Karl Marx

[Joseph] Hume

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 98 of February 28, 1855]

London, February 24. In Hume, the veteran of the House of Commons has died. His long parliamentary life is an accurate barometer of the bourgeois-radical party, which stood at its peak in 1831. In the early period of the Reformed House, a kind of parliamentary Warwick or deputy-maker, he figured eight years later, together with Daniel O’Connell and Feargus O’Connor, as one of the originators of the “People’s Charter”, which still today forms the political programme of the Chartists and basically contains nothing but the demand for
universal suffrage
, together with the conditions that would make it a reality in England.

The break that soon followed between the workers and the bourgeois agitators found Hume on the side of the latter. At the time of the Russell ministry, he drafted the “Little Charter” adopted as a programme by the so-called “parliamentary and financial reformers”. Instead of the six points of the People’s Charter, it contains three points and puts in the place of “universal” a more or less “extended” suffrage. Finally, in 1852, Hume proclaimed a new programme, in which he renounced even his “Little Charter” and demanded only one point – voting by balls (ballot). For the rest, Hume was the classic representative of the so-called “independent” opposition, which Cobbett has aptly and exhaustively characterised as the “safety valve” of the old system. In his last days, the habit of introducing motions and then withdrawing them again before the closing of the doors at a wink from the ministers had become a veritable mania with him. His coquetry with the “economy of public money” has become proverbial. All ministries allowed him to fight and reduce small items, in order to get the large ones through the House all the more unscathed.