The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867

Abstract

The Reform Act of 1867 was one of the decisive events, perhaps the decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy and made democracy not only a respectable form of government (the United States was never quite respectable), but also, it was soon taken for granted, the only natural and proper form of government. To be sure, the act had to be supplemented by others, household suffrage in the boroughs, as provided by the Act of 1867, being several steps removed from universal suffrage. But once this first step was made, no one seriously doubted that the others would follow. The Act of 1867, perhaps more than that of 1832, deserves the title of the Great Reform Bill. For while 1832 had no necessary aftermath in 1867, 1867 did have a necessary aftermath in 1884, 1918, 1928 — the later acts that genuinely universalized the suffrage, not only for Britain but for all those countries that took Britain to be the model of a parliamentary government. It is all the more bewildering, therefore, to inquire into the history of this act and to find it so meandering, purposeless, fortuitous, so full of what Herbert Butterfield has called “the most useless things in the world” — useless, that is, if one expects meaning or sense in history. John Morley, trying to make sense of an affair that struck him as “one of the most curious in our parliamentary history,” wistfully concluded: “When we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly, craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share.”

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