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the members were Republicans.' Bentham was more influential in law than in politics; but he was the friend and teacher of James Mill and of Francis Place, and it was he who drew up the motion for reform brought forward by Burdett in 1818. The democratic view, it may be said, was fairly before the country. Was it the view which the country chose to adopt?

In answering this question it is necessary to draw a broad distinction between the position of the middle and that of the working class. The leaders of the working class, as we shall notice more particularly in a later chapter, were from the first suspicious of the Reform Bill of the Whigs. It was with reluctance that they consented to connect themselves with the agitation at all; in so far as they did so, it was only from the point of view that the measure, though of little value in itself, was at least a step in the direction of what they wanted; and after it was passed they proceeded at once, with perfect consistency, to agitate for a new and more radical reform. The real supporters of the Bill of 1832 were the middle class, and they supported it frankly for what it was and not for what they hoped it would lead to. The Bill gave them the franchise, and it was the franchise that they wanted. Even those of them who professed

1 Add. MS. 27808, f. 113. A full account of this society will be found there.

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to the full the principle of government by the people, were really thinking of government by themselves. This was the position, for example, of James Mill. After arguing in his absolute way in favour of a universally extended franchise, he consoles his opponents, and perhaps himself, with the reflection that after all the mass of electors would always be guided and inspired by the intelligent and superior members of the middle class. 'The opinions,' he says,1' of that class of the people who are below the middle rank are formed, and their minds are directed, by that intelligent and virtuous rank, who come the most immediately in contact with them, who are in the constant habit of intimate communication with them, to whom they fly for advice and assistance in all their numerous difficulties, upon whom they feel an immediate and daily dependence, in health and in sickness, in infancy and in old age, to whom their children look up as a model for their imitation, whose opinions they have daily respected, and account it their honour to adopt. There can be no doubt whatever that the middle rank, which gives their most distinguished ornaments to science, and art, and to legislation itself, to everything which exalts and refines human nature, is that part of the community of which, if the basis of representation were now so far extended, the opinion would

1 Article on Government,' in the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1824.

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ultimately decide. Of the people beneath them, a vast majority would be sure to be guided by their advice and example.' Inspired by this happy conviction, Mill himself would have been prepared for a measure far more extensive than the Act of 1832. But there is no reason to suppose that the mass of the middle class were desirous of a wider extension of the franchise, even with the assurance that it would only enhance their own supremacy. On the contrary, it seems clear that they did genuinely accept the Bill of the Whigs as sufficient and as final. For, in the first place, they actively opposed the later Chartist agitation, the programme of which was frankly democratic; in the second place, they were so far from being anxious to disturb the new order of things that, as we shall see, it would be truer to say that further reform was forced upon the country by the government than that it was forced upon the government by the country.

If

Nor is this attitude difficult to understand. we look behind the rhetoric in which reformers of the middle class were wont to denounce a corrupt and tyrannical oligarchy, we shall find, as a rule, not any complete and a priori theory of democracy, but merely a keen sense of certain specific grievances, similar in kind, though felt with a more intense and bitter rancour, to those which were denounced by the Whigs of the governing class. Cobbett, for example, the most able and the most

influential of all the reformers, is by no means a democrat in principle. Not only does he believe in the Crown and in the House of Lords, but he disbelieves in universal suffrage. 'I have witnessed its effects too attentively,' he says, ' and with too much disgust, ever to think of it with approbation.'1 On the other hand, he does believe in a reform of parliament, because there are evils which he wants to see redressed. With extraordinary vigour and pertinacity he expresses what was at bottom the real complaint of the middle class: that they had not sufficient control over the raising and expenditure of the public funds; that an enormous debt had been contracted in the prosecution of wars which had been initiated and persevered in against the nation's will; that in the incidence of taxation favour was shown to the landed interest at the expense of all the other classes of the population; that the peace establishment maintained after 1815 was disproportionately large, and that this, together with the interest of the debt, and the payment in salaries, pensions, and sinecures, constituted an intolerable burden on the people's industry. The purse, in a word, was the centre of the whole agitation, and the key to it is contained in half-adozen humorous sentences of Sydney Smith: 'The schoolboy whips his taxed top, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a

1 Cobbett's Political Works, edited by John M. Cobbett and James P. Cobbett, vol. ii., p. 51.

taxed road, and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine which has paid 7 per cent. into a spoon that has paid 15 per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid 22 per cent., makes his will on an 87. stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of 1007. for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from 2 to 10 per cent. Beside the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel. His virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he will then be gathered to his fathers to be taxed no more.'1

It was, in fact, the burden of taxation that gave body and form to that general mistrust and hatred of the aristocracy to which we have already referred. But this was an evil that would be met, it might be supposed, so far as the middle class was concerned, by the action of the Bill of 1832. By that measure the middle class were admitted to the franchise; they would exercise henceforth an important influence on the Lower House, and would have the redress of their grievances in their own hands. There was no reason why they should wish for anything more, and it is clear, I think, that as a body they did not. 'The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill' was a formula of conviction, not merely of expediency. Substantially, by the Act of 1832, the middle class got

1 S. Smith's Works, vol. ii., p. 13.