87. The Chartist Movement.—The act of 1832 possessed none of the elements of finality. Its authors were in general content, but with the lapse of time it was made increasingly manifest that the nation was not. Political power was still confined to the magnates of the kingdom, the townsfolk who were able to pay a £10 annual rental, and the well-to-do copyholders and leaseholders of rural districts. Whigs and Tories of influence alike insisted that further innovation could not be contemplated, but the radicals and the laboring masses insisted no less resolutely that the reformation which had been begun should be carried to its logical conclusion. The demands upon which emphasis was especially placed were gathered up in the "six points" of the People's Charter, promulgated in final form May 8, 1838. The six points were: (1) universal suffrage for males over twenty-one years of age, (2) equal electoral districts, (3) voting by secret ballot, (4) annual sessions of Parliament, (5) the abolition of property qualifications for members of the House of Commons, and (6) payment of members. The barest enumeration of these demands is sufficient to reveal the political backwardness of the England of three-quarters of a century ago. Not only was the suffrage still severely restricted and the basis of representation antiquated and unfair; voting was oral and public, and only men who were qualified by the possession of property were eligible for election.[117]
88. The Representation of the People Act of 1867.—After a decade of spectacular propaganda Chartism collapsed, without having attained tangible results. None the less, the day was not long postponed when the forces of reform, sobered and led by practical statesmen, were enabled to realize one after another of their fundamental purposes. In 1858 the second Derby government acquiesced in the enactment of a measure by which all property qualifications hitherto required of English, Welsh, and Irish members were abolished,[118] and after 1860 projects for franchise extension were considered with increasing seriousness. In 1867 the third Derby government, whose guiding spirit was Disraeli, carried a bill providing for an electoral reform of a more thoroughgoing character than any persons save the most uncompromising of the radicals had ever asked or desired. This Representation of the People Act modified but slightly the distribution of parliamentary seats. The total number of seats remained unchanged, as did Ireland's quota of 105; Scotland's apportionment was increased from 54 to 60, while that of England and Wales was decreased from 499 to 493; and in the course of the re-allotment that was made eleven boroughs lost the right of representation and thirty-five others were reduced from two members to one. The fifty-two seats thus vacated were utilized to enfranchise twelve new borough and three university constituencies and to increase the representation of a number of the more populous towns and counties.
The most important provisions of the Act were, however, those relating to the franchise. In England and Wales the county franchise was guaranteed to men whose freehold was of the value of forty shillings a year, to copyholders and leaseholders of the annual value of £5, and to householders whose rent amounted to not less than £12 a year. The twelve pound occupation franchise was new,[119] and the qualification for copyholders and leaseholders was reduced from £10 to £5; otherwise the county franchise was unchanged. The borough franchise was modified profoundly. Heretofore persons were qualified to vote as householders only in the event that their house was worth as much as £10 a year. Now the right was conferred upon every man who occupied, as owner or as tenant, for twelve months, a dwelling-house, or any portion thereof utilized as a separate dwelling, without regard to its value. Another newly established franchise admitted to the voting privilege all lodgers occupying for as much as a year rooms of the clear value, unfurnished, of £10 a year. The effect of these provisions was to enfranchise the urban working population, even as the act of 1832 had enfranchised principally the urban middle class. So broad, indeed, did the urban franchise at this point become that little room was left for its modification subsequently. As originally planned, Disraeli's measure would have enlarged the electorate by not more than 100,000; as amended and carried, it practically doubled the voting population, raising it from 1,370,793 immediately prior to 1867 to 2,526,423 in 1871.[120] By the act of 1832 the middle classes had been enfranchised; by that of 1867 political power was thrown in no small degree into the hands of the masses. Only two large groups of people remained now outside the pale of political influence, i.e., the agricultural laborers and the miners.
89. The Representation of the People Act of 1884.—That the qualifications for voting in one class of constituencies should be conspicuously more liberal than in another class was an anomaly, and in a period when anomalies were at last being eliminated from the English electoral system remedy could not be long delayed. February 5, 1884, the second Gladstone ministry redeemed a campaign pledge by introducing a bill extending to the counties the same electoral regulations that had been established in 1867 in the towns. The measure passed the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords by reason of the fact that it was not accompanied by a bill for the redistribution of seats. By an agreement between the two houses a threatened deadlock was averted, and the upshot was that before the end of the year the Lords accepted the Government's bill, on the understanding that its enactment was to be followed immediately by the introduction of a redistribution measure. The Representation of the People Act of 1884 is in form disjointed and difficult to understand, but the effect of it is easy to state. By it there was established a uniform household franchise and a uniform lodger franchise in all counties and boroughs of the United Kingdom. The occupation of any land or tenement of a clear annual value of £10 was made a qualification in boroughs and counties alike; and persons occupying a house by virtue of office or employment were to be deemed "occupiers" for the purpose of the act. The measure doubled the county electorate and increased the total electorate by some 2,000,000, or approximately forty per cent. Its most important effect was to enfranchise the workingman in the country, as the act of 1867 had enfranchised the workingman in the town.
90. The Redistribution of Seats Act, 1885.—In 1885, the two great parties co-operating, there was passed the Redistribution of Seats Act which had been promised. Now for the first time in English history attempt was made to apportion representation in the House of Commons in something like strict accordance with population densities. In the first place, the total number of members was increased from 658[121] to 670, and of the number 103 were allotted to Ireland, 72 to Scotland, and 495 to England and Wales. In the next place, the method by which former redistributions had been accomplished, i.e., transferring seats more or less arbitrarily from flagrantly over-represented boroughs to more populous boroughs and counties, was replaced by a method based upon the principle of equal electoral constituencies, each returning one member. In theory a constituency was made to comprise 50,000 people. Boroughs containing fewer than 15,000 inhabitants were disfranchised as boroughs, becoming for electorial purposes portions of the counties in which they were situated. Boroughs of between 15,000 and 50,000 inhabitants were allowed to retain, or if previously unrepresented were given, one member each. Those of between 50,000 and 165,000 were given two members, and those of more than 165,000 three, with one in addition for every additional 50,000 people. The same general principle was followed in the counties. Thus the city of Liverpool, which prior to 1885 sent three members to Parliament, fell into nine distinct constituencies, each returning one member, and the great northern county of Lancashire, which since 1867 had been divided into four portions each returning two members, was now split into twenty-three divisions with one member each. The boroughs which prior to 1885 elected two members, and at the redistribution retained that number, remained single constituencies for the election of those two members. Of these boroughs there are to-day twenty-three. They, together with the city of London and the three universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, comprise the