TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FRANCHISE BILL.
MR. GLADSTONE, as an orator, has often been accused of diffuseness, and the late Lord Beaconsfield, in a celebrated attack upon him, described him as "inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." Our own view of him as an orator is entirely different. We believe that his mar- vellous power of exposition depends on the skill with which he confines his delineation of practical measures to just those features which will inform and interest the people, without so unduly compressing his statement as to give a merely dry and abstract resume of the changes proposed. Nothing could illustrate this peculiar power better than his speech of Thursday night, a speech which covered all the real interest of the case, and scarcely contained a phrase or a line which could have been omitted, without either diminishing the lucidity of the statement or omitting the comments needed to make the details interesting. When he is accused of diffuseness, his critics only mean that he is not as terse as a manual or an almanack. And he could not be a great orator, if he were. When you have to describe a Franchise Bill, you may, if you please, summarise its provisions as a book on the Constitution would summarise them ; but if you do, you will not awaken a single note of sympathy. Or you may, if you please, dilate at large on all the blessings you are going to confer ; but if you do, the House of Commons will sicken of such platform verbosity. Mr. Glad- stone never falls into either error. He enters into the instincts of a business Assembly as truly as he enters into the instincts of popular bodies, and lie leaves upon the mind just such a picture of the moral effect of his measure as is needed to vivify technical proposals, and give them a firm hold upon the imagination. Nothing could be more effective, for instance, than his defence of the limitation of the franchise measure to practical issues. To aim at theoretical per- fection, he said, in dealing with such a subject as this, is to take what is to very many people a most attractive road, but it is " the road to ruin." " I believe that there are authors and artists who are never satisfied with the perfection of their pictures or their diction, as the case might be, and in consequence the pictures or the diction have been wasted. I remember a most venerable Archbishop—Archbishop Howley —who was, with all respect be it spoken, the worst speaker in the House of Lords ; and why ? Because he was a man of inferior intellect ? He was a man of remarkable education and remarkable refinement, but unfortunately he had a taste so fastidious that he could never satisfy himself that his terms were perfect, or that his phrases were beyond criticism. In consequence of his fastidiousness between one and the other, that catastrophe befell him. Ideal perfection is not the true basis of legislation. We look at the attainable. We look at the practicable, and we have, I will say, too much of English sense to be drawn away by those sanguine delineations of what might possibly be done in Utopia from a path which promises to enable us to effect great good for the people of England. The following is not an exhaustive list, but there is the question of proportional representation, the question of woman suffrage, the question with regard to which my right honourable friend (Mr. Bright) invented a wicked phrase. I call a phrase wicked when it commits murder, and my right honour- able friend has had the fortune repeatedly to kill a proposal by a phrase. There was once a group of proposals made in a Reform Bill which he dubbed fancy franchises,' and by that phrase he killed them all. There is the question of voting by paper, and the question of the franchise in the Universities. There is the freeman's franchise, the livery franchise, the burgage franchise, and the principle whether one man should have more than one vote. There is no end to the propositions that may be raised on the stage of the first of these great divi- sions of the franchise, without touching the other two. Our principle has been to inquire what was practicable, and what are the conditions under which we move and act in the present state of Parliament and in the present state of Parliamentary business." That was much the most diffuse passage in Mr. Gladstone's speech, but it was of all others, perhaps, the most practical. It was the one addressed to the political crotcheteers, who alone have it in their power to wreck this Bill, but who might wreck it, if they would and dared. Mr. Albert Grey is more than half inclined to wreck it on the question of proportional representation. Sir John Lubbock, who is far too good a Liberal to wreck it at all, is yet too much disposed to lend a certain countenance to such wreckers as Mr. Albert Grey. To all such, Mr. Glad- stone says in effect,—' Your proposals may have much to be said for them ; but they are not, in the present state of the public mind, in any sense practicable ; if you want ideal per- fection, you must sacrifice this Bill. If you want this Bill,. you must sacrifice ideal perfection, and suppress your own wishes till you have at least educated a larger public into sym- pathy with those wishes.' Surely, no appeal can be more reasonable. It is, in fact, the key-note of the situation. It is not in the power of the Tories to defeat the Bill. It is in, the power of the Liberals. Let the country see to it that they accept the advice of the Liberal leader, and refuse to let their representatives be cheated into losing the substance of this measure by their desire to grasp at a shadow. It is the only danger before us, but it is a danger serious enough to awaken the constituencies, and to stimulate their earnestness and vigilance..
We, for our parts, intend to set a good example. We were, we confess, eager for the eradication of the very principle on which faggot-votes in the counties are created, and as far as we can judge, the Government do not intend so much as to destroy the existing faggot-votes, but only to prevent their creation for the future. If we rightly understand Mr. Glad- stone, the Bill described on Thursday will not expunge from the Register any of the faggot-votes even in Midlothian, or in Dumfriesshire, or in any other county where this " manu- facture " has been brisk. Well, we heartily regret that.. We even repine at it. If a single amendment on the Bill could be proposed to give a retrospective effect to the clause. prohibiting these votes for the future, we would support it warmly, but we would not expose the fate of the Bill to. the smallest risk, even in so good a cause as this. And as for our own ideal that all franchise qualifications should have been merged in the household qualification for the future,. we accept with resignation, though with regret, the decision of the Government that that ideal, too, is dangerous and un- practical. We would not forfeit a single night of progress with the Franchise Bill for the sake of an ideal which the
on their responsibility as a Government, have thought it unwise to accept. For the rest, there is not a feature in the Bill now before the House to which, in our opinion, a genuine Liberal can object.
Of course, it will be said that it is unfair to alter so greatly as this Bill must alter the constituencies of the counties, without so redistributing power as to give the new electorates a representative strength in some fair proportion to their new numbers. It will be justly enough said that under this Bill, if it passes without a redistribution measure, and if a dis- solution takes place before any redistribution measure follows it, the vote of an elector of Middlesex, for instance, will become a very much less important political force than it now is, since it will be diluted by the addition of a host of new votes for Middlesex, and so will be enormously reduced in proportional value. This is perfectly true, and it is an excellent reason for passing a sound Redistribution Bill before a dissolution of Parliament. But it is no reason at all for refusing to pass this Bill. The pretext that if Parliament passed this, and refused to pass the other, a certain number of voters would have much less power than before, is worthless. The Bill is a step towards justice, and steps towards justice generally involve a loss of privilege to those who have already got justice. When we passed the Education Act, no doubt the special privileges of the classes previously educated were greatly diminished by the intrusion of the working-classes on their preserves. But that was no reason for keeping the working- classes in ignorance. Nor is it any reason for keeping the unen- franchised classes longer in their unenfranchised condition, that the effect of their enfranchisement must be to diminish the political privileges of those who are already enfranchised ; nor even that, if Parliament cannot be persuaded to take the next step at once, the political privileges of the present county electors will be diminished even more than in the end they ought to be. The political power taken, temporarily, from the existing electors will be given to the newly enfranchised electors, and as the former will have had more than their proper share for a long time back, they will have no right to com- plain if, for a very brief period, they have something less than their proper share, though still quite as much as their newly enfranchised brethren.
We need hardly say that we ourselves are by no means en- chanted with Mr. Gladstone's sketch of the principles of Redistribution to which he personally would give his assent. Disbelieving as we do in the practicability, or rather in the intelligibility for popular purposes of what is known as minority representation, we have always looked to a large step in the direction of the equalisation of constituencies, and a large exten- sion of the number of those constituencies, as by far the most feasible mode.—at least of those intelligible to the people at large,—for securing the fair representation of minorities. Unless you have a very considerable number of nearly equal con- stituencies, there is no sufficient security for the minority of one constituency being represented by the majority of another. In constituencies of very variable magnitude, very various causes may be at work, and no one can tell how these acci- dents may affect the average of results. To go to a different p int, if we th ought—which we do not—that Mr. Gladstone really favours the suggestion of adding to the number of the House of Commons, a House already too large for efficiency, under the distracting influences of a complex and parti-coloured democracy, —we should be thoroughly dismayed. In fact, however, we understood Mr. Gladstone to convey his own conviction that the House of Commons ought not to assent to any proposal for its own increase.
With Mr. Gladstone's statement that he wished to separate the Franchise Bill from the Redistribution Bill, partly in order that the latter might be made more thorough-going than it would be possible to make it as a tag to a Franchise Bill, we are altogether satisfied. Very satisfactory, too, is his statement that he thinks this Redistribution Bill should approximate much more closely to the dimensions of the Redistribution of 1832, than to the dimensions of the petty Redistribution of 1867,—a remark which carries us, we think, far beyond the very meagre redistribution sketched out the other day by Mr. Lefevre in his Manchester speech. Mr. Gladstone's ideal of Redistribution, then, though it does not by any means satisfy us, seems to us to hold out considerable hopes of enlargement, under the influence of a strong popular movement ; and as none of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues are pledged to his general outline, and he himself left ample scope for reconsideration and revision, we do not think that any dis- satisfaction we may feel with his outline, should in the least abate our earnestness in supporting his present Bill. After all, it is not Redistribution which we have got to deal with at the present moment, but the Franchise. And household franchise in the counties will be a great gain, whether redistribution follows it or no. Nay, more, it will be a great gain, whether the Conservatives gain by it or no. We are not in the least disposed to ignore the fact that nobody has sufficient evidence to show how these new voters will vote. Many of them may turn as Conservative as their masters, so soon as they are possessed of the power to choose between Conservatism and Liberalism. We should not hesitate in the least to support this Bill, even though we could absolutely assure ourselves beforehand that it would be so. The people learns by its own blunders, at least as much as it learns by its wisest actions. Nor can we understand how Conservatives, if they really believe that the new voters will be Conservative in the main, can quarrel with this measure only on the ground that it will not give these voters as much power as they ought eventually to have. If the new voters are Conservatives in the main, the Conservatives will gain a great step by this Bill. If they are Liberals in the main, the Conservatives will lose less by this Bill than they would by this Bill with a good Re- distribution Bill appended. In either case, it is their best policy to pass this Bill, unless they really think that they can defeat it altogether.
Previous page
