Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/907

Rh was confided, an agreement was reached, and the bill was passed in the autumn session. In the following session (1885) the Redistribution Act was passed.

A uniform household and lodger franchise was established in counties and boroughs. If a dwelling was held as part payment for service, the occupier was not deprived of his vote because his home was the property of his master. The obligation was thrown on the overseers of ascertaining whether any other man besides the owner was entitled to be registered as an inhabitant occupier, and the owner was bound to supply the overseers with information. The Registration Acts were otherwise widely amended. Polling-places were multiplied, so that little time need be lost in recording a vote. These and other beneficial changes went a long way towards giving a vote to every one who had a decent home. By the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 all boroughs with less than 15,000 inhabitants ceased to return a member. These small towns were merged into their counties, and the counties were subdivided into a great number of single-member constituencies, so that the inhabitants of the disfranchised boroughs voted for the member for the division of the county in which they were situated. Boroughs with less than 50,000 inhabitants returning two members were in future to return only one, and towns of over 100,000 were divided into separate constituencies, and received additional members in proportion to their population. The members for the City of London were reduced to two, but Greater London, including Croydon, returned sixty. Divided Liverpool returned nine, Glasgow seven, Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast each four, and so on. Si.x additional seats were given to England and twelve to Scotland, so that, allowing for a diminution by disfranchisement for corruption, the numbers of the House of Commons were raised to 670 members.

Results of Reform since 1S32. — From a constitutional standpoint it is important to recognize the results of the successive Reform Acts on the working of parliament as regards the position of the executive on the one hand and the electorate on the other. Before 1832 the functions of ministers were mainly administrative, and parliament was able to deal much as it pleased with their rare legislative proposals without thereby depriving them of office. Moreover, since before that date ministers were, generally speaking, in fact as well as in theory appointed by the king, while the general confidence of the majority in the House of Commons followed the confidence not so much of the electorate as of the Crown, that house was able on occasions to exercise an effective control over foreign policy. Pitt, after 1784, was defeated several times on foreign and domestic issues, yet his resignation was neither expected nor desired. In 1788, when the regency of the prince of Wales appeared probable, and again in 1812, it was generally assumed that it would be in his power to dismiss his father's ministers and to maintain the Whigs in office without dissolving parliament. This system, while it gave to ministers security of tenure, left much effective freedom of action to the House of Commons. But the Reform Act of 1832 introduced a new order of things. In 1835 the result of a general election was for the first time the direct cause of a change of ministry, and in 1841 a House of Commons was elected for the express purpose of bringing a particular statesman into power. The electorate voted for Sir Robert Peel, and it would have been as impossible for the house then elected to deny him their support as it would be for the college of electors in the United States to exercise their private judgment in the selection of a president. As time went on, and the party system became more closely organized in the enlarged electorate, the voting power throughout the country came to exercise an increasing influence. The premier was now a party leader who derived his power in reality neither from the Crown nor from parliament, but from the electorate, and to the electorate he could appeal if deserted by his parliamentary majority. Unless it was prepared to drive him from the office in which it was elected to support him, that majority would not venture to defeat, or even seriously to modify, his legislative proposals, or to pass any censure on his foreign policy,

for all such action would now be held to be equivalent to a vote of no confidence. From the passing of the Reform Act of 1867 down to 1900 (with a single exception due to the lowering of the franchise and the redistribution of seats) the electorate voted alternately for the rival party leaders, and it was the function of the houses elected for that purpose to pass the measures and to endorse the general pohcy with which those leaders were respectively identified. The cabinet iq.v.), composed of colleagues selected by the prime minister, had practically, though indirectly, become an executive committee acting on behalf of the electorate, that is to say, the majority which returned their party to oflke; and the House of Commons practicaUy ceased to exercise control over ministers except in so far as a revolt in the party forming the majority could influence the prime minister, or force him to resign or dissolve. Meanwhile, the virtual identification of the electorate with the nation by the successive extensions of the franchise added immensely to its power, the chief limitation being supplied by the Septennial Act. The House of Lords, whatever its nominal rights, came henceforth in practice to exercise restriction rather on the House of Commons than on the will of the electorate, for the acquiescence of the upper house in the decision of the electors, when appealed to on a specific point of issue between the two houses, was gradually accepted by its leaders as a constitutional convention.

The history of parliament, as an institution, centres in this later period round two points, (A) the friction between Lords and Commons, resulting in proposals for the remodelling of the upper house, and (B) the changes in procedure within the House of Commons, necessitated by new conditions of work and the desire to make it a more business-like assembly. These two movements will be discussed separately.

A. House of Lords Question. — In the altered position of the House of Lords, the occasional checks given by it to the House of Commons were bound to cause friction with the representatives of the people. In the nature of things this was a matter of importance only when the Liberal party was in power and measures were proposed by the Liberal leaders which involved such extreme changes that the preponderantly Conservative upper house could amend or reject them with some confidence in its action being supported by the electorate. The frequent differences between the two houses during the parliament of 1880-1885, culminating in the postponement by the upper house of the Reform Bill, caused the status of that house to be much discussed during the general election of 1885, and proposals for its " mending or ending " to be freely canvassed on Radical platforms. On the 5th of March 1886 Mr Labouchere moved a resolution in the House of Commons condemning the hereditary principle. This was resisted by Mr Gladstone, then prime minister, on the ground that he had never supported an abstract resolution unless he was prepared to follow it up by action, and that the time for this had not arrived. On a division the motion was negatived by 202 votes against 166. The question of the constitution of the House of. Lords was much agitated in 1888. The Conservatives were again in power, but many of them thought that it would be prudent to forestall by a moderate reform the more drastic remedies now openly advocated by their opponents. On the other hand. Radicals were disposed to resist all changes involving the maintenance of the hereditary principle, lest they should thereby strengthen the House of Lords. On the 9th of March Mr Labouchere again moved his resolution in the House of Commons. Mr W. H. Smith, the leader of the house, in resisting the motion, admitted that some changes were desirable, and agreed with a previous speaker that it was by the Conservatives that such changes ought to be effected. On the iqth of March in the same year Lord Roseber)', in the House of Lords, moved for a select committee to inquire into the subject. He took the opportunity to explain his own plan of reform. While he did not wish to abolish the hereditary principle, he desired that no peer, outside the Royal family, should be a member of the house by right of birth alone. To the representatives of the peers