DISRAEUS LAST FORTRESS.
WE may assume that Mr. Disraeli has been driven out of every one of his special positions, from every stand he has taken up on the Government Reform Bill except one, on which he has as yet only intimated in very doubtful terms that he was willing to consider in committee any improve- ments which the House chose to suggest. This one last rem- nant of the Government Bill, this single surviving feature of the measure to which, having previously given it a whole week's favourable deliberation, the Government affectionately "recur- red" after the unfortunate interlude of its Ten Minutes' Bill, is the " principle " that the " right " of voting shall be conferred only on those who discharge in person the " duty " of rate- paying. It is pretty certain that the Government will do all in its power to cling to this last rag of its mutilated measure. They will possibly give up insisting on the com- pound householders' payment of the additional 25 per cent., —or, as Mr. Gladstone says, frequently 50 per cent.,—which the landlord who compounds for him is now excused ; and they will very probably authorize the compound householder to deduct from the rent he pays to his landlord, the amount -of the rate which the landlord would have paid for him if he had not claimed to be rated separately. But it is nearly certain that the Government will make their last and hardest fight on the so-called 'principle' of personal rate-paying, even though they consent to do all in their power to smooth the way for the compound householder, whose rates are at present paid indirectly, to pay them in person. Yet Mr. Disraeli has vir- tually given up the grand argument, that he is founding the
• concession of a right on the exercise of a duty. He cannot deny that when a municipal body makes it by special legis- lation a man's " duty " to pay rates indirectly through his landlord, the "right," if it followed the discharge of the duty, would as much accrue to him who so pays them through his landlord, as in boroughs where the municipal body rates every householder separately it accrues to householders who pay their own. It must be your duty to obey the municipal law, and it is sheer nonsense to reward a man for doing his duty in .obeying the municipal law of one borough, by the franchise, .and to refuse it to a man who obeys equally stringently the municipal law of another borough, on the ground, not that he is not discharging his duty, but that the muni- eipal law has imposed a different duty. If Mr. Disraeli wants really to be consistent in this matter, and to make the sight really follow the duty, let him repeal the Small Tene- _men& Act, and all other local Acts interfering in any way with the personal liability of the occupier of a house to rates. After that he would be justified in saying that the punctual payment of rates would be a test of every householder's dis- -charge of his municipal duties, and would be therefore a fair season for according his rights. We suppose the munici- palities would raise a great difficulty about legislation which would be in an economical point of view so wasteful and „retrograde. But this is the only course, if Mr. Disraeli wishes ratepaying to be a real process of Darwinian "natu- ral selection," by which the men best fitted for public rights by the due discharge of public duties are to be detected. Till he dares as much as this, Mr. Disraeli is obliged to .be silent about his great principle ; for the principle at pre- sent is an accident and a sham.
Being under the painful necessity of suppressing his grander language about basing the right upon a duty, Mr. Disraeli has had recourse to another ingenious plea, which, with a very -different bearing and application, we have often urged in this journal. He insists on the vast importance of a great variety of form and elements in our different borough constituencies, And maintains that the fortunate caprice of constituencies in adopting, wholly here, and partially there, and in a third place not at all, the compound-rating principle, on which the owner pays the rates and the occupier pays the owner in increased -rent, has created a very useful variety of constituency, which will in practice turn one constituency into a working-class -constituency and another into a middle-class constituency,
through the effect of this proposed exclusion of all who do not pay their rates themselves. These were Mr. Disraeli's words :—" It had been said, and most justly, that the remark- able characteristics of this assembly—the variety of character which distinguishes it—is really owing to the machinery of the small boroughs, which were called into existence, perhaps, under the Plantagenets—certainly in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts—and that they have given to England that varied representation which India, our multifarious colonies, the settlements in two oceans and of two hemispheres, demanded, and I say that of those four local Acts that have been so criticized—those Small Tenements' Acts, which prevail with power as secret and as inscrutable as that of the Jesuits— they have given us that variety which the country requires, and which I believe is a most admirable quality. How does it work ? There are twenty-seven boroughs under this system, in which almost household suffrage exists. What is the harm of that ? Have you not, year after year, been deploring that you have no longer members elected for such places as Preston by household suffrage? We have been deploring that we have no longer a system which produces among us a Hunt or a Cobbett. Among the twenty-seven boroughs where the Act does not prevail you have this large constituency. There is a ,dozen of the twenty-seven which have the most considerable constituencies in England. There are Stockport, Oldham, and half-a-dozen others. That is one of the strongest arguments I have heard in favour of it." Well, we are not going to flinch now from our old prin- ciples, that you must have sufficient variety in the con- stituencies, if you wish for sufficient variety in the poli- tical tendencies of the members elected ; but there is variety, and variety. You may have a variety of selection so obtained as to select the best specimens of each sort of constituency ; and again, variety obtained by a principle of selection, which is a mere lottery, selecting arbitrarily good, bad, and indifferent alike ; or, last, you may have variety obtained by a principle of selection which operates so as to produce the worst specimens of each kind of constituency. Now, if we have to choose between specimens of all kinds of constituencies, on condition that each shall be as good as possible of its kind, and a monotony of good constituencies all of the same kind, we should certainly choose the former. If, again, we had to choose between a monotony of good con- stituencies, and a variety, including some good, some bad, but not many of the latter kind, we might again choose the latter, so great is the advantage of variety in a delibera- tive body. But if your principle of variety almosts consists in imposing such conditions that it shall tend to give us, in general actually give us, the least favourable specimens of every sort of constituency,—we submit that a variety of that kind is not in itself a thing to be coveted.
Now, this is precisely the sort of variety which Mr. Disraeli's exclusion of compound householders seems to us to produce,—and for a very good reason. The rating of the owners, instead of the occupiers, of small tenements in very large towns is an obvious economy, and a great economy of time and trouble to all parties. It is more convenient to an artizan living on weekly wages to calculate his whole expenses in weekly instalments also, and not to have special quarterly expenses as well ; consequently, to pay his rates in the form of increased rental is rather a convenience to him than otherwise. On the other hand, it saves immense trouble in collection. One landlord pays for, perhaps, a whole street of houses. He pays for full houses and empty houses alike, being allowed a deduc- tion from the total in consideration of the empty houses. The municipal authorities know precisely what they can depend upon receiving, and have, comparatively, vastly less trouble and cost in getting it. Hence the compounding system is a natural expedient of municipal organization in all large towns. It is less necessary in small towns than large towns, because the whole scale of operations is reduced, and
accordingly, in fact, it is adopted chiefly in great towns, and especially in the most populous quarters of great towns.
But, then, again it also happens,—again quite naturally,—
that the artizans are a far more intelligent, independent, and politically educated class in great towns than they are in small.
They form their own organizations much more effectively in great towns than in small. They are a power in great manu- facturing towns, and the sense of power is in itself an edu- cation, and leads to further education. In Lancashire and
Yorkshire the artisans have almost a literature,—they cer- tainly have poets and scientific men,—of their own. Their thoughts are larger, their political discussions far more eager, their pride keener, their whole character better defined than in small boroughs. On the contrary, the smaller, the more rural, and more rotten the boroughs, the less of peculiar life and independent character the artizans have to express. Thus the principle of compounding for rates is likely to be, and is, in fact, most universally adopted where the true artizan class is at its best. The direct payment of rates is most common in places where the true artizan class is at its worst. Thus, Mr. Disraeli's Bill enlarges the constituency most often and most widely where the artizan class is least educated and least in- dependent,—least often and least widely where that class is most educated and most independent.
Let us test this by the actual facts. Mr. Disraeli says in the extract we have quoted that in 27 boroughs the Bill establishes what is equivalent to Household Suffrage, because there are no compound Acts in force in those places. So it does, and of these, there are but seven, Bury (population, 41,000), Huddersfield (population, 37,000), Oldham (population, 107,000), Rochdale (population, 43,000), Sheffield (popu- lation, 216,000), Stockport (population, 55,000), Stoke-upon- Trent (population, 111,000), that can pretend to be large and active-minded places, with an artizan class of any energetic character. And even in the Potteries (Stoke-upon-Trent) the artizan class is not of that intelligent kind which exists in the proper manufacturing towns. Of what sort are the other trwenty,—or, indeed, twenty-two places, according to the latest Parliamentary return,—where the Government proposal practically amounts to household suffrage? Such places as Arundel (population, 2,300, and decreasing), Ashburton (popu- lation, 2,890, and decreasing), Beverley (population, 11,000), Bodmin (population, 6,400), St. Ives (population, 10,600), Knaresborough (population, 5,300), Melton (population, 8,200), Richmond (population, 5,200), Thetford (population, 4,200), Thirsk (population, 5,300), Totnes (population, 3,800), and the like. Even if we deduct from these twenty-nine boroughs all large towns, however languid,—mere county towns, like York and Exeter, or Cheltenham which is a fashionable watering-place,---eighteen out of the twenty-seven places thus given up to household sufirage, or two-thirds of the whole, are very small boroughs, where the working class is pre- cisely in that condition in which they are least fitted to represent the working class, or to exercise any intelligent poli- tical discretion. In other words, at least two-thirds of the special working-class constituencies are specially fitted to mis- 'represent the working class.
Now, let us turn to the boroughs which would be by common consent admitted as those in which Household Suffrage would work best, and give us a constituency of all others the least likely to be either dependent or corruptible, and see how Mr. Disraeli's exclusion works. At Blackburn (population, 73,500), out of 10,589 male occupations, 7,718 are compounded for, and the present ten-pounders are in fact more numerous than the new voters under 10/. who would be admitted by the Bill. At Newcastle-on-Tyne (population, 121,600), out of 21,217 male occupations, 9,082 are compounded for, and would be excluded ; and here, again, the number of ten-pounders is more numerous than the new voters below the 10/. occupation admitted by this Bill. In Preston (population, 90,600), out of 12,319 male occu- pations, 8,217 are compounded for, and the ten-pounders are very much more numerous than the new voters admitted by this Bill. At Wigan (population, 40,889), out of 6,612 male occupations, 5,276 are compounded for, and only 34 new voters under. 10/. would be admitted by this Bill. At Bolton, out of 12,213 male occupations, 8,271 are compounded for, and the ten-pounders are more than double as numerous as the new voters admitted by this Bill. At Bradford, out of 22,796 male occupations, 13,094 are compounded for, and the ten-pounders are nearly twice as numerous as the new voters under 10/. admitted by this Bill. At Bristol, the mass of the householders are already included, and the numbers to be admitted by this Bill are quite insignificant if the compounders, who are tolerably numerous, though not nearly so numerous as the ten-pounders, be excluded. At Halifax, out of 7,693 male occupations, 4,789 are compounded for, and the ten-pounders are more than double the new voters who would be admitted under the Bill. At Leeds, out of 44,315 male occupations, 25,613 are compounded for, and the numbers admitted by this Bill would be almost exactly equal to the numbers of ten-pounders already qualified to vote. At Manchester, out of 63,781 male occupations, 33,013 are compounded for, and almost all the rest are above 10/., and only 2,862 in all would be admitted by this Bill. At Salford, out of 18,276 male occupations, 9,618 are compounded for, and the number of ten-pounders is far more numerous than those to be admitted under this Bill. And so we might go on for a number of other places, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, &c., so that wherever you might expect a characteristic and charac- teristically good working-class constituency, the exclusion of compound householders keeps down the influence of the work- ing class ; while in the small places, where the working class is scarcely educated at all, the exclusion does not operate, and household suffrage would in a multitude of cases prevail. It is quite impossible, then, to admit the claims of Mr. Disraeli's sort of " variety,"—a variety which selects the least characteristic sort of each constituency, both the large and the small, — keeping the power in the hands of the ten- pounders where the artisans are best fitted for it, giving it into the hands of the artisans where the ten-pounders are best fitted for it. It would be almost better to give the franchise to all who don't pay their own rates in the boroughs where the Small Tenements' Act or equivalent local Acts prevail, and to all who do in the others, than to take such a false principle of selection as this,—the tendency of which must be to get a_ bad name for working-class constituencies in almost all parts of the Kingdom.
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