ESSAYS ON REFORM.* Tins handsome volume contains a collection of
papers from twelve writers, all more or less known, all friendly to Reform, and all anxious to remove the intellectual difficulties, the doubts and fears. andhalf uttered aversions, which impede the progress of the cause- in Parliament and the country. Save this common sympathy, however, there is no nexus or bond of cohesion among them, their thoughts are as various as their styles, and one or two, such as. Mr. Hutton and Mr. Albert Dicey, differ absolutely as to the very
meaning and objects of Representative Government. As a. whole, however, the collection is much more coherent, and of very much better quality than we should a priori have expected it to be. Such essays are apt to be diffusive, but these are crammed with, ideas and facts till it will be difficult for the stoutest Tory to lay the book down without a sense that there is a heavy weight of argument on the Reforming side, or without an inward belief that he is fighting men who, wise or foolish, sincerely believe in the justice and wisdom of their cause. The depth of conviction in all the papers, written by men so different in character, history, and ideas, with no previous consultation and very little homogeneity of position, is especially noteworthy ; Mr. Bernard Cracroft, for- example, whose mind is essentially a critical one, going far beyond, the line critical judgments will approve in his eager advocacy of an, extended suffrage ; while Lord Houghton, in whom dilettanteism is.
a part of character as well as a mental habit, ends his essay on. national unity with this eloquent warning :—
" The legislation of the future, indeed, cannot hope to be infallible,. and the exigencies of the hour may distort political truth or overshado economic science. Free governments are no safer than servile ones- from fallacies and delusions, and the United States and the Australias are fascinated by the immediate comforts of the protective system, as had been the old European States. The French Treaty was carried by the firmness of the Emperor, in defiance of the views and wishes of his people. Evils of this nature are incidental to the frailty of human nature and the imperfection of human knowledge; and if they do mar the excellence of our political future, we must look for consolation to the reflection that the introduction of a larger popular element into our ancient Constitution is, after all, not a matter of free choice, but an alternative. If we refuse this Reform, we accept the responsibility of governing an unwilling and reluctant people; if we reject what may be, in some instances, a representation of defective knowledge and short- sighted speculation, we must be prepared to encounter an organized. ignorance from without, and the boundless Utopia of revolutionary expectations ; if we will not admit the working men into the great school" of Public Life, we leave them to the free exercise of their instincts and passions ; if we will not teach them political wisdom, they will teach us political disaster."
Of the Essays, two, "On the Political Character of the Working- Classes," by R. H. Hutton, and" An Analysis of the house of Com- mons," by B. Cracroft, may be called positive,—the first being an at- tempt to estimate the kind of influence workmen will bring to bear- upon Parliament, for good or for evil ; the second, an effort to resolve- the House of Commons into its component members as represen- tatives of classes, with the view of showing that it does not fairly represent all. Nine of the remainder are answers, more or less. forcible, to the arguments upon which the opponents of Reform have mainly relied—Mr. Brodrick, for example, rebutting, with. remarkable logical power, Mr. Lowe's theory that the great end. of government is administration ; Lord Houghton pointing out,. with a kind of forcible grace of style, the immense evils which. arise from political exclusion simply considered as such—the violent suspiciousness, for example, which it invariably en- genders; Mr. Leslie Stephen proving, with wonderful fer- tility of illustration, that popular constituencies do not of. necessity select inferior men ; Mr. Boyd Kinnear refuting,. by arguments of almost mathematical closeness, the popular- fallacies used to defend the petty boroughs, and Mr. Disraeli's. favourite idea that counties ought to be much more heavily repre- sented; Mr. Pearson showing from personal experience that. democratic institutions in Australia are unjustly maligned, they growing visibly better—a paper crammed with new information; Mr. Goldwin Smith smashing by a similar process, but with eloquence much calmer than usual, the prejudice of the vulgar- rich that American institutions have failed ; Mr. Bryce demon- strating that the supposed argument from antiquity against popu- lar government is no argument at all, being based on ignorance of history ; Mr. Batson rejecting the popular comparison between the perfection of government in England and its imperfection on the Continent, by showing the immense special advantages we have enjoyed from our unbroken history and freedom from ex- ternal danger, and the responsibilities these advantages involve ; and Sir George Young exposing, with admirable clearness and conciseness, the persistent delusion that the first Reformed Parlia- L* Essays on Reform By Various Writers. Lonrho: Macmillan.
meat, the House of Commons elected by the untrained constitu- ency, was either a failure or a dangerous body :—
"It was, however, in truth an epoch of fivefold importance in Par- liamentary history. To it belongs, in commerce, the opening of Oriental trade ; in social polity, the new Poor Law and the first Factory Act ; in ecclesiastical matters, the rescue of the Irish Church, by the hand of the State, from ruin, and the consequent reassertion of the principle, which time bad obscured, that the temporalities of a State Church are under the control of the State. In Law there was the abolition of several systems of intolerable formula3, which encumbered the transfer of landed property and the procedure of the superior Courts. Lastly, there was the first initiation of the Legislature into the work of National Education. With all these, the House of Commons found time to abolish Slavery in the West Indies, and to subdue Ireland with a Coercion Bill; to give the Bank a new Charter, and the metropolis a new Criminal Court ; and to discuss, sometimes abortively, sometimes with advantage, all the various crotchets (then so deemed) of the new Radical members, including Free Trade, Civil Disabilities, Bribery Pre- vention, Municipal Corporation Reform, Criminal Law Reform, Church- Rate Abolition, Tithe Abolition, Triennial Parliaments, and the Ballot. 'There is hardly a question which has exercised the wisdom of legisla- tors and the talents of debaters since, of which the history does not begin from, or in some degree turn upon, its treatment by that aston- ishing Parliament."
This paper will, perhaps, be more effective among old men than any one of the twelve, and we must not forget we are governed by the old. One of the papers, Mr. Dicey's, stands by itself, being an argument not for Reform, but for Reform in the direction of numerical sway, and directed not against reactionary ideas so much as against the ideas of the cultivated Liberals. His view, so far as we can see, may be summed up in the sentence—The majority can rule, will rule, and ought to rule—or, as he puts it,— "If, however, the majority shall fall into errors, it may still be well that the majority shall rule. All belief in free government rests ultimately on the conviction that a people gains more by the experience than it loses by the errors of liberty, and it is difficult to perceive why a truth that holds good of individuals and of nations, should not apply equally to the majority of the indivi- duals who constitute a nation."
We cannot pretend to criticize at length essays so numer- ous, so divergent, and so recently published, but we would just direct those who trust Mr. Lowe's speeches to Mr. Brodtick's eloquent and convincing answer, those who believe with Mr. Roebuck in the perfection of the "resent House of Commons to Mr. Cracroft's analysis of its contents, those who think England .will lose status in the world from the workmens' votes to Mr. Hntton's hopes and fears, and those who believe Reform may be refused to Lord Houghton's powerful description of the true danger,—a danger wholly apart from insurrection,—which such a course would involve. Of all the papers, the one which will be most quoted is probably Mr. Cracroft's. This gentleman has set himself to prove by figures and names that the House of Commons represents the upper classes of society, if not exclusively, at least in overwhelming proportion. The landowners, for example, seat directly 256 county members, but of the borough members 246 out of 396 are believed to be also territorialists, either by actual ownership of land in considerable blocks, or by dependence on and connection with those who do own them. There may be some exaggeration in this estimate, which only leaves 150 Members from the mercantile classes, but there can be no doubt whatever that "according to Dad, in the Parliament of August, 1865, there were returned 71 Baronete, 11 elder sons of baronets, 19 younger sons of baronets, and 8 grandsons of baronets ; a total for the Barouetage alone of 110. There were also 37 Peers, or elder sons of peers, 64 younger sons of peers, and 15 grandsons of peers ; a total of 116 Members of Parliament for the Peerage, and for the Peerage and Baronetage together a total of 226. Besides these there are one hundred Commoners sitting in Parliament who are connected with the Peerage by marriage or descent. The aristo- cratic class or element in the House of Commons has therefore a grand total of, at least, 326 Members. And unquestionably this number would be found, if an exhaustive search were made among other sources of information, to be below the mark. When it is remembered that in the fullest House on record, namely, on the 28th of April, 1866, those who voted in the majority had only 320 votes, the number 326, as the symbol of Caste in the House of Commons, is significant." Nor is there any doubt that 227 are public schoolmen, 292 graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, 584, or five-sixths, members of the Church of England, and 222, at least, officers in the Army, Navy, or Militia, all facts pointing decisively in the same direction, that the House of Commons is substantially a House of Landowners and their caste allies. Mr. Cracroft is not angry with that, does not quarrel with men for being possessed of property, but holds that the dominance of the class is fatal to swift or decisive progress:—
"The landowner's creed, pure and simple, is the creed of calm and
long possession. He that is wretched, let him be wretched stlll,'— Heaven's decree, who made man and the worm. It has the dignity of repose and the serenity of the everlasting landscape. It abhors disturb- ance and all that is new. It is thrifty, as not being used to windfalls ; niggardly, as being accustomed to small losses. It is tenacious, to idolatry, of its power, and for that will sell all that it has, and the education of the poor. It believes there is nothing new under the sun, and openly or secretly sneers at the wildness and vulgarity of progress. Repose is its ideal in things and men—the essence of its behaviour and nobility. It thinks "aims' but forms of vulgarity, for every aim is a confession of inferiority. He who is "mon,' need ge no further ; to aim is to confess to something beyond. It aims no higher' condescends no lower. And so, in a thousand forms, the root of all vulgarity and snobbishness, in the landowner's definition of vulgarity and snobbish- ness, is the absence of repose—fuss • fuss of good manners, fuss of gentility, fuss of kindness, fuss of hostility, fuss of disquisition, fuss of energy, fuss of haste, fuss of eagerness. Nature, he thinks, cow-footed, stands for ever ; even railways will pass away."
Mr. Cracroft does not deny or question that there are differences among these men, differences of opinion and purpose, as well as of feeling and tendency :—
" But who can doubt that each in his own way, and in the main, re- presents that class to which he belongs, that he shares its more general likes and dislikes, its horizons and planes of thought and sentiment, its secret affinities and secret repulsions, its vistas of progress, its blank walls of obstruction ? What he does not represent—and represented still less before the Reform Bill—is the mercantile feeling and fever, the ardent faith in progress, the belief, often delusive, in a mercantile millennium, to be obtained, partly by the boundless development of human energy striving like fire ever upwards, partly by unforeseen, but probable discoveries, which at any moment may throw additional millions into the lap of human comfort, and so raise humanity another stage above the gulf of wretchedness and want."
With Mr. Cracroft's conclusion, that it is simply impassible in this country to establish Democracy, that no suffrage would effect it, that no possible supremacy of numbers can secure to numbers even their just measure of influence, we, of course, do not concur ; but there is no man, Whig or Tory, who may not be the wiser for the almost grotesquely suggestive string of conclusions with which he ends his paper. Take these two as examples :—" It is not true to say, that there is a general and universal law in mankind tend- ing to Democracy. Consider the everlasting Indian Castes, and. their one anxiety, to remain everlasting. Consider the Pariahs."
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