Page:EB1911 - Volume 09.djvu/605

1866–1868] new Reform Bill. Accordingly, in March 1866 Gladstone, who now led the House of Commons, introduced a measure which proposed to extend the county franchise to £14 and the borough franchise to £7 householders. The bill did not create much enthusiasm among Liberals, and it was naturally opposed by the Conservatives, who were reinforced by a large section of moderate Liberals, nicknamed, in consequence of a phrase in one of Bright’s speeches, Adullamites. After many debates, in which the Commons showed little disposition to give the ministry any effective support, an amendment was carried by Lord Dunkellin, the eldest son of Lord Clanricarde, basing the borough franchise on rating instead of rental. The cabinet, recognizing from the division that the control of the House had passed out of its hands, resigned office, and the queen was compelled to entrust Lord Derby with the task of forming a new administration.

For the third time in his career Lord Derby undertook the formidable task of conducting the government of the country with only a minority of the House of Commons to support him. The moment at which he made this third attempt was one of unusual anxiety. Abroad,

the almost simultaneous outbreak of war between Prussia and Austria was destined to affect the whole aspect of continental politics. At home, a terrible murrain had fallen on the cattle, inflicting ruin on the agricultural interest; a grave commercial crisis was creating alarm in the city of London, and, in its consequences, injuring the interests of labour; while the working classes, at last roused from their long indifference, and angry at the rejection of Lord Russell’s bill, were assembling in their tens of thousands to demand reform. The cabinet determined to prohibit a meeting which the Reform League decided to hold in Hyde Park on the 23rd of July, and closed the gates of the park on the people. But the mob, converging on the park in thousands, surged round the railings, which a little inquiry might have shown were too weak to resist any real pressure. Either accidentally or intentionally, the railings were overturned in one place, and the people, perceiving their opportunity, at once threw them down round the whole circuit of the park. Few acts in Queen Victoria’s reign were attended with greater consequences. For the riot in Hyde Park led almost directly to a new Reform Act, and to the transfer of power from the middle classes to the masses of the people.

Yet, though the new government found it necessary to introduce a Reform Bill, a wide difference of opinion existed in the cabinet as to the form which the measure should take. Several of its members were in favour of assimilating the borough franchise to that in force in municipal

elections, and practically conferring a vote on every householder who had three years’ residence in the constituency. General Peel, however—Sir Robert Peel’s brother—who held the seals of the war office, objected to this extension; and the cabinet ultimately decided on evading the difficulty by bringing forward a series of resolutions on which a scheme of reform might ultimately be based. Their success in 1858, in dealing with the government of India in this way, commended the decision to the acceptance of the cabinet. But it was soon apparent that the House of Commons required a definite scheme, and that it would not seriously consider a set of abstract resolutions which committed no one to any distinct plan. Hence on the 23rd of February 1867 the cabinet decided on withdrawing its resolutions and reverting to its original bill. On the following day Lord Cranborne—better known afterwards as Lord Salisbury—discovered that the bill had more democratic tendencies than he had originally supposed, and refused to be a party to it. On Monday, the 25th, the cabinet again met to consider the new difficulty which had thus arisen; and it decided (as was said afterwards by Sir John Pakington) in ten minutes to substitute for the scheme a mild measure extending the borough franchise to houses rated at £6 a year, and conferring the county franchise on £20 householders. The bill, it was soon obvious, would be acceptable to no one; and the government again fell back on its original proposal. Three members of the cabinet, however, Lord Cranborne, Lord Carnarvon and General Peel, refused to be parties to the measure, and resigned office, the government being necessarily weakened by these defections. In the large scheme which the cabinet had now adopted, the borough franchise was conferred on all householders rated to the relief of the poor, who had for two years occupied the houses which gave them the qualification; the county franchise was given to the occupiers of all houses rated at £15 a year or upwards. But it was proposed that these extensions should be accompanied by an educational franchise, and a franchise conferred on persons who had paid twenty shillings in assessed taxes or income tax; the taxpayers who had gained a vote in this way being given a second vote in respect of the property which they occupied. In the course of the discussion on the bill in the House of Commons, the securities on which its authors had relied to enable them to stem the tide of democracy were, chiefly through Gladstone’s exertions, swept away. The dual vote was abandoned, direct payment of rates was surrendered, the county franchise was extended to £12 householders, and the redistribution of seats was largely increased. The bill, in the shape in which it had been introduced, had been surrounded with safeguards to property. With their loss it involved a great radical change, which placed the working classes of the country in the position of predominance which the middle classes had occupied since 1832.

The passage of the bill necessitated a dissolution of parliament; but it had to be postponed to enable parliament to supplement the English Reform Act of 1867 with measures applicable to Scotland and Ireland, and to give time for settling the boundaries of the new constituencies

which had been created. This delay gave the Conservatives another year of office. But the first place in the cabinet passed in 1868 from Lord Derby to his lieutenant, Disraeli. The change added interest to political life. Thenceforward, for the next thirteen years, the chief places in the two great parties in the state were filled by the two men, Gladstone and Disraeli, who were unquestionably the ablest representatives of their respective followers. But the situation was also remarkable because power thus definitely passed from men who, without exception, had been born in the 18th century, and had all held cabinet offices before 1832, to men who had been born in the 19th century, and had only risen to cabinet rank in the ’forties and the ’fifties. It was also interesting to reflect that Gladstone had begun life as a Conservative, and had only gradually moved to the ranks of the Liberal party; while Disraeli had fought his first election under the auspices of O’Connell and Hume, had won his spurs by his attacks on Sir Robert Peel, and had been only reluctantly adopted by the Conservatives as their leader in the House of Commons.

The struggle commenced in 1868 on an Irish question. During the previous years considerable attention had been paid to a secret conspiracy in Ireland and among the Irish in America. The Fenians, as they were called, actually attempted insurrection in Ireland, and an invasion of Canada from the United States. At the beginning of 1866 Lord Russell’s government thought itself compelled to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland; and in 1867 Lord Derby’s government was confronted in the spring by a plot to seize Chester Castle, and in the autumn by an attack on a prison van at Manchester containing Fenian prisoners, and by an atrocious attempt to blow up Clerkenwell prison. Conservative politicians deduced from these circumstances the necessity of applying firm government to Ireland. Liberal statesmen, on the contrary, desired to extirpate rebellion

by remedying the grievances of which Ireland still complained. Chief among these was the fact that the Established Church in Ireland was the church of only a minority of the people. In March 1868 John Francis Maguire, an Irish Catholic, asked the House of Commons to resolve itself into a committee to take into immediate consideration the affairs of Ireland. Gladstone, in the course of the debate, declared that in his opinion the time had come when the Irish Church, as a political institution, should cease; and he followed up his declaration by a series of resolutions, which