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• Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845
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That clear-sighted justice and high-minded generosity, combined with practical resource, which the times demand—without which this great transitional period in opinions and institutions may be lengthened out in fruitless oscillations—what reason have we to flatter ourselves that these endowments, which we seek vainly among our so-called educated classes, will be found in the untaught delegates of the factory and the workshop? Is it not much, and more than we can expect, if those for whom society has done nothing, prove no worse than those on whom it has lavished all its means of instruction and improvement?

This objection assumes, as the natural and intended effect of popular institutions, that the crude opinions and unguided instincts of the working classes would be the directing power in the state. We have no such expectation from any extension of the franchise. Reformers have always maintained, and the example Edition: current; Page: [ ] of France is now before us to show, that views of things taken from the peculiar position of the working classes are not likely to predominate, or to have at all more than their just influence, even in a legislature chosen by universal suffrage.

After a revolution made by workmen, not twenty members in an assembly of nine hundred are working men. Scarcely in our own parliament do opinions with any semblance of an anti-property character meet with a more hostile reception; and it is evident that the errors of the assembly are more likely to be on the side of conservatism than of revolution. Then what has France gained, it may be asked, or what would England gain by the admission of the working classes to the franchise? A gain beyond all price, the effects of which may not show themselves in a day, or in a year, but are calculated to spread over and elevate the future.

This gain does not consist in turning the propertied classes out of the government and transferring it to the unpropertied, but in compelling the propertied classes to carry it on in a manner which they shall be capable of justifying to the unpropertied. Grant but a democratic suffrage, and all the conditions of government are changed. Whoever may be the rulers, the interest of the great mass of the community must then stand foremost among the actuating principles in the conduct of public affairs.

The legislature must from that time make both the real and the apparent interests of the most numerous classes an object of incessant solicitude; and whenever it does things which are opposed to those apparent interests, it must defend them by reasons drawn from the interests of those same classes, and appealing to their understandings.

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The consequences of this would be incalculable. The discussions of parliament and of the press would be, what they ought to be, a continued course of political instruction for the working classes. Let those classes be as ignorant, prejudiced, passionate as any one may choose to represent them; let them be full of all sorts of prepossessions against property and order—those who are interested in property and order would feel all the more strongly that their safety depended on enlightening that ignorance, prejudice, and passion.

One of the first measures of the democratic government of France has been a bill to bestow gratuitous education, at the expense of the state, upon the whole rising generation of the French people. To educate the whole community up to the highest point attainable is not then a matter of choice but of fortunate necessity. This, however, is only one, and the most obvious, of the benefits which would arise from making the labouring masses a great power in the state. Nothing can be imagined which would tend so much to regenerate the intellectual vigour of the classes, who are now letting the powers of government perish in their hands Edition: current; Page: [ ] from mere mental feebleness.

Every one who knows history or the human mind is aware, that powerful intellects and strong characters are formed by conflict, and that the times which have produced brilliant developments of mental accomplishment in public stations have been those in which great principles and important social elements have been fighting each other hand to hand—times of struggle for national independence, political freedom, or religious emancipation.

The present age also is an age of struggle between conflicting principles which it is the work of this time, and perhaps of many generations more, to bring into a just relation with one another. The conflict now going on is between the instincts and immediate interests of the propertied classes and those of the unpropertied.

This opposition of interests—partly real, partly only apparent—is at present the grand difficulty of government. All other questions with which governments have yet begun to occupy themselves, are difficult chiefly by their connexion with this. Now, of those two opposing forces—neither of which can be disregarded, neither of which can or ought to triumph over the other, but which it is the grand business of government to attempt to reconcile—one only is represented in the British parliament.

The ministry, be it what it may, exclusively represents the propertied classes; and the two houses of parliament are unanimously on the same side of the question as itself. It has to make out a case to the satisfaction solely of its own party.

The murmurs of the other party it only hears at a distance, and is under no greater necessity of attending to them than the cabinet of a despot. There are no recognised organs for that other power, no way in which it can show itself above ground, and the extent of its subterraneous working will therefore only be known when some day, as at Vienna, it explodes and blows up the whole fabric of society.

Is it not of old one of the principal and acknowledged uses of parliament, that all which agitates and divides society should make itself felt by a corresponding agitation and division there? Ought not parliament to be the place of discussion for adverse interests and principles, the arena where opposing forces should meet and fight out their battle, that they may not find themselves reduced to fight it in a less pacific field? If so, the British parliament does not fulfil its office; for the vital question with which all Europe rings, and which fills every thinking mind, both in England and on the continent, with anxiety—the question how to make the rights of property acceptable to the unpropertied classes, is unheard of in that assembly, which it ought more than anything else to occupy; and the subjects which engross parliamentary debates, compared with the great and urgent interests of the nation, form a contrast as full of irony, as the Byzantine multitude Edition: current; Page: [ ] occupying itself with the factions of the circus when Attila was at their gates.

They have to learn the difficult but necessary act of looking at established institutions and opinions from the point of view of those who are not on the sunny but on the shady side of the social edifice. Defects by which other people alone suffer are seldom seen until the sufferers point them out.

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When the unpropertied are fairly represented in the House of Commons, their just claims will, for the first time, obtain a really impartial hearing, and their unreasonable demands will, also for the first time, be so resisted as not to leave a stinging sense of injustice behind. This article returns to the issues of No.

This one thing would do more towards diminishing the undue ascendancy of landed and moneyed wealth than all the other points, even of the charter, 1 without it. It would reduce the nominees of the landlords in the House of Commons from about two-thirds of the whole assembly to about one-third. And by making every electoral body too numerous to be bribed, it would put an end to the obtaining seats by mere expenditure, an object for which so much virtuous zeal is so ineffectually professed by all classes of half-reformers.

But as it is not convenient to say that the real objection to the measure is its efficacy, every encouragement is held out to the invention of sentimental objections. Electoral districts are said to be mechanical, pedantic, a rule-and-square system; and all the other phrases usually employed to throw discredit on precise and business-like modes of conducting any transaction. So, because the lightning and the cannon-ball fly straight to their mark, nothing else should.

Straightforwardness and directness of aim are declared to be discreditable things, and whatever takes the straight road to its object is an agent of destruction. Let us rather say that directness and power are the same thing or always accompany each other. If the object be to destroy, the means which are most direct are the most effectual; and so they are when the object is to preserve. When a person is in the water and drowning, Mr. Talfourd would hardly quote Schiller in favour of going round about, instead of straight in to deliver him. If it is absolutely necessary to have an illustration from visible nature, the sunbeams move in straight lines as well as the lightning; indeed more so, for the lightning makes no objection to twisting and turning in order to accommodate itself to the direction of the conducting medium.

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A steam-ship, also, would have been a more appropriate exemplification of rectilineal movement than a cannon-ball. The poet goes on to say that the road on which blessing travels. Does it not occur to the admirers of crooked paths that we are living in an age of railroads; and that, now-a-days, rather than Edition: current; Page: [ ] not go straight to our object, instead of winding round the hill we even tunnel through it?

The spirit of the time requires that its machinery, whether for physical or for political purposes, shall be efficient. It is not reckoned a merit in machinery to imitate the pleasing irregularities of nature. Its beauty is in its accuracy: it works by straight lines and right angles, and works best when its lines are most correctly straight, its angles most exactly square. Coleridge himself, though fond of quoting the passage which Mr. Talfourd cited from him, 5 is an authority in favour of electoral districts.

He recommended, we think in his Church and State, a new administrative division of the country, describing the present one as barbarous, and a great obstacle to improvement. Electoral districts are mechanical. And why not?

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In whatever manner members of parliament are elected, there must be mechanical arrangement of some sort; and what these should be is not a question of poetry or the picturesque, but of means to an end. What is the right end, and by what means can it be accomplished? Is it the proper end of a House of Commons to make the landed and monied aristocracies the masters of the legislature? If so, keep the system as it is. Is it the object that no class shall predominate, but that all sections of the community shall be powerful in proportion to their numbers and their intelligence?

A new division and constitution of the electoral body is then imperative; and the more nearly equal the number of electors in each constituency the more nearly is the end attained. There is a sentiment concerned in the matter, without doubt, but it is that of justice. When just ends are aimed at by just means, and means well adapted to their attainment, all other sentiment will take care of itself. Sentiment, and of the best kind, is sure to gather round all things which are large diffusers of good among the human race.

Unfortunately, reformers no more than anti-reformers have yet learned to make great principles their object, and in this lies the secret in the affairs of communities no less than in those of individuals, of ineffectual struggles and mean results. The world will rally round a truly great principle, and be as much the better for the contest as for the attainment; but the petty objects by the pursuit of which no principle is asserted, are fruitless even when attained. This unheaded third leader, another comment on the aftermath of the February Revolution see Nos.

If the revolution, after its first difficulties are over, issues in a government which at once preserves order and accelerates progress—makes the laws obeyed, and labours actively to improve them—then in England, and in all Europe, faith in improvement, and determination to effect it, will become general, and the watchword of improvement will once more be, as it was of old, the emancipation of the oppressed classes.