The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-12-03 00:00:00

AN IMPORTANT DECISION.

Last week in the Queen's Bench Division of the
High Court of Justice, Mr. Justice Denman and Mr.
Justice Bowen sat as a branch of the High Court, for
the purpose of hearing appeals from the decisions of
Revising Barristers. The cause of "Bradley v. Baylis"
and two other cases were appeals raising substantially
the same question of law, and one, as will be seen, of
considerable public importance—viz., what degree of
occupation it is which constitutes the right to a dwell-
ing-house franchise within the recent Parliamentary
and Municipal Registration Act, 41 and 42 Vic., cap.
ez6, sec. 5. The Revising Barristers had taken
different views of the Act, deciding accordingly ; but,
as the three cases rested substantially upon the same
facts, they were argued in order and a single judg-
ment was pronounced upon the three. Each case, it
may be added, was a test case,fand a considerable num-
ber of votes depended upon the determination of the
Court.
The following were briefly the facts in "Bradley v.
Baylis " :--It was an appeal from the decision of the
Revising Barrister for Chelsea, and the case stated
that the appellant had occupied for the qualified
period one unfurnished room in a dwelling-house at a
weekly rent, and that the room was rented from the
tenant of the entire house. Subject to the appellant's
occupation, and to a right of access to and from the
outer door of the house, the renter of the house, who
resided on the premises, exercised a general control
over the whole house, but rendered no service either
-by himself or his servants to the appellant The
Revising Barrister disallowed the claim, holding that
as the renter of the house resided on the premises and
exercised a general control, the occupation of the
appellant was that of a lodger, and not that of a sepa-
rate occupier. It was now contended that this decision
was wrong.
Mr. Bompas' in arguing the case, reviewed the
various Acts of Parliament dealing with the franchise.
By the first Reform Act the tenant of any house, &c.,
of the yearly value of £lO was entitled to a vote.
Then came the Reform Act of 1867, which gave the
franchise to any inhabitant occupier of a dwelling•
house, and which defined a dwelling-house as
cluding any part of a house occupied as a separate
dwelling, and separately rated to the relief of the
poor." And lastly came the Act of 1878, which en-
acted that for the purposes of the Act of 1867 the
term "dwelling-house" should include any part of a
house where that part was separately occupied as a
dwelling." The learned counsel submitted that these
Acts, considered with the decided cases, showed that
the section in the last Act, defining dwelling-house,
was framed for the express purpose of settling doubts
which had been judicially expressed with reference to
the proper meaning of the expression as defined by the
Act of 1867, the Court of Common Pleas having on
one occasion been equally divided upon the question.
Mr. Freeman having argued, on the other hand,
that the Revising Barrister was right and that the
appellant was only a lodger the Court proceeded with
the other cases.
At the conclusion of the arguments, which were ne-
cessarily somewhat prolonged,
Mr. Justice Denman gave judgment in favour of the
claimants to the franchise in each case. Taking the
facts in the first case, his Lordship said that the land-
lord's general control was subject to the occupiers'
rights, and did not prevent the holding of the
latter from being a separate residence. In his
opinion,.taking all the three cases together, the sections
of the Act of 1878 were not enlarging sections, but were
expressly enacted for the purpose of nutting an
end to doubts upon the state of law as it was
left by the previous statutes. It was too clear
for doubt that the object of the last Act was not to
confer a new franchise, but was framed in order to
settle judicial doubts as to the interpretation of dwell-
ing-house, and to lay it down distinctly that any
part of a house separately occupied as a dwelling-
house should be sufficient to confer the franchise. It
was because this seemed so clear, and because, there-
fore, they were not in any way giving an opinion con-
trary to that which had been held by other Judges,
that he thought there should be no further appeal,
although by the Judicature Act of this year the High
Court might give such leave in cases which, in tneir
judgment, seemed to require it.
Mr. Justice Bowen was of the same opinion.

The Times comments upon the above decision in a leader,
from which we take the following:—

The latest, and by no means the least, extension of
the franchise, so far from determining the fate of
Cabinets, has never been the subject of so much as a
single debate in Parliament. It is purely the effect of
judge-made law arising out of the literal intepretation
of what looks very like a piece of legislation by in-
advertence. As we pointed out, the Act of 1867
conferred the franchise on the occupiers of "dwelling-
houses " in boroughs, and defined the word "dwelling-
house " as "including any part of a house occupied
as a separate dwelling and separately rated to
the relief of the poor." This definition proved
to be ambigious, and it was amended by the
Parliamentary and Municipal Regulation Act of 1878,
apparently with a view to removing the ambiguity.
The new definition of "-dwelling-" house " expressly
substituted in the Act of 1878 for that given in the
Act of 1867 was made to "include any part of a
house " where that part is separately occupied as
a " dwelling." The words in the original Act
specifying that the dwelling-house as defined
must be separately rated to the relief of
the poor seem to have been rendered inopera- '
tive by the 7th clause of the Assessed Rates
Act 1869, which practically resuscitated the com-
pound householder by enacting that the payment
of rates by the owner "shall be deemed a pAy-
ment of the full rate by the occupier for the purpose
of any qualification or franchise which, as regards
rating, depends upon the payment of the poor rate."
The amended definition, therefore, of the Act of 1878
must be taken as a full substitute for the ambiguous
definition of 1867. The immediate result is an enor-
mous increase in the number of occupiers entitled to
be placed on the register of voters. Whether this re-
sult was intended, or even so much as contemplated,
by Parliament we have no means of determining;
but the literal meaning of the words of the Act is
so clear that the Judges who decided the case
on Wednesday declined to allow a further
appeal. In future, therefore, every occupant
of a part of a house where that part is
separately occupied as a dwelling will be entitled to
the franchise as a householder. As a " lodger " he
would not be so entitled unless his unfurnished lodgings
were of the clear annual value of £10; but as the
separate occupier of the part of a house he is now a
householder and as such entitled to the franchise.
Down to Wednesday last the question of his right was
doubtful, though the interpretation now judicially
established has already been acted upon by some
registration officers in consequence of a circular of
the Home Secretary issued last July, and calling
attention to the Act of 1878. The question is now
finally decided, and the borough constituencies
throughout the country have been potentially in-
creased by many thousands of voters.

The decision is not entirely a surprise. The subject
was brought before Parliament in 1879, by Mr.
Chamberlain, who referred to an alleged determina-
tion on the part of the Vestry Clerks of London
"not to carry out the provisions of the Act of Parlia-
ment," and both Sir William Harcourt and his pre-
decessor at the Home Office have issued circulars on
the subject. Nevertheless the result now disclosed
is certainly startling. Never before has so large an
extension of the suffrage been accomplished without
Parliamentary discussion. In a good many boroughs
it will amount to little short of manhood suffrage,
for the ordinary " lodger " of the lower class occu-
pies a room or two quite independently of his nominal
landlord, and his room must, therefore, be regarded
as "separately occupied as a dwelling." Separate
occupation of a dwelling is a very vague term indeed;
the occupier of a single room, if he does " for him-
self and makes himself no part of the common house-
hold, is no longer a lodger, but a householder, for
' the purpose of the Parliamentary franchise. In
St. Pancras alone, where the interpretation of the
Act now judicially authorised was acted upon at the
last registration' the number of persons placed on the
list for parts of houses and whose names are not to
be found in the Eatebook amounted to 10,848,
whereas the number of claims allowed to lodgers was
only 854. In other words, the number of new voters
added to the list in a single metropolitan parish
amounts to over 10,0 A, and not one of these is directly
rated to the poor or is more thaa constructively a
householder as separately occupying a part of a tene-
ment. It is obvious that a formidable difficulty will
arise in future in preparing the register of voters, in-
asmuch as the Rate-books will be no longer a suffi-
cient basis to work upon. The registration officers
will be forced to make a new list for therm elves
supplementary to the Ratebook in order to give
the new householders their franchise. Surely, never
before was a vast political change accomplished
so silently and so inadvertently. As every man
must live somewhere' so long as he keeps out of the
workhouse, and as the nearer he approaches to posi-
tive destitution the more certain he is to be a house-
holder under the new definition rather than a lodger,
the old restriction on the lodger franchise is practi-
cally swept away. The lodger in his political capa-
city is virtually aunihilatel, an the suffrage iii
boroughs becomes a manhood suffrage limited only by
a certain permanence of domicile. When the county
franchise is assimillated to that in boroughs the same
result will inevitably follow, and thus the whole of
the " residuum " will be swept into the net of regis-
tration