A Beginning of Reform

In 1820 George III died, and his son came to the throne as George IV. In 1822 Lord Castlereagh died;

a man who, in the public mind at least, was closely associated with reaction and aristocratic rule. The old king had long since ceased to be of much importance in government; but his ministers and the members of parliament had seemed unwilling to act contrary to his wishes. For George IV, however, there existed no such sentiment. By his debts, his vices, and his treatment of his queen, Caroline, he had incurred the contempt of all parties.

A new group of men now came forward, chief among whom were Canning, Huskisson, Sir John Russell, and Sir Robert Peel. In 1822, when Peel became home secretary and Canning foreign secretary in the Liverpool cabinet, the era of reform may be said to begin. These men were Tories, but moderate Tories, who had an appreciation of the needs of the country. Opposed to them in their own party were the conservative Tories, who were satisfied with conditions as they were and wished no reform.

In 1823, in the interest of reform, the criminal code was made more civilized by the abolition of the death penalty for about a hundred offences. In the same year Huskisson introduced a series of far-reaching measures touching finance and commerce. Acting under his guidance, parliament reduced the customs duties on raw materials, modified the navigation acts, cut down the interest on the national debt, and made the corn law less rigid. In 1825 it permitted workingmen to form trade unions under certain conditions.

But most important of all was the measure granting to Roman Catholics full political rights. The emancipation of the Catholics had been a burning question for fifty years. It had led to popular uprisings, known as the Gordon riots, in 1780; it had "divided, weakened, or destroyed " every government that had held office since 1800; and it was the subject upon which George III had been almost a monomaniac, so intense was his opposition to any project favoring a removal of Roman Catholic disabilities. Even now George IV was as bitter against the act as his father had been, the House of Lords was hostile to it, and the people were strongly prejudiced against it.

GEORGE CANNING.From a contemporary engraving.

The ministry was divided: Canning was for it, Peel against it. The House of Commons only was favorable. For four years the question was agitated in parliament and out. Finally Peel, though never convinced by the arguments of his opponents, yielded, and brought forward a measure, which was passed on April 13, 1829, completing the restoration of the Roman Catholics to political rights. Wellington, equally unwilling, pushed the measure through the House of Lords. The Test Act of 1673, compelling all officials under the Crown to receive the sacrament according to the rites of the English church, had been repealed the year before; and now Roman Catholics were allowed to sit and vote in parliament, after taking a new oath framed especially for them. This measure effected an important political change, in admitting a body of new and influential men into parliament. Taken in conjunction with the repeal of the Corporation Act of 1661, which had prevented Dissenters from holding office in municipalities, it took away from the established church its monopoly of certain political privileges, and raised the social as well as the political standing of both Roman Catholics and Dissenters.

Need of Electoral Reform

A greater reform was yet to come. The question of extending the right to vote to the middle classes had been before the country for half a century. Thus far the obstinacy of the aristocratic and moneyed classes, the distractions of the long war with Napoleon, and the excessive demands of the Radicals, who wished universal suffrage, had combined to prevent the adoption of any measure looking toward the extension of the right to vote. But the industrial revolution, supplementing the religious revival of Wesley and Whitefield, had given new importance to the men whose industry was the chief source of British wealth and the backbone of British commerce. The American Revolution, the establishment of the republic in France, the wars that won the empire, had tended to make those without political rights discontented with their position and determined to gain for themselves a share in government. Among those who led the demonstrations after 1815 were some who clamored for universal suffrage; and men like "Orator" Hunt, influenced by French Jacobin notions, made inflammatory appeals in behalf of the rights of the people.

The existing electoral system was notoriously unfair, even according to the older theory of representation. This theory declared that all men in the boroughs and the counties were represented, even though a majority of them had not the right to vote for those who represented them. Parliament was made up of one hundred and eighty-six members from forty counties, four hundred and seventy-two members from about two hundred boroughs, and five members from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But these members were so distributed that ten southern counties had nearly as many as the thirty central and northern counties. This condition was due to the policy of past sovereigns, who had conferred the right to elect members upon villages that could be depended on to send up members favorable to the government. The boroughs of Cornwall, for example, had returned for two centuries and a half forty-four members, and this number was not decreased until 1821, when Grampound was disenfranchised.' Thus this under-populated county returned as many borough members, less one, as all Scotland , and more by two than the densely populated counties of Durham, Northumberland, and York. The boroughs of the south had, therefore, more than their fair share of representatives, while those of the active and populous north sent fewer members to parliament than they should have done according to their population.

The borough members, thus unfairly distributed, were often not representatives at all, but nominees; that is, they were members whose election was controlled by peers, influential commoners, and the government. It is estimated that out of the entire body of four hundred and seventy-two borough members only one hundred and thirty-seven were in any sense of the word elected. The others came from pocket boroughs,' whose representatives were named by influential individuals or families ; or from rotten boroughs, some of which were not boroughs at all, but were places almost uninhabited, where the right to return members was controlled by one or more property owners. Bosseney in Cornwall was a hamlet of three cottages, possessing nine electors, eight of whom belonged to one family. Yet this hamlet sent two members to parliament. Michell had five voters; Gatton, seven; Old Sarum had no voters at all. There were in Cornwall about one thousand voters and forty-two members; of the latter twenty were actually controlled by seven peers, twenty-one by eleven commoners, and only one was in any sense of the word freely elected.

For a century this condition of things had prevailed. Something had been done to check bribery and corruption ; but nothing whatever had been done to extend the right to vote, to make the methods of voting uniform among the towns and counties, or to give to great and growing towns, like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield, a share in representation.