Karl Marx

Neue Oder-Zeitung.  
No. 261, 8 June 1855. A  
Mittagblatt

X. London, 5 June. (The Administrative Reform Association) has won a victory in Bath. Its candidate, Mr Tite, has been elected member of parliament by a large majority against the Tory candidate. This victory, gained on the terrain of the “legal” country, is today being celebrated by the liberal papers as a great event. The bulletins on the “poll” are published with no less ostentation than the bulletins on the bloodless successes in the Sea of Azov. Bath and Kerch! is the order of the day. What the press conceals, reform papers as well as anti-reform papers, ministerial and opposition, Tories, Whigs and Radicals, are the defeats and disappointments that the Administrative Reform Association has experienced in recent days, in London, in Birmingham and in Worcester. To be sure, the struggle this time did not take place on the measured terrain of a privileged electoral body. Yet its results were suited to elicit a cry of triumph on the part of the opponents of the City reformers. The first really public meeting (i.e., meeting without admission tickets) that the Reform Association held in London took place last Wednesday in Marylebone. Against the resolutions of the City reformers a Chartist moved the amendment “that the moneyed aristocracy represented by the City men was just as bad as the landed aristocracy; that under the pretext of reforms it only sought to climb onto the backs of the people into Downing Street, there to share offices, salaries and dignities with the oligarchs; that the Charter with its 5 points was the sole programme of the popular movement”. The chairman of the meeting, one of the City illuminati, raised a series of scruples, first, whether he should put the amendment to the vote at all, then, whether he should first vote on the resolution or the amendment, and finally, how he should put it to the vote. The audience, weary of his indecisiveness, tactical considerations and unpopular manoeuvres, declared him incapable of further presiding, called Ernest Jones to the chair in his stead, and then voted with an immense majority against the resolution and for the amendment. In Birmingham the City association had organised a public meeting in the Town Hall under the chairmanship of the Mayor. Against its resolution a similar amendment was moved as in London. The Mayor, however, definitively refused to put the amendment to the vote unless the word “Charter” were replaced by a less offensive one. Or he would leave the chair. The word “Charter” was therefore substituted by: “Universal suffrage and voting by ballot”. In this altered version the amendment passed with a majority of 10 votes. In Worcester, where the City reformers organised a public meeting, the victory of the Chartists and the defeat of the Administrative reformers was even more complete. The “Charter” was there proclaimed without further ado. The highly embarrassing success of these three large meetings in London, Birmingham and Worcester has determined the Administrative men to have petitions circulated for signature among sympathisers in all larger and more populous towns, instead of public appeals to the vox populi. The manifold connections of the City notabilities with the merchant lords in the United Kingdom, and the influence of these lords over the clerks, warehousemen and “smaller” trading friends, will undoubtedly enable them, quite quietly behind the back of the world, to fill these petitions with names and then send them to the “Honourable House” with the label: Voice of the people of England. Their error consists only in the moment when they think to intimidate the government with such begged-together, intrigue-ridden, sneaked-together signatures. The government has seen with ironic self-satisfaction how the Administrative people have been hissed off the theatrum mundi. Its organs remain silent for the time being, partly because they would otherwise have to register the successes of Chartism, partly because the ruling class is already toying with the idea of placing itself at the head of the “Administrative” movement, should the popular movement become importunate. They reserve a “misunderstanding” for the moment of such danger: the misunderstanding of one day looking upon the Administrative people as the spokesmen of the masses. Such misunderstandings form the chief joke of the “historical” development of England and nobody is more familiar with their handling than the liberal Whigs.

The Charter is a very laconic document and contains, apart from the demand for universal suffrage, only the following 5 points, as many conditions for its exercise: 1) Voting by ballot (balloting); 2) No property qualification for members of parliament; 3) Payment of members of parliament; 4) Annual parliaments; 5) Equal electoral districts. After the experiments that undermined universal suffrage in France in 1848, Continentals are easily inclined to underestimate the importance and significance of the English Charter. They overlook that in France society consists of ²/₃ peasants and over ¹/₃ townspeople, while in England more than ²/₃ live in the towns and less than ¹/₃ in the country. In England, the results of universal suffrage must therefore stand in the same inverse proportion to its results in France as town and country in the two realms. From this is explained the diametrically opposite character that the demand for universal suffrage has assumed in France and England. There it was the demand of the political ideologists, in which every “educated” person could take part more or less, according to his convictions. Here it forms the broad dividing line between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one side, and the popular classes on the other. There it counts as a political question, here as a social question. In England, the agitation for universal suffrage passed through a historical development before it became the shibboleth of the mass. In France it was first introduced and then began its historical course. In France the practice, in England the ideology of universal suffrage failed. In the first decades of this century, with Sir Francis Burdett, with Major Cartwright, with Cobbett, universal suffrage still had the entirely indeterminate idealistic character that made it the pious wish of all parts of the population who did not belong directly to the ruling classes. For the bourgeoisie it was in fact only an eccentric generalising expression for what it had attained in the parliamentary reform of 1831. After 1838 the demand for universal suffrage in England did not yet assume its real, specific character. Proof: Hume and O’Connell were co-signatories of the Charter. In 1842 the last illusions vanished. Lovett then made a final, but vain attempt to formulate universal suffrage as the common demand of the so-called Radicals and the popular masses. Since that moment there exists no further doubt about the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor about its name. It is the Charter of the popular classes and means appropriation of political power as a means to the realisation of their social needs. Universal suffrage, in France in 1848 the watchword of universal fraternisation, is therefore understood in England as a war cry. There the immediate content of the revolution was universal suffrage; here the immediate content of universal suffrage is the revolution. If one runs through the history of universal suffrage in England, one will find that it strips off its idealistic character in the same measure as modern society develops here with its infinite antagonisms, antagonisms such as the progress of industry engenders.

Alongside the wholly and semi-official parties, as alongside the Chartists, there still makes itself noticeable in England a clique of “wise men”, equally dissatisfied with the government and the ruling classes as with the Chartists. What do the Chartists want? they exclaim. To raise and extend parliamentary omnipotence by elevating it to popular power. They do not break parliamentarism, they raise it to a higher power. The true thing is to break the representative system! A wise man from the East, David Urquhart, stands at the head of this clique. David wants to return to the common law of England. He wants to push statute law back within its limits. He wants to localise, instead of centralise. He wants to dig up “the old genuine legal sources of Anglo-Saxon times” from the rubble. Then they will spring up of themselves and water and fertilise the surrounding land. But David is at least consistent. David also wants to lead back the modern division of labour and the concentration of capital to the old Anglo-Saxon, or rather oriental, stage. A born Highlander of Scotland, an adopted Circassian and Turk by free choice, he is capable of condemning civilisation with all its boils and from time to time even of passing judgement on it. But he is not insipid, like the Sublime ones who separate modern state forms from modern society, who fable about local independence together with concentration of capitals, about individual uniqueness together with anti-individualising division of labour. David is a backward-looking prophet, antiquarianly enraptured at the sight of Old England. He must therefore find it in order that New England passes by and leaves him standing there, as urgently convinced as he may call out: “David Urquhart is the only man who can save you!” Thus only a few days ago at a meeting in Stafford.