The Rise of the Democracy

strial R

es, Crompton, Watt, and Cartwright revolutionised the cotton trade in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and increased enormously the production of woollen goods. England ceased to be mainly a nation of farmers and merchants; domestic manufacture gave way to the factory system; the labouring people, unable to make a li

striking increase in wealth and population, they wer

d unjust laws prevented them combining together in trade unions to help themselves. Women and children were made to work as long and as hard as the men. A regular system grew up of transporting pauper and destitute children to weary factory work. There was no care for their health. There were few churches and chapels, though the Methodists often did something to prevent the people from falling back into heathendom. The workmen were ignorant, brutal, poor and oppressed.

main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. These yeomen and small landowners had been the back

in the first half of the sixteenth century r

ntifically, with better tools and greater success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great mass of the rural population were mere labourers.... Pauperism became more and more a pressing evil, especially after 1782, when Gilbert's Act

in agriculture and in manufactures. Only, the accumulated wealth fell into fewer hands, and the fluctuations in the demand for goods, caused partly by the opening up of n

r Parliamen

franchisement within sight. It was useless for Burke to maintain the incomparable beauty of the British constitution; English politicians might be

nhood suffrage. In most of the "corporation boroughs" the franchise was restricted exclusively to freemen of the borough, and to the self-elected non-resident persons who composed the governing body before the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835. A small number of rich and powerful men really worked nearly all the elections. Seats were openly bought and sold, and a candidate had either to find a patron who would provide him with a seat, or, failing a patron, to purchase a seat himself. Fox first entered Parliament for the pocket borough of Midhurst, and Sir George Trevelyan has described how it took place. Midhurst was selected by the father of Charles James Fox as "the most comfortable of constituencies from the point of view of a representative; for the ri

ater spoke in praise of this method of bringing young men of promise into Parliament. John Wilson Croker estimated that of six hundred and fifty-eight members of the House of Commons at the end of the eighteenth ce

ntres Unrepresen

e middle-class manufacturers had no means of making their influence felt in the unreformed House of Commons, for towns of such importance as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham sent no representatives t

hardly any voters at

h less than 50 voters

h less than 100 voter

h less than 200 voter

n other constituen

sentatives to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and to several other large manufacturing towns and London boroughs; extended the county franchise to leaseholders and ￡50 tenants at will; and settled th

of the Great

d without much rioting in the

lass in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands, that "no better system (of Parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man" than the unreformed House of Commons, and that he would never bring

ral election in the summer of 1831, the popular cry wa

ut forth such power as they had as a means to obtaining the power which they claimed." And the non-electors were enormously successful. For they "combined their will, their knowledge, and their manifest force in political unio

by 136: 367-231. On September 21st the third reading passed by 345 to 236. Then on the 8th of October the House of Lords threw o

convicted of riot, three were hanged. At Bristol, the jail, the Mansion House, the Customs House,

by 184 to 175, and then in Committee struck out those clauses which disfranchised the "rotten" boroughs-uninhabited constituencies like Old Sarum. Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, at once resigned, and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to form a Tory anti-re

and the Whigs resumed office with an assurance that, if necessary, the King wo

n June 4th, 1832, the Reform Bill passed the Lords by

ad to democracy. The Tories described the Bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the Act of 1832 neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its foes. What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in

accepted responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before. The New Poor Law, 1834, and the new Municipal Corpo

of the new regime in Parliament as it appeared to

ew members.... There exists no party but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals a

Class Still

eir violence-had been the driving force that had carried the Bill into law. If their expectations were extravagant and their hopes over-

ar

t popular movement. The Five Points of the People's Charter were proclaimed in 1838: (1) Universal Suffrage; (2) Vote by Ballot; (3) Annual Parliaments; (4) Abo

heir lot-its hopeless outlook, and the horrible housing conditions in the big towns-these things seemed intolerable to the more intelligent of the working pe

ranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. So it seeme

f every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. The question of universal suffrage is, after all, a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workma

the Chartist movement was by far the strongest and most revolutionary of all the post-reform popular agitations. Chartism went to pieces because the leaders could not work together, and were, in fact, greatly divided as to the methods and objects of the movement. By 1848 Bronterre O'Brien had retired from the Chartist ranks, Feargus O'Connor was M

h one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-class enfranchisement. Palmerston's very inactivity drove Liberals and the younger Conservatives to look to the working classes for support for the

asm, and it was hateful to the old Palmerstonian Whigs and most of the Conservatives, who objected to any enfranchisement of the working class. By a combination of thes

Park Rail

Union decided to hold a monster demonstration in Hyde Park on July 23rd, but the Chief Commissioner of Police had declared the meeting must not take place, and ordered the gates to be closed at five o'clock. Mr. Edmund Beales, and other leaders of the London Reform Union, on being refused admittance, drove away calmly to hold a meeting in Trafalgar Square, but the great mass of people

he town. Some thought it a revolt; others were of opinion it was a revolution. The first day of liberty was proclaimed here-the breaking loose of anarchy was shrieked at there. The mob capered and jumped over the sward for half the night through. Flower beds and shrubs suffered a good deal, not so much from wanton destruction, as from the pure boistero

the park, but the people only cheered the soldiers good-

necessity of an immediate adoption of the reform principle."[82] Disraeli, who in 1859 had proposed reform without getting any support, now saw that a great opportunity had come for a constructive Conservative poli

February, 1867, a Reform Bill was promised in the Queen's Speech. To Lord Derby the measure was frankly a "leap in the dark," and one or two Conservative ministers (including Cranborne, afterwards Lord S

old Su

en should not be excluded from the franchise was moved by John Stuart Mill, and defeated. Some redistribution of seats took place under the Act of 1867, eleven boroughs were disfranchised, thirty-five with less than 10,000 inhabitants were made single-member constituencies, and additional representation was given to Chelsea, Hackney, Leeds,

se who were qualified neither as householders nor lodgers, and the principle of single-member equal electoral districts-on a basis of 54,000 inhabitants-was adopted. Only twenty-three boroughs, the City of London and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, re

instead of, as at present, a year's residence from one July to the next, should be sufficient to qualify for the franchise. There is also a strong demand for "one man, one vote." At present, while no elector may give more than one vote in any constituency, he may, if he has property in various places, give a vote in each of

bution of seats, for in the last twenty-five years there have been deep and extensive changes in the distribution of populations, and Ireland in particular

Representation

he first to send Labour representatives to Parliament, and to-day their members outnumber those of any other trade. Since 1892 industrial constituencies, chiefly in Yorkshire, Lancashire, South Wales, and the mining districts, have gone on steadily electing and re-electing

sentative assembly, and both have used enfranchisement for obtaining representation in Parliament. The return of forty Labour Members at recent general elections is evidence that a large electorate supports the Labour Party in its desire to carry in Parliament legislation that will make life a better

legislation in recent years. It is true that Lord Shaftesbury's benevolent and entirely disinterested activities promoted Factory Acts in the first hal

isabilities-Catholics,

century that saw the removal of religious disabilities, and the free admission to Parli

the passing of the Act of Union, and the Irish people were bitterly disappointed that the disabilities remained. But George III. refused all assent to the proposals, and Pitt resigned. Several times the House of Commons passed Catholic Relief Bills, which were thr

on priests who said mass in England, and on Roman Catholics who attended mass-took place in 18

d the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, but many Roman Catholics are members of Parliament

art in debates and sit on committees, but were not allowed to vote. Finally, in 1858, the Lords, after rejecting the measure for ten years, passed the Jews' Disabilities Bill, wh

icipal affairs, these Acts had long been a dead letter. All that was done in the nineteenth century was to repeal these Acts, and to throw open the unive

rnment being in power all the time-and three times during that period the electors of Northampton triumphantly returned Charles Bradlaugh as their member, only to be answered by resolutions of refusal and expulsion passed by the House of Commons against their representative. It was a repetition of the battle Wilkes had fought one hundred and twenty years earlier, and it ended in the same way. A new Parliament assembled in January, 1886 (after a gen

nchisemen

acy to the middle class and the working class, for to-day, alike in Parliament and in the permanent Civil Service, men of the middle class predominate, assisted by those who served apprenticeship in mine or workshop. The removal of religious disabilitie

ment to pass a Women's Enfranchisement Bill. From the time of John Stuart Mill's advocacy in 1867 there have always been supporters of Women's Suffrage in the House of Commons, and in the last five years these supporters have been growing in numbers. Only the refusal of the Government to give time for the discussion of the Bill in Committee has prevented a Woman's Enfranchisement measure, which on several occasions has received a second reading, from passing the House of Commons; and the announcement by

were declared eligible by Parliament for membership on county and borough councils, and for the chairmanship of county councils and the mayoralty of boroughs. Since this Act was passed we have seen women elected to the councils of great cities-Manchester and Liverpool, for instance-and chosen as mayors in several towns. No political movement in recent years has been of greater public interest or importance than the agi

d the workmen of Great Britain were sure that they could not get from Parliament an understanding of popular grievances, still less fair treatment, until they possessed the right to choose their own parliamentary representatives, so women ar