The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Rise, like lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number!

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you:

  Ye are many – they are few!

  Demands such as those that led to Peterloo were not always simply calls for electoral reform. Economic hardship usually figured, especially among the new industrial working classes whose strikes often turned into riots.61 By the 1830s the situation had become incandescent as more riots followed the repeated vetoing of reforms by the House of Lords. In Bristol, in 1831, rioters demolished the Bishop’s Palace (the bishops had long opposed any reforms), the Customs House and other important buildings. A dozen rioters died, a hundred were wounded: ‘It was the last great urban riot in English history.’62 Finally, the Prime Minister, the Whig Earl Grey, managed to get the ‘Great Reform Act’ through both houses. The Act increased the representation of those who lived in industrial areas and abolished the number of seats with small voting populations.

  A further and far more significant step forward was taken with the Second Reform Act of 1867, which extended the suffrage to 30 per cent of adult males, in other words all ‘householders’, enfranchising most of the ‘respectable’ working class.

  The Third Reform Act (the Representation of the People Act, 1884) further widened the franchise. This enlarged the electorate from 2.6 million to 5.6 million –about 60 per cent of the male population.63

  Universal manhood suffrage was finally adopted in Britain only in 1918. Women over the age of thirty were enfranchised. Real equality between the sexes at elections came into force only in 1928. France, which had promulgated the Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen in 1789, had real universal suffrage (i.e. women as well as men) only in 1944. In the United States, which had declared in 1776 that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’, women were enfranchised only in 1920 for federal elections (many states had introduced it earlier) with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution – forty-one years after it had been introduced by Senator Aaron Sargent, whose wife, Ellen, was a prominent suffragette. The effective and practical enfranchisement of all blacks had to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  John Stuart Mill, who, unlike most of his peers, was in favour of allowing women to vote on the same terms as men, seemed to believe in some kind of inevitable class struggle between employers and employees. In The Principles of Political Economy (1848) he wrote that the working classes lacked the ‘just pride which will choose to give good work for good wages’.64 As he wrote in the preface to the third edition (1852), socialism was not practical, because of ‘the extreme unfitness of the labouring classes … for any order of things which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtues’.

  Other ‘progressives’ held similar doubts about the lower orders. Thus John Ruskin, after whom a college in Oxford intended for the education of the working classes was named, wrote in 1862 that the central policy of government is:

  that the wise and kind, few or many, shall govern the unwise and unkind … I once saw democracy finely illustrated by the beetles of North Switzerland, who by universal suffrage and elytric acclamation, one May twilight, carried it, that they would fly over the Lake of Zug; and flew short, to the great disfigurement of the Lake of Zug … over some leagues square, and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for that year.65

  Ruskin’s worry about the lack of education of the working classes increased during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867 when he wrote on 17 February that workers should realize that they need ideas to bring about change: ‘Your voices are not worth a rat’s squeak, either in Parliament or out of it, till you have some ideas to utter with them.’66 Almost as alarmed was Matthew Arnold, who, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), announced that the working class (which he called the Populace):

  which, raw and half-developed, has long-lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor … is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes …67

  Arnold, a true cultural elitist, was even more contemptuous of the aristocracy, whom he called ‘the Barbarians’, and the middle classes, whom he called ‘Philistine’.

  The anti-democratic position had been previously well established by Catholic writers and, in England, High Anglicans. William George Ward, a reactionary supporter of papal infallibility, with some sagacity, was casting aspersions on the double standard of the democrats (whom he called ‘revolutionists’). He wrote in 1865:

  whenever the masses are on the whole orderly and devout, your true revolutionist despises them as ignorant, superstitious, and (if so be) priest-ridden … ‘the people’ means with him the aggregate of shallow public writers, and of restless busybodies, and of those generally who have received a certain smattering of what he absurdly calls education.68

  The more mundane conservative position was uncomplicated: since people were unequal why should their vote count for the same? Thus, in 1851, the future Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (then Lord Cecil) declared that:

  Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men to whom … a community looks to undertake its government.69

  Later, in 1859, he still thought it was completely ridiculous that ‘twenty struggling green-grocers’ should carry more (voting) weight than ‘a dozen of those colossal capitalists whose word is law to the bourse of Europe’, adding, ‘If you give the poor the power of taxing the rich at will, the rich will soon find the whole expenditure of the country saddled upon them.’70

  A few years later, in 1864, and a few years before the Second Reform Act (enacted by his own party), Lord Salisbury was still fighting, along with many others, the good anti-democratic fight in the pages of the Quarterly Review. Of course, few, at the time, were outright supporters of ‘democracy’, but, as Paul Smith wrote, Salisbury was the ‘cleverest and most virulent anti-democrat in the party’.71 He was also a pragmatist who had said, in quite a different context (the Eastern Question), that ‘the commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies’.72 Unsurprisingly, Salisbury eventually changed his mind on the suffrage and even had the audacity, some might call it chutzpah, to tell the House of Lords, in 1884, that he never had ‘any adverse feeling to the extension of the suffrage on the ground of the presumed incapacity or unfitness of those to whom it has to be extended’. He even mused that eventually the suffrage might be extended to women and they could well inject stability, morality, and wisdom into British political life.73

  Salisbury had assumed that, since legislation is mainly concerned with property, to give the suffrage to a poor man ‘must infallibly give to that class a power pro tanto of using taxation as an instrument of plunder, and expenditure and legislation as a fountain of gain’.74 Labour agitators in favour of extending the suffrage used the same logic linking the vote and property. James Bronterre O’Brien, the Irish Chartist leader, put it thus: ‘Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are under-represented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are under-represented that you have no property …’75

  The years of Chartist agitation (1838–48), partly caused by widespread disappointment at the limitations of the Reform Act of 1832, would be described by A. V. Dicey as a period when:

  The time was out of joint. The misery and discontent of city artisans and village labourers were past dispute … The horrors connected with factory life were patent. Widespread was the discontent of the whole body of wage-earners … there were acts of violence by trade unionists in the towns. The demand for the People’s Charter was the sign of a social cond
ition which portended revolution.76

  The response was a set of gradual reforms, the work of both utilitarian liberals and Tory humanitarians. The threat from the working classes had occurred far earlier than in other countries, a reflection of the lead that Britain had in industrialization. The revolutions of 1848 on the continent were essentially middle-class revolutions led by liberals and nationalists whereas in Britain the Chartists, while demanding liberal reforms (universal manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, annual elections, etc.), were a national working-class movement. Robert Gammage, author of one of the first histories of Chartism, explained that ‘the masses’, contrasting the opulence of the ‘enfranchised classes … with the misery of their own condition’, arrived at the conclusion that ‘their exclusion from political power is the cause of our social anomalies’.77

  By 1864 liberals like Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, once lukewarm about extending the suffrage, now accepted that ‘there ought to be, not a wholesale, nor an excessive, but a sensible and considerable addition to that portion of the working classes – at present almost infinitesimal – which is in possession of the franchise’.78 This was said in support of Edward Baines’s private members’ bill for the extension of the borough franchise. The bill was soundly defeated by 272 votes to 56, but Gladstone’s speech was a turning point. Some pointed out that there was no need for further reforms. After all, working-class agitation for an extension of the franchise had quietened down; the old Chartist demand for universal suffrage was by then somehow muted. But the Reform League, which later led powerful demonstrations in 1866 and 1867 in Hyde Park, was ready to settle for an expansion of the suffrage falling short of universality. But Gladstone was far-sighted:

  but is it desirable that we should wait until they do agitate? In my opinion, agitation by the working classes, upon any political subject whatever, is a thing not to be waited for, not to be made a condition previous to any Parliamentary movement; but, on the contrary, it is a thing to be deprecated, and, if possible, anticipated and prevented by wise and provident measures.

  A worried Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Palmerston expressing her fears that this ‘imprudent declaration’ may produce agitation in the country.79 Gladstone, however, did not look back. On 27 April 1866 he fulminated against those who described working men ‘as an invading army … as a band of enemies’: ‘these men whom you are denouncing … are your own flesh and blood’.80 The British nation was becoming a community, at least in thought. The radical liberal MP John Bright in his Glasgow speech of 16 October 1866 called for manhood suffrage, declaring:

  The nation would be changed … The class which has hitherto ruled in this country has failed miserably. It revels in power and wealth, whilst at its feet, at terrible peril of its future, lies the multitude which it has neglected. If a class has failed, let us try the nation … I see … the glimmerings of a dawn of a better and nobler day for the country and for the people that I love so well.81

  Although Queen Victoria did not understand that the times were changing, Disraeli, whom she much preferred to Gladstone for his wit and ‘exotic’ charm, did. By 1867 the Conservatives were back in power. The Prime Minister was Lord Derby but the pillar of the government was Disraeli, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was this administration that passed the 1867 Reform Act and it was this Act that changed British politics, trebling the number of voters.82 Disraeli did not think the 1867 reform would introduce ‘democracy’: ‘We do not … live – and I trust it will never be the fate of this country to live – under a democracy.’83 And, still in 1867, he reassured a group of businessmen by declaring ‘England is a country of classes, and the change that is impending in this country will only make those classes more united, more complete, and more cordial.’84 Most Conservatives too needed reassuring. There were exceptions: H. A. M. Butler-Johnstone, a maverick Conservative saw the enfranchisement of workers as a necessary step for uniting the country. Speaking on the Reform debate in the House of Commons he declared that ‘If this country was to be engaged in a life and death struggle with any of the nations of the world – if we had to defend our overland route to India – if we had to maintain our passage through Egypt – how should we fare if the whole country was not united?’ Another Conservative, Viscount Sandon, declared that nothing was ‘more dangerous’ than depriving a ‘great class’ (the working classes) of their views in the House of Commons.85

  The Conservatives’ otherwise unenthusiastic support for the reform was due in part to the desire to maintain and expand their popular basis by pioneering a reform which, sooner or later, would have been passed anyway. In the short term this was a miscalculation. The Conservatives lost the 1868 election and Gladstone became Prime Minister. But Disraeli, like Gladstone, had an eye on the long term. As Dicey said in 1898: ‘The lesson which Disraeli taught his party was the possibility, which he had long perceived, of an alliance between the Tories and English wage-earners; and the true basis of this alliance was their common dissent from individualistic liberalism.’86 The Conservatives had little choice but to cultivate the urban middle classes, though they remained for decades overwhelmingly the party of rural Britain.87 Eventually, in the course of the twentieth century, they became the party of capitalism, displacing the Liberals.

  The liberal elites were by no means united behind the expansion of the suffrage. The liberal weekly The Economist continued to view any widening of the franchise with suspicion. What if the people’s representatives adopted the views of the people and not the ‘right’ position (presumably that of The Economist).88 In fact, conservative fears and radical hopes did not materialize. The radicals were dismayed at the lack of revolutionary (or even reformist) zeal shown by the newly enfranchised working-class electorate. Engels, writing to Marx, on the first elections held under the 1867 Reform Act, expressed his disappointment that in proletarian Manchester and Salford, three Tories were returned: ‘The proletariat has once again made an awful fool of itself … Everywhere the proletariat is the rag, tag, and bobtail of the official parties, and if any party has gained strength from the new voters it is the Tories.’89 Disraeli, who had said that he always regarded ‘the labouring classes as essentially the most conservative interests in the country’, would have had reasons to be smug.90

  Conservatives continued to worry about the ‘socialist threat’ in the 1880s (even though there were hardly any socialists in the United Kingdom). By 1886 the scare seemed over. Socialists, social liberals, and ‘collectivists’, as socialists were often called at the time, continued to fight for the further democratization of the country but insisted that this should coincide with a constant improvement in the economic conditions of the lower classes. Thus Sidney Webb wrote in 1892 that ‘The problem of our own time is to secure for the whole community not political but economic freedom. We must frankly recognise that our task is to convert, by the aid of the English genius for representative self-government, a political into a social democracy.’91 Liberal imperialists (and anti-socialists) such as the Prime Minister Lord Rosebery lamented the fact that there were not many representatives of the working classes in Parliament.92 Yet he did not suggest a remedy.

  In the rest of the world issues around suffrage were moving too. During the 1880s, Belgian politics was dominated by two parties: the rural-based and conservative Confessional Catholic Party and the anti-clerical Liberals. The dispute between them centred mainly on the question of secular education, the so-called School War (la guerre scolaire). The suffrage was still severely restricted. A socialist party emerged only in 1885/6, helped by the rise in unemployment and the hardship caused by an unduly severe winter.93 Alfred Defuisseaux, one of the founders of the Belgian Socialist Party, produced a pamphlet, ‘Le catéchisme du peuple’ (1886), which sold some 300,000 copies, in the form of questions and answers (as in the Catholic catechism) such as these:

  Q. Article 25 of the Constitution says: ‘All powers come from the nation.’ Is it true?

  A. It is a lie
.

  Q. Why?

  A. Because the nation is made up of 5,720,807 inhabitants. Let’s say 6 million, and of these 6 million, only 117,000 are involved in making laws.

  Q. How come 6 million are ruled by 117,000?

  A. Because to vote you must pay 42.32 francs in taxes and in Belgium only 117,000 citizens pay this …94

  The Socialists organized a demonstration (13 June 1886) in favour of universal manhood suffrage. This was followed in 1893 by a general strike (the first in Europe).95 The result was a near-victory: all males could vote, though some had more than one vote depending on income and education. By 1906 the electorate had expanded from 136,000 to 850,000 and the Socialists obtained a quarter of the vote, though the Confessional Catholic Party further enshrined its hold on government.96

  In Italy, too, what was a highly restricted suffrage (2.2 per cent of the adult population) was extended in 1882 to all adult males who were not illiterate or who paid a minimum tax. The result was that the suffrage was extended to almost 7 per cent of the population – still a very long way from the ‘advanced’ countries.97 Giuseppe Zanardelli, the architect of the law (and also a champion of many social and civil reforms – he abolished capital punishment in 1889), thought that, in principle, all males should be allowed to vote as long as they possessed some ‘cultura intellettuale’. Hence the exclusion of the illiterates who did not pay taxes.98

  Germany was, in terms of the extension of the suffrage, the most democratic country in Europe along with Greece and France. Elections were frequent (every three years) and virtually all seats were contested (unlike Britain where one-fourth were not).99 But the Reichstag (the federal parliament) was not very powerful. It could not appoint the Chancellor or dismiss him, though it could make life difficult for him. And it did. Almost all significant pieces of legislation were modified by the Reichstag against the wishes of Bismarck and his government.100 Foreign policy and overall taxation remained in the hands of the executive. Elections, however, contributed to the growing ‘nationalization’ of the German electorate in that there was increased popular participation in them. In 1871, when universal manhood suffrage was introduced, only 52 per cent cast their vote; by 1912 it was 85 per cent. The beneficiaries were the mainly rural Catholic Zentrum Party and the Socialists of the SPD.101