TOPICS OF THE DAY.
FRANCHISE - EXTENSION : SYMPTOMS OF ADVANCE. WHEN, at the beginning of last session of Parliament, Lord John Russell threw up the Government, he confessed in that act his in- ability to devise measures or to indicate principles which could give cohesion and harmony to the various sections of politicians styling themselves Liberals. Whether the difficulty lay with him- self, his immediate friends, or the leaders of sections, makes no difference. " Wanted a principle and a policy" was the interpre- tation of his act. From his resignation of office to the close of the session, his policy was simply preventive ; and beyond a re- solute adherence to the Free-trade measures he had himself passed or helped to pass, no particular inference could be drawn as to his future career. iord Derby has been generous enough to furnish his opponent with a phrase which, whether it embraces a principle and a policy or not, that opponent was adroit enough to handle cleverly and turn to his own advantage with marked effect, at Perth. In proclaiming himself from Downing Street the foe of Democracy, Lord Derby has enabled Lord John Russell to proclaim himself its champion. Whether the one or the other had a very definite meaning, or intended more than to raise a vague emotion in the minds of his respective public, time will show. But we cannot think so meanly of Lord John Russell as to suppose that he uttered phrases without knowing what interpretation would be put upon them through the length and breadth of the kingdom, or that, knowing this, he could intend to excite expectations which he never dreamed of realizing or helping to realize. Lord John Russell is too practised a speaker, and knows the people of this country too well, not to be aware that whatever other meaning they might put into his words, they could not fail of pushing their interpretation at least to the extent of expecting from him a measure of franchise-extension adding largely to the numerical factor in the election of Members of Parliament. Either Lord John Russell has advanced beyond the position of his abortive bill of last session, or he has most culpably used language which the masses and his own followers can scarcely fail to misunderstand. A similar interpretation may, we think, be put on Sir James Gra- ham's language at Carlisle in the spring and summer. Sir James also is in too responsible a position not to weigh, before he speaks in pub- lic, the meaning others will find in his words, as well as that which they may bear to himself ; and when he, one of the original framers of the Reform Bill, tells a public meeting that his experience has made him less afraid of popular power than he was at one time, we may conclude, as we may be sure his audience did, that he in- tends in those words to express his willingness to extend the franchise. We can have no difficulty in presuming that all sections of Liberals, with the exception of here and there an individual, would go as far in this direction as either Lord John Russell or Sir James Graham : so that we arrive at the inference, that the Liberal party might be again reunited in support of a practical measure embracing in one great system the changes demanded in the dis- tribution and employment of the franchise. A 'writer in the current number of the Edinburgh Review not only supplies another indication of the tendencies working in the minds of the least venturesome of Progressists, but enters into elaborate exposition of details, so as to form a rough draught of a working programme. To the writer's theory that the interests of the community will always be compromised by restricting the fran- chise to not more than a select number of the class of hand-workers, because they are at once the most numerous and most easily mis- led, we are not prepared to assent; chiefly because we have no taste for laying down an ultimatum for posterity, as posterity has a knack of utterly disregarding such foregone conclusions. But for the present, the facts justify this limitation, and he must be a strange friend to Democratic progress who :will not recognize a vast practical stride in that direction in a scheme which pro- poses to bestow the franchise upon any man who can prove him- self to have been worth 501. for a year through, (for that is the writer's real meaning,) and upon operatives placed in stations of authority over others, whatever the amount of their property may be. The scope of the article is very wide; embracing, among other matters, our own suggestion of National Representatives, and proposing to supply an important want which has grown up since the Reform Bill, by giving to Ministers official seats in the House of Commons without votes,—a want which we indicated, and for which we advocated the same remedy, during the Reform discussions twenty years ago. Nor is the mode of taking the vote, by ballot or otherwise, overlooked; a suggestion being made which is intended by the writer to supersede the necessity of ballot-voting, upon the merits of which no decision is demanded at present. Whatever be the immediate reception of this article among the acting leaders, it cannot fail to have the effect of indu- cing a larger mode of discussing changes connected with the re- presentation among politicians throughout the country; nor should we despair of converts to its comprehensive mode of treatment even among some who pass for very high Tories.
These are personal indications allowing how opinions are conver- ging. But there are facts of far deeper significance, bearing an unconscious evidence of an approaching extension of political privi- leges to large sections who have them not at present. The mena- cing aspect of Continental affairs has already compelled our politi- cians with unusual unanimity to agree in the necessity of arming our population. The singular exception to this unanimity was found among those who claim the name of Democrats. It is
their business, not ours, to reconcile the inconsistency. But, what- ever their motive, it is plain that to habituate a population to the use of arms, is the first step 'towards making them brave, independent, and powerful. In fact, no liberty is secure with- out this habit • it depends on accident alone. An armed dis- franchised population is an anomaly, that in these days of logical thin -king is not likely to continue long. Mr. Secre- tary Walpole was instinctively right and blindly prophetic when he proposed to give a vote to any man who had served a certain time in the Militia, blunderingly as his motion was intro- duced, and ludicrously as it was withdrawn. The operative called to arm and perhaps to fight in defence of the country, can- not long remain without all the privileges of a citizen which he is disposed to claim. Then again, the very party in whose ranks Old Toryism is to be found if anywhere, is the very party which is urging forward the reconstitution of Convocation; and that means a Church Parliament elected by men whose sole essential qualifi- cation for voting would be church-membership, not property. By the side of a Democratic institution of that kind, how long would civil disabilities maintain themselves P The operative would ask with some surprise, "Am I good enough, wise enough, to elect men to decide the most important interests, (as they profess to be,) and not good enough and wise enough to give the ten thousandth part of a vote upon a question of mere temporal policy—to have a share in deciding how I am to be taxed l The result of this reasoning would not be long in showing itself. Both these measures have a natural tendency to impress the notion of the conventional nature of the distinction between poor and rich. The poor man can defend his country as well as or better than the rich man—between the :value of the two classes in this respect there is no comparison ; the rich offer to the spoiler the maximum of temptation and the mini- mum of resistance. That before God all men are equal, and all equal- ly in need of a redemption from sin and misery, is the fundamental creed of the Christian Church ; the great future fact to which it points ever with warning finger, is that a time is coming when rich and poor shall meet together, at the judgment. The electoral sys- tem of the Christian Church cannot admit the laity and draw a line between rich and poor. But, looking beyond facts of this specific nature, it cannot be doubted that the English poor man is rising in the social scale, rising absolutely and relatively, in spite of hideous exceptions. He knows more, he has more physical comforts, he has more sympathy from those above him which does not degrade him ; above all, he has unexampled opportunities of bettering him- self by going. to another country if he does not like this. Educa- tion and emigration are together working to elevate the nature and to better the condition of those who live by manual labour— to bridge over the gulf between their class and others. The fact is far enough from being accomplished, but that is the tendency of things ; a tendency which, spread into the region of polities, can have no other effect than that of extending the suffrage. Another class of facts seems to us to bear immediately upon this question. All our restrictions on the possession of the franchise are so framed as to depend on the relative value of money and real property. That relation, never permanent, is likely soon to receive a more violent shock than it has received for three hundred years. Are we prepared to alter our electoral system as we find that a ten- pound house or a forty-shilling freehold no longer represents a wealth or station higher than those of the lowest Irish cottier ? Even earth itself, as it seems to us, will settle this franchise ques- tion, or will at least utterly unsettle our present arrangements, so that, though nominally the same, the facts they represent will be totally different.
From Lord John Russell's Perth manifesto, through Convoca- tion and the Militia Bill, to California and the Australian Diggings, is rather a wide and scrambling journey. But all seem to have an undeniable bearing on the progress of Democracy among us ; and our purpose in thus linking such apparently heterogeneous subjects will have been answered, if we have made it probable that the franchise question is not a barren speculation, but a proper object of present political action. Leading politicians, both actors and thinkers, are again turning their attention to it; and facts be- yond the control of either actors or thinkers seem to concur in this tendency of human purpose. But Lord Derby has undertaken to stem Democracy : does he know what it means P Can he control —does he even perceive—the tendency of the facts of which Demo- cratic progress is the necessary result P Our ambition would rather be, not to play Mrs. Partington to a moral Atlantic, but to study the laws and causes of its advance, and so to learn and obey the conditions under which all laws of nature and society become not only innoxious to men but conducive to their happiness, and the instruments of successive stages of progress for nations and hu- manity.
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