[4] It might be said that promotion could still be kept going on in the regiment itself. Officers need not have then been transferred for promotion. But in that case rich officers might have bribed their seniors to retire. Or, the subalterns might have made up a purse by subscription to induce one of their seniors to retire and let them each get a step upwards.
[5] It may be mentioned that this course was suggested as a possible one in the debate by Lord Derby.
[6] The alternative courses of a creation of new Peers, and a dissolution, it should be noted, also involved an exercise of the Royal Prerogative—a fact forgotten by those who denounced Mr. Gladstone as a “tyrant” for coercing the Peers by the use of Prerogative.
[7] According to Addison, the House of Commons as far back as 1708 began to discuss the Ballot. After 1832 it became a popular cry with the Radicals, and in the first Session of the Reformed Parliament Mr. Grote brought in a Ballot Bill which was rejected by a majority of 211 to 106. Year after year Mr. Grote was beaten in his attempt to carry his measure. To him succeeded Mr. Henry Berkeley, who every year brought forward a resolution in favour of secret voting, and in 1851 even carried it by a majority of 37 against the opposition of Lord John Russell and the Whig Government. The odious corruption and scandalous scenes of violence which were associated with open voting at elections gradually made Lord John and Mr. Gladstone converts to Mr. Berkeley’s views. In 1868 the revelations of Lord Hartington’s Committee as to the manner of conducting elections convinced the country that the Ballot must be adopted. In 1869 another Committee on Electoral Practices reported in favour of it.
[8] Philosophical Radicals, like Mr. Mill, disliked the Ballot because they feared that one influence would always operate on the ignorant elector’s mind, even in the secrecy of the polling booth—that of the priest who had threatened him with “the pains of Hell” as a punishment for voting on the wrong side.
[9] Mr. Disraeli, it is fair to say, had endeavoured to save the time of the House by suggesting that there should be no debate on the Second Reading—the discussion of the principle of the measure to be taken on the next stage—the motion that the Speaker leave the Chair. This arrangement was agreed to by the Government, but it provoked a mutiny in the Conservative ranks, or rather in the section of the Party represented by Mr. Beresford Hope, Mr. Newdegate, and Mr. G. Bentinck, the first-named of whom jeered at Mr. Disraeli’s late Administration as a “disorganised hypocrisy.”
[10] Mr. Gladstone and the Government supported the first, but opposed the latter of these proposals, greatly to the annoyance of the Radicals, who saw in it the most effective check to bribery that could be devised.
[11] Large numbers of Liberal Peers did not even attend the debate or the division.
[12] Previous to this Act the Unions were so far without the law, that they could not even prosecute their office-bearers for stealing their funds.
[13] This was given by Sir James Hannen in the case of a man called Purchon, a member of the Glassbottlers’ Union of Yorkshire. Three members of the Union, professing to believe certain disgraceful charges against Purchon, procured his expulsion from that body. Then his employers dismissed him because they were threatened with a strike if he remained in their service. Purchon sued the three Unionists who got him expelled from his Union for conspiring to deprive him of employment. Mr. Justice Hannen ruled that there was an undue interference with the rights of labour, and £300 damages were awarded by the jury. The case of Purchon v. Hartley proved that though the Unions had got rid of a limited term of imprisonment for coercion, they were now punishable by unlimited damages.