The reform of Parliament was the next question to come up for
settlement. In 1830 representation in the House of Commons still
remained upon a basis which had been established centuries
before. Meantime the distribution of the voting population had
been totally transformed. The most populous shires had no more
seats than the least of all. There were decayed boroughs which
had dwindled in population until but a handful of voters
remained, yet these "rotten" boroughs retained their right to
choose one or more members of Parliament, while the great modern
manufacturing towns and seaports were totally unrepresented. The
agitation for parliamentary reform, which rose in the middle of
the eighteenth century, was directed against the sale of seats in
the rotten boroughs, and the shameless bribery. As early as 1770
Lord Chatham had predicted reform or revolution. His son, the
younger Pitt, had proposed remedies, but the deluge which
overwhelmed the government of France in the closing years of the
century stiffened English conservatism for a century against any
radical political change. Meanwhile the rapid industrial
expansion of the kingdom, with its unprecedented increase of
population, and the sudden growth of insignificant hamlets into
teeming factory towns, had emphasized the injustice of existing
arrangements. Earl Grey, who had been an advocate of reform for
forty years, and Lord John Russell, who had championed the cause
for a decade, were united in the Whig ministry which succeeded
Wellington in 1830. Supported by a tremendous popular demand
which seemed to stir the nation to its depths they brought in
their first bill in 1831. It prevailed in the Commons by a bare
majority, but the Tory House of Lords threw it out. This action
by the privileged class was a signal for an indignant outburst
from the nation. The "Radicals," as the advanced Whigs were
already beginning to be called, did not conceal their lack of
respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats
against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be
tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers
could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was
ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to
frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House
with new peers created expressly to vote for reform. The threat
sufficed. Wellington and the most stern and unbending Tories
absented themselves from the decisive division, and allowed the
Reform Bill to become a law in June, 1832.