you will agree with me that it should not be divided. You mean probably that you are proud of your House of Commons—and that you are so because it speaks with the voice of the people. The voice of the people, in order that it may be heard without unjust preponderance on this side or on that, requires much manipulation. That manipulation has in latter years been effected by your Reform bills, of which during the last half century there have in fact been four or five—the latter in favour of the ballot having been perhaps the greatest. There have been bills for purity of elections—very necessary; bills for creating constituencies, bills for abolishing them, bills for dividing them, bills for extending the suffrage, and bills, if I am not mistaken, for curtailing it. And what has been the result? How many men are there in this room who know the respective nature of their votes? And is there a single woman who knows the political worth of her husband’s vote? Passing the other day from the Bank of this great metropolis to its suburb called Brentford, journeying as I did the whole way through continuous rows of houses, I found myself at first in a very ancient borough returning four members—double the usual number—not because of its population but because it has always been so. Here I was informed that the residents had little or nothing to do with it. I was told, though I did not quite believe what I heard, that there were no residents. The voters however, at any rate the influential voters, never pass a night there, and combine their city franchise with franchises elsewhere. I then went through two enormous boroughs, one so old as to have a great political history of its own, and the other so new as to have none. It did strike me as odd that there should be a new borough, with new voters, and new franchises, not yet ten years old, in the midst of this city of London. But when I came to Brentford, everything was changed. I was not in a town at all though I was surrounded on all sides by houses. Everything around me was grim and dirty enough, but I am supposed to have reached, politically, the rustic beauties of the country. Those around me, who had votes, voted for the County of Middlesex. On the other side of the invisible border I had just past the poor wretch with 3
s. a day who lived in a grimy lodging or a half-built hut, but who at any rate possessed the political privilege. Now I had suddenly emerged among the aristocrats, and quite another state of things prevailed. Is that a reasonable manipulation of the votes of the people? Does that arrangement give to any man an equal share in his country? And yet I fancy that the thing is so little thought of that few among you are aware that in this way the largest class of British labour is excluded from the franchise in a country which boasts of equal representation.
“The chief object of your first Reform Bill was that of realising the very fact of representation. Up to that time your members of the House of Commons were in truth deputies of the Lords or of other rich men. Lord A, or Mr. B, or perhaps Lady C, sent whom she pleased to Parliament to represent this or that town, or occasionally this or that county. That absurdity is supposed to be past, and on evils that have been cured no one should dwell. But how is it now? I have a list—in my memory, for I would not care to make out so black a catalogue in legible letters—of forty members who have been returned to the present House of Commons by the single voices of influential persons. What will not forty voices do even in your Parliament? And if I can count forty, how many more must there be of which I have not heard?” Then there was a voice calling upon the Senator to name those men, and other voices denying the fact. “I will name no one,” said the Senator. “How could I tell what noble friend I might put on a stool of repentance by doing so?” And he looked round on the gentlemen on the platform behind him. “But I defy any member of Parliament here present to get up and say that it is not so.” Then he paused a moment. “And if it be so, is that rational? Is that in accordance with the theory of representation as to which you have all been so ardent, and which you profess to be so dear to you? Is the country not overridden by the aristocracy when Lord Lambswool not only possesses his own hereditary seat in the House of Lords, but also has a seat for his eldest son in the House of Commons?”
Then a voice from the back called out, “What the deuce is all that to you?”
LXXVIII
The Senator’s Lecture.—No. II
“If I see a man hungry in the street,” said the Senator, instigated by the question asked him at the end of the last chapter, “and give him a bit of bread, I don’t do it for my own sake but for his.” Up to this time the Britishers around him on the platform and those in the benches near to him, had received what he said with a good grace. The allusion to Lord Lambswool had not been pleasant to them, but it had not been worse than they had expected. But now they were displeased. They did not like being told that they were taking a bit of bread from him in their own political destitution. They did not like that he, an individual, should presume that he had bread to offer to them as a nation. And yet, had they argued it
