ELECTIVE FRANCHISE BILL— [BILL 101.] (Hansard, 18 July 1866)

§ MR. CLAY

said, that although he could not hope to carry the Bill to a successful issue, the House would, he trusted, bear with him a short time while he proceeded to reply to some objections which had been urged against the measure on the first day of the debate, and to which, owing to the form of the House, he had had no opportunity of replying. He was more desirous of making the House and the country aware of the nature of his proposal because he was aware it was open to one serious drawback—that of novelty. It was, perhaps, too much to expect that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Lancashire (Mr. Gladstone), amid his occupations as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the anxieties attending the progress of his own Bill, would have given to the measure before the House the attention which he could have wished. Whether he had a right, however, to expect that or not, the right hon. Gentleman certainly failed to comprehend the nature of the proposal, or to obtain a mastery over its details; and on this account he (Mr. Clay) the more regretted the haste which had attended the introduction of the Government measure. When it first became notorious, last autumn, that the Government purposed introducing a measure of Parliamentary Reform, he gave his constituents a pledge that he would bring his proposal before the House; and in doing so he had hoped that it would be received as a supplemental franchise to any lowering of the property qualification which might be proposed by the Government. He still thought that it would have been a very excellect adjunct to the Government measure, and if it had 1004 received the attention at the hands of the House, which he believed it merited, he thought it would also have facilitated the passing of the Government Reform Bill, because it would have given to the latter the character of permanence, the absence of which contributed, in his belief, more than anything else to the miscarriage of that measure. He had not shared in the opinion that the introduction of any Reform Bill by the Government during the present Session was necessary. He had thought that it would have been best if the Government had contented themselves with promising to introduce a Reform Bill on the first day of next Session; and had that course been adopted he would probably have been able, in private conversation at all events, to make the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer thoroughly acquainted with the nature of his proposal. That hope, however, was disappointed, and he confessed that he listened with regret and astonishment to the speech in which the right hon. Gentleman had displayed the small mastery he had obtained of the details of his proposal. The right hon. Gentleman ridiculed the idea of any working man being able to pass the examination which he proposed. Now, he confessed that his only fear was that the examination was too easy. The examination he proposed was less severe than that passed by the lowest grade of the Civil Service, and by the officers of Customs, and in which little difficulty was generally found. The right hon. Gentleman, moreover, spoke of the vast trouble which would be imposed upon those who desired to obtain the franchise by means of the examination; but the only trouble imposed upon the candidates was the necessity of submitting themselves to a test occupying about half-an-hour, or at the most about an hour in a room in the town in which they resided. The right hon. Gentleman further objected to the plan because of the expense it entailed upon the candidate; but he (Mr. Clay) could not see that the exaction of a shilling from those who failed and half-a-crown from those who succeeded was the slightest drawback to the merits of the proposal. The right hon. Gentleman as Chancellor of the Exchequer was naturally —and rightly enough—jealous of any scheme which tended to burden the public purse, and in his proposal he (Mr. Clay) had therefore suggested these trifling charges, which he had been informed by those fully competent to judge upon the 1005 subject would be ample to meet all the expenses incurred. The expense, therefore, to the candidates would be extremely small, while to the country it would be absolutely nothing. The right hon. Gentleman again objected that this was a young man's franchise. That objection, however, was one which might easily be obviated. The Bill proposed that candidates should not be examined before they were twenty-one years of age; but if the House had thought fit the age might easily have been altered, and twenty-five or any other age substituted for that adopted in the first instance. It was urged again that a man at fifty might have forgotten what he had known at twenty-one or twenty-five; but such forgetfulness was not confined to those who were likely to be candidates under this Bill. He did not believe, for instance, that any of those who had formerly taken degrees at the Universities would be able without any preparation again to pass the necessary examination. The objection, however, was futile, unless it was acknowledged that education was necessary to fit a man for the possession of the franchise. It should be remembered that his proposal would embrace two classes. The first comprised those who already possessed the necessary information and who had nothing to do but to walk in from the street and pass their examination. This class chiefly consisted of clerks, small shopkeepers, and the very best educated and the pick of the working men, all of whom hon. Gentlemen had unanimously expressed their willingness to enfranchise, and for whose benefit all sorts of forms and franchises had been suggested. The other class comprised those who did not possess the necessary knowledge, and who, therefore, would be put to some little pains to acquire it. With regard to that class he had always said that he did not desire to admit them simply on account of the small scrap of education which they managed to pick up; but if a man would take the trouble which was necessary to obtain the right of voting, he believed that man would be a fit and proper man to be intrusted with the franchise. One great advantage, therefore, of this franchise was that it gave proof of earnestness; his proposition would enable a man who possessed the necessary information to prove it by a short examination, and thus commercial clerks and shopkeepers' assistants might acquire the franchise by the 1006 process which had been called lateral extension, while it might stimulate the man who had not the necessary knowledge to take pains to acquire it. It was on the ground of the proof of their earnestness that he had asked the House to admit these classes to the franchise, and if the crossing-sweeper at his door would put himself to such trouble to acquire the franchise, he (Mr. Clay) should consider him a fit person to enjoy its exercise. The hon. Member for Birmingham (Mr. Bright) had also, to his great surprise, opposed the Bill; but the arguments of the hon. Member were to his (Mr. Clay's) mind, at all events, destitute of their usual cogency, for the hon. Member asked what knowledge of constitutional history would be acquired by a man in the course of his preparation for the examination. But he would in return ask the hon. Member for Birmingham what knowledge of constitutional law was obtained by a man through the simple occupation of a £10 or a £7 house? If the objection could reasonably be urged against the one plan, it could at least with equal reason be urged against the other. The hon. Member, too, spoke disrespectfully of the University constituencies, and instanced them as constituencies which were the most learned of all, and were at the same time the most wrong-headed of all. But if the argument were good for anything at all, it simply went to show that education was a disadvantage and not a benefit. The hon. Member also made use of another argument which showed how little he knew of the working classes. He said that the sons would, through their superior education, get the franchise which the father could not obtain, and that this would lead to jealousy. But all experience showed that the contrary was the case. The feeling more prevalent than any other in the mind of the working man was the desire that his sons might know more than himself, and occupy a superior position in life to that which he himself filled. "I am no scholar myself, sir, but I have managed to give my son a decent education," was what was constantly said by many working men. Of all the objections which had been urged against his proposal that one was, he believed, the most futile. The right hon. Gentleman the late Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. Goschen), in a very pretty antithesis, characterized the proposal as the maxi- 1007 mum of the Liberal profession and the minimum of the Liberal perfromance, because it would be of no service to the working man, and that few would come in under it. All he could say was that if that were the case, it would only show that the working men did not care for the franchise, and that they did not deserve to receive it. The hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Tiverton (Mr. Denman), on the other hand, thought that it was nothing but universal suffrage in another form. He might, perhaps, well leave the right hon. Gentleman the late Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the hon. and learned Member for Tiverton to settle between themselves the difference in their opinions, for it seemed to him (Mr. Clay) that in making a proposal which had provoked two such exactly opposite criticisms, he had exactly hit upon the happy medium. The hon. and learned Member for Tiverton also complained that the Bill had been introduced without any statistics; but he (Mr. Clay) maintained that in this matter statistics were not at all necessary, because it was impossible by statistics to gauge the anxiety of the non-electors to form part of the elective body. The hon. and learned Gentleman also complained, as did several other hon. Gentlemen, that by this proposal the worst members of the working classes would not be excluded; but neither were they excluded under the £10 or the £7 test. In support of that argument his noble Friend the Member for Haddingtonshire (Lord Elcho) had instanced the case of the clever housebreaker Caseley, whose description of the way in which he carried on his operations excited the astonishment, and even the admiration, of those who heard him. His noble Friend contended that by the present proposal that housebreaker would probably exercise the right of voting. But it should also be remembered that he would not be excluded under the present system, and as one of the characteristics of ability was the admiration of ability in others, he should not be surprised had Caseley lived in a £10 house in Haddingtonshire to have found him among the most ardent supporters of his noble Friend. He would further say that his object in this proposal was to create a double title to the franchise. He was perfectly willing to allow that property qualification—and a low property qualification—should be one test; but he also maintained that intelligence should be another; and as they did not re- 1008 quire that property should be joined to intelligence he could not see why they should demand that intelligence should be joined to property. He strongly objected to one thing in the late Government Reform Bill; but when he said he objected to one thing he hoped it would not be understood that he objected to any lowering of the franchise. He had voted for the Government Reform Bill in every stage, in spite of which he was told—for he had not seen it himself—that The Star, with the fairness which they all expected, when they remembered the influences under which that journal was supposed to labour, had gibbeted him as one of the opponents of the measure. He had always been in favour of a great reduction in the franchise, but he thought that its lowering by £2 at a time was unadvisable, because it could only tend to keep the subject in a perfect fever of agitation. There could be no permanence in the change from £10 to £7—another change from £7 to £5 would be demanded, and so on, and he would rather see the subject dealt with permanently. For his own part, he should prefer to go down at once to household suffrage in accordance with the views of the hon. and learned Member for Richmond (Sir Roundell Palmer). He had been all his life in favour of household suffrage as held by the late Lord Durham, as whose political disciple he had started in public life. One of his objects, therefore, was to introduce into his proposal the element of permanence, and he believed that with the adoption of his proposal agitation would be at an end, because it could not reasonably be urged that there was any ground of complaint on account of any exclusion from the franchise. He might be told that there were not many petitions presented in favour of the measure; but, considering the circumstances and the novelty of the proposal, he did not regard that fact as anything surprising. As it was, the most bonâ fide of all the petitions presented in favour of Reform was one signed by 7,000, chiefly working men and clerks, in support of his proposal—a petition to which the signatures had been obtained without the expenditure of a single sixpence. There would have been many more petitions forthcoming in favour of the Bill, but for the general impression that a private Member could not possibly succeed in carrying a Reform Bill. While that impression generally prevailed he felt bound to acknowledge that an equally general impression prevailed that the Government could 1009 carry a Reform Bill. The latter impression, at all events, was a mistaken one. But that many more petitions would have been presented but for the feeling to which he had alluded was proved by hundreds of letters which he had received from mechanics' institutes, working men's associations, and similar institutions, while the newspapers representing the feeling of the working men bore testimony to the fact. He could only add that if at any time it should be his good fortune to succeed in carrying his proposal into Committee he should be willing to adopt any reasonable suggestions which might be needed. He could not, however, possibly assent to any raising of the standard of examination, because he believed that the result of such an alteration would be simply the destruction of the Bill. If they carried the arithmetic into fractions and required some knowledge of history and geography, they might, no doubt, render valuable additions to the present constituencies, but they would at the some time fail to remove the present cause of complaint which rested on the score of exclusion. He would now, with the consent of the House, withdraw the Bill.