ABSTRACT
In 1848, Lord John Russell publicly stated that the 1832 Reform Act required modification. In February 1852, as prime minister, he introduced a Reform bill. The measure proposed the extension of the borough franchise to occupiers of property worth £5 per annum and the vote in counties to £20 occupiers. Russell also proposed a direct taxation franchise of 40s per annum, operative in both towns and counties. The abolition of property qualifications for MPs, the abolition of the requirement that ministers face re-election on taking up office, and amendment of the parliamentary oath rendering it less objectionable to Catholics and possible for it to taken by practising Jews were also included. Any redistribution was conspicuous by its absence. Russell characterised the measure as a supplement to the 1832 Reform Act, not a substitute for it.
On Russell’s announcement of his bill, Disraeli responded that, prior to careful consideration of its specific proposals, it was not prudent to pass judgement. The merit of any measure would depend on its details. Russell, he commented, had suggested two tests for enfranchisement, numbers of population and property. While not objecting to these tests, Disraeli suggested that Reform legislation at this moment was of questionable propriety. Any change to parliamentary representation should be permanent. While supporting the admission of the working classes to the suffrage, he doubted whether the £5 borough franchise would achieve this object. At the same time, proceeding with Reform would divert parliamentary attention away from other necessary legislation.
In the event, Russell’s resignation as prime minister on 21 February foreclosed further consideration of his Reform proposals.
In February 1854, Russell introduced another Reform bill to the Commons. Its main provisions were the lowering of the borough franchise to those occupying property with a £6 annual rateable value. In the counties, the vote was extended to £10 occupiers. ‘Merit franchises’ would give the vote to men receiving an annual salary of £100 or more, those receiving £10 or more annually from funds or stock, university graduates, and those with savings of £50 or more deposited in a Savings Bank in the borough in which they resided. Redistribution would enable a third MP to be given to 46 two-Member counties and nine boroughs with populations of more than 100,000. In these new three-Member constituencies, electors would possess only two votes. This was a protection of minority representation.
John Wilson Croker’s article ‘The Reform Bill’ condemned Russell’s measure as experimental and destructive. Legislation distinguished by dangerous innovation. In 1832, Croker had resigned from the Commons in protest over the Reform Act. He did so because it exposed venerable institutions, which custom suggested were unchangeable, to refashioning. It conceded the principle that numbers, not just property, were a consideration in conferring the privilege of the vote. As a result, for the past 20 years, he pronounced, the country had slid down the inclined plane of democracy. In 1848, Russell had abandoned 1832 as a final settlement of Reform. This, Croker believed, inoculated a cancerous disease into the vitals of the constitution. Russell’s motive for doing so, Croker suggested, was Russell’s realisation that 1832 had neither pacified the demand for democracy, nor secured the official domination of the Whigs.
Croker saw the object of Russell’s 1854 Reform measure as the attempt to extend the numerical principle through the whole representative system, all political power being passed to numerical majorities. This was a path, Croker warned, that led ultimately and ineluctably to universal suffrage. In France since 1848, universal suffrage had led to despotism, marked by Louis Napoleon’s apotheosis as Emperor Napoleon III. In the United States there existed, often unrecognised, constitutional checks on government by numbers. Russell’s redistribution proposals confirmed, Croker argued, that his great object was to give all power to selected numerical majorities – a subversion of the principle that the Commons should represent property and ‘interests’.
