On the English Reform Bill

[p. 108]

|108| – for it is not more closely elaborated – which the Duke of Wellington in his last speech lays upon the heart of the House of Lords as a point that has hitherto been overlooked by it as by the House of Commons, namely that what is to be created is a legislative assembly and not a corporation of those entitled to vote, a House of Commons and not a new system for the constituents. If it were a matter not of rights of voting entitlement and of who the constituents are to be, but of the result that a legislative assembly and a House of Commons be constituted, then it could indeed be said that such a House of Commons has already been constituted according to the hitherto existing right of representation, – and indeed the Duke, in the course of the speech, cites the testimony of a friend of the Reform Bill that the present House of Commons is of such a character that no better could be elected. And in fact there lies in the Reform Bill itself no further guarantee that one elected according to it, with violation of the hitherto existing positive rights, will be superior.

These rights the Duke in his speech equates with the right by virtue of which his seat in the House of Lords may be taken from him as little as his estates in Yorkshire from the minister, Earl Grey. The Bill does indeed contain the new principle that the privileged right of election is no longer placed in the same category as the actual right of property. On this side it is to be acknowledged as correct, what the opponents of the Bill reproach it with, that by virtue of its new principle itself it is absolutely inconsistent in itself. A reproach touching more closely upon persons lies in the statement that the boundary line, according to which privileged smaller towns are to be left the right of election, has been drawn in the Bill with premeditation in such a way that the Duke of Bedford, brother of Lord John Russell, who introduced the Bill into the House of Commons, should have his boroughs left untouched. The Bill is in fact a mixture of the old privileges and of the general

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49