The English Constitution | Page 6

people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions
of the rich--whose plans were their plans. The electors only selected
one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy
associations.
So fully was this so, that the class to whom the great body of the
ten-pound householders belonged--the lower middle class--was above
all classes the one most hardly treated in the imposition of the taxes. A
small shopkeeper, or a clerk who just, and only just, was rich enough to
pay income tax, was perhaps the only severely taxed man in the country.
He paid the rates, the tea, sugar, tobacco, malt, and spirit taxes, as well
as the income tax, but his means were exceedingly small. Curiously
enough the class which in theory was omnipotent, was the only class
financially ill-treated. Throughout the history of our former Parliaments
the constituency could no more have originated the policy which those
Parliaments selected than they could have made the solar system.
As I have endeavoured to show in this volume, the deference of the old
electors to their betters was the only way in which our old system could
be maintained. No doubt countries can be imagined in which the mass
of the electors would be thoroughly competent to form good opinions;
approximations to that state happily exist. But such was not the state of
the minor English shopkeepers. They were just competent to make a
selection between two sets of superior ideas; or rather--for the

conceptions of such people are more personal than abstract--between
two opposing parties, each professing a creed of such ideas. But they
could do no more. Their own notions, if they had been cross-examined
upon them, would have been found always most confused and often
most foolish. They were competent to decide an issue selected by the
higher classes, but they were incompetent to do more.
The grave question now is, How far will this peculiar old system
continue and how far will it be altered? I am afraid I must put aside at
once the idea that it will be altered entirely and altered for the better. I
cannot expect that the new class of voters will be at all more able to
form sound opinions on complex questions than the old voters. There
was indeed an idea--a very prevalent idea when the first edition of this
book was published--that there then was an unrepresented class of
skilled artisans who could form superior opinions on national matters,
and ought to have the means of expressing them. We used to frame
elaborate schemes to give them such means. But the Reform Act of
1867 did not stop at skilled labour; it enfranchised unskilled labour too.
And no one will contend that the ordinary working man who has no
special skill, and who is only rated because he has a house, can judge
much of intellectual matters. The messenger in an office is not more
intelligent than the clerks, not better educated, but worse; and yet the
messenger is probably a very superior specimen of the newly
enfranchised classes. The average can only earn very scanty wages by
coarse labour. They have no time to improve themselves, for they are
labouring the whole day through; and their early education was so
small that in most cases it is dubious whether even if they had much
time, they could use it to good purpose. We have not enfranchised a
class less needing to be guided by their betters than the old class; on the
contrary, the new class need it more than the old. The real question is,
Will they submit to it, will they defer in the same way to wealth and
rank, and to the higher qualities of which these are the rough symbols
and the common accompaniments?
There is a peculiar difficulty in answering this question. Generally, the
debates upon the passing of an Act contain much valuable instruction
as to what may be expected of it. But the debates on the Reform Act of
1867 hardly tell anything. They are taken up with technicalities as to
the ratepayers and the compound householder. Nobody in the country

knew what was being done. I happened at the time to visit a purely
agricultural and Conservative county, and I asked the local Tories, "Do
you understand this Reform Bill? Do you know that your Conservative
Government has brought in a Bill far more Radical than any former Bill,
and that it is very likely to be passed?" The answer I got was, "What
stuff you talk! How can it be a Radical Reform Bill? Why, BRIGHT
opposes it!" There was no answering that in a way which a "common
jury" could understand. The Bill was supported by the Times and