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pocket-picking is no disgrace, and in the House of Commons it is apparently no greater disgrace to be suspected of having obtained one's seat in Parliament by adroit bribery. Some of you owe your seats, not to the free choice of the voters, but to special influences brought to bear upon them. Threats of eviction from a large landholder are often as potent as a bribe in influencing a vote, and it must be a strange sense of honour which permits a man to sit as the representative of voters who have to record their votes or lose their farms. Some of you represent banking interests, some of you are the advocates of insurance interests, many of you are the advocates of railway enterprise, or have your seats to watch the interests of docks or gas companies. Some of you are younger sons of noble families, some military men, and many lawyers desiring advancement; there are, alas! few out of your number who even desire to represent the people, and those of you who are really fair parliamentary representatives are only enough to mark the wretched character of the bulk. You are a House of Commons in name, but not in fact; and if you seek to prevent the reform which shall make our constitution a reality, you will provoke a revolution which shall sweep away your obstinate policy of obstructiveness.
Gentlemen, in your late discussions on the wretchedly impotent Tory measure now before the House—I cannot call it a Tory Reform Bill—you have nearly all of you spoken as though the advent in any large numbers of the people to political life, were an event to be dreaded and avoided. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer confesses that the Bill he introduces, and in which he uses household suffrage as a catchword, while by clogs and checks he makes the measure worse than useless, is not intended to give to a democracy any real influence in the formation of the government of the country. Mr. Disraeli desires that the governing class shall still remain a class unconnected with the people. The late Chancellor of the Exchequer while professing, and as I believe honestly professing, a wish for wide enfranchisement—uneducated by the failure of his last bill, which we supported for its honest intent rather than for any benefit it gave us—adheres to a half-hearted and contemptible rating qualification. Neither Disraeli nor Gladstone represent the popular demand, and the only reason for trust in the member for
