The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-18 00:00:00

class of the people, should be admitted to the Parlia-
mentary franchise. I understand that in Bradford
there are many gentlemen in favour of household
suffrage. I confess lam not able to discover any
real difference between the two propositions, and I
would not ask anybody who was in favour of house-
hold suffrage to go with me for a rating suffrage ;
but I will go with the greatest pleasure with him
for the household suffrage which he prefers—the
only difference, if it can be called such, which I can
discern, seems to be in favour of the proposal which
I value. A household suffrage would exclude every
person who did not himself occupy a dwelling house,
although he might have a warehouse, an office, or a
manufactory, and, measured by wealth, be a much
more important member of society than many of
those who are householders. I presume that the
advocates of household suffrage do not wish
to exclude from the franchise the occupier of one of
yoiuthr
hisw friendsarelouses,aaoldthhoiurngsholhf enot
be a householder.
may happen to live
w
as said before, to take the
and the late Earl Grey
.)
proposed in 1 4
franchiseCheerswhich ha ie, m
h97lt
willing,
which Lord Lord Durham proposed at
oinof
tlhBe32l a
st , and6o whichyears hasal-
the time
every of
e
advocated. I believe that if such a franchise were
leading Reform
Bill
reformer
established there would be felt throughout the
kingdom a consciousness which nothing could dis-
turb, that so far as that matter at least went Par-
liament had done full justice to all classes of the
people. (Cheers.) Any provision making it easy for
persons wishing to have a vote to procure admit-
tance to the franchise I should be perfectly willing
to see superadded, as I am satisfied that there will
not be among a large portion of those who are now
enfranchised a full contentment with any measure
which shall deal pusillanimously with a distinction,
be it a privilege or a right, which must ever be very
dear to the citizens of a free country. But I am
told by a considerable authority in this country
that danger would arise from so large an extension
of the franchise. The actual extension may be
briefly
.stated, and I believe that in certain boroughs,
where it happens that the working classes form an
unusually large proportion of the population, the
number of voters would be increased threefold—
where. there are 1,000 electors there would be 3,000.
But.
in a great many other boroughs--in fact, I be-
lieve in all those which are not chiefly manufactur-
ing, the number of voters wouldn't be more than
doubled; and, taking the whole of the boroughs of
the kingdom together, I am inclined to think that
the average wouldn't reach, or at all events exceed
two and a-half times the present number of electors.
It may be said, however, that even that is a serious
increase, and " Who knows what the new voters
will do ?" Who, indeed ? (A laugh.) lam quite
certain there are some men returned to Parliament
who would have to revise the tariff of their opinions,
or they would not be likely to go there again. (A
laugh and cheers.) There are others whom, per-
haps,it would be desirable to have in Parliament,
who would doubtless find their positions changed
lin an election ; but I conceive that, as a rule, the
new constituencies would be actuated by precisely
the same motives which sway the present consti-
tuencies. (Hear.) Do you fear that you would
have violence in your streets ? You may have heard,
for I have told the story before, that when it was
proposed to confer two members upon Leeds and to
establish a £lO franchise, a banker declared that it
would be no longer safe to have a bank in that
town, and that if the proposal were carried out he
would be obliged to• remove his establishment—l
presume to Knaresborough, or some other similar
place. (A laugh.) All the talk of violence and
turbulence by men who possess votes arises from
an ignorance that is positively incomprehensible.
I always thought that a vote was a symbol of moral
as opposed to physical force. (Cheers.) I always
imagined that when a member was entitled to re-
cord his vote in favour of a particular candidate
the idea of violence vanished from his mind, and
the club dropped, as it were, from his helpless
hands. (Cheers.) How is the franchise exercised
at the present moment ? Some persons vote for a
candidate because they agree in opinion upon some
pet subject, or perhaps because they are pretty
much of one mind as to affairs generally ; but there
are many others who vote because somebody else
votes in favour of a man who in the opinion of both
is a very good, respectable gentleman, who may be
trusted as a member of Parliament. It is not neces-
sary that an elector should be profoundly versed in
history or positively incomprehensible in finance—
(a laugh)—but it is necessary that he should pos-
sess an average amount of common sense, in order
that he may be able to form a moderately just
opinion of the character of the man who solicits
his suffrage as well as of the party by whom he is
supported. (Hear, hear.) But I am told that
the new voters will swamp the present consti-
tuencies. I received a letter the other day from
a friend in London, a most intelligent man, who
said, " I understand that they are getting
up a notion or fear that your franchise would
swamp the shopkeepers, and the shopkeepers are
turning against you ; " but what did they say in
1832 ? Why, they said that you ought to give the
franchise to the shopkeepers because the shop-
keepers would swamp somebody else. I don't be-
lieve that the bakers, the grocers, and various other
shopkeepers in Bradford, or in any town in England,
ever conspired for the purpose of swamping the
men of large capital, such as the great merchants,
manufacturers, and so forth ; andif you go lower in
the scale of wealth you come to men of the same
flesh and blood, the same interest, the same families,
the same hopes, the same fears, who read the same
newspapers and learn the same facts. What would
they do ? They would be acted upon precisely like
those above them, some going one way, some an-
other, and you would find the working men of this
town or of any other, just as much broken up into
all the sections that arise at an election as any
other class. You are, perhaps, not aware
that nearly one-third of the whole of the
present constituencies in the boroughs enfran-
chised by the Reform Act are occupiers of between
£l5 and under £25 yearly rent—that is to say,
between £lO and £25, far more than half of the
constituencies are to be found, and yet the men
under £25 have never done anything to swamp
those above £25, and when the franchise comes
down to £5, or to household or a rating suffrage, I
believe that any such danger will prove thoroughly
chimerical and absurd as it has done under the fran-
chise established by the last Reform Act. So much
as to that point. There is the question of the fran-
chise for the counties, on which I should wish to say
merely a senteuce. The county franchise has hitherto
always been of what is termed a more Conservative
or select kind than that of the boroughs. It was
before the Reform Bill a franchise based on the
,ownership of land ; the Conservative and landlord
party broke in upon that principle by establishing
a franchise based on a £5O occupancy. It has
now been proposed for many years to bring
down the franchise in the counties on the
same level as it now stands upon in the towns.
That, I think, is the opinion of the majority of the
present House of Commons. I :believe it meets
with a large amount of acceptance throughout
both the boroughs and counties of the kingdom;
and as I have no intention whatever of advocating
or proposing a measure which is far in advance of
public opinion, but rather going along with and
acting in harmony with that opinion, I shall be
perfectly satisfied, with regard to the county fran-
chise now, to see the £lO franchise established in
all the counties of the country. Now when all
these men get their votes by law it becomes a
question of interest to know whether they shall
proceed to the exercise of their right as we have
done in past times, and up till now, or whether
they shall have whatever security, whatever shelter
from influence and front menace, can be afforded by
the adoption of vote by ballot. (Hear, hear.) In
almost every country in the world, where a repre-
sentative system exists, the ballot is the mode of
voting that is practised. I remember reading in the
work of some historian of I believ the United States,
andlalughhor willthnaotbofrdeyedom depends b:aelnadrsm::epdonatrtehpirserseenf
reference
representative e
(a
institutions, and the freedom of in-
stitutions depends upon the ballot. (Cheers.) The
rich generally, though some of them certainly are
not very courageous—(a laugh)—do notl need, and
;l
essential to
do not ask for, the ballot, but almost
those who
are not rich regard it as absolute]
enable them honestly to perform their public duty
in giving their votes at the poll. (Cheers.) I would
rather take the opinion of th.osewho feel the neces-
sity for the ballot than I would take thatarn satisfied
of those to
whom it must ever be unessential
from no little experience during the I
last 20 3earssh ined
parliamentary elections, that I should be conferring
no advantage whatever upon my fellow-countrymen
who are now un enfranchised if I could give themthe
vote without giving them with it the protection of
the ballot. (Hear.) I have not the smallest doubt of
the passing of the ballot within a short period.
Cheers.) Th ere are nowin the House of Commons more
than 230, I forget how many more, members who have
voted for the ballot; and every election without a
Reform Bill will add to that number—and an elec-
tion with a Reform Bill, even if t were (possible
for Parliament to grant a Reform Bill without the
ballot, would add, I believe, very largely to the
number of that vote ; and I am as satisfied as one
can be of anything that has yet to come, and I be-
lieve I express only the opinion of every intelligent
man in the House of Commons when I say it, that
the ballot is at this moment almost within the
reach of the constituencies of the United Kingdom.

_ -
(Cheers.) Let us now_ step on to the ques-
tion of the 'distribution of members—a point on
which you will probably have observed that I have
never expressed myself in more than general terms
in the speeches that I have recently delivered, be-
caust it was impoggible, ae you will gee, until a lid

of the borough ofh hee census beceonnscaulrteefdulalys
gone over, and sdonihadreturns
to the population of particular towns now en-
franchised, or of towns which ought to be so.
To state anything in detail on this matter
the whole question had first to be subjected
to a most sifting and minute investigation. I was
asked on coming to Bradford if I could tell what
the Government Bill was to be. He was rather a
young politician who put that question to me. I
am not in the secrets of the Cabinet ; at the same
time I am willing to take this opportunity of stat-
ing, with perfect honesty, that no single step which
I have taken with regard to the subject has been
influenced in the slightest degree by any hostility
to the Government of Lord Derby. (Cheers.) I
know that the one party wishes its opponents to be
damaged, and that almost everything that a person
in my position may say may be construed in the
one direction or in the other, but my experience
teaches me this,—that if there is a Government
question to be carried, if a great principle is to be
passed into law, if you wish to have on your side
the Government, the heart and conscience of the
people, it is necessary that you should bid both
parties stand aside from your path, and that you
should go straight, not for party objects, but for the
great one on which your own and the national
mind is fixed. (Loud chem.) Now, there are
several ways in which the distribution of members,
if there is to be a distribution, may be treated. In
the first place, it is not exactly a mode of distri-
bution of which I am about to speak, because the
members will be left just where they are. It is
possible for the Government, or for anybody else,
to propose that all the Ethic boroughs which every-
body now admits ought not to return members to
Parliament, should still retain their right to return
them, with the addition of two or three country
parishes the population of which, added to the
population of such a little borough, should make
what would appear a sufficient constituency to
send a representative or representatives to the
House of Commons. Now, we have had some ex-
perience of this in several boroughs—viz., in the
borough of New Shoreham, I think in Sussex, the
borough of Cricklade, and the borough of East
Retford. There are several other little towns with
the grass growing in every street; a small village
here or there, with hardly a house, extending five or
six miles in one direction and as much in another;
a few farms, a few farm labourers, a wheel-
wright's shop, and soon—and all this put together
and made into a Parliamentary borough, my Lord
Somebody or Mr. Somebody, who happens to own
the land, being, in point of fact, the entire consti-
tuency: (Laughter.) We shan't give ourselves the
least trouble about the question of Reform if that
be the sort of bill that we are asked to be satisfied
with ; we had much better remain as we are ; there
is another mode of dealing with the boroughs. You
may group two or three of them together, if you
can find them within any reasonable distance, and
then you will make a constituency more numerous
than those that now exist, while you may also gain
a few members to divide among the larger towns.
But this grouping together has great disadvan-
tages. Every man who has represented a consti-
tuency consisting of several boroughs must know
that it has great disadvantages. The candidate
must have a committee in every one of them, and if
the unhappy system of employing lawyers prevail
there, he must likewise have a lawyer in each of
them—(a laugh)—and when you have taken all this
trouble and gone to all this expense you have only
bound three dead bodies together in the hope of
making a single living one out of them. (Laughter
and cheers.) There is another course still, and that
is to take a certain line and disfranchise a consi-
derable number of small boroughs, apportioning
the seats which you get from them among the
larger constituencies ; you may distribute them one-
half, three-quarters, or the whole to the number of
county members ; that I should take to be a spe-
cies of Parliamentary reform which would not be
satisfactory to the great body of Reformers in the
kingdom. (Cheers.) We know very well what
giving members to the counties means, even as
things now stand. We know such an arrangement
as that would necessarily disable the Government,
if it were so disposed, from giving members to
those great towns, the representation of which is
now so very inadequate for their population, their
property, their situation, and their general in-
fluence in the country. Now, the Reform
Bill of 1832 gave 63 seats to the boroughs, and
I think 65 to the counties, and I believe
generally from that time to this that there
has been a feeling among all those who are in favour
of reform that the Reform Bill gave too large an
influence to the counties and the landed interest in
the distribution of members which is made by it.
I wish you and your countrymen everywhere to
watch this point with the keenest eye possible--to
repudiate without mercy any bill of any Govern-
ment, whatever its franchise, whatever its seeming
concession, if it does not allot the seats obtained
from the extinction of the small boroughs mainly
among the great city and town population of the
kingthon. (Cheers.) This question of distribution
is the very soul of the question of reform. (Re-
newed cheering.) Unless you watch that you will
be deceived, and when the bill is past you may pos-
sibly turn back and lament that you are not in the
position in which you now find yourselves. (Hear.)
I have undertaken on this occasion to explain,
which I will do as briefly as I can, the mode in
which I should propose to deal with the franchise,
the extent to which it should be carried, and what
I would recommend should be done with the mem-
bers and seats obtained from the extinguished bo-
roughs. (Cheers.) The bill of 1832 laid its hand on
56 boroughs, and totally extinguished them ; these
boroughs returned 111 or 112 members. It laid its
hand on 30 other boroughs, some of which you
would not have found if you had travelled thrOugh
the country to look for them. (A laugh.) It laid its
hand on 30 other boroughs, and took one member
from each of them, and it gained two members by
the union of three or four boroughs. Altogether it
obtained 143 seats. Now, I propose to proceed on
the same principle as the Bill of 1832, but to travel
a little more. Yet I hope and believe not more than
is required by the necessities and the wishes of the
country ; by the Reform Bill of 1832 every borough
with a population under 2,000 was utterly extin-
guished, while every borough with a population
under 4,000 lost one member where it had pre-
viously returned two. In the bill which Lord J.
Russell introduced in 1854, and which as you know
did not pass, it was proposed to extinguish boroughs
whose population was under 5,000, and to take one
member from those with populations under 10,000.
We all observed lately in a journal of great emi-
nence and great influence an article suggesting
what should be done in this matter. That joumal
has not been very civil to me of late, and it has not
been very fair either. I ask nothing but fairness.
(Cheers.) The Times newspaper suggested that we
might very well go up to the line of 10,000 inhabi-
tants, and disfranchise all the boroughs below that
line, thus obtaining a considerable number of seats
to divide among the larger constituencies. Well, I
thought the measure of Lord J. Russell was not suf-
ficient. I considered it was not necessary to draw
the line as high as that recommended by the Times,
and, on looking over the list of voters, and begin-
ning with the smallest place, which is the town of
Arundel, having a population of 2,748,1 foundthat
if you come down to the limit of 8,000 inhabitants
you include the borough of Woodstock, and take in
altogether 56 boroughs, the precise number com-
prised in Schedule A of the original Reform Act.
Of the boroughs 25 return one member, and 31 re-
turn two members, and the whole schedule of these
56 boroughs includes 87 seats or more. Then there
was another point to consider—if all boroughs are
disfranchised whose population is under 8,000 where
should be the limit below which you should allow
no borough to return more than one member ? If I
am not mistaken, the same article in the Times re-
commended that boroughs of less than 25,000 inha-
bitants should not send more than one member to
Parliament. I have not exactly taken that sugges-
tion, and bear in mind that every proposition which
I have now to explain has been decided, I believe,
without reference to any of those other suggestions,
for I did not happen to see them or to know of them
at the time when they were published. I propose
to disfranchise all boroughs under 8,000 inhabitants

Then to step on to populations of 16,000, and to
say that all boroughs having less than that number
should 'henceforth only have one member. This
will yield 34 seats to be added to the other 87, and
if we add four more seats for the two corrupt
boroughs of St. Albans and Sudbury, which were
some years ago disfranchised, we shall have a
grand result, as far as England and Wales alone
are concerned, of 125 seats to dispose of.
I proposed to explain to you how these seats should
be allotted, which, after all, is the pith of the whole
question. (Hear.) There are a number of boroughs
whose populatioh is between 16,000 and 25,000,
some of which have one member, and, I think, about
12 or 13 have two members. Not wishing to make
any more change than appears to be necessary, I
propose to leave this dais of boroughs precisely as
they are. I begin, then, at the limit of. 25,000 in-
habitants, and I give to every borough having above
that amount of population, and now sending only
one member, an additional seat, until I come up to
populations of 54,000. I will read to you for they
are very few, the names of the boroughs comprised
in that list. There are 16 boroughs containing
populations between 25,000 and 54,000, and re-
turning one member each; they are Gateshead,
Walsall,. Monmouth, Chatham, South Shields,
Rochdale, Tynemouth and North Shieldi;, Ashton-
under-Lyne, Huddersfield, Leith,
Bury, Chelten-
ham, Greenock, Dudley, Swansea, and Paisley.
Now, under my plan all these place would return
two members. When I get to a population of