But this irregularity, into which the Prime minister was apparently betrayed by his desire of victory, must not be allowed to affect our verdict on the main question; and, now that the lapse of time has enabled us to contemplate dispassionately the case on which he had to decide, it will, probably, be thought that his justification of his conduct in recommending a creation of peers is fairly made out. That, under any pressure short of that, the peers would have again rejected the Reform Bill, or at least would have pared it down to much smaller proportions than would have satisfied the popular demand for Reform, may be regarded as certain; and equally certain that such a line of conduct would have led to a renewal of disgraceful and dangerous tumults. The minister, therefore, as has been said before, had to choose between two evils. It was a grievous dilemma; but those who had to deal with it (even while it may be admitted that they cannot be held wholly free from blame, as having themselves contributed by their own language to the popular excitement and irritation)[220] may be excused for thinking the wound inflicted on the constitution, by thus overbearing the voice of one House of Parliament on a single occasion, less formidable in its immediate fruit, and more capable of being remedied and retrieved, than that which would have followed from a renewal of insurrectionary tumults, even if they should have come short of actual civil war.
One critic of these transactions[221] whose experience and high reputation entitle his opinion to respectful consideration, after reminding his readers that, "although Parliament is said to be dissolved, a dissolution extends, in fact, no farther than to the Commons, and that the Peers are not affected by it; no change can take place in the constitution of their body, except as to a small number of Scotch representative peers," proceeds to argue that, "so far as the House of Peers is concerned, a creation of peers by the crown on extraordinary occasions is the only equivalent which the constitution has provided for the change and renovation of the House of Commons by a dissolution. In no other way can the opinions of the House of Lords be brought into harmony with those of the people." But it may be feared that this comparison is rather ingenious than solid. Indeed, the writer himself limits such an expedient as a creation of peers to insure the passing of a particular measure to "extraordinary occasions." But a dissolution of the House of Commons is so far from being so limited, that it is the natural and inevitable end of every House of Commons after an existence which cannot exceed seven years, and which is very rarely so protracted. And though it may be, and probably has been, the case that a House of Commons has passed measures to which it had no great inclination, lest it should provoke a minister to a premature dissolution, yet no submission on its part can long postpone it; and a threat or apprehension of a dissolution would certainly fail to overcome the opposition of the House of Commons, or of a party within it, if the measure before them seemed open to serious objection. The presumed or presumable immortality of the one body, and the limited existence of the other, seem to constitute so essential a difference between them as must prevent the measures adopted toward one being fairly regarded as any guide to a justification of those employed in the case of the other.
The Reform Bill of 1832 has sometimes been called a new Revolution, and to some extent it deserved the name; for it was not, like the Catholic Emancipation Act, a mere restoration of privileges to any class or classes of the people which had once been enjoyed by them, and had subsequently been withdrawn, but it was a grant of a wholly new privilege to places and to classes which had never enjoyed it; while it was manifest that the political power thus conferred on these classes involved a corresponding diminution of the powers of those who had hitherto monopolized it. It was also the introduction of a new principle. The old doctrine of the constitution had been, that the possession of freehold property, as the only permanent stake in the country, was the only qualification which could entitle a subject to a voice in the government and legislation of the kingdom. The new doctrine was that, as others besides owners of land contributed to the revenue by the payment of taxes, those who did so contribute to a sufficient amount had a right to a voice, however indirect or feeble, in the granting of those taxes; and so far it was the extension and application to subjects at home of the principle for which Lord Chatham and Burke had contended sixty years before in the case of the American Colonies, that taxation and a right to representation went together; a principle which, many ages before, had been laid down by the greatest of our early kings as the foundation of our parliamentary constitution and rights. But this principle, however generally it may have been asserted, had hitherto been but very partially carried out in practice, and the old borough system had been skilfully devised by successive kings and ministers to keep the political power in the hands of the crown and the aristocracy. It was with that object that most of the boroughs which were first allowed to return members under the Tudors had been enfranchised,[222] a great noble or landholder, whose affection to the government could not be doubted, being often able to obtain the promotion of some village or petty town in the neighborhood of his estates to the dignity of a parliamentary borough, and thus acquiring a great addition to his political and social importance by his power of influencing the election. No one could deny that the existence of such boroughs was an abuse, or at least an anomaly, rendered the more conspicuous as time went on by the denial of representatives to towns which contained as many thousands of citizens as they could boast single burgesses. At the same time it was equally undeniable that the aristocracy, generally speaking, exerted their influence advantageously for the state. A peer or great squire who could return the members for a borough took a worthy pride in the abilities and reputation of those whom he thus sent to Parliament; especially the leaders of the two parties sought out promising young men for their seats; and it has often been pointed out that, of the men who in the House of Commons had risen to eminence in the country before the Reform Bill, there was scarcely one who had not owed his introduction to Parliament to the patron of one of those boroughs which were now wholly or partially disfranchised; while on one or two occasions these "rotten boroughs," as, since Lord Chatham's time, they were often derisively called, had proved equally useful in providing seats for distinguished statesmen who, for some reason or other, had lost the confidence of their former constituents. So, when Bristol had disgraced itself by the rejection of Burke, Malton had averted the loss with which Parliament and the country were threatened by again, through the influence of Lord Rockingham, returning the great statesman as their representative. So, to take a later instance, Westbury, under the influence of Sir Manasseh Lopes, had provided a refuge for Sir Robert Peel, when the course which he had taken on Catholic Emancipation had cost him his seat for Oxford. And these practical uses of these small boroughs-anomalies in a representative system, as they were called in the debates on the subject, and as they must be confessed to have been-were so important, that some even of those who felt compelled by their principles to vote for their parliamentary extinction have, nevertheless, confessed a regret for the sacrifice, lamenting especially that it has, in a great degree, closed the doors of the House of Commons against a class whose admission to it is on every account most desirable, the promising young men of both parties.