On the Second Reform Act, 1867

But had they? Should Bagehot have announced the fall of the citadel or Carlyle, the reign of a stinging "swarmery" of dirty workers? Disraeli, who had claimed in June of 1867 that "the elements of democracy do not exist in England," consoled his fellow party members by telling them that only approximately a fifth of the men in the 1,500,000 houses in the boroughs would "qualify to exercise the franchise," and other members of his party reassured themselves with the notion that working-class men would not "take the trouble" to pay their rates so that they could vote.[19]

In 1832, T. B. Macaulay, then a young MP, famously urged his colleagues to "reform so that they could conserve," and the Second Reform Act arguably conserved more than it reformed. Because any given parliamentary act does not alter any previous act unless explicitly stipulating that it does so, the £10 franchise survived the passage in 1867 of "An Act Further to Amend" the suffrage, but so too did many of the limitations that continued to exist after 1832. Some of these exclusions – along with the predictable categories of "women, idiots, criminals, and minors" – must seem to us odd: excise men, certain kinds of tax collectors, men who worked for such government services as the Post Office, policemen, and election agents were all deemed ineligible to vote.

Moreover, various other forms of suffrage survived both the First and Second Reform Acts: the "ancient rights" voter was one who derived his eligibility from his location in a particular kind of borough or his membership in a specific group of men, such as "freemen, liverymen, burgage holders" or "potwallopers" (men who had both fireplaces and "pots" in which to "wallop" or cook their food). After 1867, there remained approximately 43,000 such electors (Seymour 282). These exclusions and inclusions, except in case of potwallopers, slowed the trends towards what Victorians defined as democracy; but there were other, more consistently effective ways of ensuring that the household suffrage about which Disraeli had boasted would remain more a political slogan than a political reality.

Conservatives crying doom did so without considering the often significant hurdles that stood between working-class men and the vote – hurdles so high that the stonemason Henry Broadhurst was elected to serve as an MP in the House of Commons before he himself could vote (Seymour 381). How many qualified working-class voters were turned away from or never went to the polls is impossible to know, though some estimates are as high as 50% (Cowling 380 n1).

Such an outcome should not be surprising. In addition to the number of men who would not pay their rates in order to vote, as the Conservatives put it, were the men who could not pay or who were themselves so impoverished that they were excused from paying poor rates.

At the end of 1867, there were in these categories more than 165,000 adult occupiers in boroughs of over 20,000 inhabitants (Smith 202). Since rates were no longer compounded in rents, a worker might be expected to pay in advance the amounts due for the next three months or for twice or even four times that long; and because workers, unlike their middle- or lower-middle-class counterparts, moved often, they were more unable or unwilling to come up with such large lump sums.

Even more problematic was the ornate and unworkable system of registration, initiated by the First Reform Act, that had made a parish's rate book the basis of the voting register. Among the many difficulties that this system posed were: multiple series of complicated deadlines, lists of rate payers compiled by often incompetent officials, elaborate forms, processes of claiming a vote for oneself or of objecting to another man's vote, and two kinds of courts (one in London) in which claims and objections were adjudicated. A select committee investigating the workings of the registration system in 1869 found plenty of reasons to deplore its shortcomings. In one case, a barrister presiding over a local revision court summarily struck 2,400 men from the registers, even though he was repeatedly warned he had no legal right to do so (Report 44-45).

Moreover, registration processes, like parliamentary debates, were replete with confusion and obfuscation. According to those testifying in front of the 1869 committee, registration was simply a "farce," a "mass of blunders". To the MPs on the committee, it was "a scandal to our representative system"; and the "grievances" of working men could be redressed only through a new statute, one that would be the "necessary complement and corollary to the Reform Act of 1867" (Report 24, 55, vi, v).

No such "complement and corollary" on the issue of registration was forthcoming. Even the famously controversial issue of how electors recorded their votes – by voice or by ballot – was dealt with in 1872 when the Ballot Act became law (see Elaine Hadley, "On Opinion Politics and the Ballot Act of 1872″), but for decades the registration system remained largely unreformed. The problems created by the elimination of compounding, however, were addressed more quickly than those caused by registration. Yet Hodgkinson had been wrong to think that compounding could be eliminated by a wave of his – or Disraeli's – hand.

Here, in a way typical of much Victorian legislation aiming at reform, theory and practice faced off; and here, as was also generally the case, practice won. A customary way of doing business was not likely to disappear if it worked to the advantage of every party involved. The flouting of the new law that eliminated compounding was widespread: landlords and overseers simply did just as they liked when it came to the poor rates that tenants owed. The language that MPs used in 1869 as they described the resulting situation might seem hyperbolic: the boroughs were experiencing "disturbances and rioting almost"; "parochial anarchy" reigned (H 197: 1369; 196: 1314).

Yet conditions were often genuinely chaotic. Working men were expected to come up with relatively large sums of money, rate collectors had to badger them repeatedly and then issue summonses to those unable to produce such amounts, and workers' "goods and chattels" could be seized and sold for nonpayment of rates. When a new MP for the borough of Hackney estimated that 100,000 summonses had been served in his constituency, he asked his listeners to recognize that this "great calamity" had caused "the greatest anxiety, distress, and serious loss to thousands of poor families". As another member lamented, the new system was "the most inconvenient, irritating, and odious it was possible to conceive – and all this under the name of political reform" (H 196: 1314; 197: 363).

Such statistics and such rhetoric emerged in the spring and summer of 1869 after the Liberals, still in power, put forth legislation that would reintroduce or, rather, re-legitimize the practice of compounding. After only three debates, a bill passed, receiving the royal assent on 26 July 1869 as the Poor Rate Assessment and Collection Act, 1869, or, more formally, An Act for Amending the Law with Respect to the Rating of Occupiers for Short Terms, and the Making and Collecting of the Poor Rates (32 & 33 Vict., c. 41).

The seventh clause of this measure, replacing the seventh clause of the Second Reform Act, mandated that rates paid by either the owner of a dwelling or its occupier "shall be deemed a payment of the full rate by the occupier for the purpose of any qualification or franchise which as regards rating depends on the payment of the poor rate". A second crucial stipulation, set out in the nineteenth clause of this relatively brief act, was that the names of the occupiers should be entered into the rate book even if their landlords had paid the rates due on their dwellings; the occupier was in that case as "duly rated for any qualification or franchise aforesaid" as if there had been no compounding of rates. 

Another provision regularized the practice of compounding by allowing landlords of dwellings of certain values – £20 or less in London, £13 in Liverpool, £10 in Manchester or Birmingham, and £8 in other boroughs (clause 3) – to enter into written agreements about rate paying. In addition, according to a genuinely transformative stipulation, owners of dwellings and overseers of the poor were liable to summary convictions and fines of £2 for every name of an eligible voter omitted from the lists that officials were required to compile.

The most remarkable features of this act and of the parliamentary debates that led to its passage were the almost revolutionary effect of the former and the largely pedestrian, disengaged tenor of the latter. The rate-paying clauses of both the First and Second Reform Acts had been seen from the early 1830s through the 1860s as safeguards against democratic rule. Conservatives held that the personal payment of rates was the only way to prevent the disempowerment of the middle and upper classes, which together constituted less than approximately 20% of the population. Yet Gladstone now sounded a bit like Disraeli trying to reassure his Conservative colleagues after the passage of the Second Reform Act: the Liberal leader weakly contended that an assessed rates act would leave untouched the rate-paying clauses of the Second Reform Act (H 197: 528). 

Other Liberals also tried to downplay both the intention and effects of the bill under discussion. George Goschen, president of the Board of Trade, held that the bill involved matters of finance, not of politics (H 196: 1303).

Why the tone of the debates in Parliament was so relatively subdued remains an open question. Some members on both sides of the House seem to have feared that the confusions and consternation of 1866 and 1867 might be revived. Moreover, "a great number" of the Liberal candidates in the election of 1868 had pledged to "disconnect, as soon as they possibly could . . . the suffrage from the payment of rates," as one of them put it (H 194: 330); and any movement toward that goal might have seemed worthy of support.

The only MP who put some life into the debates over the poor-rate assessment bill, thereby offering at least one explanation of its successful passage, was William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, a Liberal MP who had made a late entrance into Parliament in 1868 as a representative for Oxford after decades of working as a lawyer and as a writer for such periodicals as The Morning Chronicle, The Saturday Review, and The Times. Offering not quite the last word on this subject before the bill came to a vote, Vernon Harcourt noted that the abolition of compounding was widely acknowledged to have been "a great economical blunder," and he then contributed to the debates their most vivid image:

"Tacit consent" was the order of the day. As Vernon Harcourt put it, the "hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite," the Conservatives, had been reduced to the role of clown-like professional mourners assisting in the "funeral" of what had been one of their most cherished principles. Yet he went further still: his colleagues "might call the Bill what they liked, but there could be no doubt it was a new Reform Bill," one that had been "necessitated by the errors of the Bill of 1867" (H 197: 519, 521).

It is hard to argue with that assessment. The 1869 law was in effect a "new Reform Bill". As conservative commentators rightly feared, the Poor Rate Assessment and Collection Act had a transformational effect simply because one of its clauses required that the names of all rate-paying occupiers be entered in the rate books. The great irony about the 1869 act was that it accomplished what Gladstone had proposed in 1866 when he excluded from the Liberal bill the personal payment of rates as a requirement for the suffrage: if the Liberals had been able to pass their bill in that year, its £7 fixed-line franchise might have been more limiting than the so-called household suffrage of the Conservative bill, but it clearly would have moved more quickly than did the act of 1867 toward the goal of separating voting from rate paying. Any liberalizing effects that the Second Reform Act might have had, therefore, actually depended on a little-known and less-heralded act dealing with assessed rates. This apparently minor piece of legislation arguably did more to move Britain toward a fully expanded suffrage than the 1867 act had done.

A comparable case might be made for the relation between the First and Second Reform Acts. Victorians often framed the distinction between them as a difference in magnitude, with the Great Reform Act of 1832 opposed to, as Punch archly noted, the "little" one of the 1860s (31 March 1866: 133).

The record of the parliamentary debates in 1866 and 1867 might seem to justify that diminutive: in those years, the House rang less often than it had in the early 1830s with heroic speeches either condemning or extolling radical change. Yet the shift from an occupation franchise to a residential or so-called household suffrage could easily reverse the conventional valuation of the legislation of 1867 in relation to that of 1832: removing the fixed line was arguably a bigger step forward than instituting the £10 standard had been.

And here we return, at least briefly, to the realm of historical generalization: in 1884, the Third Reform Act extended to the counties the suffrage of both the £10 occupier and the rate-paying householder; but universal manhood suffrage came only in 1918, the year in which all adult men, along with some women, were enfranchised. Long before the 1867 bill made its torturous way through the House of Commons, Disraeli voiced his opposition to "household democracy" (H 152: 985), but the Second Reform Act inched forward in that direction – albeit haltingly, unevenly, and hesitantly. There were still plenty of retrograde forces. There was much work left to be done to make registration a fair and consistent process.

Redistricting in both 1832 and 1867 had assured that the landed interests, as the aristocracy and gentry were called, would prevail in most counties and in many of the more largely rural borough constituencies; and the proportion of MPs to the population in different electoral districts continued to be vastly unequal. Moreover, numbers of working-class votes continued to be disqualified. But by 1867 there was legislation in place that at least in theory redefined the phrase the representation of the people: by calling into question the assumption of the 1832 act that members of the middle classes were alone in constituting "the people," the Second Reform Act recognized that some, if not all, working-class men were also among "the people" who were, as Gladstone put it in 1864, "entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution".

published July 2014