请将“Even if the first associations for civil rights had only very limited success, and the Correspondence Societies that arose in the 1790s initially remained first and foremost societies for self-education - given the draconian prosecution of English Jacobins at the turn of the century and beyond - the demand of a wider public to have a voice in the general affairs of the country had been 
since the late eighteenth century a structural feature of the English system of rule. The old ruling strata reacted to this demand with strategies of criminali-sation. So-called ‘loyalty associations' arose in support of this policy - espe-cially when political radicalism began to spread even among artisans.68
Thus even though official policy aimed at defining political radicalism as a public-order problem, and treating it accordingly, many who participated in this repression must have been aware that their practice was unsustainable. This can be seen from the fact that a regular theory to legitimise the political status quo was developed and publicised. The notion of ‘virtual representa-tion' maintained that it was incidental who voted, all that mattered was who was elected. Existing procedure would secure the election of Members who did not represent individuals but interests, and the interests of all Englishmen to boot. Thus, if, for example, a large manufacturing town was unrepresented, it should not be concluded from this that the manufacturing interest was not represented. This justification of the old electoral system was supplemented by the view that the legislature stood above public opinion. Sovereignty sup-posedly lay with the law-makers (i.e. Parliament and crown), and there was no basis for the sovereign claim of the public. This, in my view, quite pertinently interpreted the existing system of estate rule. The mere fact of this interpreta-tion, however, indicates that the foundation of estate rule was changing.
This did not initially change anything in the dominance of the estate power of interpreting what political views were relevant. In this selection process, for example, the 700 petitions Parliament received from some 350 towns in 1817 alone were as little relevant as the threat of the inhabitants of St George's, Hanover Square, to refuse to pay taxes. By unanimously rejecting their petition, the Members of the House of Commons demonstratively excluded this public manifestation from relevant political discourse.69
With the Reform Bill of 1832, a fundamental change in the basis of rule became evident. This electoral reform certainly did not aim at abolishing the supremacy of the landed nobility in English political institutions,70 nor was this its practical effect. Only after the Second Reform Bill of 1867 did the social composition of the lower house change in any notable sense, but even in 1886, after the Third Reform Bill, members of the landed nobility and their relatives still made up half of all MPs.71
The focus on the social composition of Parliament, however, overlooks the immense symbolic importance of the First Reform Bill.72 After 1832, it would scarcely have been possible for any of the great landlords to express himself as did the Duke of Newcastle in 1829, when he responded to the reproach that he had terminated the tenancies of farmers who voted against his wishes: ‘it is presumed then that I am not to do what I will with my own'.73
The Reform also changed the conditions of election campaigns in a dual sense. Firstly, though the new strata of electors were initially prepared by and large to continue entrusting the selection of candidates to the social strata who had long been politically dominant, this did not mean that they accepted all of these. In particular, it now became steadily more common for electors to expect Members of Parliament to pursue definite political aims, making them in this sense ‘their' representatives. Public debates, direct demands and petitions tied MPs not only to those people to whom they owed their position, but, to a previously unknown degree, also to their electors. Secondly, the election of a candidate who enjoyed the support of influential local nobles could not be taken for granted to the same extent as previously. Whilst the ‘benefits' that the nobility previously distributed at election time had functioned as a kind of legitimately expected counterpart to the recipients casting their votes for the candidate promoted, these were now simply a means to influence the election decision. In the decades that followed the First Reform Bill, bribery was a structural feature of the English electoral system. This structure was, in a certain sense, self-reproducing. Since the costs of election campaigns were very high - because of bribery - candidates from the rising social strata were largely excluded. Conversely, the costs of election campaigns remained very high just because of this exclusion. For as long as there was little difference between the candidates and programmes, and in very many constituencies the question in the mid-nineteenth century was still to decide which of two socially similar groups was to dominate local politics, material offers actually often were a decisive factor.74
The eventual banning of such electoral practices only sealed the dissolution of traditional structures of political influence, it was not the cause. After urban oligarchies were destroyed by the law of 1835, the old structures for repro-ducing political domination remained intact especially in the countryside. The landed nobility therefore stubbornly defended the structural favouring of rural constituencies. It was only in 1884-5, when (as described above) the influence of the nobility on the electoral decisions of their tenants fell victim to economic conflicts, that resistance to abolition of this inequality came to an end.
A broad public had already arisen in England in the seventeenth century, in the form of a religious public (cf. Chapter 2, Section c.1). The restoration of estate rule required and effected the restriction of this opinion. The limited public basis of policy was described by those who belonged to it as the ‘politi-cal nation'. But a culture of Nonconformism that had arisen, i.e. the demand to make one's own mind up about God and the world, was not abolished. Protestantism is an important structural element in the specific English form of bourgeois revolution. The old-style ‘dissent' had lost its dynamism with the stabilisation of political conditions in the early eighteenth century. But the development of new social conflicts, and the advancing of new social and political demands, led to a new wave of dissent at the close of the century. An important inflection of political radicalism marked the rationalist tendencies of Nonconformism and forms of religious practice such as Methodism that were accepted by poor people as their own. The change from preaching to poor people to a religious orientation of poor people is attributable to a fundamental change in the political system.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Nonconformism was no longer pro-scribed, though it was still discriminated against. The Test and Corporation Acts excluded members of almost all Nonconformist denominations from public office, along with Catholics, Jews and unbelievers. The de facto cir-cumvention of this discrimination in certain towns, however, already struck a breach in the ancien-régime form of rule, and the repeal of the Test Act in 1828 meant the abandonment of an important bulwark of this. The fact that a considerable number of Nonconformists were elected to Parliament after 1832 marked the dissolution of a regular political culture. Yet conflicts over religious belief were still present in English political discourse long after 1832. Contrary to the opinion of J.C.D. Clark,75 this was not simply a continuation of earlier discourses. For in the nineteenth century religious debate developed in a society that was already pervaded by rationalism. The prevailing characteristic of the politically dominant culture was not a continuity of theologically determined secular goals, but rather the manifold moral interpretation of a rationalistic world view. Since the cultural forms of rationalism delimited relevant questions as to the sense of human life, they necessarily provoked radical counter-positions. Millenarianism and spiritualism reflected this pro-cess of rationalisation.
In the context of the social supremacy of rationalism, the relation of the state church to society also underwent a change. It is true that Parliament in the 1830s and 40s was in no hurry to demolish the establishment of the Church of England. It did however successfully threaten an internal reform. The admin-istrative and financial structures of the established church were investigated, in part newly regulated, and subjected to the future control of Parliament; the practices of local clergy were placed under greater supervision, and more attention was paid to competence for spiritual office in the appointment of bishops. Freehold tenure still protected the Anglican clergy from displacement and removal,76 yet the duties of clerical office-holders were now valued more highly than their qualification for appropriation. The internal reform of the Church of England was politically forced upon it. To a degree, however, it was also supported by the spread of rationalist ideas among the clergy. The uncertainty that had marked the period of the French Revolution gave the most important impulse to the view that the Church of England could not just con-tinue as a defence against papism, Nonconformity and scepticism; religious practice had to legitimise itself as useful to 'society'. This gave an upswing to educational orientations in the church, and promoted the adoption of the principles of 'political economy' in the orientation of Christian-administered local Poor Law policy. All in all, the spread of rationalism in the church meant that its tasks were set for it by the socially decisive representative groups.77 The separation of the church from the exercise of rule by the land-owning estates, and its reorientation as a conservative institution actively engaged in the process of socio-political stabilisation, became conceivable for certain bishops of the established church from the end of the eighteenth century. The collaboration of two bishops in the commission - led by a bishop - that elabo-rated the draft of the New Poor Law showed for the first time in the early 1830s the adaptation of the episcopacy to altered circumstances.
The institutional change took longer. 1834 saw the failure of an attempt to abolish legislation providing that couples who did not confess the Anglican belief had to register their marriage with the Poor Law authorities of the 'established' church. Similarly unsuccessful were the attempts at this time to introduce state supervision of church schools and abolish tithes. The Church of England monopoly on burials was also retained. As Logie Barrow has shown, this situation could provoke grotesque situations. As late as 1884, burial rites for a steadfast spiritualist who had held out against a church burial to the end of his life had to be held on the street outside the cemetery, since the religious authorities insisted on their legal right to forbid the utterance of un-Christian speech in the cemetery.78”翻译为中文