extended at a contested election for any county or borough represented by three members no person should vote for more than three candidates,1 — an experiment in favor of minority elections. act of 1867 In 1868 the Representation of the People Act was extended to Scotland to Scotland by 31 and 32 Vict. c. 48; and to Ireland by 31 and 32 Vict. c. 49. After the acts thus extended were fully developed, they finally raised the electorate for the three kingdoms, including the universities, to a grand total of 3,183,5522 (1885), electorate. as against 1,370,793, the highest product (1868) of the reform measures of 1832. and Ireland; great increase in the Introduc tion of voting by ballot; the old system involved While the second reform bill made no direct change in electoral procedure, the widening of the electorate effected by it hastened the adoption of a measure that for forty years had been the subject of discussion as a political theory. From the earliest times nominations had been made at the "hustings", in public speeches of the supporters of each candidate, and the choice of the electors was manifested in the first instance by show of hands, from which the apparently defeated candidate could appeal by demanding a poll, by means of which each elector was required to openly state his name together with that of his candidate to a poll-clerk, who recorded the result in the poll-books. In order to reduce the expense, and to rebribery, and strain the bribery and intimidation incident to that method of intimida- voting, evils which tended to increase as the electoral system widened, the advanced liberals demanded the substitution of a new system of secret voting by ballot, a proposal for a long time resisted by Lord Palmerston and the more conservative element that followed after him. In 1870, however, a ballot bill was introduced in the house of commons as a government measure; and in the next year another was brought in and passed by that body, after prolonged discussion. As the bill. reached the lords too late in the session for consideration, it was not until 1872 that the act was passed, generally known as the Ballot Act,4 "to amend the Law relating to Procedure expense, tion; a ballot bill passed the commons in 1871; Ballot Act of 1872; at Parliamentary and Municipal Elections," by virtue of which the old method of voting at such elections was superseded, except as to the universities,1 by the new system requiring nominations in writing by ten registered electors, and a poll by secret voting taken by means of a ballot-paper, to be marked by a single X by each elector. Originally passed as a annually temporary measure to expire at the end of 1880, the Ballot Act has been continued by annual reënactments. reenacted. bills of tion;" tation of the Redistribu 3. The moment that the second reform bill was thus Reform rounded out and completed by the Ballot Act of 1872, a fresh 1884-85: demand for a still further extension of the electoral system arose whose war-cry was "equalization," — equalization of the cry for "equalizafranchise in county and borough; equalization of the electoral areas by such a redistribution of seats as would place the county and borough voter upon an equal plane as to representation. Not, however, until 1884 was the political understanding reached which finally transformed that demand into law. Then it was that the house of lords agreed to pass the Repre- Represen sentation of the People Act, 1884,2 upon the understanding People Act, that a Redistribution of Seats Act should be introduced in the 1884; lower house in 1885.3 Thus the subject of electoral qualifica- tion of tions and that of electoral areas were dealt with in separate 1885; bills, and not jointly as in the acts of 1832 and 1867. By the terms of the first act, which embraces not only England but the United Kingdom, and whose main object was to assimilate the qualification for the county vote with that already established for the borough vote, it was provided that exactly the same dwelling-house and lodgings qualification as county and that established in the boroughs by the act of 1867 should franchises confer the franchise in the counties. And in order to further assimilated extend the uniformity, the county occupation qualification was reduced from £12 to £10, subject, however, to the diverse conditions of the qualifications which had been annexed in the case of boroughs by the act of 1832, and in the case of counties Seats Act, borough Effort to electoral be repre only; the "single seat system" applied both to counties by the act of 1867. All former rights to the suffrage were reserved, subject to the same conditions as to rating, length of residence, and the like; and some electoral privileges were added in favor of service occupiers, whose tenure, not being in law a tenancy, did not cover the right to register and vote. By the terms of the Redistribution of Seats Act, 1885, create equal which became law on June 25 of that year,1 and which deals divisions to with the electoral areas of Scotland and Ireland, as well as sented by with those of England, — the effort was made to so reconstruct the electoral districts as to arrange them in divisions with one member substantially equal populations, each division to return one member only. In order to attain that result, known as the single-seat system" of division, seventy-nine boroughs, of less than 15,000 inhabitants, were entirely disfranchised, while thirty-six, of less than 50,000 inhabitants, were reduced to one member instead of two. A redistribution was then made by splitting up all the counties into electoral districts, nearly equal in population, to each of which was given one member. Fourteen boroughs, such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds, gained additional members, and thirty-five new boroughs, such as Croydon and St. Helen's, were created. The "single-seat system " was then applied as far as it could be to the larger boroughs, twenty-six of them being divided on the same plan. Liverpool, for instance, was split up into as many as nine divisions. "The net result is that the Act gives the [English and Welsh] counties 253 members instead of 187, and the [English and Welsh] boroughs 237 instead of 297, the proportion to population being one to 52,800 in counties instead of one to 70,800, and one to 52,700 in boroughs instead of one to 41,200, the increased representation of the counties being necessitated by the increase in the number of county electors caused by the act of 1884." 2 and boroughs; the net result; number of In the following table 3 appears the total number of electors electors and in the United Kingdom upon the register in 1896, together population with the registrar-general's estimate of the population in the estimate of in 1896; middle of the year. 1 The act first named became law on December 6, 1884. 8 For parliamentary returns I am indebted to Sir Reginald Palgrave, clerk 2 Lely and Foulkes, Parl. Elec. and of the house of commons. Reg. Acts, p. xxii. It thus appears that England and Wales are represented by one member for every 10, 180 electors, Scotland by one member for every 8,988 electors, and Ireland by one member for every 7,082. The representation in the house of commons, which has number of stood at 670 since 1885, is distributed as follows: representatives and their distribution. constitu lords; member 4. It is a notable fact in the history of the revolution, car- Present ried on under constitutional forms, by which the electorate of tion of the the house of commons was widened from about 400,000 voters house of in 1832 to 6,415,469 in 1896, that the membership of that house remained throughout substantially unchanged. Before trifling the passing of the first reform bill, the representative cham- increase in per contained 6581 members, and now it contains only 670. ship of the On the other hand, the notable fact in the history of the process house,through which the house of lords has been developed into its present form is that its membership, which at the accession of vast the house of Tudor numbered only 52 lay peers,2 has been that of the so extended as to now embrace, all told, 567.3 Only once upper; 1 See above, p. 541. 2 See above, p. 28. 3 5 princes of the blood, 26 archbishops and bishops, 21 dukes, 22 marquesses, 117 earls, 27 viscounts, 305 barons, 16 Scottish and 28 Irish repre- lower increase in under the Tudors, temporal peers, who were number by the spirit ual lords, prior to their reduction to of greater monas teries; lavish creations made by Act of added six a total under the Tudors, who restricted their creations almost excluabout sixty sively to the old knightly families, did the aggregate of the temporal peers reach the number of sixty. Before the destruction of the greater monasteries by Henry VIII. in 1539, and the consequent withdrawal of the abbots and priors, who sat by virtue of their baronial status as lords of parliament, the generally lords spiritual generally exceeded the temporal lords in numexceeded in ber, and even after that event the twenty-one archbishops and bishops remaining constituted more than a third of the house. To the twenty-one old bishoprics that thus survived Henry VIII. added six, one of which was soon after suppressed.1 twenty-six To the number of spiritual peers, thus finally reduced to twentythrough destruction six, no subsequent additions have ever been made, while the lay peers have been multiplied many-fold. Through the somewhat lavish creations made by the Stuarts, the peerage numbered at the Revolution about one hundred and fifty, the Stuarts; raised by William III. and Queen Anne to one hundred and sixty-eight. In Anne's reign it was that by the Act of Union with Scotland the upper house was further increased by the teen Scotch addition, in 1707, of sixteen representative peers for that kingdom, elected at the beginning of each parliament. While no new Scotch peers were to be created after the union, the peerage per Scotch peerage, which then numbered one hundred and fiftyelect them; four, was perpetuated in its integrity as an aristocratic body endowed with the right to chose from their own ranks the requisite number to speak for them at Westminster. An account has already been given of the unconstitutional attempt made by the whigs in 1720 to secure their hold upon the upper house by limiting the power of the crown to add to its membership. After the failure of that audacious effort to make the hereditary chamber a close aristocratic body, indeat the end pendent of the crown and irresponsible to the nation, George of reign of I. and George II. continued to add to its ranks by so moderate George II. peerage an exercise of the peer-creating power vested in the crown numbered about one that at the end of the reign of the latter the peerage numbered hundred only one hundred and seventy-four, of which thirteen minors enty-four. and twelve Roman Catholics were incapable of sitting and voting in parliament.4 peers; Scotch petuated to and sev 1 See above, p. 90, and notes 3, 6. 3 See above, p. 459. 4 Court and City Register for 1760. |