Nor was this the only way in which the inherent difficulty of finding good town constituencies in poor and rude times was artificially aggravated in our old system of representation. Not only were the best boroughs not chosen to be constituencies, but the best persons in those boroughs were not chosen to be electors. The old and complex rights of suffrage in different boroughs are antiquarian matters, on which we have not a single line of space to bestow; but they differed very much. Originally, perhaps, the right or duty had belonged or attached to all ratepaying householders; but this simple definition, if it ever existed, had long passed away, and the rights of suffrage had become most various. No short description, much less any single definition, would include. them. We give those which existed in the boroughs of two counties, Somersetshire and Lancashire, to show how great the diversity was, and how many "permutations and combinations" it embraced :: BRISTOL, BATH, WELLS, SOMERSETSHIRE. Freeholders of 40s. and free burgesses. Mayor, aldermen, and common-councilmen only. Mayor, masters, burgesses, and freemen of the seven trading companies of the said city. TAUNTON,. . [Householders or "pot-boilers," anciently called] Potwallers, not receiving alms or charity. BRIDGEWATER, . [The corporation, consisting of the] Mayor, aldermen, and twenty-four capital burgesses of the borough paying scot and lot. ILCHESTER, MINEHEAD, Alleged to be the inhabitants of the said town paying scot and lot, which the town called "potwallers." The parishioners of Dunster and Minehead, being housekeepers in the borough of Minehead, and not receiving alms. MILBORN PORT, . The capital bailiffs and their deputies, the number of bailiffs being nine, and their deputies being two; the commonalty stewards, their number being two; and the inhabitants thereof paying scot and lot. LANCASHIRE. Freemen only. LANCASTER, LIVERPOOL, CLITHEROE, [NEWTON, WIGAN, Mayor, bailiffs, and freemen not receiving alms. Freeholders, resident and non-resident. Freeholders of 40s., joint tenants having but one vote. Proprietary borough.] [Supposed to be the] Free burgesses.* Generally speaking, we may perhaps say that the original scot-and-lot (or rate-paying) qualification had been submitted to two opposite forces of alteration. By one it had been restricted to certain inhabitants of the town who, by virtue of some corporate right or municipal office, assumed to themselves to be its most important and chief inhabitants. These princi pal persons were usually few, and they prudently contrived that their number should not be augmented: they formed themselves into self-renewing corporations; at every vacancy the remaining members filled up the place as they deemed best, and they took care no one should have votes for the borough but themselves. On the other hand, by a second process, the borough suffrage had been widened so as to include all freemen, or all inhabitant householders not receiving alms; everybody, in short, who could be included in it. The process of extension, as was natural, was of the two the older process: while the right of electing members was attended by the duty of paying them, it was an onerous burden, and the chief people in the place tried to extend it as far as they well could; in later times, when members were no longer paid, and political advantages were to be obtained by the skillful use of a vote, the influential people of a borough tried as much as possible to keep the parliamentary suffrage to themselves. In the last attempt they generally succeeded: the boroughs in which the people at large elected the members were, in the * Oldfield, Vol. iv. I have restored his order and one borough omitted by Bagehot.-ED. eighteenth century, far fewer than those in which a few persons of one sort or another elected them. The tendency of the House of Commons itself, from various causes, was rather to confine than to extend the right of suffrage. But in whichever direction the progress of time had altered what we may suppose to have been the original right of franchise, whether it had restricted it or had extended it, the effect upon the constituency was almost equally bad. If it was much narrowed, it fell into the hands of a very small number of persons, who used for their own benefit what had become a very marketable privilege; and if the franchise had been very much extended, -especially if it became, as in several places it did, nearly equivalent to universal suffrage, - we may readily conceive in what manner it was used, when we remember that many of the boroughs were small, that in that age corruption was thought far less disgraceful than at present, and that the poorer classes were much poorer and much more ignorant than they now are. We need not further explain the general causes which impaired the independence and purity of the ancient boroughs. As it would have been somewhat difficult to find in old times enough boroughs that were proper to choose representatives; as the best had not been chosen - perhaps had not been searched for; as in the actual boroughs the best people to be voters had not been selected as such; as in most of them the electing constituency was very small, it is no wonder that most of these boroughs fell more or less under the control of rich men who considered the franchise of the borough a part of their own property. With the counties the case was somewhat different as yet there was no Chandos clause,* the 40s. *The clause in the Reform Bill of 1832 giving votes to all farmers occupying lands of £50 rental without specific tenure; introduced by the Marquis of Chandos. Ed. - freehold was as yet the only title to a vote. Yeomen with such freeholds were as yet numerous, in many counties very numerous, and were still sturdy and independent; the inferior gentry were not always much disposed to submit to the dictation of lord or duke. In the last century the county franchise was always considered as the free and independent element; those who wished to purify the legislature always proposed to augment that element, and saw no other means of obtaining what they wished for. But even the counties were in former times far less independent than from the nature of the legal franchise from the paper description of it-we should suppose. Our county society has always been an aristocratic society; and in the last century aristocracy was a power of which it is difficult, in these days of free manners and careless speech, to realize the force. Society had then far more than now a simple, regular, recognized structure; each class had its place, it looked up to the classes above it, it would have thought it wrong to vie with them or even to imitate them. Each class was to a certain extent independent; each went its own way on its own affairs, attended to the transactions of its own calling and the details of its own life: but each had a tendency, such as we can hardly now imagine, to be guided, impelled, and governed by those who were above them, on all questions and in all matters which concerned or seemed to concern all classes equally. The real distinction between classes, too, was then an infinitely greater one than it now is. The aristocratic class was the most educated class, had access to the best society, was as a whole by far the most polished and cultivated class in the nation. For good and for evil, noblemen had a power then to which there is nothing comparable, scarcely anything analogous, Amusing illustrations of this occur in the documents of the time. Thus Burke, in a memorandum on East-Indian affairs addressed to the noblemen and gentlemen who composed the Rockingham party, proposes the following scheme:-"With regard to the Bank [of England], which is the grand instrument of the Court on this occasion, might it not be proper (if possible) that some of you of the greatest property should resolve to have nothing to do with their paper? There are five or six of you that would frighten them. If the territorial influence of the aristocracy was supposed to be so powerful in Threadneedle Street, we may easily suppose what it must have been in their own counties, at their own doors. The county contests of the last century had a continued tendency to become family conflicts between one noble house and another; the political questions of the day were merged in the intensity of the aristocratic and perhaps hereditary feud. Such was the representation of England, and it seems restricted enough; but that of Scotland was even more restricted still, and more subject to illegitimate influence. Even the stoutest defenders of the old system of representation before 1832 used to own that the Scotch system could only be defended as "part of a whole," and that taken by itself it was absurd. There were in theory in Scotland thirty county members and fifteen borough members; but the franchise had in both of them been narrowed to an almost inconceivable extent. In 1812 the whole county constituency only amounted to 1235, and the whole borough constituency to 1253. The franchise in the counties was restricted to the tenants-in-chief of the Crown; all proprietors (the feudal law in theory still prevailed) who held from a subject were disfranchised, though a very large portion of the county was owned by them. The result was much the same as if in England the county member had been chosen, not by the 40s. freeholders but [by] the lords of the * "Correspondence," Vol. i., page 429. Dated 1773. Refers to Government attack on the East India Company. - Ed. + The useless word "about" is added in the reprint.-ED. |