a widespread agitation throughout the country in favor of Reform: monster meetings were held in Hyde Park; the Park railings were pulled down and trampled on by an excited mob, and the police regulations proved as unable to bear the unusual strain as police regulations usually do on such occasions.

The result was that Mr. Disraeli became convinced that a Reform Bill of some kind or other was inevitable, and Mr. Disraeli's opinion naturally carried the day. The Government, however, did not go straight to the point at once. They began by proposing a number of resolutions on the subject, which were very soon laughed out of existence. Then they brought a bill founded on them, which, however, was very shortly afterwards withdrawn after a very discouraging reception. Finally, the Ministry, lightened by the loss of three of its members-the Earl of Carnarvon, Viscount Cranborne, and General Peel-announced their intention of bringing in a comprehensive measure.

*

The measure in question proposed household suffrage in the boroughs subject to the payment of rates, and occupation franchise for the counties subject to the same limitation, and a variety of fanciful clauses, which would have admitted members of the liberal professions, graduates of the universities, and a number of other classes to the franchise. The most novel feature was a clause which permitted a man to acquire two votes if he possessed a double qualification by rating and by profession. The great objection to the bill was that it excluded "the compound householder." The compound householder is now as extinct an animal as the potwalloper found in earlier parliamentary strata, but he was the hero of the Reform debates of 1867, and as such deserves more than a passing reference. He was, in fact, an occupier of a small house who did not pay his rates directly and in person, but paid them through his landlord. Now the occupiers of these very small houses were naturally by far the most numerous class of occupiers in the boroughs, and the omission of them implied a large exclusion from the franchise. The Liberal party, therefore,

*The present Marquis of Salisbury.

rose in defence of the compound householder, and the struggle became fierce and hot. It must be remembered, however, that neither Mr. Gladstone nor Mr. Bright wished to lower the franchise beyond a certain point, and a meeting was held in consequence, in which it was agreed that the programme brought forward in committee should begin by an alteration of the rating laws, so that the compound householder above a certain level should pay his own rates and be given a vote, and that all occupiers below the level should be excluded from the rates and the franchise alike.

On what may be described roughly as "the great drawingthe-line question," however, the Liberal party once more split up. The advanced section were determined that all occupiers should be admitted, and they would have no "drawing the line." Some fifty or sixty of them held a meeting in the tea-room of the House of Commons and decided on this course of action: in consequence they acquired the name of the "Tea-Room Party." The communication of their views to Mr. Gladstone made him excessively indignant. He denounced them in violent language, and his passion was emulated by Mr. Bright. If the Tea-Room party had been a second set of Adullamites, sworn to resist all reform, they could scarcely have been attacked with greater fury. Their sole crime, however, consisted in opposition to Mr. Gladstone, for it is now universally recognized that their proposed policy was far the most enlightened and liberal of the two, and that the Gladstonian scheme must have ended in considerable confusion and injustice.

Mr. Gladstone had to give in, and his surrender was followed by that of Mr. Disraeli. The Tea-Room party, in fact, were masters of the day, and were able to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the Government to induce them to admit the principle of household suffrage pure and simple, and to abolish all distinctions of rating. The coup de grâce was given to the compound householder, and a number of persons admitted to the franchise who would otherwise have been excluded. The rest of the debate may be characterized as a cutting and carving into symmetrical proportions of the measure which the government had brought roughhewn into the House. The bill in its final form, the details

of which are reserved for the next chapter, differed very considerably from the form in which it had originally appeared. Not only was the household suffrage clause considerably extended, the dual vote abolished, and most of the fancy franchises swept away, but there were numerous additions which completely altered the character of the bill, and transformed it from a balanced attempt to enlarge the franchise without shifting the balance of power to a sweeping measure of reform.

In the course of the debate Mr. Disraeli had to listen to attacks and denunciations very similar to those which he had hurled at the head of Peel in the Corn-Law debate. Lord Cranborne described his action as "a policy of legerdemain," and "a great betrayal which has no parallel in our parliamentary annals, which strikes at the root of all mutual confidence, which is the very soul of our party Government, and on which only the strength and freedom of our representative institutions can be secured." There was this difference, however, in principle between the position of Mr. Disraeli in 1867, and in Sir Robert Peel in 1846, that Sir Robert carried the repeal of the Corn Laws by the help of the Opposition, in defiance of the well-known opinions of the mass of the men he professed to lead and to rely on; Mr. Disraeli had, on the contrary, educated the great mass of his party-all except a few seceders--into the firm conviction that he could read the signs of the times better than most men, and that the moment had come when Reform of some kind was inevitable. Mr. Disraeli moreover was in a minority in Parliament; he had turned out Mr. Gladstone solely by the help of the Adullamites; he knew he could not carry the smallest measure of Reform without the help of the Liberals; the principle of compromise must in fact have been present to his mind from the first, or it were worse than useless to have brought in the bill at all.

The immediate result of the bill was a great Liberal triumph at the General Election, which returned Mr. Gladstone to power at the head of a Ministry drawn from all sections of the Liberal party. A period of active and aggressive Reform set in, of which the nation soon wearied, and the result was, that when Mr. Gladstone suddenly dissolved Parliament

in 1874, a large Conservative majority was returned to power. A period of active foreign policy followed, which as naturally produced the inevitable reaction, leading up, in 1880, to a new period of vigorous legislation, and the Third Reform Bill of 1884-1885.

CHAPTER XXIII.

PARLIAMENTARY DEVELOPMENT.

SECTION 1.-Cabinet Government.

THE passing of the First Reform Bill may be regarded as the second Act of the English Revolution. The expulsion of the Stuarts had transferred the government of the country from the king to the aristocracy, who ruled for nearly a century by means of a well-organized system of corruption. George III., by a crafty use of their own weapon, succeeded in wresting from them a large share of the authority which the Crown had lost. The Reform Bill put an end almost at once and forever to personal government by influence, broke the power of the aristocracy, depressed the House of Lords. very low in the political balance, exalted the House of Commons to unquestioned supremacy, and vested the real government of the country solely in the Cabinet.

Not that these important results were immediately appar

ent.

All that the Reform Act appeared to do was to destroy a vast deal of corruption, and admit the middle classes to political power. But the new constituencies, though extremely vulnerable to bribery in every form, were comparatively but slightly susceptible to personal influence. Rich men might buy seats at enormous expense, great landowners might command an overwhelming interest in some particular constituency, ministers might make an unfair use of the very considerable patronage in the public departments, and the army and navy, still left to them, to attach a large personal following to their cause. But anything like the deliberate and systematic formation of a party by wholesale purchase or intimidation of the electors was utterly impossible for the future. The character of this House of Commons naturally underwent a considerable change in consequence. There