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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 469: MR. GREY’S MEASURE OF PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.
By Edward Farr
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The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

MR. GREY’S MEASURE OF PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.

During this session Mr. Grey brought forward a motion for parliamentary reform. He observed, in reply to the objection, that this was not the proper time for reform, that it would be equally rational in times of prosperity and adversity, in times of peace and war. He remarked:—“Whatever evils did, or might threaten the nation, there was no preventive so certain, no safeguard so powerful, as an uninterrupted house of commons, emanating fairly and freely from the people. To the want of this we owed the American war, and the vast accumulation of national debt; and if this had been done last year, it would probably have saved us from our present distresses. No set of Britons, unless bereft of their senses, could, after recent events, propose the French revolution as a model for our imitation. But were such principles even likely to threaten danger, the surest way of preventing it was to promote the happiness and comfort of the people, to gratify their reasonable wishes, and to grant that reform which was so earnestly desired.” Grey’s arguments were enforced by Fox, Whitbread, and others; and opposed by Pitt, Jenkinson, and Powys. Pitt explained his former motives for being friendly to a parliamentary reform, and his objections against it at the present moment. Many petitions had been presented in favour of reform; and Pitt said, that if the principle of individual suffrage, pointed at in some of these petitions, was to be carried out, the peerage would be extinguished, the king deposed, every hereditary distinction and every privileged order swept away, and there would be established that system of equalizing anarchy announced in the code of French legislation, and attested in the blood of the massacres at Paris. Fox attacked Pitt on the score of inconsistency. He observed, that as Lord Foppington said in the play, “I begin to think that when I was a commoner, I was a very nauseous fellow; so Pitt began to think, that when he was a reformer, he must have been a very foolish fellow.” Fox called the objection to the time for reform a fallacy; a mere pretext for putting off what the house knew was necessary, but felt unwilling to grant. The debate lasted two days; when the motion for referring the petitions to a committee were negatived by two hundred and eighty two, against forty-one.

GEORGE III. 1793-1794