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THE BEGINNING OF REFORM

habeas corpus was suspended.

431

But it soon became evident

that the social changes of the last decades had created a new type of workingman not so easily held down. The agitation continued notwithstanding all efforts at repression, and soon began to find spokesmen in the house of commons. It has been said that the first great radical victory won in parliament was the repeal in 1824 of the combination laws, the laws under which combinations of workingmen to better their condition were held illegal.

But by 1824 the indications were already clear that the first great reform age of the nineteenth century was opening. The ministry of Lord Liverpool as reconstructed in 1822-23, though tory, was a reform ministry, if reforms did not cut too deeply into the constitution. Changes in the criminal law had long been urged. About two hundred capital crimes were contained in the criminal code of the early nineteenth century, most of them inherited from the middle ages. Thirty-five kinds of forgery were punishable with death, as well as many slight offences like petty larceny. While in actual practice so severe penalties were not exacted, the whole code needed reconstruction. This was given it between 1822 and 1830, and the death penalty left on the statute books only for serious crime. The procedure of criminal trials was at the same time simplified.

Financial reforms important in themselves, and even more important as opening a long series of similar reforms, were adopted. The navigation laws, many centuries old, might be abandoned under reciprocity treaties with any nation which would grant a like concession - the practical end of the system. The corn laws, also of long standing and strengthened at the end of the war as a protection to national agriculture, which did at that time need assistance, were modified and their wisdom sharply challenged. More important still, the general protective system was attacked. No attempt was made to bring in free trade, but progress Cheyney, Readings, 663-669; Robertson, Statutes, 512-517.

was made towards that result. Tariff duties were lowered, in some cases very decidedly lowered, on a long list of articles, and absolute prohibitions removed, of manufactured goods and especially of raw materials. Bounties on exports and prohibitions on the emigration of workmen were abolished. A large beginning was made but the way was still long to free trade, and yet enough had been done to allow the evidence of facts and experience to accumulate.

More striking in the popular judgment and equally essential to future progress were the steps taken towards religious toleration. During the reign of George III, from 1760 to 1820, both protestant and catholic dissenters had been relieved of many disabilities. These had concerned, however, matters of religious belief and practice rather than political status. The test and corporation acts of the seventeenth century still remained enforceable in law, though they were in practice generally disregarded and annual acts of indemnity passed to relieve from penalties those who had violated them. They were at last repealed in 1828. In the next year the even more important "catholic emancipation act" was passed.10 The union with Ireland had increased greatly the proportion of catholics in the population for which it was the duty of parliament to legislate, and forced into attention the injustice of the existing laws. The increasing agitation in Ireland, led by Daniel O'Connell, brought the country to the verge of civil war. The change was carried by the tory ministry of the duke of Wellington in 1829. At first George IV declared as violently as his father had done that he would not consent, but he was compelled by the force of circumstances to yield — the last occasion on which a British king threatened to thwart a measure to which the cabinet had agreed. The act of emancipation admitted catholics to both houses of parliament and to all public offices, local and national, except a very few. Comparatively little yet remained to be done in this direction, 10 Robertson, Statutes, 312-327; A. and S., 508–513.

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but Jews were not admitted to parliament until 1858, nor nonconformists on equal terms to the universities until 1871.

Meantime a general popular demand had sprung up for a reform, more important from a strictly constitutional point of view and more difficult to carry, the reform of parliamentary representation. Generally recognized as necessary for two generations, and many times brought forward in parliament by one advocate or another, it now became an object of increasing agitation among the people, but its serious consideration by the parliament which had granted catholic relief was prevented by the necessity of a general election on the death of the king. George III had died in 1820, though his reign had really ceased in 1810 upon his permanent disability. In the severe struggles through which the nation had been called to pass after 1790, the king had shown himself so thoroughly at one with his people in sentiment and purpose and so devoted to the national cause that he had won a degree of affectionate regard hardly before obtained by any English king. His son, George IV, inherited none of this regard, either personal or political, but on the contrary his moral character and his ignorance and lack of interest in matters of government made him the least respected of kings. He was succeeded by his brother, William IV, who was equally ignorant of public affairs but who retained his whig principles, and was more conscientious about the duties which should fall to a king and more scrupulous to regard the limitations of his constitutional position.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.- P. A. Brown, The French Revolution in English History, 1918. P. Mantoux, La Révolution Industrielle au XVIII Siècle, 1905. E. Porritt, The Unreformed House of Commons, 2 vols., 1903. Lord Rosebery, Pitt, 1891. A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, 1913. G. M. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, 1920. Sir G. O. Trevelyan, George III and Charles Fox, 1914. G. S. Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform, 1913. G. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 1898.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE AGE OF REFORM

The necessity of the reform of parliamentary representation had been almost forced upon the attention of thinking men by the corrupt practices of the eighteenth century. Lord Chatham denounced the existing system severely in 1766, and again in 1770. In 1776 Wilkes introduced a bill making extensive changes, but he could not get a division upon it. In 1780 the duke of Richmond fared no better with a bill which went farther in the way of change than parliament could be persuaded to go for more than a century following. The younger Pitt made motions in the house looking to reform in 1782 and 1783 without success and, as prime minister, in 1785 failed to obtain leave to introduce a bill making very considerable reforms. He proposed to purchase at the expense of the state, as it was then thought justice demanded, the rights of private owners and borough corporations in nearly fifty boroughs and to transfer their representation to London and the counties. This was Pitt's last attempt, but others took up the rather hopeless effort: Flood in 1790, and in 1792 Grey, afterwards earl Grey, so long identified with the reform, and again in 1793 and 1797. It was nothing more than natural that the French revolution, with what seemed to many the excesses necessarily brought on by its democratic tendency, should lead to a reaction against any plan which appeared to have similar tendencies, and it required many years to remove the fear of the results of reform from the minds of statesmen who had had their training in the period of struggle. The subject was brought forward in vain in 1809, in 1810, in 1818, and in 1819. Lord John Russell, who had so much to do with the passage

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of the reform bill of 1832, made his first motion for the purpose in 1820 and repeated it in 1822, 1823, 1826, 1828 and 1830. Meantime attempts had been made by others, and it was clear that a great weight of public opinion was collecting behind the effort.

The result of the industrial revolution in creating a more democratic spirit had greatly increased the public support which could be relied on for a measure of reform, but the argument against the old system had long been complete. No change had been made in the election laws since the fifteenth century, and members were still elected from the counties by the votes of the holders of freehold land of the annual value of forty shillings, and from an arbitrary list of boroughs, long regarded as fixed, in which the right of suffrage was defined in widely varying ways as each borough had originally determined for itself. Glaring inequalities had always existed in the relation of representation to population, to some extent in the counties and to a great extent in the boroughs. The puritan reformers had dealt with this matter in the modern sense, but their measures were not continued, and the inequalities, especially in the case of the boroughs, were greatly increased by the changes in population which followed the industrial revolution. Large new towns arose which had no representation. Old boroughs lost population heavily. Old Sarum with no electors, Galton with seven, and Tavistock with ten, returned each two members, while Manchester and Birmingham had none. Ninety members were sent by forty-six places with less than fifty electors each. Worse even than this, the decline in population, combined with limited rights of suffrage, had put many boroughs sending members to the house of commons completely into the hands of neighboring great landowners who either controlled the election through their ownership, the socalled pocket boroughs, or found it easy to buy the required number of voters, the rotten boroughs. The duke of New1 Cheyney, Readings, 643–646.

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