly attain supreme success in the four fields in which, from time to time, Macaulay appeared to be successful. At present we are only concerned with the speeches which he delivered in the House of Commons during the debates on the Reform Bills. Macaulay's appearance was not impressive, and he had a gift of fluency, a rapidity of utterance which continued, from first to last, to be a most serious difficulty in the way of his success as a Parliamentary orator. He appears to have committed his speeches to memory, and his memory was one of the most amazing of all his gifts; and when he rose to deliver an oration he rattled it off at such a rate of speed that the sense ached in trying to follow him, and the reporters for the newspapers found it almost impossible to get a full note of what he said. This was all the more embarrassing because his speeches abounded in illustrations and citations from all manner of authorities, authors, and historical incidents, and the bewildered {185} reporter found himself entangled in proper names which shorthand in the pre-phonetic days could but slowly reproduce. The speeches, when revised by the author, were read with intense delight by the educated public, and with all the defects of the orator's utterance he soon acquired such a fame in the House of Commons that no one ever attracted a more crowded and eager audience than he did when it became known that he was about to make a speech. We may quote here a characteristic description given by Greville of his first meeting with Macaulay in the early February of 1833, while the struggle over Lord Russell's third Reform Bill was still going on. "Dined yesterday," says Greville, "with Lord Holland; came very late and found a vacant place between Sir George Robinson and a common-looking man in black. As soon as I had time to look at my neighbor, I began to speculate, as one usually does, as to who he might be, and as he did not for some time open his lips except to eat, I settled that he was some obscure man of letters, or of medicine, perhaps a cholera doctor. In a short time the conversation turned on early and late education, and Lord Holland said he had always remarked that self-educated men were peculiarly conceited and arrogant, and apt to look down on the generality of mankind from their being ignorant of how much other people knew; not having been at public schools, they are uninformed of the course of general education. My neighbor observed that he thought the most remarkable example of self-education that of Alfieri, who had reached the age of thirty without having acquired any accomplishment save that of driving, and who was so ignorant of his own language that he had to learn it like a child, beginning with elementary books. Lord Holland quoted Julius Caesar and Scaliger as examples of late education, said that the latter had been wounded, and that he had been married and commenced learning Greek the same day, when my neighbor remarked 'that he supposed his learning Greek was not an instantaneous act like his marriage.' This remark and the manner of it gave me the notion that he was a dull fellow, for it came out in a {186} way which bordered on the ridiculous so as to excite something like a sneer. I was a little surprised to hear him continue the thread of conversation, from Scaliger's wound, and talk of Loyola having been wounded at Pampeluna. I wondered how he happened to know anything about Loyola's wound. Having thus settled my opinion I went on eating my dinner, when Auckland, who was sitting opposite to me, addressed my neighbor: 'Mr. Macaulay, will you drink a glass of wine?' I thought I should have dropped off my chair. It was Macaulay, the man I had been so long most curious to see and to hear, whose genius, eloquence, astonishing knowledge, and diversified talents have excited my wonder and admiration for such a length of time, and here I had been sitting next to him, hearing him talk, and setting him down for a dull fellow." We are here only at the opening of Macaulay's great career. Even at this time the world seemed to have made up its mind that Macaulay had a great career before him. At the present day, when more than forty years have passed over his tomb in Westminster Abbey, it is a question still keenly contested every now and then, whether Macaulay fully realized or barely failed to realize the expectations which men were forming of him on that day when Charles Greville met him for the first time, and was amazed to find, as the conversation went on, that he was sitting next to Macaulay.
[Sidenote: 1832—Death of Sir Walter Scott]
The year of the Reform Bill was marked by an event forever memorable in the history of literature. That event was the death of Sir Walter Scott. The later years of Scott's life, as we all know, had been darkened by the failure of his publishers, by the money troubles in which that failure had involved him, by the exhausting efforts he had to make to force his wearied mind into redoubled literary exertion, and, more than all, by the loss of the wife who had been his devoted companion for so many years. No words could be more sorrowful and more touching in their simplicity than those in which Scott declared that after his wife's death he never knew what to do with that large share of his thoughts which always, in other {187} days, used to be given to her. He had gone out to Italy, obeying the advice of his friends, in the hope of recovering his health under warmer skies than those of his native land, but the effort was futile. It was of no use his trying to shake off his malady of heart and body by a change of air. He carried his giant about with him, if we may apply to his condition the expressive and melancholy words which Emerson used with a different application. Scott was little over sixty years of age when he died—a time of life at which, according to our ideas of longevity at the present day, we should regard a man as having hardly passed the zenith of his powers and his possibilities. He had added a new chapter to a history of the world's literature. He had opened a new school of romance which soon found brilliant pupils in all countries where romance could charm. There have been many revolutions in literary rulership since his time, but Walter Scott has not been dethroned.
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