The Sun.
London, England, 1859-03-24 00:00:00

THE REFORM BILL.

When the Tory aristocracy assume that the
middle classes are ready to respond to their call, and
prepared to make common cause with them against
any real extension of the suffrage, they reckon with-
out their host. It may, indeed, be true that a cer-
tain superficial section of the middle classes, ren-
dered selfish by excessive wealth, and subservient by
occasional contact with those who are socially above
them, would rally to the standard of resistance, and
abuse the opulence and influence acquired in com-
merce or in trade to thwart the enfranchisement of
laborious industry. And it may be true that scat-
tered up and down a land so populous and indus-
triously diversified as ours, individuals, or even
groups of individuals, may be found needy or mean
enough to lend themselves to the work of faction
at the bidding of those whose motives they do not
pause to scan, and whom they are accustomed, with-
out well knowing why, to call "their betters."
But the thoughtful, intelligent, enterprising, self-
reliant bulk of the middle classes are no more to be
wheedled or bullied into joining a crusade against
the working population, as such, than they are to be
caught by the fluttering ribands of a recruiting
sergeant, or captivated by his drum and fife. Enlist-
ment, whether for political or military service, is
not a popular word in their vocabulary. They have
not been brought up to wear any man's badge, and
nothing but the manifest sense of national danger
would reconcile any large proportion of them to don
even for a day the Queen's livery. To be crimped,
and drilled, and told to march at the bidding of a
churlish, over-reaching, and bigoted oligarchy
against the mass of their neighbours, customers,
clients, and working hands is just about the last
thing in the whole world that they could be per-
suaded to do. Their strongest interests and their
best feelings, their most venerated traditions and
their deepest prejudices, concur to render them in-
vincibly averse to any proceeding of the kind ; and
should the experiment be practically tried the result
will signally verify what we say.
The middle classes, to whom electoral power was
given by the Reform Act of 1832, are not, indeed,
exempt from the consciousness or love of power.
But the love that makes us jealous and tempts us to
be unjust must be associated with a vivid perception
of the value of what we prize, or a vivid realisation
of the fact that we either do or may exclusively
possess it. And if the present House of Commons
were really chosen equally and fairly by electoral
circles of Ten Pound Householders, so that every
man amongst them should be made practically to
feel that he exercised a certain and definite con-
trolling power over the most potent assembly in
the world, we might perhaps entertain a fear lest a
grudging spirit should render them unwilling to
enlarge their numbers, and so diminish their collec-
tive and individual influence. But it is admitted
on all hands that no such state of facts has any
existence. One-third of the members of the House
of Commons are confessedly appointed and sent
thither by members of the House of Lords. Another
third are returned, some by their own influence as
landed proprietors, some by their money as jobbers,
and some by a combination of influences in which
the free and independent suffrages of the few Ten
Pound electors that vote in the various small
boroughs is decidedly the least important. We fear
we are far exceeding the mark if we say, for argu-
ment sake, that the remainder of the 220 are
returned bona fide by majorities consisting of
middle-class men. It would puzzle us exceedingly
to name anything like that number of gentlemen
in the present Parliament who we could honestly
say we believed had been so returned. So that
instead of the present electoral class possessing, or
fancying that they possess, that predominant power
in the State which her Majesty's Ministers would
fain cajole them into fancying they do, they are not
after all able to hold their own, or anything like
their own, with the greedy and grasping few, who,
now that their political craft is in danger, modestly
call on the Ten Pound electors to make common
cause with them in defending it.
Common cause ! There is none, and they know
it ; and so do we. There is not a borough in England,
Ireland, or Scotland whose representation during
the last five-and-twenty years the aristocracy could
filch from the middle class, that they have not
recklessly seized and used as their own : and as
for the counties, Lord Derby himself has put
upon record the impudent declaration that if you
but tell him to which West-end Club most of the
large landowners belong, he can tell you unerringly
who are the members. Had oligarchy kept up the
semblance of justice or fair dealing with the
electoral body, it might now with a better grace
call on that body to come to the rescue of its