[JOHN RUSSELL, Earl Russell, born, London, August 18, 1792; died,
Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, May 28,1878; educated at
Westminster School and Edinburgh University; Member of
Parliament, 1813; favored Catholic emancipation; 1830-34,
paymaster general; 1831, introduced the first Reform Bill; 1832,
carried the third Reform Bill; 1835-39, Home Secretary; 1839-41,
Colonial Secretary; 1846-52, Prime Minister; 1852-53, Foreign
Secretary; 1854-55, President of the Council; 1855, Colonial
Secretary; 1859-65, Foreign Secretary; 1865-66, Prime Minister.]
The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political
institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the
council of the wise men--"The Witenagemot"--which was summoned to
give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth
century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles
certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs.
The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a
useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired
certain legislative rights. In time the nobles or peers began to
sit by themselves, leaving the chosen representatives to meet in
a House of Commons. The story of the increasing influence of
Parliament is in great part the history of the English nation.
Before the close of the seventeenth century the power of
Parliament had become the leading force in the state. Yet much
remained to be done in the nineteenth century to bring this
supreme governing body into living touch with the heart of the
nation.
The conservative habit of the English had left the constitution
of the House of Commons untouched for so many years that it had
lost all but the semblance of a representative body. No uniform
qualification for the voter existed. In one locality the
franchise was closely restricted, in others every man, however
poor, might exercise the right to vote. There were all manner of
variations in these "fancy franchises," which had been conferred
by special charters at long separated intervals. Neither was
there any existing relation between population and
representation. Strange as the statement will appear to American
readers, accustomed to the reapportionment of congressional
representation after every federal census, it is a fact that
there had been no radical change in the boundaries of election
districts in England for centuries. The population had meanwhile
undergone enormous changes. Not only had it increased manifold,
but the rise of modern industry had occasioned a redistribution
of the people. London had become a swarming hive. Liverpool docks
and warehouses were surrounded by a crowded city. Manchester,
Birmingham, Leeds, and other places scarcely known to the England
of Tudor and Stuart, were centers of busy industrial life,
attracting to themselves multitudes of the inhabitants of the
countryside. The counties, large and small, continued to have
equal representation in Parliament, though some of them were many
times more populous than others. In the boroughs the inequalities
were most flagrant. Where a goodly village had been in Tudor
times there might now be nothing visible but the crumbling tower
of the parish church, yet the place still retained its right to
representation in the House of Commons. Such decayed or "rotten"
boroughs existed in considerable numbers. Their few voters were
controlled by the land-owning nobility. McCarthy says, "The case
of Old Sarum is famous. It returned members to Parliament in the
days of Edward III., and from that period down to the time of the
Reform Bill. But the town of Old Sarum gradually disappeared.
Owing to the rise of New Sarum (Salisbury) and to other causes
the population gradually deserted it. The town became practically
effaced from existence; its remains far less palpable or visible
than those of any Baalbec or Palmyra. Yet it continued to be
represented in Parliament. It was at one time bought by Lord
Chatham's grandfather, Governor Pitt. It was coolly observed at
the time that "Mr. Pitt's posterity now have an hereditary seat
in the House of Commons as owners of Old Sarum," just as any earl
had a seat in the House of Lords by virtue of his hereditary
peerage. When the Reform Bill was passed the member of Parliament
for the borough of Ludgershall was himself the only voter in the
borough and had chosen himself to Parliament on his own
nomination. Another place with two members had only seven
qualified voters. McCarthy is quite within the truth when he
asserts that two-thirds of the House of Commons was made up of
the nominees of the peers and great landlords "who owned their
boroughs and members just as they owned their parks and their
cattle." Thus the power of the landed aristocracy, which was the
House of Lords, lacked but little of being the House of Commons
as well. The mass of the nation, which was now rapidly gaining in
education and wealth, had no way of making its influence felt in
Parliament except by the power of public opinion, to which the
periodical and pamphlet press was beginning to give expression.
The condition of the representation, the rotten boroughs, as
those in decay were called, and the pocket boroughs, a name
applied to those which were the property of individuals, opened
the way for shameless corruption. Where the electorate was small
and the secret ballot unknown bribery had free rein. Seats were
openly bought and sold. As early as 1770 the elder Pitt (Lord
Chatham) had placed his finger upon this ailing spot in the
English body politic, and had said, "Before the end of this
century, either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or
be reformed with a vengeance from without." His prediction was
falsified by the reactionary effect of the French Revolution,
which not only made the English aristocracy cautious about
readjusting political arrangements, but kept the minds and hands
of Englishmen so fully occupied with foreign affairs as to divert
attention from their own domestic troubles. At the close of the
long struggle with Napoleon the question came rapidly to the
front. Financial distress and industrial depression made the
populace restless and discontented. The glowing principles which
had inspired the French Revolution in its early days with its
watchwords of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," gained a deep
lodgment in the popular mind. The dissatisfaction vented itself
in attacks upon a political system which denied the right of
representation to so large a proportion of the wealth-producing
population.
The government at first turned a deaf ear to these appeals, then
tried to suppress the agitation which swept through the great
manufacturing towns. It was one of these bungling attempts to
silence free speech in Manchester on August 16, 1819, which led
to the trampling and sabring of many innocent persons by
cavalrymen, the "Peterloo massacre," which the populace long
cherished as a bloody score against, their aristocratic
oppressors. For ten years more the democratic press continued to
agitate even more bitterly for reform, and a lonely "radical"
member of Parliament would bring forward his motions only to have
them contemptuously thrust aside. In 1830, however, a ministry
came into power which allowed nothing to stand in the way until
the long awaited bill had become a law. The condition which
contributed to its success, the incidents of the tremendous
parliamentary struggle, and the men who carried it through, are
all worthy of the most careful attention of the student of human
affairs.
The death of George IV. (June 26, 1830) made way for his brother,
William IV., and made necessary a general parliamentary election.
The summer had seen a liberal revolution in Paris. The Bourbons
had been thrust out and Louis Philippe had been accepted as the
citizen-king of the French, governing under a liberal
constitution. This revolution, and simultaneous movements
throughout western Europe, touched an answering chord in the
breasts of Englishmen, and the Tories found themselves in a
minority when the new Parliament assembled in November. The Duke
of Wellington was Prime Minister, the last man from whom the
popular cause could expect to receive any concessions. At the
opening of the session the premier took occasion to declare his
disbelief "that the state of representation could be improved or
be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large than at the
present moment." "I am fully convinced," he said, "that the
country possesses a legislature which answers all the good
purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any
legislature has answered in any other country whatever." He
flatly declared his determined opposition to any measure of
reform. Within a fortnight his government met its Waterloo and he
resigned.
Earl Gray, the Whig premier who succeeded Wellington, came into
office fully resolved to pass a Reform Bill. The responsibility
of drafting the measure was intrusted to a young Whig commoner,
Lord John Russell, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, and a
scion of one of the great Whig houses. Lord John Russell had
entered Parliament in 1813, at the age of twenty-one, for one of
the family boroughs. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, and
his parliamentary career, if not brilliant for oratory, had at
least been marked by intelligent devotion to high ideals. In
1819, before the echoes of Peterloo had died away, he had asked
Parliament to disfranchise all boroughs of proved corruption, and
transfer their representation to more deserving constituencies. A
little later he proved to the House the corruption existing at
Gram-pound, and secured the disfranchisement of that borough and
the transfer of its voting rights to the great county of York.
This was but a small step, but it opened the way to tremendous
changes. He was determined, he said, to strip "the dead bones of
a former state of England" of their political influence and give
it to the "living energy of England of the nineteenth century,
with its steam engines and its factories, its cotton and woolen
cloths, its cutlery and its coal mines, its wealth and its
intelligence." Session after session he returned to this text
only to be as often defeated by the Tories. He was more
successful in 1828 when he carried the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, relics of a bygone age when it was thought
necessary to the safety of the nation to exclude from military or
civil office all persons who did not take the communion in
accordance with the ritual of the Established Church. "Lord
John," as he came to be called in the course of his half-century
of parliamentary life, would have advanced from the relief of
Protestant dissenters to the emancipation of the Catholics, had
not the Tories, in their dread of civil war in Ireland,
forestalled him, and made the measure their own (April, 1829).
The first Reform Bill, which had been drafted by Russell, and
worked over by Lord Durham and other ministers, was presented to
the Commons on March 1, 1831. Its provisions had been kept
profoundly secret, and the house was thronged to hear them
explained in the low and measured tones of Lord John Russell. The
nation was as eager as the immediate auditory to know how far the
government would go in granting the popular demand. Touching upon
some of the existing anomalies the speaker imagined a foreigner
visiting England; having been impressed with British wealth,
civilization, and renown, "Would not such a foreigner," he
queried, "be much astonished if he were taken to a green mound
and informed that it sent two members to the British Parliament?
. . . . or if he walked into a park without the vestige of a
dwelling and was told that it, too, sent two members to the
British Parliament? But if he was surprised at this, how much
more would he be astonished if he were carried into the north of
England, where he would see large, flourishing towns, full of
trade, activity, and intelligence, vast magazines of wealth and
manufactures, and were told that these places sent no
representatives to Parliament!"
By the provisions of the bill sixty boroughs with less than two
thousand members were to lose both members, and forty-seven
boroughs were to be reduced to a single member. Of the seats thus
vacated eight were to be given to London, thirty-four to large
towns, fifty-five to English counties, five to Scotland, three to
Ireland, one to Wales. The franchise was to be extended to
inhabitants of houses taxed at ten pounds a year, and to
leaseholders and copyholders of counties. The changes added about
half a million to the number of voters in the United Kingdom.
The country followed the progress of the debate with intense
interest night after night. The bill passed to its second reading
by a majority of one in the fullest house on record and the
country gave itself up to illuminations and other expressions of
joy. But the bill got no farther. The majority was too close for
the comfort of the ministers, and having been defeated on a
matter of detail, they confidently appealed to the country. The
King dissolved Parliament, and writs were issued for a general
election. It was at this juncture, when London was illuminating
to show its satisfaction over the prospect for a reform victory,
that the darkened windows of the Duke of Wellington's town house
were stoned by the populace. The rallying cries of the Whigs were
"The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," and
"Reform, Aye or No?" Popular agitation by associations,
newspapers, speech-making, monster meetings, etc., reached an
unprecedented height, and the force of public opinion was shown
at the polls. In spite of pocket boroughs, family influence, and
flagrant corruption, the reformers came back to Parliament with
their majority increased to fully one hundred. Of the eighty-two
members for the counties where the popular feeling had its freest
expression, only six were opposed to Lord Russell's scheme of
reform.
Lord Russell's second Reform Bill was introduced on June 24th.
The minority, hopeless of success in a stand-up fight, resorted
to the obstructive tactics now known as "filibustering." After
wasting three months in tedious obstruction the Commons passed
the bill by a majority of one hundred and nine, and Lord Grey
laid it before the House of Lords in the most impressive speech
of his career. He endeavored to persuade the aristocrats before
him that only by such concessions could the Constitution of
England be saved. Already there were wide-spread evidences of
popular discontent in the "nightly alarms, burnings, and popular
disturbances." The rotten boroughs could no longer be tolerated
with safety to the state. "This gangrene upon our representative
system bade defiance to all remedies but that of excision." Deaf
to his arguments, and blind to everything but their own privilege
and immediate interest, the peers pronounced against the bill.
The rejection of the second Reform Bill by the House of Lords
brought England to the brink of revolution. As it was, the
newspapers were full of signs that the patience of the nation was
exhausted. Mobs and incendiary fires were reported in many
districts, and the abolition of the House of Lords found
strenuous advocates. It was at one of the numerous indignation
meetings that Sydney Smith hit off the attempt of the Lords to
stay the progress of reform by comparing it with Mrs.
Partington's attempt to check the high tide at Sidmouth with a
mop. "The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington's spirit was up.
But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The
Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Gentlemen, be at your ease;
be quiet and steady; you will beat Mrs. Partington!"
As soon as the Parliament reassembled in December, Lord John
Russell offered the third Reform Bill. It was identical in
principle with the others, though the number of the affected
boroughs had been slightly altered. It passed its successive
stages by ample majorities and was in due order presented to the
House of Lords. The ministers were prepared to play their last
card. They found the peers determined to mutilate the proposition
in disregard of the popular demand, now louder than ever, for
"The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill." Earl Grey
and his chancellor, Lord Brougham, thereupon requested King
William to overcome the opposition by sanctioning the creation of
new peers sufficient to insure a majority for the act. But the
King held back. The ministers offered their resignations, and the
King commissioned the Iron Duke to form a government. But no Tory
government could stand a day in the face of the hosts of reform
in the Commons and in the nation, as Wellington had reluctantly
to confess. The monarch had to yield, and so doing, helped
establish the principle more firmly than ever before that the
chief power in the English Constitution is lodged in the House of
Commons, acting through its ministers. In this case it was
Commons against King and Lords, and the Commons had their way. To
save themselves from an inundation of new peerages the Lords
whose hostility to the bill was irreconcilable absented
themselves from Westminster when the vote was taken--"skulked in
clubs and country houses" as Lord Russell sharply phrased it. The
Duke of Wellington's words will show the temper with which the
hide-bound Tories received the act. "Reform, my Lords, has
triumphed. The barriers of the Constitution are broken down, the
waters of destruction have burst the gates of the temple, and the
tempest begins to howl. Who can say where its course should stop?
Who can stay its speed? For my own part I sincerely hope that my
predictions may not be fulfilled, and that my country may not be
ruined."
The immediate effect of the reform was to admit the tradesmen and
tenant-farmers, the sturdy English middle class, to a share in
the government. Thirty-five years later, after Lord Russell had
made three or four futile endeavors to carry still further the
principle of reform, his opponents, the Conservatives, led by
Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, passed the Reform Bills of 1867-68,
greatly reducing the property qualification of voters, and
rectifying inequalities in borough representation. Under this act
most of the mechanic and artisan class gained the right to vote.
Finally, in 1884, Mr. Gladstone carried the reform another stage,
conferring the franchise upon two millions of poor men, including
the class of agricultural laborers.
His contribution to the success of reform identified Lord John
Russell with the cause of liberty, and made him a leading man. It
is not within the scope of this sketch to follow him through the
shifting scenes of the honorable career in politics and
statesmanship which now opened out before him, and which
continued until, when at nearly four-score, the party leadership
passed from him to his able associate, William Ewart Gladstone.
Among the notable measures in which he had a leading hand was the
Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which put the government of cities
in the hands of the taxpayers and did away with the effete and
corrupt corporations which had exercised it. His "Edinburgh
letter," in 1845, hastened Peel's conversion to free trade. He
was ever concerned in religion and education. After the overthrow
of Peel's government, in 1846, he was raised to the premiership.
He held the position until 1852, and again, from October, 1865,
to June, 1866. His retirement in the latter year removed from
British politics a conspicuous figure. It was a figure which had
filled a large place in the affairs of the world, and for the
most part filled it well, though never again in his career was it
his lot to become such a popular hero as he was during the early
battles for reform. Russell's death, in 1878, brought up the varied
panorama of his life. McCarthy, in reviewing it, touches upon
some of its points of interest. "He had a seat in the
administration at his disposal when another young man might have
been glad of a seat in an opera box. He must have been brought
into more or less intimate association with all the men and women
worth knowing in Europe since the early part of the century. He
was a pupil of Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, and he sat as a youth
at the feet of Fox. He had accompanied Wellington in some of his
peninsular campaigns; he measured swords with Canning and Peel
successively through years of parliamentary warfare. He knew
Metternich and Talleyrand. He had met the widow of Charles
Stuart, the young chevalier, in Florence; and had conversed with
Napoleon in Elba. He knew Cavour and Bismarck. He was now an ally
of Daniel O'Connell, and now of Cobden and Bright. He was the
close friend of Thomas Moore; he knew Byron. Lord John Russell
had tastes for literature, for art, for philosophy, for history,
for politics, and his aestheticism had the advantage that it made
him seek the society and appreciate the worth of men of genius
and letters. Thus he never remained a mere politician like Pitt
or Palmerston."
No one will now claim that Earl Russell--he was raised to the
peerage with this title--is to be ranked with the few greatest of
English statesmen, but that he served his country devotedly,
honorably, and courageously will not be denied. His contemporary,
Lord Shaftesbury, noted his death in his own journal with this
just comment: "To have begun with disapprobation, to have fought
through many difficulties, to have announced and acted on
principles new to the day in which he lived, to have filled many
important offices, to have made many speeches and written many
books, and in his whole course to have done much with credit and
nothing with dishonor, and so to have sustained and advanced his
reputation to the very end, is a mighty commendation." And the
Queen, in a letter to his widow, wrote: "You will believe that I
truly regret an old friend of forty years' standing, and whose
personal kindness in trying and anxious times I shall ever
remember. 'Lord John,' as I knew him best, was one of my first
and most distinguished ministers, and his departure recalls many
eventful times."