TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE REDISTRIBUTION BILL. THE country certainly owes much to Lord Salisbury, though it owes much more to Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone supplied the moving force which has secured, or will secure, Re- form, but Lord Salisbury has supplied the force which prevented the mutilation of a great measure. Without Lord Salisbury it would have been simply impossible for the Government to go much beyond the limits of the Bill disclosed by the Standard. With the co-operation of the Opposition, Mr. Gladstone has been enabled to produce a measure which, without that co- operation, would have been absolutely impossible ; and which differs from a complete representation of the national will only in this,—that it shades off the old system into the new, instead of taking at one bound the whole distance between our present composite system of Democracy in the large towns, a political lottery in the small boroughs, and privilege in the counties, and an absolutely impartial and equal representation of the people in all parts of the United Kingdom. But though the change will not be absolutely abrupt, though the double-barrelled system is to be maintained in about forty-one boroughs, neither very large nor very small, though about sixty-six boroughs of between fifteen thousand and fifty thousand inhabitants, which would not strictly be entitled even to one Member, are to keep one Member where they have one, and one out of the two where they happen now to have two,—yet the change to be effected will be really enormous,—so great, indeed, that it is at present simply impossible to forecast what the character of the result will be.
The change even in the Borough representation will be very great indeed. About seventy-nine small boroughs in England and Wales, which hitherto, no doubt, have been represented by a preponderance of Liberals, will disappear as boroughs and be- come political leaven for the counties in which they are situated, while some thirty-four other English and Welsh boroughs will lose a seat each. The disfranchising part of this provi- sion will operate chiefly as a suppression of the element of chance which is now so important in our representative system ; for it cannot be denied that in these small places the choice of the electors depends on the chapter of accidents much more than it does in the larger places, where caprices in one direction neutralise caprices in another, and where the popular verdict is really determined, therefore, by the deeper and more permanent currents of political conviction. There is unquestionably a steadiness in the political convictions, and a method even in the political conversions, of great towns like the Metropolis, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast, which is not to be found in the political convictions or the political conversions of places like Abingdon and Andover; • or even of places like Bury St. Edmunds, Cam- bridge, &c. It is much to reduce very greatly, as this Bill will reduce, the element of chance in the working of our representative system. But the Bill will do a great deal more than this. It will transfer substantial power from the small boroughs to the great boroughs, and to those county districts which will be in a vast number of cases nothing but boroughs in disguise. The large Parliamentary boroughs already in exist- ence and the new boroughs to be constituted in the counties will absorb a great number of the seats of which small boroughs are to be deprived. But that is not all, for of the seats which are to be transferred to counties without the name of boroughs, a great many, though they will be nominally divi- sions of a county, will be really great boroughs with a rural margin to them, like the Accrington division, for instance, of Lancashire, or the Rotherham division of Yorkshire. Hence, besides the seats which are to pass from small boroughs to great, a great many of the seats which pass nominally to the counties will really swell the influence of the great working populations in the State. Yorkshire as a county, for instance, will gain no fewer than sixteen Members, and Lan- cashire no fewer than fifteen. In a word, the energy of the country will be infinitely better represented by the borough Members of the future, than it is by the borough Members of the present. And we look for one very important result from that better representation of the efficiency and resolute industry of the English people. We look to it for a very sharp mode of dealing with obstruction, if obstruction rears its head in future Parliaments as it has in past Parliaments. A Parliament in which the vigour and enterprise of the country is represented as they will be represented under this Bill, should make short work of those who try to paralyse the energy of the State as a whole.
However, the great change of all is undoubtedly the vast step taken in this Bill towards the creation of electoral dis- tricts, towards the equalisation of the effect of a vote in all parts of the country. In the great cities as well as in all counties the system of equal electoral districts is frankly adopted. This will go far to obliterate the distinction between a county Member and a borough Member. What difference will it make whether a man represents Aston Manor, for in- stance, or Barrow-in-Furness,—both of them new boroughs under this Bill,—or whether he represents an urban division of Warwickshire, or an urban division of Lancashire ? What will it matter whether he represents one of the new suburban boroughs round the Metropolis, or one of the suburban divisions of Surrey, containing a group of thriving little towns ? We shall soon find that Members, who would never have been even thought of as county Members under the old system, will be as likely to succeed for the divisions of counties under the new system as for single boroughs. The very notion that a landed proprietor is necessarily the fitting representative of a county seat will vanish under the new system. Men known in the various boroughs with which the counties will now be leavened,—for there is to be no eviscerating of the counties by the application of the grouping system,—will become as common in the representation of counties as blackberries on the country hedges. Except that a county election will continue to be somewhat more expensive than a borough election, there will, indeed, be no longer that marked distinction between county and borough Members which has obtained hitherto. In thoroughly rural districts the agricultural labourers will, no doubt, be able to carry their own candidate ; and it will be an interesting matter to notice in how many of them the great landed proprietor is still to be regarded as the natural repre- sentative of agriculture. But in a very large number of county divisions the reign of landowners as landowners is certainly over ; we say of landowners as landowners, for we do not in the least believe that the landowner who takes a popular part in politics, and really represents the wishes of the people, will suffer in the least from his status as a landowner, though he may gain but little by it. In the county electorates of the future, an ounce of the right kind of political conviction will weigh more than a pound of social consideration. Some politicians have argued that because in several of the rural boroughs,— in Eye, for example, and in Shoreham,—the Conservatives have asserted their power as decidedly as in the counties, therefore household suffrage in the counties will not greatly interfere with the power of the landowners to dictate their own politics to the rural constituencies. But surely such reasoners forget that most places, when isolated, and unable to act in concert with any large number of electorates of their own type, yield passively to the predominant social influence of the locality ; but that so soon as they find them- selves in possession of the power to exert a great influence on matters of policy, they awaken to an independence of which hitherto they had never dreamed.
The first election held under this Redistribution scheme will tell us for the first time what England, outside the great boroughs, really desires and hopes. When it is con- sidered that the counties of England and Wales alone will be represented in future by 244 Members, instead of by 187, that all these 244 Members will be elected by separate constituencies,—whereas less than half of the 187 Members represent at present separate constituencies, since the same constituency has hitherto elected either two or (in a few cases) three Members,—and that in every one of these 244 county divisions there will be a host of new electors, generally out- numbering all the old electors of that same area put together, we can hardly overrate the magnitude of the change which is to take place. In fact, we shall have a new political England. Politically speaking, the nation will enter on a totally new life with the operation of this Bill. We shall know for the first time what the people's political ambitions really are.
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