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The History Of England - A Study In Political Evolution
The Struggle For Self-Government
by Pollard, A. F.
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1603-1815
National independence and popular self-government, although they were
intimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-century
liberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of complete
national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any
solution of the question of popular self-government. Still, that
achievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and a
nation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and the
temporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive under
domestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastened
the admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first session
of the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in him
many things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked in
Elizabeth.
Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with no
clear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized under
pressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude for
political speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by the
facilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He tried
to reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system as
practical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite of
Henry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentary
statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from
inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had
never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of
succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such
mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the
obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and
he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary
principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory
of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine
right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not
necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as
at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory,
which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings.
According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king
de facto, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, by
selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be
determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond
the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice
or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament
could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his
authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From
this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was
absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could call
him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man--a doctrine
which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy
over the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people,
and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of his
predecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royal
grace; they could not be claimed as rights.
This dogmatic assurance, to which the Tudors had never resorted,
embittered parliamentary opposition and obscured the historical
justification for many of James's claims. Historically, there was much
more to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace of
the monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed by
grace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessed
such powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertion
that the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Few
of James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and not
a little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from local
gentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them by
earlier parliaments. The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growing
popular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors for
national purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interests
of the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened,
the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on their
theory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was driven
to insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that of
James I.
This alternative theory was difficult to elaborate. There was no idea
of democracy. Complete popular self-government is, indeed, impossible;
for the mass of men cannot rule, and the actual administration must
always be in the hands of a comparatively few experts. The problem was
and is how to control them and where to limit their authority; and this
is a question of degree. In 1603 no one claimed that ministers were
responsible to any one but the king; administration was his exclusive
function. It was, however, claimed that parliamentary sanction must be
obtained for the general principles upon which the people were to be
governed--that is to say, for legislation. The crown might appoint what
bishops it pleased, but it could not repeal the Act of Uniformity; it
might make war or peace, but could not impose direct and general
taxation; it selected judges, but they could only condemn men to death
or imprisonment for offences recognized by the law. The subject was not
at the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law.
The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that there
are always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; and
there were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day.
These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown and
parliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminish
parliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative without
parliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history.
Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unless
the crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they were
denounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of the
constitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown by
precedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents on
both sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth and
which were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force of
circumstances, and the control of parliament over the national purse
was the decisive factor in the situation.
The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was
steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with
the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth
century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the
influx of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense of
government automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes over
foreign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopal
jurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minor
matters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the empty
Treasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they do
not consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less a
popular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater the
obstacles they encountered in securing compliance.
James I levied additional customs which were called impositions, and
the judges in 1606 properly decided that these were legal. But they
increased James's unpopularity; and, as a precaution, parliament would
only grant Charles I tonnage and poundage (the normal customs duties)
for one year after his accession instead of for life. Charles contended
that parliament had, owing to non-user, lost the right of refusing
these supplies to the crown; he proceeded to levy them by his own
authority, and further demanded a general forced loan and benevolence.
For refusing to pay, five knights were sent to prison by order of the
privy council "without cause shewn," whereby the crown avoided a
judicial decision on the legality of the loan. This provoked the
Petition of Right in 1628; but in 1629 Charles finally quarrelled with
parliament over the question whether in assenting to the petition he
had abandoned his right to levy tonnage and poundage. For eleven years
he ruled without parliament, raising supplies by various obsolete
expedients culminating in ship money, on behalf of which many patriotic
arguments about the necessities of naval defence were used.
He was brought up sharply when he began to kick against the
Presbyterian pricks of Scotland; and the expenses of the Bishops' War
put an end to the hand-to-mouth existence of his unparliamentary
government in England. The Long parliament went to the root of the
matter by demanding triennial sessions and the choice of ministers who
had the confidence of parliament. It emphasized its insistence upon
ministerial responsibility to parliament by executing Strafford and
afterwards Laud. Charles, who laboured under the impression common to
reactionaries that they are defending the rights of the people,
contended that, in claiming an unfettered right to choose his own
advisers, he was championing one of the most obvious liberties of the
subject. Parliament, however, had realized that in politics principles
consist of details as a pound consists of pence; and that if it wanted
sound legislative principles, it must take care of the details of
administration. Charles had ruled eleven years without parliament; but
so had Wolsey, and Elizabeth had apologized when she called it together
oftener than about once in five years. If the state had had more
financial ballast, and the church had been less high and top-heavy,
Charles might seemingly have weathered the storm and let parliament
subside into impotence, as the Bourbons let the States-General of
France, without any overt breach of the constitution. After all, the
original design of the crown had been to get money out of parliament,
and the main object of parliament had once been to make the king live
of his own. A king content with parsimony might lawfully dispense with
parliament; and the eleven years had shown the precarious basis of
parliamentary institutions, given a thrifty king and an unambitious
country. Events were demonstrating the truth of Hobbes's maxim that
sovereignty is indivisible; peace could not be kept between a sovereign
legislature and a sovereign executive; parliament must control the
crown, or some day the eleven years would recur and become perpetual.
In France, unparliamentary government was prolonged by the victory of
the crown for a century and three-quarters. In England, Charles's was
the last experiment, because parliament defeated the claim of the crown
to rule by means of irresponsible ministers.
In such a contest for the control of the executive there could be no
final arbitrament save that of force; but Charles was only able to
fight at all because parliament destroyed its own unanimity by
attacking the church, and thus provided him with a party and an army.
More than a temporary importance, however, attaches to the fact that
the abeyance of monarchical power at once gave rise to permanent
English parties; and it was natural that those parties should begin by
fighting a civil war, for party is in the main an organ for the
expression of combative instincts, and the metaphors of party warfare
are still of a military character. Englishmen's combative instincts
were formerly curbed by the crown; but since the decline of monarchy
they have either been vented against other nations, or expressed in
party conflicts. The instinct does not commonly require two forms of
expression at once, and party strife subsides during a national war.
Its methods of expression, too, have been slowly and partially
civilized; and even a general election is more humane than a civil war.
But the first attack of an epidemic is usually the most virulent, and
party strife has not a second time attained the dimensions of civil
war.
One reason for this mitigation is that the questions at issue have been
gradually narrowed down until, although they bulk large to heated
imaginations, they really cover a very small area of political life,
and the main lines continue the same whichever party triumphs. Another
reason is that experience has proved the necessity of the submission of
the minority to the majority. This is one of the greatest achievements
of politics. In the thirteenth century Peter des Roches claimed
exemption from the payment of a scutage on the ground that he had voted
against it, and his claim was held to be valid. Such a contention means
anarchy, and considerable progress had been made before the seventeenth
century towards the constitutional doctrine that the vote of the
majority binds the whole community. But the process was incomplete, and
the causes of strife between Roundhead and Royalist were fundamental. A
victory of the Royalists would have been carried to extremes, as the
victory of the Roundheads was; and the result would almost certainly
have been despotic government until a still more violent outbreak
precipitated the country into a series of revolutions.
Liberty, like religious toleration, has been won through the
internecine warfare between various forms of despotism; and the
strength of the Royalists lay in the fact that parliament, in espousing
Presbyterianism, weighted its cause with an ecclesiastical system as
narrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New presbyter was but old priest writ
large, and the balance between the two gave the decision into the hands
of the Independents, whose numerical inferiority was redeemed by
Cromwell's military genius. When Presbyterians and Independents had
ground the Royalists to powder at Marston Moor and Naseby, Charles
sought to recover his authority through their quarrels. He fell between
two stools. His double dealings with both parties led to the second
civil war, to his own execution, and to the abolition of monarchy and
of the House of Lords in 1649. Having crushed Catholic Ireland and
Presbyterian Scotland, to which Charles and his son had in turn
appealed, Cromwell was faced with the problem of governing England.
The victorious party was in a hopeless minority, and some of the
fervour with which the Independents appealed to divine election may
have been due to a consciousness that they would not have passed the
test of a popular vote. In their view, God had determined the
fundamentals of the constitution by giving the victory to His elect;
these fundamentals were to be enshrined in a written rigid
constitution, and placed beyond the reach of parliament or the people.
Under the sovereignty of this inspired constitution (1653), which
provided, among other things, for the union of England, Ireland, and
Scotland, a drastic reform of the franchise and redistribution of
seats, the government was to be in the hands of a "single person," the
Protector, and a single chamber, the House of Commons. The single
person soon found the single chamber "horridly arbitrary," and
preferred the freedom of military despotism. But his major-generals
were even more arbitrary than the single chamber, and in 1657 a fresh
constitution was elaborated with a Second Chamber to make it popular.
The Restoration had, in fact, begun almost as soon as the war was over;
the single chamber republic of 1649-1653 had given place to a single-
chamber monarchy, called the Protectorate, and a further step was taken
when in 1657 the "other" House was added; Cromwell was within an ace of
making himself a king and his dynasty hereditary. Only his personal
genius, the strength of his army, and the success of his foreign policy
enabled him thus to restore the forms of the old constitution without
the support of the social forces on which it had been based. His death
in 1658 was necessarily followed by anarchy, and anarchy by the recall
of Charles II.
The Restoration was not so much a restoration of monarchy, which had
really been achieved in 1653, as a restoration of the church, of
parliament, and of the landed gentry; and each took its toll of profit
from the situation. The church secured the most sectarian of its
various settlements, and the narrowness of its re-establishment kept
nearly half the nation outside its pale. The landed gentry obtained the
predominant voice in parliament for a century and three-quarters, and,
as a consequence, the abolition of its feudal services to the crown,
the financial deficit being made up by an excise on beer instead of by
a land-tax. Parliament emancipated itself from the dictation of the
army, taking care never to run that risk again, and from the
restrictions of a written, rigid constitution. It also recovered its
rotten boroughs and antiquated franchise, but lost its union with the
parliaments of Ireland and Scotland. At first it seemed more royalist
than the king; but it soon appeared that its enthusiasm for the
monarchy was more evanescent than its attachment to the church and
landed interest. Even in the first flush it refrained from restoring
the Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts and councils which
had enabled the crown to dispense with parliamentary and common law
control; and Charles II was never able to repeat his father's
experiment of ruling for eleven years without a parliament.
The ablest, least scrupulous, and most popular of the Stuarts, he began
his reign with two objects: the emancipation of the crown from control
as far as possible, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics from
their position of political inferiority; but the pursuit of both
objects was strictly conditioned by a determination not to embark on
his travels again. The two objects were really incompatible. Charles
could only make himself autocratic with the support of the Anglican
church, and the church was determined to tolerate no relaxation of the
penal code against other Catholics. At first Charles had to submit to
Clarendon and the church; but in 1667 he gladly replaced Clarendon by
the Cabal administration, among the members of which the only bond of
unity was that it did not contain a sound Anglican churchman. With its
assistance he published his Declarations of Indulgence for Roman
Catholics and Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure himself against
parliamentary recalcitrance by a secret treaty with Louis XIV (1670).
This policy failed against the stubborn opposition of the church. The
Cabal fell; Danby, a replica of Clarendon, came into office; and the
Test Act of 1673 made the position of the Roman Catholics worse than it
was before the Declaration.
This failure convinced Charles that one of his two designs must go by
the board. He threw over the less popular cause of his co-religionists;
and henceforth devoted himself to the task of emancipating the crown
from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused
by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus
Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of
England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot.
The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more
than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced
one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial
murders, and a foolish attempt to exclude James from the succession, As
it subsided, Charles deftly turned the reaction to the ruin of the
Whigs (1681). Of their leaders, Shaftesbury fled to Holland, and Sidney
and Russell were brought to the block; their parliamentary strongholds
in the cities and towns were packed with Tories; and for the last four
years of his reign Charles ruled without a parliament, but with the
goodwill of the Tories and the church.
This half of the nation would probably have acquiesced in the growth of
despotism under James II, had not the new king ostentatiously ignored
the wisdom of Charles II. He began (1685) with everything in his
favour: a Tory parliament, a discredited opposition, which further
weakened its case by Argyll's and Monmouth's rebellions, and a great
reputation for honesty. Within a couple of years he had thrown away all
these advantages by his revival of Charles II's abandoned Roman
Catholic policy, and had alienated the Anglican church, by whose
support alone he could hope to rule as an English despot. He suspended
and dispensed with laws, introduced Roman Catholics into the army, the
universities, the privy council, raised a standing force of thirty
thousand men, and finally prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel.
William III, the husband of James's daughter Mary, was invited by
representatives of all parties to come over as England's deliverer, and
James fled on his approach. He could not fight, like his father,
because no English party supported his cause.
The Revolution of 1688 was singularly negative so far as its results
were expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. These
celebrated constitutional documents made little provision for national
self-government. One king, it is true, had been evicted from the
throne, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and these
measures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been a
Stuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Why
should self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than on
those of 1399, 1461, or 1485? Future sovereigns were, indeed, to
refrain from doing much that James had done. They were not to keep a
standing army in time of peace, not to pardon ministers impeached by
the House of Commons, not to dismiss judges except on an address from
both Houses of Parliament, not to suspend laws at all nor to dispense
with them in the way James had done, not to keep a parliament nor do
without one longer than three years, and not to require excessive bail.
Religious toleration, too, was secured in some measure, and freedom of
the press to a limited extent. But all these enactments were safeguards
against the abuse of royal power and infringement of civil liberty
rather than provisions for self-government. No law was passed requiring
the king to be guided by ministers enjoying the confidence of
parliament; he was still the real and irresponsible executive, and
parliament was limited to legislation. The favourite Whig toast of
"civil and religious liberty" implied an Englishman's right to freedom
from molestation, but not a right to a voice in the government of the
country. Responsible self-government was not guaranteed by the laws,
but it was ensured by the facts, of the Revolution.
The truth is, that the methods of English constitutional progress have
been, down to this day, offensive strategy and defensive tactics.
Positions have been taken up which necessitate the retirement of the
forces of reaction, unless they are prepared to make attacks
predestined to defeat; and so, nearly every Liberal advance has been
made to appear the result of Tory aggression. The central position has
always been control of the purse by parliament. At first it only
embraced certain forms of direct taxation; gradually it was extended
and developed by careful spade-work until it covered every source of
revenue. Entrenched behind these formidable earthworks, parliament
proceeded to dictate to the early Stuarts the terms of national policy.
Charles I, provoked by its assumptions, made his attack on the central
position, was foiled, and in his retreat left large portions of the
crown's equipment in the hands of parliament. Rasher attacks by James
II resulted in a still more precipitate retreat and in the abandonment
of more of the royal prerogatives. The growth of the empire and of the
expenses of government riveted more firmly than ever the hold of
parliament over the crown; the greater the demands which it alone could
meet, the higher the conditions it could impose upon their grant, until
parliament determined absolutely the terms upon which the office of
monarchy should be held. In a similar way the Commons used their
control of the national purse to restrict the powers of the House of
Lords; provocation has led to attacks on the central position, and the
failure of these attacks has been followed by surrender. Prudent
leaders have preferred to retire without courting the preliminary of
defeat.
William III and his successors adopted this course when confronted with
the impregnable position of parliament after the Revolution; and hence
later constitutional gains, while no apparent part of the parliamentary
position, were its inevitable consequences. William, absorbed in a
life-and-death struggle with Louis XIV, required a constant stream of
supplies from parliament; and to secure its regularity he had to rely
on the good offices and advice of those who commanded most votes in the
House of Commons. In the Lords, who then numbered less than two
hundred, he could secure the balance of power through the appointment
of bishops. In the Commons his situation was more difficult. The
partial demise of personal monarchy in 1688 led to a scramble for its
effects, and the scramble to the organization of the two principal
competitors, the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs formed a "junto," or
caucus, and the Tories followed their example. William preferred the
Whigs, because they sympathized with his wars; but the country
sometimes preferred the Tories, because it hated William's Dutchmen and
taxation. On William's death in 1702 the danger from Louis XIV was
considered so acute that a ministry was formed from all parties in
order to secure the united support of parliament; but gradually, in
Anne's reign, the Tories who wanted to make peace left the ministry,
until in 1708 it became purely Whig. In 1710 it fell, and the Tories
took its place. They wanted a Stuart restoration, even at the price of
undoing the Revolution, if only the Pretender would abandon his popery;
while the Whigs were determined to maintain the Revolution even at the
price of a Hanoverian dynasty. They returned to power in 1714 with the
accession of George I, and monopolized office for more than half a
century. As time went on, many Whigs became hardly distinguishable from
Tories who had relinquished Jacobitism; and from Lord North's accession
to office in 1770 down to 1830 the Tories enjoyed in their turn a half-
century of nearly unbroken power.
During this period the party system and cabinet government were
elaborated. Party supplanted the crown as the determining factor in
British government, and the cabinet became the executive committee of
the party possessing a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Anne had
not the intellect nor vigour to assert her independence of ministers,
and George I, who understood no English, ceased to attend cabinet
meetings. The royal veto disappeared, and even the king's choice of
ministers was severely limited, not by law but by practical
necessities. Ministers, instead of giving individual advice which the
sovereign might reject, met together without the king and tendered
collective advice, the rejection of which by the sovereign meant their
resignation, and if parliament agreed with them, its dissolution or
surrender on the part of the crown. For the purpose of tendering this
advice and maintaining order in the cabinet, a chief was needed;
Walpole, by eliminating all competitors during his long administration
(1721-1742), developed the office of prime minister, which, without any
law to establish it, became one of the most important of British
institutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and was not created by
any Act; indeed, while the cabinet and the prime minister were growing,
it would have been impossible to induce any parliament to create them,
for parliament was still jealous of royal influence, and even wanted to
exclude from its ranks all servants of the crown. But, fortunately, the
absence of a written constitution enabled the British constitution to
grow and adapt itself to circumstances without legal enactment.
The circumstance that the cabinet was the executive committee of the
majority in the House of Commons gave it the command of the Lower
House, and by means of the Commons' financial powers, of the crown.
This party system was deplored by many; Bolingbroke, a Tory leader out
of office, called for a national party, and urged the crown to
emancipate itself from Whig domination by choosing ministers from all
sections. Chatham thought that in the interests of national efficiency,
the ablest ministers should be selected, whatever their political
predilections. George III adapted these ideas to the purpose of making
himself a king in deed. But his success in breaking down the party and
cabinet system was partial and temporary; he only succeeded in humbling
the Whig houses by giving himself a master in the person of the younger
Pitt (1784), who was supported by the majority of the nation.
With the House of Lords the cabinet has had more prolonged and
complicated troubles. Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes have
been between the two Houses of Parliament; and this was really the case
before the development of the close connexion between the cabinet and
the Commons. Both Houses had profited by the overthrow of the crown in
the seventeenth century, and the extremes to which they sometimes
pushed their claims suggest that they were as anxious as the crown had
been to place themselves above the law. The House of Lords did succeed
in making its judicial decisions law in spite of the crown and Commons,
although the Commons were part of the "High Court of Parliament," and
no law had granted the Lords supreme appellate jurisdiction; hence the
constitutional position of the House of Lords was made by its own
decisions and not by Act of Parliament or of the crown. This claim to
appellate jurisdiction, which was much disputed by the Commons during
the reign of Charles II, was only conceded in return for a similar
concession to the Commons in financial matters. Here the Commons
practically made their resolutions law, though the Lords insisted that
the privilege should not be abused by "tacking" extraneous provisions
on to financial measures.
There were some further disputes in the reigns of William III and Anne,
but the only occasion upon which peers were actually made in order to
carry a measure, was when the Tories created a dozen to pass the Peace
of Utrecht in 1712. It is, indeed, a singular fact that no serious
conflict between the two Houses occurred during the whole of the
Georgian period from 1714 to 1830. The explanation seems to be that
both Houses were simply the political agents of the same organized
aristocracy. The humble townsfolk who figured in the parliaments of
Edward I (see p. 65) disappeared when a seat in the House of Commons
became a position of power and privilege; and to the first parliament
(1547) for which journals of the Commons proved worth preserving, the
eldest son of a peer thought it worth while seeking election. Many
successors followed; towns were bribed or constrained to choose the
nominees of peers and country magnates; burgage tenements were bought
up by noble families to secure votes; and the Restoration parliament
had material reasons for treating Cromwell's reforms as void, and
restoring rotten boroughs and fancy franchises. By the time that
parliament had emancipated itself from the control of the crown, it had
also emancipated itself to a considerable extent from the control of
the constituencies.
This political system would not have developed nor lasted so long as it
did, had it not had some virtue and some relevance to its environment.
In every country's development there is a stage in which aristocracy is
the best form of government. England had outgrown monarchical
despotism, but it was not yet fit for democracy. Political power
depends upon education, and it would have been unreasonable to expect
intelligent votes from men who could not read or write, had small
knowledge of politics, little practical training in local
administration, and none of the will to exercise control. Politics were
still the affair of the few, because only the few could comprehend
them, or were conscious of the uses and limitations of political power.
The corrupt and misguided use of their votes by those who possessed
them was some reason for not extending the franchise to still more
ignorant masses; and it was not entirely irrational to leave the
control of national affairs in the hands of that section of the nation
which had received some sort of political education.
The defects, however, of a political system, which restricts power to a
limited class or classes, are that each class tends to exercise it in
its own interests and resents its extension to others, even when they
are qualified for its use. If all other historical records had
disappeared, land laws, game laws, inclosure acts, and corn laws--after
the Revolution a bounty was actually placed on the export of corn,
whereby the community was taxed in order to deprive itself of food or
make it dearer--alone would prove that political power in the Georgian
period was vested in a landed aristocracy, though England's commercial
policy, especially towards Ireland, would show that mercantile
interests had also to be consulted. Similarly, the journals of the
House of Commons would prove it to have been a close corporation less
anxious for the reign of law than for its own supremacy over the law.
It claimed authority to decide by its own resolutions who had the right
to vote for its members and who had the right to a seat. It expelled
members duly elected, and declared candidates elected who had been duly
rejected. It repudiated responsibility to public opinion as derogatory
to its liberties and independence; it excluded strangers, and punished
the publication of debates and division-lists as high misdemeanours. It
was a law unto itself, and its notions of liberty sometimes sank to the
level of those of a feudal baron.
Hence the comparative ease and success with which George III filled its
sacred precincts with his paid battalions of "king's friends." He would
have been powerless against a really representative House; but he could
buy boroughs and votes as effectively as Whig or Tory dukes, and it was
his intervention that raised a doubt in the mind of the House whether
it might not need some measure of reform. The influence of the crown,
it resolved in 1780, had increased, was increasing, and ought to be
diminished. But it could only be diminished by destroying that basis of
corruption which supported the power of the oligarchs no less than that
of the crown. Reform would be a self-denying ordinance, if not an act
of political suicide, as well as a blow at George III. Privileged
bodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and by
others were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolution
came to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the Industrial
Revolution had changed the face of England did the old political forces
acknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nation
against its will.
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