The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1884-11-15 00:00:00

tourbrib.y Oburt)er.

SATGRDAY, NOVEMBER 15th, 1834.

T RE REFORM 01? PARLIAMENT.
FRCM one point of view there may seem to
be a singniar incongruity in the discussions
upon the question of Parliamentary Reform
which during the past twelve months has
occupied so much attention in this country.
Nearly a. century has elapsed since the sub-
ject first commanded the serious notice of
the House of Commons, in the days when
Pitt a/le: Fox were the rivals in the great
legislative arena of the Lower House. But
the times were unpropitious for dealing with
it, The excesses of the French Revolution
had alarmed the moderate men on the Whig
side and e: eterrnined the Tories to oppose
any den-lane for the extension of the basis of
electoral po -er. The great war with France,
which, pract.cally beginning in 1792, went
on intermitter.tly until 1815, concentrated
all the energies of the nation, was not a
favourable time for discussing the question of
widening the foundation of the suffrage.
Fee- half a generation after the close of that
tremendous struggle, there were other things
to be attended to. No doubt the topic of
Parliamentary Reform was often brought be-
fore the -House of Commons; but there was
no popular agitation over it—no pressure
from without; and it was not until the French
Revolution in July. 1830, that reform came
to the front at a bound. We all know the
result of the conflict that ensued. A. very
considerable change was made in the political
mechanism of the realm, and gloomy fore.
bodings on the one side and high hopes on
the other.
In the recently-published reminiscences of
Mr. John Wilson Croker, there are letters of
Sir Robert Peel, showing that he regarded
the working of the Reform Bill with the ut-
most dread. He anticipated revolution from
it,. for he plainly told Croker so. Yet within
two. years of the passing of the Reform Bill,
Earl Grey's ministry was out of power, and
Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister of
England. He dissolved the first Reformed
, Parliament, in which the Whigs had such an
enormous preponderance and although the
results of the general election then ensuing
were:insufficient to give him a majority in the
House of Commons, they were quite enough to
prove the unsoundness of the predictions of
those who had anticipated a perpetual tun
of office for one political party and the ex-
clusion of the other. In another six years
Sir Robert- Peel was again in Downing-
street, this time possessing not merely the
• An:Wow but the reality of power. A decade
141 R wrought a wondrous change in the feel-
itgs of the people. The mighty host of the
Whig majority in the House of Commons
had disappeared like a phantom of the night,
and the great Conservative Minister was
backed by a solid and predominant strength
of ninety votes. This did not look much
like the revolution of which the right hon.
baronet ten years before had been so appre-
hensive. His five years' rule was dis-
tinguished by a series of splendid onslaughts
upon the excise—in the words of Mr. Glad-
stone, "striking off the shackles from the
arms of industry"—developing trade and in-
creasing the sources of national wealth. It
was remarkable that the special impost, the
corn laws which that Parliament was elected
to sustain—it ended by clearing away. With
the end of his second Government Sir Robert
Peel never returned to official life; but he
had seen sufficient to know that the great
body of his countrymen were neither revolu
tionaries nor insurrectionary bands, whose
only aim was to overturn the constitution of
the country.
The whirligig of Time, it is said, brings
about its revenge. The next Reform Bill
was passed by a Conservative Administra-
tion, with the late Earl of Derby at its head.
So far from being at all nervous at the use
which he masses might make of political
_power, the noble earl, whilst admitting that
it was a "leap in the dark," regarded the
measure as an eminently Conservative one ;
for by placing the franchise in boroughs on
a sound and unalterable basis, a return had
been made to the old lines of the Constitu-
tion. Earl Russell, the author of the Re-
form Bill of 1832, doubted the wisdom of
this policy. Yet nothing has happened dur-
ing the past seventeen years to justify the
dubious musings of the departed Whig states-
man The first election under the new Act
gave the Liberals a majority ; but in the
second the political pendulum took a swing
to the other side, and, as a result, the Con-
servatives enjoyed six years of undisturbed
power. The ballot was at one time much
dreaded, but the very first general election
under it ended in a Conservative majority.
At the present time the contention between
the two Houses of Parliament is not so much
over the extension of the suffrage as over
the form in which the question shall be pre-
sented to Parliament. Shall redistribution
accompany enfranchisement or not? But
neither of the political parties in the State
reg:lrd the great masses of their fellow-
countrymen as either Carbonari or Jacobins
to be distrusted and kept as long as possible
outside that invisible line which is called
"the pale of the Constitution."