27 FEBRUARY 1864, Page 4

COUNTY FRANCHISES.

MR. LOCKE KING, the member for East Surrey, is a very 111 inconvenient person. He has individual convictions as well as party leanings, and an idea that action and opinion should bear at least some faint kind of relation to each other. Consequently, believing that primogeniture is in- jurious he is in the habit of proposing bills for the abolition of primogeniture, tad thinking the county suffrage too narrow he asks Parliament to extend it, and is pronounced, therefore, on all hands, an " impracticable" man. He is in truth only an honest one, who happens to be out of accord with that disposition to laissez faire which for the moment enfeebles all political action, and who, therefore, is felt as an aggressor when he is only trying to remind people who want to doze that there is work remaining for them to do. It is not a thankful office that of wakening people who have dined. In a speech of singular moderation, as full of statistics as if it had been on sugar, Mr. Locke King proposed on Tuesday to reduce the county suffrage from a fifty-pound tenancy to a ten-pound one, and to do it before the existing Parliament had been sent back to the constituencies. We do not agree with his proposal, but it is no more " dangerous" now than it was in 1859, when Lord Derby proposed a bill including the same innovation • no more inconvenient than in 1860, when Lord Palmerston promised it, introduced it, and then gave it up with an exulting vade in pace to the executioner.

Mr. Locke King's consistency is a reproach to the Ministry which attained power by a pledge to enlarge the suffrage, and then decided that the country had released it from a voluntary obligation, and it is not to him but to his proposal that we are compelled to demur. We object to a ten-pound franchise in counties on our long-accustomed ground, that the object of every Reform Bill should be to enlarge the representation and net insrely the suffrage, to include new classes and not simply greater numbers, to give to every division of English society, every form of activity, every old interest, every new growth, its fair share of direct action upon the Legis- lature. Mr. Locke King's proposal only increases the existing uniformity, simply hands over to the class which already rules in boroughs power also to rule in counties. The ten pounders, using that phrase to cover the mass of the middle class, are fully represented already, if anything, too well represented. All our foibles, and shortcomings, and illogical habits of think- ing, and prejudices, and social whims, and readiness to give up anything if convinced that it will not pay, are reflected in the House of Commons with a distinctness which but for the disturbing influence of the little seats, the nominee seats, and the seats which are filled, like Brighton, by accident or caprice, would destroy the national representation altogether. What is now wanted is not to make that reflection a little more clear, but to enlarge its field ; not to intensify, but to widen, and a five-pound franchise in boroughs, or a ten-pound one in counties would not do that, but would simply &- franchise dozens of classes now represented, to increase the existing, active, and sufficient power of a single one. We quite admit that the county franchise is absurdly high and_ought to be reduced, but there is no reason for a ten-pound limit except a lazy desire for a mischievous uniformity. Tho present limit leaves out whole classes, ex- cludes, for example, in thousands of instances, the best edu- cated men in the village, the village doctor, the well-to-do tradesman, the retired officer, everybody who cannot afford the style which in the country is represented by a rental of 50rifyear. It is absurdly unequal, also, the man who is ad- mitted near a large town where rent is high, being excluded twenty miles off where houses are in less demand. It ex- cludes, too, a most competent class, the men who used to live in cities, but now live out of them, for the sake of purer air and comparative economy. Thousands of men round Lon- don, to whom the bitterest Tory would never dream of refus- ing a vote, are thus debarred from a privilege left to the gardener who owns a couple of acres of his own. The re- introduction of this class to the franchise would just suffi- ciently correct the unhealthy uniformity of the agricultural mind, and enable the county member to represent the county instead of merely the county agriculture. But a reduction to 201. would meet all these ends without establishing a prece- dent for " treating counties and boroughs alike," and with- out placing a new mass of almost dependent voters, bailiffs, petty tradesmen, village artisans, and all to whom the favour of the local great man is important, at the disposal of the great squires. Such a reduction would increase the intelligence of the voting class, while increasing also the subdivisions of society actually represented. At the lower rate a county would be in ordinary times absolutely in the hands of its owners,—which was Lord Derby's secret idea,— and in excited times become a Marylebone, where no man of education, or property, or ideas, or refinement is ever repre- sented at all, where the greengrocer class has not a repre- sentation, which it ought to have, but the whole representation, which it ought not to have. A. borough completely filled with professional men is made to vote for ideas which pro- fessional men regard with the most outspoken disgust and annoyance, and that would be precisely the case also in the more active counties.

We wish very much to define our precise position on this subject. We are not opposed to the extension of the numbers of the constituency, but to a decrease in the numbers of re- presentative members. Our own desire would be a household franchise with differing weight assigned to every class of voter, so that while every class, down to the very lowest, was represented, no one class could swamp the remainder. A franchise commencing with one vote for a five-pound rating, and rising to ten votes for a fifty-pound rating, would secure that end, would, we believe, succeed in linking the whole body of the people into the constitution without destroying its spirit, or the leadership which men of education and property now possess. No such scheme has the smallest chance with a House which will not even consider any but broad distinctions, and never can understand the distinction between the repre- sentation of all classes and class representation. But failing a consistent and thorough scheme, those Liberals who are not also doctrinaires may at least struggle to introduce the one class wholly left out of the constitution—the working men, and resist the tendency to disfranchise other classes; to abolish, for instance, the little boroughs which represent everything except numbers, or to swamp the counties, like the great towns, under a deluge of mere ten-pounders. They may at the same time resist the dishonest effort sure to be made simply to "choke off" the question. The reform of the suffrage is just as useful a project now as it is likely to be in this generation, and to talk of the absence of public excite- ment is merely to appeal from the judgment of the educated to the passions of the mass. The charge of " piecemeal reform" is, moreover, absurd. A man might as well complain that the builder did his work "piecemeal," because one brick succeeded another, or avow his resolution to bolt his food to avoid a " piecemeal" dinner. The reduction of the county franchise from fifty pounds to twenty is an improvement as visible as any untried change ever can be, and when Parlia- ment has nothing to do except dine why should improvement wait? "It's ill arguing with hungry men," and by the time the unenfranchised have begun to hunger for power they will not stop to weigh exactly how much the enfranchised ought in their turn to retain.