London, June 5. The Association for Administrative Reform '* 
has gained a victory in Bath. Its candidate, Mr. Tite, has been 
elected a Member of Parliament by a large majority against the 
Tory candidate.* This victory, gained on the territory of its 
“legal” country, is being celebrated as a great event by today’s 
Liberal papers. Bulletins about the poll? are being published with 
no less ostentation than those about the bloodless successes on the 
Sea of Azov. Bath and Kerch! is the motto of the day. But the 
press—pro-reform and anti-reform, Ministerial, Opposition, Tory, 
Whig and Radical papers alike—says nothing about the defeats 
and disappointments which the Association for Administrative 
Reform has suffered in the last few days in London, Birmingham 
and Worcester. To be sure, this time the battle was not fought on 
the well defined territory of a privileged electoral body. Nor were 
its results such as to draw cries of triumph from the opponents of 
the City reformers. 

The first truly public meeting (i.e., one without admission tickets) 
which the Reform Association held in London took place in 
Marylebone last Wednesday.‘ One of the Chartists* countered the 
resolutions of the City reformers by moving the amendment 

“that the money aristocracy represented by the City men is as bad as the landed 
aristocracy; that, under the pretext of reform, it merely wants to climb, on the 
shoulders of the people, into Downing Street, and there to share offices, salaries 

* Q. C. Whateley.— Ed. 
> Marx uses the English word.— Ed. 
“ May 30, 1855. A report on the meeting was published in The People’s Paper, 
No., 161, June 2, 1855.— Ed. 
M’Dickey.— Ed. 

The Association for Administrative Reform 24] 

and ranks with the oligarchs; that the Charter with its five points is the onlv 
programme of the people’s movement”. 

The chairman of the meeting,’ one of the City illuminati, voiced 
a number of misgivings, first, whether he should put the 
amendment to the vote at all, then, whether he should first take a 
vote on the resolution or on the amendment, and lastly, how he 
should take the vote. The audience, being tired of his indecision, 
tactical considerations and troublesome manoeuvres, declared him 
incapable of presiding further, called on Ernest Jones to replace 
him in the chair, and voted by a vast majority against the 
resolution and for the amendment. In Birmingham, the City 
Association called a public meeting in the Town Hall with the 
Mayor in the chair.” The resolution proposed by the Association 
was countered by an amendment similar to that moved in London. 
The Mayor, however, flatly refused to put the amendment to the 
vote unless the word “Charter” was replaced by a less objection- 
able one. If not, he would withdraw from the chair, he said. The 
word “Charter’ was therefore replaced by “universal suffrage and 
voting by ballot”. Thus edited, the amendment was passed by a 
majority of 10 votes. In Worcester, where the City reformers held a 
public meeting, the victory of the Chartists and the defeat of the 
Administrative Reformers were even more complete. There the 
Charter was proclaimed without more ado.‘ 

The extremely embarrassing success of these large meetings in 
London, Birmingham and Worcester decided the Administrative 
Reformers to circulate in all the bigger and more populous towns 
petitions to be signed by people holding similar views, rather than 
to make public appeals to the vox populi. The City notables’ 
manifold links with businessmen in the United Kingdom, and the 
influence these gentlemen exert upon their clerks, warehousemen * 
and “minor” commercial friends will no doubt enable them to fill 
the petitions with names very quietly, behind the back of the 
public, and then to send them to the “Honourable House” with 
the label, Voice of the People of England. But they are mistaken if 
they think they can intimidate the Government with signatures 
collected by cadging, intrigue and _ stealth. The Government 
observed with ironical self-satisfaction that the Administrative 

* H. Farrer.— Ed. 
> The meeting was held on May 21, 1855. A report on it was published in The 
People’s Paper, No. 160, May 26, 1855.— Ed. 
“ The meeting was held at the end of May. A report on it appeared in The 
Heoples Paper, No. 161, June 2, 1855.— Ed. 
4 Marx uses the English word.— Ed. 

Reformers were hissed out of the theatrum mundi. Its organs are 
silent for the time being, partly because they would otherwise have 
to register the successes of Chartism, and partly because the ruling 
class is already toying with the idea of putting itself at the head of 
the Administrative Reformers should the people’s movement 
become importunate. They keep a “misunderstanding” in reserve 
should this danger set in: a misunderstanding allowing them 
sometime in the future to regard the Administrative Reformers as 
the spokesmen of the masses. Such misunderstandings are an 
essential element of England’s “historical’’ development, and no 
one is more familiar with handling them than the free-thinking 
Whigs. 

The Charter is a very laconic document; besides the demand for 
universal suffrage, it contains only the following five points, which 
are all prerequisites for exercising it: 1) vote by ballot; 2) no 
property qualifications for Members of Parliament; 3) payment of 
Members of Parliament; 4) annual Parliaments; 5) equal electoral 
districts. After the experiments which undermined universal 
suffrage in France in 1848,'*' the continentals are prone to 
underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter. 
They overlook the fact that two-thirds of the population of France 
are peasants and over one-third townspeople, whereas in England 
more than two-thirds live in towns and less than one-third in the 
countryside. Hence the results of universal suffrage in England 
must likewise be in inverse proportion to the results in France, just 
as town and country are in the two states. This explains the 
diametrically opposite character which the demand for universal 
suffrage has assumed in France and England. In France the 
political ideologists put forward this demand, which every 
“educated” person could support to a greater or lesser extent, 
depending on his convictions. In England it is a distinguishing 
feature roughly separating the aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the 
one hand, and the people, on the other. There it is regarded as a 
political question and here, as a social one. In England agitation 
for universal suffrage had gone through a period of historical 
development before it became the slogan of the masses. In France, 
it was first introduced and then started on its historical path. In 
France it was the practice of universal suffrage that failed, whereas 
in England it was its ideology. In the early decades of this century, 
universal suffrage as propounded by Sir Francis Burdett, Major 
Cartwright and Cobbett was still a very vague and _ idealistic 
concept, so that it could become the pious wish of all sections of 
the population that did not belong directly to the ruling classes. 

The Association for Administrative Reform 243 

For the bourgeoisie, it was in fact simply an eccentric, generalised 
expression of what it had attained through the parliamentary 
reform of 1831. In England the demand for universal suffrage 
did not assume its concrete, specific character even after 1838. 
Proof: Hume and O’Connell were among those who signed the 
Charter. The last illusions disappeared in 1842. At that time 
Lovett made a last but futile attempt to formulate universal 
suffrage as a common demand of what are known as Radicals and 
the masses of the people. Since that day there has no longer 
been any doubt about the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor 
about its name. It is the Charter of the people and implies the 
assumption of political power as a means of satisfying their social 
needs. Universal suffrage, which was regarded as the motto of 
universal brotherhood in the France of 1848, has become a battle 
cry ii England. There universal suffrage was the direct content of 
the revolution; here, revolution is the direct content of universal 
suffrage. An examination of the history of universal suffrage in 
England will show that it casts off its idealistic features at the same 
rate as modern society with its immense contradictions develops in 
this country, contradictions that are produced by industrial 
progress. 

Alongside the official and semi-official parties, as well as 
alongside the Chartists, there is another clique of “wise men” 
emerging in England, who are discontented with the Government 
and the ruling classes as much as with the Chartists. What do the 
Chartists want? they exclaim. They want to increase and extend 
the omnipotence of Parliament by elevating it to democratic power. 
They are not breaking up parliamentarism but are raising it to a 
higher power. The right thing to do is to break up the 
representative system! A wise man from the East, David Urquhart, 
heads that clique. He wants to revert to England’s Common Law. 
He wants to squeeze Statute Law’ back into its bounds. He wants 
to localise rather than centralise. He wants to unearth “the true 
old legal sources of Anglo-Saxon times” from the rubbish. Then 
they will gush forth of themselves and will water and fertilise the 
surrounding country. But David is at least consistent. He also 
wants to reduce modern division of labour and concentration of 
capital to the 6ld Anglo-Saxon level or, preferably, to that of the 
Orient. A Highlander by birth, an adoptive Circassian and a Turk 
by free choice, he is able to condemn civilisation with all its evils, 

* Marx uses the English terms “Common Law” and “Statute Law” and explains 
their meaning in German in brackets.— Ed. 

and even to evaluate it from time to time. But he is not trite like 
the men with lofty ideas who separate the modern political forms 
from modern society, and who prattle about local autonomy 
combined with concentration of capital, and about the uniqueness 
of the individual combined with the anti-individualising division of 
labour. David is a prophet who looks backwards, and is in an 
old-fashioned way enraptured by old England. He must therefore 
consider it quite all right that new England passes him by and 
leaves him behind, however urgent and persuasive he may be 
exclaiming: “David Urquhart is the only man who can save you!” 
As he did only a few days ago, at a meeting in Stafford.