Reform Movement

REFORM MOVEMENT, the name given in history to that movement towards parliamentary electoral reform, active in Eng land between 1769 and 1832, and in France between 1832 and 1848. Different as the two movements were in character, time (the principal phase of the English struggle was over in 1832, when the movement in France was, strictly, only beginning) and result (the ultimate desideratum of manhood suffrage was achieved in France in 1848 and in England only in 1918), the march of events in either country had a profound effect upon the movement in the other. The following article sketches the course of the movement in the two countries. (X.) The ultimate, if long delayed, success of "reform," embodied in the great act of 1832 was due to an unanalysable blend of political theory and the logic of concrete fact. The political, social and economic structure of Great Britain had, in short, been revo lutionized between 1780 and 1830 before the revolution was ex pressed in a decisive formative statute. The act of 1832 did not so much impose the new system of an ardent minority on an unprepared country as it translated into the organization of self government the appropriate machinery for achieving what a ma jority had already accepted as inevitable.

The System in 1714.

The system of representation existing in 1714 was, like every other major organ of the national life, the deposit of a prolonged historic development of at least eight cen turies. The House of Commons in 1714 consisted of 558 mem bers, of whom 513 represented England and Wales and 45 repre sented Scotland. Ireland (with I0o members) was not included until the Act of Union of 1800, which abolished the separate Irish legislature. The Scottish representation had only been introduced in 1707 by the Act of Union. Of the 513 English representatives 94 represented counties, 415 boroughs, and four the two univer sities of Oxford and Cambridge ; 3o members represented Scottish counties and 15 Scottish boroughs. The English franchises for the counties, and the boroughs differed fundamentally. The county franchise, with trifling exceptions, was based on a 4os. freehold, assessed to the land tax. The borough franchise was amazingly

varied and defied reduction to a single principle. Four groups can broadly be distinguished: (i.) The "Scot and lot" and "pot walloper" boroughs, where the voters, roughly, were residents rated to Church and poor rate; (ii.) the boroughs where every freeman, i.e., enjoying the freedom of the borough, had a vote; (iii.) the burgage-boroughs with the franchise attaching to a certain holding or burgage, and (iv.) the corporation-boroughs, where a close corporation was the privileged electoral organ.

The county franchise dated back to 1430. The borough fran chise was the haphazard result of five centuries of piecemeal de velopment. The electoral map of 1714 emphasized the enormous preponderance of voting power in the borough representatives. The distribution of the boroughs roughly represented the distribu tion of population at the end of the 16th century. But by 1650 this distribution had altered, and since then had been altering rap idly, even before the radical redistribution and growth caused by the "Industrial Revolution" (q.v.). The "Reform of Parliament" embodied in "The Instrument of Government" of the Crom wellian period (1654), demonstrated very clearly by its redistribu tion the admitted hiatus between the existing system and the actual facts. The elaborate analyses made by the "Reformers" of the 18th century revealed these bewildering anomalies. Apart from the contradictions of the borough franchise, which allowed a vote in one borough that was denied in another, custom degener ating into caprice, or avowed manipulation, the distribution of seats resulted in the most astonishing paradoxes. Cornwall, for example, paying 16 out of 513 parts of the land-tax, returned 42 members (two county, 4o borough members) ; Lancashire, paying ten times as much, returned 14 (two county and borough mem bers). The City of London returned four, as did, also, the united boroughs of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, with neither landed nor economic interests. In Yorkshire, York city and 13 boroughs, with a total of 7,000 voters, returned 28, while the county, with a total of 16,000 voters, returned two members.