Karl Marx

The New British Reform Bill

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" Nr. 5586 vom 17. März 1859]

London, 1 March 1859

On the evening of February 28, Mr. Disraeli initiated the House of Commons into the secrets of the government’s Reform Bill. By reason of the reduction of the electoral qualification in the counties from £50 to £10, this bill can be briefly characterised as Mr. Locke King’s bill, moderated by the withdrawal of the franchise from the 40-shilling freeholders residing in towns, so far as their voting in the counties is concerned, and embellished by a complicated hotchpotch of arbitrary electoral titles, which on the one hand are altogether null and void and on the other would merely strengthen existing class monopolies. Questions so important as the inclusion of the majority of the people within the franchise, the equalisation of electoral districts, and the protection of the voter by secret ballot have not been touched upon at all. How accurate my characterisation of the bill is can be gathered from the following summary of its essential details: The franchise based on rental value is to be reduced to a uniform standard for the counties and the boroughs; that is to say, in other words, the Chandos clause of the Reform Bill of 1832, which gave the franchise in the counties only to tenants paying at least £50 rent, is to be abolished. The franchise based on rental value is to be extended to every kind of landed property, whether or not a house belongs to the property. The introduction of the £10 qualification for the franchise in the counties would, according to Mr. Newmarch’s calculation, increase the number of electors in the counties by 103,000, while Mr. Disraeli estimates that the electorate in the counties will increase by 200,000 votes. On the other hand, the 40-shilling freeholder franchise was nominally to remain on its former basis, but the 40-shilling freeholders who live in towns and have hitherto exercised their franchise on the strength of their property in the counties would lose this privilege and be compelled to cast their vote in the boroughs in which they reside. In this way about 100,000 votes would be transferred from the counties to the boroughs, while about 40,000 or even more such electors, not resident in the counties, would be altogether stripped of their franchise. That is the kernel of the new plan. It would take away from the county electorate with one hand what it gives with the other, and would take care that all influence of the towns, which they have exercised in the county elections since the Reform Bill of 1832 by the purchase of 40-shilling freeholds, is eliminated.

Mr. Disraeli, when introducing the bill, endeavoured to show in a long speech that in the last fifteen years so many 40-shilling freeholds had been created by townspeople that the number of electors in the county constituencies who do not reside in the county now exceeds the number of those who vote under the rental clause, so that on polling day “some large towns poured their multitudes by railway into the country and, through certain arrangements made in town, outvoted the persons who live in the counties.”

To this statement of the country gentleman, Mr. Bright gave the following striking reply:

“Your object is to make the county constituencies more exclusive. You seem to fear nothing so much as a good electorate, especially in the counties. It is a very remarkable fact that in a large part of England for a considerable time the electorate in the county constituencies has not increased, but in many of them it has diminished. Mr. Newmarch has shown that there are eleven county constituencies in which, in the period of fifteen years from 1837 to 1852, the electorate decreased by not less than 2,000 electors; altogether the electorate of the county constituencies of England and Wales increased in those fifteen years by only 36,000, of which more than 17,000 fell to Lancashire, Cheshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the rest of England the difficulties of buying freehold land, and the extent to which the tenant farms are becoming larger, are such that the electorate of almost all the county constituencies has remained the same or has positively declined.”

If we now pass from the counties to the boroughs, we come to the new arbitrary electoral franchises, which derive partly from Lord John Russell’s abortive drafts of 1852 and 1854, and partly from the genius who hatched the intricate perplexities of Lord Ellenborough’s ill-fated India Bill. First, there are some so-called educational franchises, which, as Mr. Disraeli ironically remarked, independent of scientific knowledge, assume that a “considerable capital has been invested” in the education of the classes concerned, and that these can therefore be counted among the general category of property franchises. The franchise is accordingly to be conferred on university graduates, the clergy of the Anglican Church, ministers of all other religions, barristers, advocates and notaries, attorneys and proctors, doctors, schoolmasters with a certificate of qualification, in a word, on the members of the different professions or, as the French used to call them in the time of Mr. Guizot, the “capacities”. Since the greater part of these “capacities” already possess the franchise as £10 leaseholders, it is to be supposed that the number of electors would not be noticeably increased thereby, but clerical influence would be.

Other new franchises are provided for: 1. lodgers or occupiers of any house, furnished or unfurnished, that brings in a rent of 8s. a week or £20 a year; 2. persons who, by investment of personal property in government securities or annuities, East India Company stock or bank stock, derive an annual income of £20, or who receive a pension or a retiring allowance of £20 per annum for services performed in any department of the army, navy, or civil service and are no longer employed therein; 3. holders of a deposit of £60 in a savings bank.

At first glance it is evident that all these new franchises, while admitting some new sections of the middle class, have been devised with the express purpose of excluding the working class and keeping them in their present state of political “pariahs”, as Mr. Disraeli indiscreetly called the non-electors.

It may be regarded as a new feature of the opposition raised in the House of Commons that all the opponents of the Ministry, from Mr. John Bright to Lord John Russell, laid particular stress on this point as the most reprehensible provision of the new Reform Bill. Mr. Disraeli himself stated,

“when the Reform Bill was introduced in 1831, the universally acknowledged object was thereby to give the middle classes of England a legitimate position in the legislature.”

“Well, Sir,” said Lord John Russell, “when I abandoned the principle of finality, I did so for the reason which seemed to me the only one for interfering with so comprehensive and complicated a settlement as this, namely, the fact that a large body of persons were excluded, and that these persons belonged to the working classes of this country, who are very well able to exercise the franchise.”

“The Bill of 1832,” said Mr. Roebuck, “was intended to give the middle class influence. Without the working classes no Reform Bill would have been carried at that time. They conducted themselves in a manner which I shall never forget, and which the middle classes of England ought not to forget. And I now appeal, in the name of the working classes of this country, to the middle classes.”

“I,” said Mr. Bright, “should despise the working classes of this country utterly, nay, not only despise them, but abandon all hope for them, if I thought they would be content with such an exclusion.”

The exclusion of the working class, coupled with the disfranchisement in the county constituencies of the townsmen who possess freeholds there – that is the battle-cry under which the new Reform Bill and its authors are attacked, at a time when the dissension in the ministerial camp, provoked by the proposed abolition of the Chandos clause and already made manifest by the resignation of Messrs. Walpole and Henley from the Cabinet, in no way contributes to strengthen the government’s capacity for defence.

As for the other clauses of the bill, they are comparatively unimportant. No constituency that has hitherto returned a member is to lose that right, but 15 new parliamentary seats are to be created, of which the West Riding of Yorkshire will receive 4, South Lancashire 2, and Middlesex 2, while 7 new members can be returned by the following towns, which have lately greatly increased in size: Hartlepool, Birkenhead, West Bromwich and Wednesbury jointly, Burnley, Stalybridge, Croydon, and Gravesend. In order to make room for these additional members of Parliament, 15 constituencies whose population is less than 6,000 are to be represented in the House of Commons by only one member instead of by two members each. These, then, are the forms in which the “equalisation” of the electoral districts is to be carried out.

Polling places are to be established in every parish or in groups of parishes comprising not less than 200 electors: the additional polling places are to be provided at the expense of the county constituencies. As a sort of compromise with the advocates of the secret ballot, it is provided that an elector who does not wish to give his vote publicly may have recourse to a voting paper. This paper will be sent to the elector on request, signed by the same in the presence of two witnesses, of whom one must be a householder, and returned to the returning officer in a registered letter. The letter will then be opened on polling day by a person specially authorised for the purpose. Finally, some improvements are to be introduced with regard to the registration of electors in the county constituencies.

There is not a single London newspaper, with the exception of *The Times* and the government organ, that accords this bill any prospect of success.